The Primitive Mind in Digital Dress

A Species at the Crossroads Between Evolution and Regression

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Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

In his non-fiction 1958 book, Brave New World Revisited Aldus Huxley made the following prediction:

“By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”

Huxley was an exceptionally astute observer of society. But even so, the fact that he could predict our present-day reality so accurately, suggests that the components and processes were already there in 1958, and even in 1932 when he published Brave New World. That he was among a handful who could see this coming suggests that the processes were already effective at keeping people on edge and distracting them from looking closer at their reality. The mechanisms were already operating—they just needed the right technological amplification to become fully manifest. We may well have reached a watershed moment in our history, as our technology crosses new frontiers.

What we’re witnessing isn’t really a new form of control, but rather ancient dominance hierarchies dressed up in sophisticated technological clothing. The ‘ruling oligarchy’ Huxley described emerges naturally when power-seeking individuals gravitate towards control—a process aided by systems that reward power-seeking behaviour and masses that offer little resistance.

But we don’t get off easily by blaming it all on some mysterious, conspiratorial ‘cabal’ that somehow kept itself going for tens of thousands of years. What we see at play is primitive human psychology. Modern technology gives a new look and some veneer of progress to something very old. We are a primitive species, focused mostly on survivalism. We’ve always allowed the predatory, empathy-challenged class to rule over our groups and societies. I suspect that back in our hunter-gatherer days, groups led by people without empathy may have been more successful at surviving on a hostile planet, compared with groups led by progressive, ethical leaders. Both ways co-exist, but the survivalist way of life is by far the most dominant. It still holds all the positions of power at all levels of society.

Groups led by individuals willing to make harsh, pragmatic decisions—those who regard empathy or ethics as weaknesses—likely did have survival advantages in genuinely hostile environments. But we’ve carried those same leadership selection criteria into a world where our primary threats are no longer external predators or resource scarcity, but the very systems we’ve created ourselves.

The evidence of our primitive nature is everywhere. We’ve failed to use our remarkable ingenuity and the technology it has produced to care for our planet and enable all humans to flourish. Instead, we use these same tools to maintain primitive hierarchies that thrive on suffering and the obscene waste of human potential. We have the technical capacity to solve most, if not all, of humanity’s material problems, yet we remain trapped in zero-sum thinking and dominance games—stuck, essentially, in survivalism. If we perish—or worse, continue to regress—it will be entirely because we failed to seize the extraordinary opportunity life has offered us: to evolve beyond our primitive fears and impulses, which originally emerged from the need to survive on a hostile planet.

The solution isn’t to fight the survivalists, but to strengthen the alternative and grow it until it becomes the norm. Empathy, love, compassion, cooperation, generosity, and kindness shouldn’t be the exception—they must become the baseline of human interaction. I regularly meet intelligent people who apologise for showing emotion, revealing how deeply we’ve internalised the belief that pain, sadness, or grief are weaknesses, and that empathy is somehow a character flaw. We’ve created a culture where ordinary, healthy people are pathologised and medicated for experiencing and expressing normal emotions in response to events and circumstances. This isn’t accidental—it reflects a systematic attempt by those in power to reshape us all in their own image.

Psychopaths don’t just lack empathy—their brains also fail to generate healthy emotions in response to reality. The reason we have such a mental health crisis is that most humans cannot force themselves to adopt the psychopaths’ way of being without suffering catastrophic harm to their mental health. Put simply: you cannot stop a healthy human being from feeling healthy emotions in response to reality without destroying their mental health. The reason we’re seeing ‘Christian nationalists’ promoting the idea that ‘empathy is evil’ becoming more mainstream these days, is that the psychopaths are feeling increasingly emboldened. They sense that the world is changing in a direction that favours them.

Holding onto our feelings is already a powerful act of resistance. Our tenderness, empathy, and compassion are healthy and natural responses to a suffering world. When we allow ourselves to feel and share these emotions, we refuse to surrender our humanity to those who want to see it disappear.

Strengthening the alternative rather than fighting the existing system is both wise and practical. It acknowledges that real change happens through psychological shifts that lead to cultural transformation—through modelling new ways of being rather than direct confrontation with entrenched power structures. You simply can’t fight ‘evil’ because it doesn’t play fair. Those in power feel no obligation to respect any norms, boundaries, or rules of engagement. The moment existing rules work against them, they adapt in service of their own survival. Since evil holds most of the power, it uses that power to rewrite the rules in its favour. What Yvette Cooper did is one such example.

We can cooperate—all primates do. The crucial question is: what are we cooperating for? As long as our cooperation focuses on survivalism, we’ll continue following in our ancestors’ footsteps, repeating the same patterns they followed. But if we use our natural capacity to cooperate to create a world where everyone can thrive we could transform everything.

Evolutionary biology isn’t an excuse for anyone—not for the psychopaths, not for the silent, complicit majority. We’re all responsible for the way things are, and for choosing a different path. An explanation is never an excuse—it’s simply an explanation. We're all responsible for contributing to one way of being or the other. No one exists truly outside society, no matter how hard they try, and no matter how much they tell themselves that what’s happening ‘out there’ doesn’t affect them personally or that they can somehow shield themselves from it. Every person who chooses cooperation over competition, empathy over dominance, contributes to making the alternative more visible and viable.

The starting point is simple: stop thinking of yourself as stupid, weak, or sick because you feel difficult emotions. Own them, validate them, and notice how this alone begins transforming you into a more grounded and healthy being. We can’t change the world whilst we still believe the falsehoods and myths we’ve been taught—including the lie that our feelings are a sickness or a weakness.

Our modern and ancient mythologies are filled with recognition of both our problem and the solution for it. In Star Trek Picard, Broken Pieces (S1:E8) there’s a moment when everything seems utterly hopeless. As the super-powerful enemy is about to win, there’s crucial dialogue between Picard and Captain Rios that captures not only the focus of the entire series, but the essence of our non-fictional human predicament. (You don’t need to understand the storyline details to grasp the point, though for science fiction lovers, I wholeheartedly recommend Picard.)

Picard: “We did betray ourselves … the ban itself was a betrayal. Oh, … they set the trap, but we could merely have sidestepped it. Instead, we gave way to fear.”

Rios: “What if they’re right?”

Picard: “They may be right about what happened 200,000 years ago. The past is written, but the future is left for us to write, and we have powerful tools, Rios, openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity. All they have is secrecy and fear, and fear is the great destroyer…” [my emphasis]

In another modern myth, The Lord of the Rings Frodo is tasked with taking the ‘ring of power’ to the place where it was forged and destroying it at its source. The ring embodies ultimate evil and its hunger for dominance, and the quest to destroy it seems hopeless. Bent on domination at any cost, the powerful enemy plays dirty and doesn’t negotiate. But in the end, it wasn't the military might of humans, the cunning of dwarves, or the magic of elves and wizards that triumphed over despair and defeated evil. It was the meek, unassuming hobbits—their friendship, love, kindness, courage, and ability to stand by each other even through disagreements. These unlikely heroes never lost sight of what truly matters in life.

The ‘one ring’ symbolises that recurring pattern of ‘evil’ I’ve discussed—the one that keeps reappearing throughout human history in different guises. To prevent humanity from becoming the eternal casualty of survivalism and fear, we need to ‘destroy these forces at the source’, or rather the hold that they have on us. If we stop being afraid and choose to live differently, we can win—not by destroying the ‘bad guys’, but by making the alternative the norm. This is how we extinguish the power that evil holds over humanity: we refuse to let it stop us from living as full human beings who genuinely care for one another.

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