In the previous chapter, I claimed that the world isn't broken. That it is, in fact, functioning exactly as it should .. under the conditions we've created .. and that the reason this world feels so broken is because we misunderstand the defining functional component of reality: Ourselves.

The chapter opens by confronting a disturbing question: If we know something is wrong, why do we keep making the same mistakes? Why does individual willpower fail so consistently? Why do even well-meaning people create systems that produce outcomes no one wants?

Are we trying to use political and governmental solutions to fix problems that are neither political nor governmental in origin? Are we wearing ourselves out trying to solve the symptoms of something?

The answer lies in recognising that most of what we call "choice" isn't conscious decision-making at all, but automated responses generated by unconscious programming we inherited from our evolutionary past.

Dave's Guide to Evolution

When people hear 'survival of the fittest,' they tend to imagine strength, speed, sharp teeth. But the real engine behind evolution is far simpler: It's the ones who survive and reproduce. That's it.

The chapter breaks down the mathematics of evolutionary change using bacteria as an example. When antibiotics were introduced in the 1940s, resistant strains appeared within five years, representing 130,000 bacterial generations. For humans to experience the same number of generations would require 3.3 million years.

Three point three million years. That far back, archaeology and anthropology tell us that our ancestors weren't even Homo sapiens. We were Australopithecus Afarensis, small-brained, upright-walking apes, known as 'Lucy' to Paleoanthropologists. No fire, no language, no tools, just a short, hairy nervous system trying to survive another day.

The implications are staggering:

And yet, we've convinced ourselves that we are evolving along with the world we create, just because we're surrounded by modern architecture, instant information, and artificial intelligence. That illusion is fatal .. because we're not evolving in the way that matters.

The Mind that Time Forgot

The chapter reveals the fundamental mismatch we're dealing with:

We are still the same Palaeolithic hardware that evolved for tribal life and danger-driven instinct. And having largely discarded the traditional moral frameworks that acted as a security layer, against the worst of those Stone-Age drives and reactions in ourselves and others, we've plugged this ancient, unprotected system into a digital, hyper-stimulating reality of algorithmic manipulation, and global-scale complexity that changes by the day.

We cannot naturally adapt fast enough to match the pace of the world we've created, and biological evolution is not going to save us … unless we wipe-out and a handful of survivors get to start again.

So if we all want to survive, not just physically, but psychologically, spiritually, and socially, we need to do something no species has ever done before: We need to evolve on purpose. Consciously.

Meet the Flintstones

We are, at our core, still Palaeolithic beings. For hundreds of thousands of generations, we lived in small, tribal communities where nothing changed across tens of generations. The pressures we faced, finding food, avoiding predators and staying in the tribe, shaped the biological and psychological machinery that's still running the show today.

Stone tools, which mark the beginning of shared learning and cooperative hunting, date back more than 2.5 million years. For the vast majority of that time, we lived in groups of a few dozen people, extended families surviving together. This changed only gradually with the advent of agriculture around 12,000 years ago.

It wasn't until the industrial revolution, just a few generations ago, that the pace of change began to utterly outrun our evolved-in settings, and by the end of the 20th century, with the rise of mass media, general literacy, state-run education and welfare, technological expansion, and global connectivity, we had effectively abandoned our natural habitat entirely.

In bacteria-years, measured in 20-minute generations, the Industrial Revolution happened a few hours ago. The internet appeared minutes ago, and social media is still fizzing in the Petri dish, a few seconds old.

Fixed Ideas In a Fast-Changing World

The world we have created is capable of changing faster than we are and it's already over the hill and running away from us, and evolution cannot save us even if it wanted to.

This creates a dangerous situation where our instinctual responses, designed for a stable environment, are constantly misfiring in our rapidly changing world. The chapter explores how this plays out in everything from our relationship with technology to our political tribalism.

Know Thyself

The chapter reveals the staggering disparity between conscious and unconscious processing:

It's estimated that the human unconscious processes information up to 275,000 times the rate of the conscious mind. That's not a metaphor. It's a staggering difference in processing power.

To put this in perspective: it's the power of all four engines of 747 airliner at takeoff, Vs a kitchen blender.

While your conscious mind decides what to eat, your unconscious is simultaneously:

monitoring and calculating for body temperature, heart rate, tone of voice in your last conversation, social position, status threats, emotional resonance, environmental risk, thoughts of whether or not your current tribe might be losing faith in you and working through a conversation you haven't had yet.

The crucial point:

It's doing all of this invisibly, and it isn't running on logic or language. It's running on patterns.

Hijacked by The New World

What this means is that the unconscious system is highly vulnerable in the modern environment. Its job, remember, is to react quickly and keep you alive. So it evolved to prioritise certainty over truth, cohesion over clarity, familiarity over novelty.

Modern systems exploit these ancient vulnerabilities:

Social media, advertising, news cycles, ideology machines, political tribes, cultural branding … They all target the same ancient circuits: belong, belong, belong .. or die. And the unconscious doesn't know the difference between being exiled from your hunter-gatherer band being ratioed on Social Media.

Belief as Belonging

We don't just believe things because they're true. We believe things because they help us belong. And in a survival-based mind, belonging always beats truth.

Our unconscious system was never built to weigh evidence or revise conclusions. It was built to read the room, track the vibe, keep us aligned with the tribe, and avoid exile at any cost.

Dissonance isn't just emotional discomfort. It's a hard-wired signal: Danger to the lineage detected. Correct course immediately.

The Ancient Sculpture of Tribalism

The unconscious doesn't just influence how we feel .. it constructs the very reality we experience. It doesn't wait for permission or defer to reason. It begins filtering before we even know there's something to see.

If you found yourself standing in disagreement with the rest of the tribe, you weren't just wrong .. you were in danger. Your brain treated dissent not as an intellectual issue, but as an existential threat.

The chapter reframes tribalism not as primitive behaviour but as sophisticated adaptation:

This isn't stupidity, it's not weakness or moral failure. It's tribal logic, operating at full capacity. But the environment has changed, and that's the crux of the issue.

Zero-Day Vulnerability

The problem isn't that we're tribal. The problem is that we've removed the natural boundaries, feedback loops, and slow evolutionary pressures that once kept that tribal instinct in balance.

Yes, bad people do bad things … but only because we present an open temptation, living our lives unprotected against a threat we don't know about and therefore cannot see .. a zero-day vulnerability .. giving root-access to our belief systems without us even knowing it.

Interrupting The Loop

If you've ever found yourself mid-argument, hearing the words come out of your mouth and wondering .. Why am I saying this? .. you've touched the loop.

You can begin to notice your reactions, but try to think of them as the scripts you run automatically. Interrogate these reactions and reach through them to the underlying beliefs you inherited.

The key is "free-won't":

One tradition calls this 'The not-doing of the Self', a way of exercising personal will so that it becomes capable of carrying true intent. You don't need a better argument, you don't need a plan, you don't need to be 'right.' You just need to not do the thing you were about to do.

What This Chapter Reveals

Chapter 2 explains why individual willpower fails and why changing leaders doesn't change systems. We're all running the same legacy firmware, which means the solution isn't better people, it's conscious recognition of the code we're all running.

The chapter shows that our "primitive" instincts aren't flaws to be overcome but sophisticated adaptations to be understood. The problem isn't the instincts themselves, but their application in an environment they weren't designed for.

Once you see the unconscious programming running beneath conscious awareness, you can begin to work with it rather than being unconsciously driven by it. This is the foundation for everything that follows.

The groundwork is laid for Chapter 3's exploration of how this unconscious programming shapes what we mistake for "free choice."