One of the saddest changes I’ve witnessed over the past decade isn’t that Americans disagree. We’ve always disagreed. It’s that we’ve begun treating disagreement as something relationships cannot survive.
For most of human history, families gathered around tables not because they agreed about everything, but because they belonged to one another. Anthropologists have long argued that communal meals, weddings, funerals, religious holidays, and seasonal festivals weren’t simply traditions. They were survival technologies that reinforced cooperation in small groups. Long before there were governments, there were families, and long before there were constitutions, there were shared stories reminding everyone that no one faced the world alone.
Today, the family dinner table often feels like a diplomatic summit.
Every November, newspapers publish some version of the same article: How to Talk to Your MAGA Uncle. How to Deal with Your Liberal Cousin. How to Survive Thanksgiving. The joke works because everyone understands it. Somehow, one of humanity’s oldest rituals of belonging has become something to navigate with talking points, contingency plans, and emotional armor.
That should concern us. Not because democracy requires agreement. It never has. Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed relentlessly. Lincoln deliberately filled his cabinet with political rivals. Democracies don’t depend on consensus. They depend on the willingness to remain a community despite profound disagreement. What’s changed is that disagreement increasingly feels like betrayal.
I’ve heard versions of the same heartbreaking story from patients, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Parents convinced their children have been brainwashed. Adult children convinced their parents have disappeared into cable news. Brothers who no longer speak. Sisters who quietly celebrate holidays separately. Grandchildren who avoid grandparents because no one can promise the conversation will remain civil.
The details change. The heartbreak doesn’t. Evolution didn’t prepare us for democracy. It prepared us for survival.
For roughly 300,000 years, belonging to the tribe wasn’t a luxury. It was the difference between life and death. A person rejected by the group was unlikely to survive for long. Natural selection therefore favored brains exquisitely tuned to loyalty, belonging, cooperation, and shared identity. Evolution didn’t reward our ancestors for winning debates. It rewarded them for remaining part of the group.
That ancient brain still lives inside us. Our tribes simply have new names. Political parties. Religions. Cable news networks. Podcasts. Social media feeds. The irony is difficult to ignore. The same psychological machinery that allowed human beings to cooperate well enough to survive an evolutionary bottleneck, build civilizations, and eventually walk on the Moon can also persuade us to see our own relatives as strangers.
As Yuval Noah Harari (historian) writes, “Humans think in stories rather than facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.” Democracy therefore depends upon something evolution rarely demanded of us: listening respectfully to people outside our tribe.
Heather Cox Richardson (historian) has argued that democracy ultimately depends upon citizens maintaining a shared civic reality, while Timothy Snyder (historian) warns that authoritarianism begins not by changing laws but by changing what people believe is true. More than thirty years ago, Carl Sagan (astronomer and science communicator) recognized the same danger from a scientific perspective, writing, “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.”
Notice what Sagan didn’t write. He didn’t say they. He said we. That may be the most important word in the sentence.
Science educator Dave Farina reminds his audience that the strength of science isn’t certainty but the willingness to abandon yesterday’s conclusions when tomorrow’s evidence demands it. Meanwhile, Jennifer Welch (podcaster) jokes that Americans increasingly treat political opinions like blood types, while George Carlin observed that everyone laughs at the stupidity of “other people,” never imagining they might belong to the same group.
Psychologists have a name for that tendency. The bias blind spot. We are remarkably good at recognizing irrationality in everyone except ourselves.
Americans reporting politics has strained family relationships: about 40%
Americans avoiding political discussions with certain relatives: more than one-third
Approximate years modern humans have survived through cooperation: 300,000
Number of “How to Survive Thanksgiving” articles published every November: too many to count
Perhaps democracy’s greatest achievement has never been convincing us to agree. Perhaps it has been asking our Stone Age brains to do something they were never designed to do. Treat people outside the tribe as though they belong to it. Everything else in this article begins there.
Why Propaganda Works on Good People
If propaganda only fooled unintelligent people, it would have disappeared long ago. Instead, it has shaped virtually every civilization in history. That’s because propaganda doesn’t exploit stupidity. It exploits a brain that evolved for survival rather than objective truth. Our ancestors survived because they rapidly distinguished friend from foe, trusted their own group, and responded quickly to danger. Those instincts saved lives for hundreds of thousands of years. They also left us vulnerable to anyone skilled at manipulating them.
Propaganda rarely begins by asking people to become cruel. It begins by asking them to become afraid. Afraid that someone is coming for their children. Their jobs. Their religion. Their freedoms. Their country.
Once fear takes hold, the brain changes its priorities. The question quietly shifts from “Is this true?” to “Am I safe?” Evolution designed that response because hesitation in the face of a predator could be fatal. But the same survival system that once helped our ancestors escape lions can make modern humans surprisingly susceptible to misinformation, tribalism, and authoritarianism.
As Hannah Arendt (political philosopher) observed after covering Adolf Eichmann’s trial, evil is often frighteningly ordinary. Her phrase, “the banality of evil,” wasn’t meant to excuse atrocities. It was a warning that history’s greatest horrors are frequently committed by people who believe they are simply doing their duty.
Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has spent decades demonstrating that chronic stress changes the way we think. We become more reactive, less flexible, and more likely to divide the world into allies and enemies. That’s adaptive if a lion is chasing you. It’s a terrible way to run a democracy. Perhaps the greatest strength of propaganda isn’t that it changes minds. It’s that it narrows the circle of trust.
Once you’ve become convinced that only one television network, one political leader, one podcast, one church, or one website tells the truth, you’ve built a wall around your own thinking. Contrary evidence no longer arrives as information. It arrives as proof that everyone else is lying.
That’s why Timothy Snyder (historian) argues that one of the first goals of authoritarian movements is to undermine trust in independent institutions. Courts. Universities. Journalists. Scientists. Elections. Once citizens believe that no one outside the movement can be trusted, the movement itself becomes the only remaining source of reality.
Notice how different this is from simply lying. The most successful propagandists don’t merely convince people what to think. They convince them whom to trust. Everything else follows naturally. It’s believing it couldn’t happen to us.
Germans who belonged to the Nazi Party by 1945: approximately 8.5 million
Participants in Stanley Milgram’s (social psychologist) obedience experiments who administered what they believed were dangerous electric shocks: 65%
Days during which approximately 800,000 people were murdered in the Rwandan genocide: 100
Americans reporting little or no trust in the mass media: about two-thirds
Propaganda doesn’t defeat democracy by making citizens hate one another. It defeats democracy by convincing them they no longer inhabit the same reality. Once that happens, disagreement is no longer a debate. It becomes a battle between tribes.
The Kind of Mind Democracy Requires
If evolution prepared us to survive in tribes, why do some people seem more comfortable questioning the tribe than others? Psychologists have been asking that question for decades. The answer isn’t intelligence. Highly intelligent people can become zealots just as easily as anyone else. The more interesting difference may be how comfortable people are living with uncertainty.
Children naturally think concretely. Rules are fixed. Good people are good. Bad people are bad. As the brain matures, particularly the prefrontal cortex through our twenties, most of us become increasingly capable of abstract thought. We begin to appreciate irony, ambiguity, competing values, and the possibility that two intelligent people can disagree without either being evil. Growing up, in many ways, means becoming comfortable with complexity. Not everyone reaches the same destination.
One of the most consistent findings in personality psychology is a trait known as openness to experience. People who score higher tend to be more curious, more tolerant of ambiguity, and more willing to revise their beliefs when confronted with new evidence. Those who score lower often prefer predictability, tradition, and clear rules. Neither style is inherently better. Every civilization needs people who preserve traditions as well as people who challenge them.
The danger comes when certainty replaces curiosity. This is where politics often becomes misleading. For years, researchers have reported average psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals, on average, tend to score somewhat higher on openness to experience. Conservatives, on average, tend to place greater value on stability, order, and tradition. Some neuroimaging studies have even suggested modest average differences in brain regions involved in processing threat and conflict.
Those findings are fascinating. They’re also easy to misuse. The differences are averages across millions of people. They are not diagnoses. There is enormous overlap. No MRI scanner can tell you how someone votes, and reducing political beliefs to brain anatomy is every bit as simplistic as reducing personality to eye color.
Still, one observation keeps appearing throughout the literature: people who perceive the world as more dangerous generally place greater value on order and security, while those who perceive it as relatively safe are often more willing to embrace novelty and uncertainty.
The operative word is perceive. Our brains don’t respond to reality. They respond to the reality they believe they’re living in. That insight may help explain why two people can watch the same event, read the same statistics, and reach completely different conclusions. They’re not necessarily processing different facts. They’re processing different worlds.
As Jonathan Haidt (social psychologist) has argued, liberals and conservatives often begin with different moral intuitions. Liberals tend to emphasize care and fairness, while conservatives often place greater weight on loyalty, authority, and sanctity alongside those same values. Neither side owns morality. They simply begin the moral conversation in different places.
Unfortunately, modern politics rewards the opposite of complexity. Every problem has one villain. Every question has one answer. Every compromise is weakness. Every election is “the most important in history.” The human brain loves simple stories. Reality almost never provides them.
Perhaps that’s why Richard Feynman (physicist) remains one of my intellectual heroes. He wrote, “I can live with doubt and uncertainty... I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” That sentence could just as easily describe democracy.
Democracy doesn’t require us to agree. It requires us to tolerate uncertainty long enough to keep listening.
Human personality traits in the “Big Five” model: 5
Age at which the prefrontal cortex generally reaches full maturity: mid-20s
Political issues that can honestly be reduced to simple good-versus-evil stories: almost none
The most dangerous phrase in politics: “It’s that simple.”
Perhaps the brain democracy requires isn’t the smartest one. Perhaps it’s the one most willing to remain curious after certainty would have been easier.
We Inherit More Than Genes
If evolution gave us the brain, who teaches it what to believe? The answer is everyone. Parents. Teachers. Friends. Religious leaders. Schools. Books. Television. Algorithms. Every generation is born into a world already under construction, inheriting not only knowledge but also fears, loyalties, prejudices, traditions, and stories. Civilization isn’t rebuilt from scratch every twenty-five years. It’s handed from one generation to the next.
That’s one reason I’ve become fascinated by epigenetics. For much of the twentieth century, biology taught that genes were destiny. Today we know the picture is more complicated. Experiences can influence how genes are expressed without altering the DNA itself. Stress, nutrition, illness, and environmental exposures can leave biological marks that affect the way the body functions. The DNA is the library.
Epigenetics is the librarian. The most intriguing question is whether some of those experiences can echo across generations. Research involving Holocaust survivors, the Dutch Hunger Winter, and other populations exposed to profound trauma suggests they sometimes can, although scientists continue debating how much reflects inherited biology versus parenting, prenatal development, and family culture. Whatever the mechanism, the implication is profound.
History doesn’t end when the history book closes. It continues living inside families. That realization made me wonder whether we’ve been asking the wrong question. We spend enormous effort studying how trauma is passed from one generation to the next. Why don’t we spend equal effort studying how compassion is transmitted? If fear can echo across generations, can curiosity? If violence can become cultural, can kindness? Can secure attachment, good schools, stable democracies, and loving families shape not only one generation, but the next?
Those questions are still largely unanswered. Perhaps the most surprising clue comes not from genetics, but from archaeology. Roughly 12,000 years ago, long before cities, writing, or perhaps even agriculture, people gathered at a place we now call Göbekli Tepe. Nearly every archaeologist who studies the site reaches a similar conclusion: whatever happened there, it appears to have been ritual. That observation has always fascinated me because it suggests that before humans built governments, they built meaning.
Religion, in one form or another, seems to be nearly universal throughout human history. That shouldn’t surprise us. Evolution didn’t simply produce a species capable of reasoning. It produced a species capable of believing together. Shared stories allowed strangers to cooperate, trust one another, raise children together, bury their dead, and eventually build civilizations. The specific stories changed from culture to culture.
The need for stories did not. That also explains something I’ve wondered about for years. Even as someone who is Jewish, I’ve always been struck by how simple many of Jesus’ ethical teachings appear to be: love your neighbor, forgive others, care for the poor, treat people as you would want to be treated. Yet two thousand years later, countless scholars, denominations, and televangelists have constructed astonishingly complicated interpretations around those remarkably straightforward ideas.
Years ago, while living in Pittsburgh, some friends and I would watch Christian television for hours. We weren’t mocking it. We were genuinely fascinated. We’d look at each other wondering whether everyone on the screen had somehow read a different Bible than everyone else. The conversations often felt surreal.
It finally occurred to me that this isn’t really about Christianity. It’s about human beings. Ideas evolve just as cultures evolve. Every generation inherits a story, interprets it through its own fears, ambitions, politics, and historical moment, then hands a slightly different version to the next. Sometimes those changes move us closer to the original ideals.
Sometimes they carry us astonishingly far away.
Approximate age of Homo sapiens: 300,000 years
Estimated size of one ancient human population bottleneck: 1,000-2,000 breeding individuals
Approximate age of Göbekli Tepe: 12,000 years
Number of known civilizations without shared rituals or belief systems: 0
Perhaps that’s our greatest inheritance. Not our genes. Our stories. And every generation must decide which stories deserve to survive.
The Cure Is Curiosity
If evolution prepared our brains for survival rather than objective truth, are we trapped by our own biology? I don’t think so. One of evolution’s greatest gifts is that the human brain remains remarkably adaptable throughout life. Every conversation, every book, every friendship, every mistake, and every success changes us a little. The same brain that can be manipulated can also learn.
The obstacle isn’t intelligence. It’s certainty. Most of us begin with the comforting assumption that we’re decent, rational people. Once that identity forms, our minds become remarkably good at protecting it. We notice evidence that supports what we already believe, discount evidence that doesn’t, and judge our own tribe more generously than everyone else’s. Daniel Kahneman (psychologist and Nobel laureate) spent much of his career demonstrating that these shortcuts aren’t character flaws. They’re ordinary features of the human mind.
The remarkable thing isn’t that we’re biased. It’s that we’re capable of recognizing those biases. That may be the greatest achievement of science. Science isn’t a collection of facts. It’s a disciplined way of discovering where we’re wrong. As Richard Feynman (physicist) famously wrote, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Few sentences better capture the humility that both science and democracy require.
That realization has gradually changed the way I think about propaganda. Perhaps the opposite of propaganda isn’t more information. Perhaps it’s curiosity. Curious people ask questions before choosing sides. They seek out people who disagree with them. They tolerate uncertainty long enough for evidence to accumulate. They understand that changing one’s mind isn’t surrender. It’s often progress.
Psychologists repeatedly find that one personality trait, openness to experience, is associated with greater curiosity and cognitive flexibility. That doesn’t make someone wiser or morally superior. It simply makes continued learning more likely. The real enemy isn’t liberalism. It isn’t conservatism. It’s the belief that we’ve reached the end of learning.
As Bertrand Russell (philosopher) observed, “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” Like all good aphorisms, it’s an exaggeration. But it points toward an important truth: wisdom often sounds less certain because it has encountered more complexity.
Perhaps intellectual maturity has very little to do with IQ. Perhaps it’s the ability to hold an opinion firmly enough to act, yet loosely enough to revise it when reality demands.
Estimated number of documented cognitive biases: more than 180
Scientific theories that have survived forever without revision: 0
Number of words that may be hardest for any human being to say: “I was wrong.”
Number of times curiosity has threatened a dictatorship: every time someone asked for evidence
If this article has a single message, it’s this: Evolution gave us the brain that helped our ancestors survive. Civilization asks us to build something evolution never could. A mind capable of remaining curious even when certainty feels safer.
The Brain Democracy Requires
By now you may have noticed something. This article hasn’t really been about liberals or conservatives. It hasn’t been about Fox News or MSNBC. It hasn’t been about Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or any particular election. They’re examples. The subject has always been us.
The human brain is one of the most extraordinary objects in the known universe. It composed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, developed antibiotics, split the atom, decoded DNA, landed on the Moon, and built civilizations. The very same brain also invented slavery, concentration camps, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, Jim Crow, and nuclear weapons. None of those events happened because humans suddenly became a different species.
They happened because the same brain that is capable of extraordinary compassion is also capable of extraordinary certainty.
Whenever I hear someone confidently say, “I could never have supported something like that,” I wonder how they know. If you had been born in Germany in 1915, Mississippi in 1850, Rwanda in 1965, or Cambodia in 1975, would you have become the hero of the story? Or would you have believed what your parents believed, what your teachers taught, what your neighbors repeated, what your religious leaders preached, and what everyone around you accepted as common sense?
I’d like to believe I’d have resisted. So would almost everyone else. History suggests we should all be a little more humble.
As Yuval Noah Harari (historian) has written, humans dominate the planet not because we’re the strongest or fastest animals, but because we’re uniquely capable of cooperating around shared stories. Those stories gave us civilizations, religions, democracies, science, and human rights. They’ve also justified crusades, slavery, genocides, and dictatorships. The problem has never been that human beings tell stories.
The problem is forgetting they’re stories. Every child enters the world knowing almost nothing. Language, mathematics, religion, democracy, prejudice, compassion, and hatred all have to be learned. Every generation inherits a world already under construction. Some of what we inherit is magnificent. Some of it is poisonous. Then, almost without realizing it, we become the architects of what the next generation will inherit.
That may be the most important responsibility any civilization has. Not deciding what to believe. Deciding what to pass on. As Carl Sagan (astronomer and science communicator) wrote, “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.” I would argue that democracy is, too. Democracy isn’t simply majority rule or free elections. It’s a way of thinking that asks us to question our own assumptions, tolerate uncertainty, listen to opposing views, and occasionally admit we were wrong.
Those are remarkably unnatural acts. Evolution prepared us to survive in tribes. Democracy asks us to cooperate with strangers. Evolution rewarded loyalty. Democracy rewards curiosity. Evolution taught us to fear outsiders. Democracy asks us to expand the definition of “us.” Perhaps that’s why democracy has always been such a fragile experiment. It requires a kind of brain evolution never demanded. One capable of placing truth above tribe. Curiosity above certainty. Humility above ideology.
Approximate years Homo sapiens have existed: 300,000
Approximate years democracy has existed in recognizable form: 2,500
Time evolution has had to prepare us for democracy: essentially none
Generation responsible for deciding what happens next: ours
I’ve spent my career trying to understand the human mind. The older I get, the less interested I become in whether someone is liberal or conservative. I’m much more interested in something else. Can they ask a sincere question? Can they tolerate uncertainty? Can they change their mind when the evidence changes? Can they remain connected to someone who disagrees with them?
Because those aren’t simply the habits of good scientists. They’re the habits of good citizens. And they may be the very qualities that determine whether democracy survives the remarkable, imperfect, tribal brains that evolution gave us.
Notes and Sources
1. Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press.
2. Feynman, R. P. (1985). Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! W. W. Norton.
3. Gallup. Long-term surveys on Americans’ trust in institutions and mass media.
4. Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books.
5. Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper.
6. Harari, Y. N. (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau.
7. Henrich, J. (2015). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton University Press.
8. Henrich, J. (2020). The WEIRDest People in the World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
9. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
10. Lumey, L. H., et al. Studies of the Dutch Hunger Winter and the long-term biological effects of prenatal famine exposure.
11. Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row.
12. Pew Research Center. Reports on political polarization, partisan identity, trust in institutions, and family relationships (2014-present).
13. Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. (2002). “The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369-381.
14. Richardson, H. C. (2023). Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Viking.
15. Sagan, C. (1995). The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House.
16. Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin Press.
17. Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Penguin Press.
18. Schmidt, K. (2006). Sie bauten die ersten Tempel (They Built the First Temples). C.H. Beck. Foundational work on Göbekli Tepe, supplemented by subsequent archaeological publications.
19. Snyder, T. (2017). On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books.
20. Snyder, T. (2018). The Road to Unfreedom. Tim Duggan Books.
21. Tomasello, M. (2019). Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Harvard University Press.
22. Waddington, C. H. (1942). “The Epigenotype.” Endeavour, 1, 18-20.
23. Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects: Putative Role of Epigenetic Mechanisms.” World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243-257.
24. Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House.
Hannah Arendt — Political philosopher
George Carlin — Comedian
Dave Farina — Science educator (Professor Dave Explains)
Richard Feynman — Physicist
Jonathan Haidt — Social psychologist
Yuval Noah Harari — Historian
Daniel Kahneman — Psychologist and Nobel laureate
Heather Cox Richardson — Historian
Bertrand Russell — Philosopher
Carl Sagan — Astronomer and science communicator
Robert Sapolsky — Neuroscientist
Timothy Snyder — Historian
Jennifer Welch — Political commentator and co-host of I’ve Had It
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