I don’t know what the number of ‘likes’ on posts really means. The practice of clicking a ‘like’ button started with social media, and I’ve never paid that much attention to it. But I can’t help noticing that the number of likes on essays that not only diagnose problems but offer a clear solution, is consistently and substantially lower than essays that express indignation, pain or anger, or expose bad behaviour, injustices and crimes. This has been consistent ever since I started to publish essays here on Substack back in 2022. If the reactions to essays are anything to go by, then here is what I am thinking:
Every revolution in history has been driven primarily by pain, hurt, and rage against the existing order, rather than a genuinely developed vision of something different. As a result they have reproduced the same dominance structures they claimed to replace. We don’t just get ‘more of the same’ after a revolution, but often worse. The French Revolution produced Napoleon. The Russian Revolution produced Stalin. The US Revolution produced Trump. Trump’s voters were promised a transformation for the better of a system that has failed them, but is producing a dictatorship/quasi-monarchy instead.
Human psychology, which is a direct product of our neurobiology hasn’t changed much in the last 50,000 years. Changing the people in power without changing the neurological substrate of enough individuals is doomed to produce more of the same. Often worse, because the new predators in charge have the additional energy of recently won power, and the moral cover of having been previously oppressed.
The mechanism is always the same. Strong feelings, limbic energy, are sufficient to destroy the existing structure, but they cannot build anything genuinely different. Building something different requires the very prefrontal capacity for vision that limbic dominance overrides. Because the limbic brain is so dominant in almost everyone, essays that validate strong feelings offer a real dopamine hit. They can be very gratifying psychologically, even if the feelings they express and validate — pain, indignation, incredulity, anger — are uncomfortable or unpleasant. Less emotive essays discussing a vision of something we have not yet experienced probably don’t offer the same gratification.
Our limbic brain can only recreate what it already knows, which means what’s already wired in from lived experience, witnessing, and powerful cultural inheritance. Without prefrontal vision in charge, we’re doomed to repeat patterns both at the individual and group levels. We always end up with new people in charge running the same software as their predecessors.
I have no doubt people want change, but what we need is not merely a regime change but a complete paradigm change. We need a new vision, and enough integration (maturity) to make it happen.
Perhaps the low like count is evidence that whilst people want change, they are not yet able to believe in an entirely new vision for humanity. They may not even be that attracted to reading about it. This essay and others like it may be proving their own argument in real time through the response they generate.
A comment on paid subscriptions
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