I’ve made my way a couple of chapters into A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains by Max Bennet. My son recommended it last month, assuring me it was a delicious cocktail of Sapiens, Behave, and Superintelligence,—all books I’ve rated highly, courtesy of Harari, Sapolsky, and Bostrom, respectively. So far, it’s digestible without being patronizing, requiring no extensive background in the field.
But this post isn’t about the book. It’s about what all good books should do: make you think.
If you’ve followed my writing over the years, you’ll know that I have little patience for psychology, which I regard as the astrology to neuroscience’s astronomy. Reading Fisher’s Capitalist Realism has only reinforced this perspective.
Frankly, I should do away with psychology altogether. Much of it—no, not just the vacuous self-help drivel clogging the internet and bookstore shelves—is pseudoscience. To its credit, it did function as a stepping stone to neuroscience, but that’s like crediting alchemy for modern chemistry.
Psychology’s greatest sin? Missing the forest for the trees—or, more precisely, ignoring the structural forces that shape the so-called individual. Western capitalism, ever eager to monetize everything, finds it far easier (and more profitable) to blame the individual rather than the system. It’s like the old joke about the man searching for his lost keys under the streetlamp, not because that’s where he dropped them, but because that’s where the light is. It’s just more convenient (and profitable) that way.
Enter psychology: the perfect tool for a society steeped in narcissism and instant gratification. Feeling anxious? Depressed? Alienated? Just take a pill! Never mind the material conditions of your existence—your stagnant wages, your crushing debt, your eroding sense of community. No, the problem is you, and conveniently, there’s a profitable solution waiting on the pharmacy shelf.
Sure, psychology has made some strides in attributing behaviours to neurotransmitters—dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and the rest of the usual suspects. And sure, pharmaceuticals can sometimes treat symptoms effectively. But they are just that: symptoms. The root cause? Often stressors imposed by the very society we refuse to scrutinize. And guess what rarely makes the diagnostic checklist? The system itself.
We need to zoom out and see the whole damn forest. We need to ask the hard questions—run the classic five whys to get to the root of the problem. And spoiler alert: the answer isn’t some chemical imbalance in your head.
It’s us. Collectively. Systemically. Structurally.
But sure, keep searching under that streetlamp.
Philosophics 