A recent search commissioned by Channel 4 suggested that more than half of people aged 13 to 27 would prefer that the United Kingdom is an authoritarian dictatorship.
The results shocked many people concerned about the growing threat of autocracy around the world, including me. However, on reflection, I don’t think we should be surprised. The way we have evolved predisposes us to trust those who often deserve it – in a sense, to fire us to support the most Machiavellian among us and to propel them to power. It seems to be an insoluble problem. But that’s what we face this knowledge that matters.
Recent work in anthropology and primatology show how this wiring has evolved. Our ancient ancestors, like most primates today, lived in groups dominated by violent and aggressive Alpha males. However, during our biological and cultural evolution, unlike our primates cousins, we learned to work together to counter these bullyboys, by organizing to reduce their influence.
This is sometimes considered a self -domestication process – a hypothesis with roots in the writings of Charles Darwin. Today, there is solid evidence to support this point of view: not only do we cooperate to a large extent that any known species, but even our faces – which are more flat and do not have prominent front ridges associated with higher testosterone levels – suggest a reduced tendency to aggression than that observed in our nearest genetic parents, such as chimpanzees.
There is another set of features that researchers support today have evolved while we are starting to cooperate more widely. They are known as learning biases. Work in anthropology and psychology shows convincingly that humans tend to believe what others around them believe, in particular those they consider as a success. These are known respectively under the name of conformity and prestige respectively – and can have strong effects on how we perceive the information. Psychologist Salomon Asch demonstrated it in certain classic experimental work on visual judgment: when he was asked to compare the lines on a map, the participants agreed that a short line was of the same length as longer once they had heard other people from the group say that it was.
These biases have probably evolved to help us coordinate more effectively, as we would need to hunt Big Game, for example. This could explain why, in pre -industrial and modern societies, adolescents tend to imitate the behavior of the most athletic people, that this athletics is expressed in hunting or sports.
However, these same biases, combined with our kinds of trust, leave us vulnerable to exploitation by autocratic leaders. I believe that after above all eliminated manifest assault, old societies ended up inadvertently improving the chances of individuals who were skillful to manipulate others in a more subtle way. Some people call this proactive aggressive trait, others, Machiavellian intelligence or the ability and the desire to dominate not with violence, but via social maneuvers and deception. We have accidentally favored and continue to promote those who claim to cooperate until they no longer need to pretend – what you could call our “invisible rivals”.
Machiavellians are particularly effective in using our prejudices against us. Influencers such as Andrew Tate, who appeared as a popular source of information in the Channel 4 survey, are able to use their success and popularity to sell their ideas to their subscribers, carefully avoiding any balancing point of view. And it is the young people, the impressable and perhaps the most unhappy of themselves that are more likely to trust them.
Strong men like Donald Trump work similarly. They use deception and manipulation to create total confidence in their abilities, then use this confidence to propel themselves in power positions – often betraying people who supported their offers, as Trump did several times.
Today’s authoritarian leaders have these secular tools at their disposal, but large networks for the deployment of their information -based agendas. Trump’s recent attacks on the worlds of science and education, promoted to Truth Social, his own social media platform, and stimulated by his acolyte Elon Musk, are an example. Despite the new means of dissemination, these actions are only the last rooms of a long history of wars on trust and belief. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, for example, they judged certain areas of the “bourgeois” scientific study and substituted them for ideologically acceptable areas.
However, we can be optimistic that timeless problems are subject to timeless solutions. Our ancestors have found ways to balance the best elements of human nature against the worst – and, in so doing, to counter the influence of our integrated biases. The first step towards this is to recognize that we have a propensity to blindly follow others and to trust, to share this information and to support the ability of our fellow citizens to think both in a critical and ethical way.
Where we see authorities aiming for institutions creating knowledge – whether universities such as Harvard or organizations such as the National Museum of African -American History and Culture which teach us our past mistakes – we must move to protect them, both with our voices and our financial resources. Where we see a raw power combined with ignorance, we can throw our support behind knowledge, peaceful protests and education.
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And finally, when the reigns of terror end – and finally, they always do it – it is essential to learn and absorb lessons. In this way, we again inoculated against our natural tendency to trust the worthy of confidence, carrying this wisdom towards the future so that we are better able to thwart the autocrats who seek to close our mind.
Jonathan R Goodman is a social specialist and the author of Invisible rivals (Yale).
Upon reading
Autocracy, inc by Anne Applebaum (Allen Lane, £ 20)
How the democracies die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (£ 10.99, Penguin)
Wired for culture by Mark Pagel (Penguin, £ 25)
