Quote of the Day
Your brain did not evolve for 24-hour cable or a phone that never sleeps. It evolved for a band of 150 people, a horizon you could walk, and a predator you could see.
The amygdala does not read policy papers.
It reads threat. Once a face, a slogan, a hat, a pronoun, a flag becomes tagged as not-us, the prefrontal cortex…the part that does slow, expensive, adult thinking…gets shoved out of the driver’s seat.
That is not poetry. That is threat circuitry doing what it was built to do.
Dopamine is not your friend here.
Variable-ratio reinforcement…the same schedule that makes slot machines addictive…is how feeds work.
Outrage, in-group applause, the little hit when your team “owns” someone. You are not informed. You are trained.
Skinner would have wept with professional pride.
Mirror neurons and identity fusion do the rest. You stop evaluating claims. You evaluate who said them. A lie from your tribe feels like loyalty.
A truth from the other tribe feels like betrayal.
That is not stupidity in the insult sense. It is a predictable failure mode of a social brain under industrial-scale stimulation.
LHGrey
September 7, 2026
IT’S ALL OF THEM – LHGrey’s Substack
Grey claims to be a forensic psychologist.
As something of an amateur psychologist, what she says here strikes me as true. It explains a lot of what I see in politics.
I also find it profoundly depressing.
To find it depressing to describe human nature/evolution/whatever is a hallmark of the libertarian/rationalist/religious mindset. It is the one thing that libertarians and the religious have in common.
It’s not new.
I mean, it’s a nice statement of the issue, sure, and it’s nice to see the “in-group, tribalism” stuff in the same place as the “your brain wasn’t made for this” and “social media works like slot machines” points, but that’s about it.
Everything said here has been known to anyone who bothered to want to know for years.
I do think the “You evaluate who said them.” part is generally overstated. Unless you are personally going to evaluate every single thing ever (which no one can), you choose who to trust, and in MANY things, you trust those sources… because there isn’t enough time in life to do otherwise.
Even people like us, who want THE TRUTH no matter how unpleasant instead of happy convenient lies, are stuck with that situation. Welcome to limited human existence.
That’s not to say that far too many people make those choices lazily and never re-evaluate those choices even with obvious reason, so the point to the general populace isn’t horrible… just, as I said, overstated, both in vehemence and regularity. IMO, of course. The people that can be reached with those statements have already been reached – it’s mostly a waste of time.
For the record, this is certainly available to ALL sides, politically, and there is at least some in essentially every group… but in the current era, it’s the left that has raised this to an art form. “Queers for Palestine”, QED.
The trick is being able to force the square peg of instinct and evolutionary adaptation into the round hole of “civilization”….