Given current IQ trends, humanity is getting dumber. Let’s not mince words. This implies the AGI singularity—our long-heralded techno-apotheosis—will arrive against a backdrop of cognitive decay. A dimming species, squinting into the algorithmic sun.
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Now, I’d argue that AI—as instantiated in generative models like Claude and ChatGPT—already outperforms at least half of the human population. Likely more. The only question worth asking is this: at what percentile does AI need to outperform the human herd to qualify as having “surpassed” us?
Living in the United States, I’m painfully aware that the average IQ hovers somewhere in the mid-90s—comfortably below the global benchmark of 100. If you’re a cynic (and I sincerely hope you are), this explains quite a bit. The declining quality of discourse. The triumph of vibes over facts. The national obsession with astrology apps and conspiracy podcasts.
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb argues that as humans outsource cognition to AI, they lose the capacity to think. It’s the old worry: if the machines do the heavy lifting, we grow intellectually flaccid. There are two prevailing metaphors. One, Platonic in origin, likens cognition to muscle—atrophying through neglect. Plato himself worried that writing would ruin memory. He wasn’t wrong.
But there’s a counterpoint: the cooking hypothesis. Once humans learned to heat food, digestion became easier, freeing up metabolic energy to grow bigger brains. In this light, AI might not be a crutch but a catalyst—offloading grunt work to make space for higher-order thought.
So which is it? Are we becoming intellectually enfeebled? Or are we on the cusp of a renaissance—provided we don’t burn it all down first?
Crucially, most people don’t use their full cognitive capacity anyway. So for the bottom half—hell, maybe the bottom 70%—nothing is really lost. No one’s delegating their calculus homework to ChatGPT if they were never going to attempt it themselves. For the top 5%, AI is already a glorified research assistant—a handy tool, not a replacement.
The real question is what happens to the middle band. The workaday professionals. The strivers. The accountants, engineers, copywriters, and analysts hovering between the 70th and 95th percentiles—assuming our crude IQ heuristics even hold. They’re the ones who have just enough brainpower to be displaced.
That’s where the cognitive carnage will be felt. Not in the depths, not at the heights—but in the middle.
Once upon a time — which is how all good fairy tales begin — suspension of disbelief was a tidy little tool we used to indulge in dragons, space travel, talking animals, and the idea that people in rom-coms have apartments that match their personalities and incomes. It was a temporary transaction, a gentleman’s agreement, a pact signed between audience and creator with metaphorical ink: I know this is nonsense, but I’ll play along if you don’t insult my intelligence.
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This idea, famously coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the “willing suspension of disbelief,” was meant to give art its necessary air to breathe. Coleridge’s hope was that audiences would momentarily silence their rational faculties in favour of emotional truth. The dragons weren’t real, but the heartbreak was. The ghosts were fabrications, but the guilt was palpable.
But that was then. Before the world itself began auditioning for the role of absurdist theatre. Before reality TV became neither reality nor television. Before politicians quoted memes, tech CEOs roleplayed as gods, and conspiracy theorists became bestsellers on Amazon. These days, suspension of disbelief is no longer a leisure activity — it’s a survival strategy.
The Fictional Contract: Broken but Not Forgotten
Traditionally, suspension of disbelief was deployed like a visitor’s badge. You wore it when entering the imagined world and returned it at the door on your way out. Fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction — they all relied on that badge. You accepted the implausible if it served the probable. Gandalf could fall into shadow and return whiter than before because he was, after all, a wizard. We were fine with warp speed as long as the emotional logic of Spock’s sacrifice made sense. There were rules — even in rule-breaking.
The genres varied. Hard sci-fi asked you to believe in quantum wormholes but not in lazy plotting. Magical realism got away with absurdities wrapped in metaphor. Superhero films? Well, their disbelief threshold collapsed somewhere between the multiverse and the Bat-credit card.
Still, we always knew we were pretending. We had a tether to the real, even when we floated in the surreal.
But Then Real Life Said, “Hold My Beer.”
At some point — let’s call it the twenty-first century — the need to suspend disbelief seeped off the screen and into the bloodstream of everyday life. News cycles became indistinguishable from satire (except that satire still had editors). Headlines read like rejected Black Mirror scripts. A reality TV star became president, and nobody even blinked. Billionaires declared plans to colonise Mars whilst democracy quietly lost its pulse.
We began to live inside a fiction that demanded that our disbelief be suspended daily. Except now, it wasn’t voluntary. It was mandatory. If you wanted to participate in public life — or just maintain your sanity — you had to turn off some corner of your rational mind.
You had to believe, or pretend to, that the same people calling for “freedom” were banning books. That artificial intelligence would definitely save us, just as soon as it was done replacing us. That social media was both the great democratiser and the sewer mainline of civilisation.
The boundary between fiction and reality? Eroded. Fact-checking? Optional. Satire? Redundant. We’re all characters now, improvising in a genreless world that refuses to pick a lane.
What happens to a psyche caught in this funhouse? Nothing good.
Our brains, bless them, were designed for some contradiction — religion’s been pulling that trick for millennia — but the constant toggling between belief and disbelief, trust and cynicism, is another matter. We’re gaslit by the world itself. Each day, a parade of facts and fabrications marches past, and we’re told to clap for both.
Cognitive dissonance becomes the default. We scroll through doom and memes in the same breath. We read a fact, then three rebuttals, then a conspiracy theory, then a joke about the conspiracy, then a counter-conspiracy about why the joke is state-sponsored. Rinse. Repeat. Sleep if you can.
The result? Mental fatigue. Not just garden-variety exhaustion, but a creeping sense that nothing means anything unless it’s viral. Critical thinking atrophies not because we lack the will but because the floodwaters never recede. You cannot analyse the firehose. You can only drink — or drown.
Culture in Crisis: A Symptom or the Disease?
This isn’t just a media problem. It’s cultural, epistemological, and possibly even metaphysical.
We’ve become simultaneously more skeptical — distrusting institutions, doubting authorities — and more gullible, accepting the wildly implausible so long as it’s entertaining. It’s the postmodern paradox in fast-forward: we know everything is a construct, but we still can’t look away. The magician shows us the trick, and we cheer harder.
In a world where everything is performance, authenticity becomes the ultimate fiction. And with that, the line between narrative and news, between aesthetic and actuality, collapses.
So what kind of society does this create?
One where engagement replaces understanding. Where identity is a curated feed. Where politics is cosplay, religion is algorithm, and truth is whatever gets the most shares. We aren’t suspending disbelief anymore. We’re embalming it.
The Future: A Choose-Your-Own-Delusion Adventure
So where does this all end?
There’s a dark path, of course: total epistemic breakdown. Truth becomes just another fandom and reality a subscription model. But there’s another route — one with a sliver of hope — where we become literate in illusion.
We can learn to hold disbelief like a scalpel, not a blindfold. To engage the implausible with curiosity, not capitulation. To distinguish between narratives that serve power and those that serve understanding.
It will require a new kind of literacy. One part media scepticism, one part philosophical rigour, and one part good old-fashioned bullshit detection. We’ll have to train ourselves not just to ask “Is this true?” but “Who benefits if I believe it?”
That doesn’t mean closing our minds. It means opening them with caution. Curiosity without credulity. Wonder without worship. A willingness to imagine the impossible whilst keeping a firm grip on the probable.
In Conclusion, Reality Is Optional, But Reason Is Not
In the age of AI, deepfakes, alt-facts, and hyperreality, we don’t need less imagination. We need more discernment. The world may demand our suspension of disbelief, but we must demand our belief back. In truth, in sense, in each other.
Because if everything becomes fiction, then fiction itself loses its magic. And we, the audience, are left applauding an empty stage.
Lights down. Curtain call. Time to read the footnotes.
Reading Leviathan has me thinking. Nothing new, mind you—just reinvigorated. Hobbes, bless his scowling soul, is the consummate pessimist. People, in his view, are untrustworthy sods, ready to stab you in the back at the first flicker of opportunity. He doesn’t believe in community. He believes in containment.
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And to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong. He captures a certain cohort with uncanny accuracy. You know the type. Type-A™ personalities: the Donald Trumps, Elon Musks, Adolph Hitlers, Shahs of Iran, and that guy in marketing who always schedules meetings for 8am. The ones who salivate at the mere whiff of power, who’d sell their grandmothers for a press release and call it vision.
This, in short, is why we can’t have nice things.
Now, I’ll concede that most people want more than they have. Economics depends on this assumption like religion depends on guilt. But not everyone is driven by an insatiable lust for money, dominance, or legacy. That, my friends, is not ambition. It is pathology—a malignant, metastasising hunger that infects the likes of Trump, Musk, Bezos, Sunak, and their ilk. The hunger to rule, not just participate.
The trouble is, the majority of the world’s population are idiots—not technically, but metaphorically. Soft-headed. Overstimulated. Easily distracted by flags, influencers, and “free shipping.” And there are flavours of idiots. Musk is a lucky idiot. Trump is a useful idiot. Most are a hair’s breadth from being cannon fodder.
And then we wonder why everything’s broken.
The world could be configured differently. It could consist of autonomous collectives, each minding its own business, each respecting the other’s boundaries like courteous houseplants. But this equilibrium is shattered—always shattered—by the predatory few. The outliers. The sharks in suits. The ones who mistake governance for domination and diplomacy for personal branding.
So we build mechanisms to defend ourselves—laws, institutions, surveillance, standing armies—but these mechanisms inevitably attract the same types we were trying to ward off. Power-hungry cretins in different hats. The protectors, it turns out, are rarely benevolent dictators. They are predacious politicos, wearing virtue like a costume, mouthing justice while tightening the screws.
And here lies the eternal problem. Not technology. Not ideology. Not even ignorance.
But the recurring infestation of pathological ambition in a species otherwise just trying to get on with its day.
David Brooks and the Hollowing Out of Conservatism
David Brooks is the quintessential old-school Conservative—the kind who once upheld a semblance of ideological coherence. He belongs to the pre-Reagan-Thatcher vintage, a time when Conservatism at least had the decency to argue from principles rather than blind tribalism. We could debate these people in good faith. Those days are gone. The current incarnation of Conservatism contains only homoeopathic traces of its Classical™ predecessor—diluted beyond recognition.
The Degeneration of Conservatism
The rot set in with Reagan, who caught it from Thatcher. Greed and selfishness were laundered into virtues, repackaged as “individual responsibility,” and the party’s intellectual ballast began to erode. By the time Bush II’s administration rolled in, Neo-Conservatism had replaced any lingering Burkean ethos, and by Trump’s tenure, even the pretence of ideology was gone. Conservatism-in-Name-Only—whatever Trump’s brand of reactionary nihilism was—swallowed the party whole. Do they even call themselves Conservatives anymore, or has that ship sailed along with basic literacy?
To be fair, this didn’t go unnoticed. Plenty of old-school Republicans recoiled in horror when Trump became their figurehead. Before the 2016 election, conservative pundits could barely contain their disdain for his incompetence, lack of moral compass, and general buffoonery. And yet, once they realised he was the party’s golden goose, they clambered aboard the Trump Train with the enthusiasm of lottery winners at a payday loan office. His staunchest critics became his most obsequious apologists. What does this tell us about their value system? Spoiler: nothing good.
Brooks’ Lament
Which brings us back to Brooks, who now bemoans the death of Conservative values. On this, we agree. Where we part ways is on whether those values were worth saving. Say you’re boarding a train from New York to Los Angeles. Conservatism might argue that a Miami-bound train is still a train, so what’s the problem? It’s the same vehicle, just going somewhere else. Except, of course, Conservatism has always insisted on the slow train over the fast train—because urgency is unseemly, and progress must be rationed.
If I’m an affluent middle-classer, I might prefer Conservatism’s careful incrementalism—it keeps my apple cart stable. Admirable, if you enjoy tunnel vision. Progressives, by contrast, recognise that some people don’t even have apple carts. Some are starving while others hoard orchards. To the Conservative, the poor just aren’t trying hard enough. To the Progressive, the system is broken, and the playing field needs a serious re-levelling. Even when Conservatives acknowledge inequality, their instinct is to tiptoe toward justice rather than risk disrupting their own affluence.
The Fallacy of Objective Reality
Leaving politics for philosophy, Brooks predictably rails against Postmodernism, decrying relativism in favour of good old-fashioned Modernist “reality.” He’s horrified by subjectivism, as though personal interpretation weren’t the foundation of all human experience. Like Jordan Peterson, he believes his subjective truth is the objective truth. And like Peterson, he takes umbrage at anyone pointing out otherwise. It feels so absolute to them that they mistake their own convictions for universal constants.
As a subjectivist, I accept that reality is socially mediated. We interpret truth claims based on cognitive biases, cultural conditioning, and personal experience. Even when we strive for objectivity, we do so through subjective lenses. Brooks’ Modernist nostalgia is touching but delusional—akin to demanding we all agree on a single flavour of ice cream.
The Existential Problem
And so, I find myself in partial agreement with Brooks. Yes, there is an existential crisis. The patient has a broken leg. But our prescriptions differ wildly. I won’t offer a metaphor for that—consider it your homework as a reader.
Brooks is likely a better writer than a public speaker, but you may still find yourself nodding along with some of his arguments. If you’re a “true” Christian Conservative—if you still believe in something beyond crass self-interest—he may well be preaching to the choir. But let’s be honest: how many in that choir are still listening?
This is Chapter 5 of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society. I’ve had this on my bookshelf for quite a while and wasn’t sure how a 70-year-old book could have so much relevance, but it does. Granted, some of it is irrelevant, a victim of the period it was written. This happens.
Sidebar: Whilst praising Freud, Fromm also calls him out, essentially accusing him of projecting his mummy-daddy issues onto the world at large. When I first encountered Freud’s work in the 1980s, it was already largely discredited. Some of what should have been wasn’t. Freud’s work as a psychoanalyst heavily overshadowed his other contributions. In fact, Freud offers some strong philosophical insights into society and civilisation. He’s not all about cigars and dreamscapes.
What strikes me about this chapter is the historical perspective it provides on capitalism. I’m an academic economist. I taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade. I’ve read (and recommend reading) Marx’s Capital firsthand.
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Fromm adds additional details here. Firstly, he notes that the capitalism that marked the early days of the Industrial Revolution—the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—differed from that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The earlier period still had cultural and moral tethers that became frayed or lost in later periods. Without regurgitating the chapter, I cite some themes:
“this underselling practice is grown to such a shameful height, that particular persons publicly advertise that they undersell the rest of the trade.”
People were not very keen on price cutting as a competitive mechanism.
They also note the unfair competitive advantage of the monied elites who could buy materials in cash instead of credit and could thereby undercut prices, who would have to account for paying interest rates or markups on credit.
Whilst in the twentieth century, regulating undercutting is seen as protectionism, the earlier centuries had no problems defending merchants. We do have laws on the ebooks that prevent dumping, but these are rarely enforced, and when they are, it’s a political rather than economic statement. In practice, but done in the name of economics are politics in the same manner as science was used as cover to implement policy during the COVID-19 debacle.
Montesquieu says “that machines which diminish the numbers of workers are ‘pernicious’.” This sentiment echoes the current sentiments about robotics and artificial intelligence.
Nineteenth-century capitalism saw man as the measure of all things supplanted by capital. This is the capitalism Marx rails against—profits over humanity and society, the pursuit of local maxima at the expense of global maxima. This is also where the goal of hypergrowth and growth for growth’s sake came into vogue, ushering us into the Modern Age of Modern ideals—science, progress, order, and so on.
I won’t exhaust the chapter here, but for what it is, it’s a relatively light read. Whether I comment on later chapters depends on whether they engage me. Cheers.
These are the first two chapter titles of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society. I suspect I’ll be reading this book twice for good measure. I’m four chapters in, with three to go, and eager for a deeper dive.
Despite being published in 1955, Fromm’s analysis remains strikingly relevant. Mark Fisher picks up a similar thread in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, but whereas Fisher dissects the ideological stranglehold of late capitalism, Fromm, as a psychiatrist, turns the lens on human nature itself. He questions the very concept of normalcy—something we tend to accept uncritically, much like Michel Foucault would in the following generation.
I’ll hold off on any sweeping conclusions until I’ve finished the book (and, more likely, after a second read). But for now, consider this a tentative recommendation. Snow Crash was an amusing detour, but non-fiction is where I feel most at home.
Humans, we are told, are exceptional—unlike the rest of the lowly animal kingdom. We alone possess reason, morality, and the ability to transcend our base instincts. And yet, curiously, this argument is rolled out only when convenient. At times, we are commanded to rise above our primal urges; at others, we are scolded for even thinking about resisting them. This ideological schizophrenia is no accident—it is a feature, not a bug, of our prevailing moral and economic order.
The contradictions of “human nature” arguments can be broken down into two key patterns:
A. We must transcend our animal instincts—but only when they threaten social or economic order.
B. We must accept our animal instincts as unchangeable—but only when they reinforce existing power structures.
This hypocrisy is especially visible in how capitalism and morality are framed. Let’s examine two case studies.
Case 1: Prostitution—A Market That Must Be Morally Suppressed
Sex is as fundamental a biological drive as hunger or thirst. One would think that in a world where everything is commodified, prostitution—the most direct transaction of supply and demand—would be embraced by free-market capitalists. But no. We are told that engaging in this “base” activity is degrading, immoral, and must be curtailed. The same capitalists who defend free enterprise at all costs suddenly become moralists, urging us to resist temptation and rise above our urges. Sex, despite being one of the most natural acts imaginable, is treated as an impulse to be tamed rather than an economic exchange to be normalised.
Case 2: Capitalism—A System We Must Accept as “Natural”
Contrast this with how we are told to think about capitalism. Greed, exploitation, and ruthless competition? Those are “just human nature.” The strong thrive, and the weak perish. We are warned not to question the system because to do so would be to fight against nature itself. Socialism? A naive fantasy. Economic cooperation? Impossible. Mutual aid? Utopian nonsense. We must accept that humans are selfish creatures, that hierarchy is inevitable, and that billionaires accumulating obscene wealth while millions starve is simply the way of things.
Why are we ordered to suppress our instincts in one case yet surrender to them in another? Because morality, in its institutional form, is not about virtue—it is about control.
The Convenient Flexibility of “Human Nature”
This selective logic is designed to keep power structures intact. The rules shift depending on whose interests are at stake:
If an instinct challenges profit or control, it must be suppressed.
If an instinct benefits the ruling order, it must be accepted as natural.
Thus, the same societies that demand moral restraint when it comes to sex, leisure, or pleasure suddenly rediscover their inner Darwinist when defending capitalist greed and economic cruelty.
The “Natural Order” Myth
The claim that capitalism is the inevitable result of human nature is one of history’s greatest ideological scams. If it were indeed “natural,” it would not require:
Constant propaganda to reinforce its legitimacy.
Violent suppression of alternative systems.
Trillions in government bailouts every time it fails.
Moreover, humans are not only competitive, selfish creatures. We are also wired for cooperation, altruism, and communal living—traits conveniently erased from discussions about economics.
Final Thought: Breaking the Cycle
If we can rise above base instincts for sex and violence, why can’t we rise above capitalist greed and exploitation? Why is overcoming “human nature” only demanded when it suits power? The truth is, we are only commanded to rise above when it keeps us obedient—and ordered to accept reality when it keeps the powerful in control.
The only real rebellion is to reject this hypocrisy entirely. The future belongs not to those who passively accept the contradictions of the present, but to those who refuse to play by its schizophrenic rules.
It’s not uncommon to label workers under the capitalist system as wage slaves.
As with the abolition of slavery in the United States, the future will one day recoil at Capitalism, wondering how humanity could ever have justified the exploitation of others for commerce and profit. Then again, that’s the same question, isn’t it?
As with the old story, a man asked a lady: “Would you be willing to sleep with me if I paid you £1,000,000?” Without hesitation, she answered, “Yes.” “And what if I only paid you £5?” The irate lady fumed: “£5? What do you think I am?” The man replied: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re trying to determine the degree.”
Capitalism is only a matter of degree from slavery. In practice, slavery is a Capitalist’s wet dream.
Philosophics 