A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

by Heather E. Heying

In times of stability, when inherited wisdom allows individuals to prosper and spread across relatively homogeneous landscapes: Culture reigns. But in times of expansion into new frontiers, when innovation and interpretation, and communication of new ideas, are critical: Consciousness reigns.

Cultural beliefs are often literally false, but metaphorically true.

This means that the cover story isn’t true, but when people behave as if it were, they prosper. This is how religion and other belief structures spread. Even if such things are not literally true, acting as if they are benefits people;

But many of our strengths are also cryptic weaknesses. Our outsize brains are prone to confusion and miswiring. Our children are born helpless, and they remain dependent on us for an uncommonly long time. Our great linguistic diversity severely limits to whom we can talk. Even our bipedal gait, so important in allowing us to move and carry things on the ground, comes with risk to mother and baby in childbirth, and reliably causes back pain. We’re gossipy, sentimental, and superstitious. We build extravagant monuments to fictional gods. We are arrogant and confused, often mistaking the unlikely for the inevitable, even as we downplay massive and obvious hazards.

Our obsession with growth creates two problems.

The first is that we have convinced ourselves that growth is the normal state and that it is reasonable to expect it to go on and on. That patently ridiculous idea—exactly as hopeful and deluded as the search for a perpetual motion machine—causes us to stop searching for other possibilities. While this expectation greatly reduces the chances that we will miss out on growth, it also prevents us from recognizing and pursuing more sustainable options.

Second, because we regard growth as normal rather than exceptional, we behave destructiv...

Sometimes we violate our stated values by inventing justifications to steal from a population that has resources but not the means to defend them. Other times we degrade the world, and inflict decline—the opposite of growth—on our descendants in order to fuel current expansion. The former scenario accounts for many of the greatest atrocities in history. The latter e...

Growth über alles is a disast...

Our economic and political system, in combination with our desire for growth in the moment, inflicts policies and behaviors that don’t seem crazy at first, not at all, and yet they too often turn out to be not only bad for us and the planet, but also irreversible, by the time we realize what we have wrought. We are living the unfortunate reality of the Sucker’s Folly—again, the tendency of concentrated short-term benefit to not only obscure risk and long-term cost, but also to drive acceptance even when the net analysis is negative.

Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.

Historically, manipulation was kept in check by living in small groups of interdependent people. Shared fate was the rule that kept us in line. Putting one over on a person whose fate is intimately linked to your own is generally a poor idea, and those who do quickly get a reputation for doing so.

We no longer live in small, interdependent communities. Many of the most critical systems we rely on are global, and the participants are nearly always anonymous. Malicious market forces are largely an expression of manipulation made possible by such anonymity, and by a lost sense of shared fate.

Not optimize for a single value. Mathematically speaking, if you try to optimize for any single value, no matter how honorable—be it liberty or justice, decreasing homelessness or improving educational opportunities—all other values, every single other parameter, will collapse. Maximize justice, and people will starve. Everyone may starve equally, but that’s small recompense.

When looking back on history, we have the responsibility to recognize that truth, and also to recognize when our ancestors’ wins—legitimate or, very often, not—have provided us advantage that we did not ourselves earn. It is not, however, our responsibility to subjugate ourselves to those histories.

Let us not romanticize any people or period.

no society can be both the freest and the most just. Freedom and justice exist in trade-off relationship with each other. We ought not try to push either of these two sliders all the way to one end.

Coming to grips with the fact that freedom and justice cannot both be maximized is a critical step in the conversation,

Utopia is an impossibility, and its persistence as a fantasy is a profound hazard.

In order for us to have a conversation about humanity’s future effectively, people of every political persuasion need to understand diminishing returns, unintended consequences, negative externalities, and the finite nature of resources.

Liberals (our political kin) are particularly prone to underestimating diminishing returns and unintended consequences.

Conservatives are particularly prone to underestimating negative externalities and the f...

According to the economic law of diminishing returns, as you increase your input to a given variable, while holding everything else constant, the increases i...

Unintended consequences are a variant of Chesterton’s fence: messing with an ancient system that you do not fully understand may create problems that you do not foresee.

both liberal solution making and conservative desire for market innovation are the source of unintended consequences.

Negative externalities occur when individuals making decisions—or products—do not have to bear the full cost of those decisions.

allowing the harm from what is created to be disassociated from its value.

Chasing growth as if it is always there to be caught is a fool’s errand. Sometimes the opportunity exists, and sometimes it doesn’t. The expectation of perpetual growth is in many ways similar to the pursuit of perpetual happiness—it is the route to a host of miseries.

If we are to persist, sustainability must displace growth as the indicator of success.

Good laws and regulations are hard to write. Simple, static laws will either be wrong from the beginning or have a short shelf life.

To the degree that a system is set in stone, it will be both gameable and gamed.

Society is obsessed with short-term safety because short-term harm is easy to detect and comparatively simple to regulate. Long-term harms are a different story, being more difficult to detect, and even harder to prove.

We foolishly presume long-term harms are absent until they can no longer be ignored, and are then shocked that our expectations of safety were wrong.

don’t let someone else’s profit motive determine what you desire or do.

Consumers are less observant, meditative, and deeply thoughtful than people who value creating, discovering, healing, producing, experiencing, communicating.

Rely less on metrics, more on experience, hypothesis, and deriving truth and meaning from first principles. Rely less on static rules, and seek an understanding of the context in which those rules are appropriate.

Dispense with anything predicated on a utopian vision that focuses on a single value.

As soon as someone reveals that they are trying to maximize a single value (e.g., freedom or justice), y...

Liberty is emergent—therefore not a single value. It is an emergent consequence of having fixed the other problems (e.g., justice, security, innov...

Consider Chesterton’s fence in all of its guises—from health care to cuisine, from play to religion.

All human enterprises should be both sustainable and reversible.

The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Only support systems that tend to enrich people who have contributed po...

Don’t game honorable...

One should have a healthy skepticism of ancient wisdom, and engage novel problems consciously, explicit...

Opportunity must not be allowed to concentrate ...

Precautionary principle: When the costs of an action are unknown, proceed with caut...

Society has the right to require things of all people, but it has natural obliga...