A non-specialist’s attempt to climb the ladder from chemistry to behaviour — and understand what it means for the rest of our political and cultural economy project
The gaps are real
The physics essay that precedes this one, “Where Do We Fit?” was prompted by a stupid question I asked in a class. It turned out not to be so stupid. The question was about whether subatomic particles are real if we can only know them through mathematics. The tutor went back to the equations. The question, it turned out, was one of the most contested in the philosophy of physics.
This essay begins from a different kind of embarrassment. Not a single question but a recurring experience: of picking up popular books in neuroscience, or philosophy of mind, or social psychology, or behavioural economics — reading with genuine interest, feeling the ground briefly solidify underfoot, and then losing it again at the point where one discipline hands off to another. Not because any individual book was unclear (well some bits were but that’s my bad). But because, I think, the handoff itself is unclear. The disciplines are not always talking to each other, and the gaps between them are not merely pedagogical inconveniences. They are, in some cases, genuine unresolved problems that the people on either side of the gap have largely agreed, by professional convention, not to stare at too long.
So this is an essay about a ladder and about the gaps that are in it. Written for us laypeople. The ladder runs, roughly, from the chemistry of the brain upward through neuroscience, through the philosophy of what consciousness actually is, through the psychology of individual minds, through the social psychology of people in groups, through the untested assumptions about human nature that underpin all political philosophy, and arrives — rather later than most economics textbooks would prefer — at the question of how human beings actually make decisions. The answer to that last question, it turns out, is the most practically important one in the sequence, and also the one that most directly connects to everything else this project has been arguing about.
I spent a career in finance. This is a world that rewards — materially rewards, with some enthusiasm — the performance of certainty. Models, systems, alpha, attribution analysis: the whole apparatus projected objectivity. The confident call, delivered without visible hesitation, is the valued commodity. The admission of uncertainty is, at best, a tolerated eccentricity. Inside the paradigm, I played by the rules, despite a nagging suspicion that this was illusory.
It was only significantly later, reading Daniel Kahneman with the particular quality of attention that arrives when you suspect something is about to reframe a portion of your life, that I understood what had actually been happening. The research notes, the investment theses, the confident market views — these were, in significant part, System Two constructing elegant post-hoc narratives for decisions that System One had already made. The certainty was largely performed. The models and notes were largely stories. Most active fund managers underperform their benchmark index, after fees, over any sustained period. This is not a controversial finding. It is simply one that the industry has a strong institutional interest in not dwelling on. Even now in a world of indexed funds, trackers, ETFs and the like. And, to compound the paradox, most of their investor clients also believe they are wired to win.
This personal experience is the most concrete illustration I have available of the gap between how human beings like to think they make decisions and how they actually do. Finance is just the domain where that gap is most expensively measurable. The gap exists everywhere. We will spend a significant portion of this essay examining how it got there, what it means, and — most importantly for the project — how the economic system we live inside has learned to exploit it.
But we need to climb the ladder first. And the ladder begins, somewhat humblingly, with the question of what the brain actually is — which turns out, almost immediately, to produce a problem that nobody has solved.
From chemistry upward: the short version, and where it breaks
Start at the bottom of the ladder. The brain is, among other things, a chemical system. Neurons communicate through electrochemical signals — a nerve impulse travels along a neuron as an electrical charge, reaches a synapse, triggers the release of neurotransmitters, those chemicals cross the synaptic gap and bind to receptors on the next neuron, and either excite or inhibit its firing. This is, at the level of description, chemistry and physics. The same laws that govern molecules in a test tube govern the signalling between neurons in your visual cortex.
Neuroscience has made extraordinary progress in mapping how this chemistry produces specific functions. We know, in broad terms, where in the brain visual processing happens, where language is processed, where emotional responses are generated, where long-term memories are encoded. Brain scanning technologies — fMRI, EEG, and others — allow us to watch, with increasing resolution, which regions activate during which tasks. The pharmacology of mood is well enough understood that we can intervene in it, with varying levels of precision and side effect. We know that the neurotransmitter serotonin is involved in mood regulation; we know that dopamine is implicated in reward and motivation; we know that disruptions to these systems produce conditions we recognise as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia.
This is all impressive and useful. And then you ask the question that the tutor in the physics class went back to the equations to avoid, and everything gets considerably more interesting.
The question is this: how does electrochemical activity in the brain become experience? How does the firing of neurons in the visual cortex become the redness of a red apple — not the processing of wavelength information, but the actual felt quality of red? How does the chemistry become the sensation of pain, rather than merely the signal that tissue damage has occurred? How, in short, does matter become mind?
This is what the philosopher David Chalmers called the hard problem of consciousness, distinguishing it from the merely difficult ones. The difficult problems — how does the brain integrate information, how does attention work, how are memories stored and retrieved — are hard in the ordinary scientific sense: they require a great deal of careful work to answer, but we have a reasonable idea of the kind of answer that would count as satisfying. The hard problem is different. We have no idea, even in principle, why there should be any subjective experience at all. Why isn’t it all just processing, in the dark, with no one home?
The honest answer, in 2026, is that nobody knows. And — and this is important in and of itself — most people simply don’t care. Life is rewarding/tough enough without disappearing down the consciousness rabbit hole. Nonetheless, this is not a temporary gap awaiting the next round of brain scanning. It is a genuine conceptual puzzle about the relationship between physical processes and subjective experience — between the third-person description that science provides and the first-person reality that each of us inhabits. The neuroscientist can tell you everything that happens in the brain when you see red. What they cannot tell you is why any of it feels like anything. I can’t shake that off.
This gap — between the neuroscience and the experience — is the first real one in our ladder. And it matters for the rest of the essay because almost everything that follows assumes that there is someone home. A self that decides, conforms, obeys, desires, and ultimately participates in an economic system. If we cannot account for where that self comes from — if we cannot bridge from the chemistry to the consciousness — then we are building the rest of our argument on a foundation we have not fully examined. The honest thing is to acknowledge the gap, hold it open, and climb the next rung anyway. Which is what we will do.
The knowing problem: can we trust what we think we know about our own minds?
Before we climb further, there is a problem worth pausing on that sits between the hard problem of consciousness and everything above it. It is an epistemological problem — a problem not about what the mind is but about how reliably we can know it from the inside.
The assumption baked into ordinary life is that the self is, at minimum, transparent to itself. I know what I think. I know why I did what I did. I know what I want. This is such a basic feature of how we navigate daily existence that questioning it feels almost perverse. And yet the evidence, assembled carefully over about a century of psychology, is that this assumption is largely wrong — not at the edges, not in unusual circumstances, but routinely and systematically.
Freud was the first to make this claim with any force, and his specific mechanisms — the Oedipal complex, the hydraulic model of repressed drives — have not fared well under subsequent scrutiny. But the core insight, that a great deal of what drives behaviour lies outside conscious awareness and that introspective reports are not reliable guides to actual causes, has been confirmed repeatedly by experimental psychology. We confabulate. We construct explanations for our behaviour after the fact and experience those explanations as memories of genuine deliberation. The explanation feels like a cause. It is often, in the technical sense, a story.
The psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson demonstrated this with uncomfortable clarity in a series of experiments in the 1970s. In one, shoppers were asked to evaluate pairs of identical stockings and choose a preferred pair, then explain their choice. They chose with a consistent positional bias — items on the right were preferred — but their explanations cited texture, sheerness, quality. Nobody said ‘I chose the one on the right.’ Nobody knew. The explanations were fluent, confident, and causally disconnected from the actual determining factor. When the experimenter suggested that position might have influenced the choice, subjects denied it, with some indignation.
This is not a story about unusually irrational people. It is a story about the normal operation of the human mind. We act, and then we explain. The explanation is generated by the same apparatus that generated the action, and it has access to culturally available narratives about why people do things — quality, preference, reason — but not necessarily to the actual mechanism. The self that reports on itself is not a neutral observer. It is a narrator with a strong interest in coherent authorship.
The implication for everything that follows is significant. When we ask why people obey authority, why they conform, why they make the economic choices they make, we cannot simply ask them. Their answers will be sincere and mostly wrong. The mechanisms are elsewhere. This is not comfortable, but it is the necessary foundation for taking the social psychology and the behavioural economics seriously — they are studying what is actually happening, rather than what people report is happening, and the gap between those two things turns out to be where most of the interesting action is.
David Hume got to a version of this from a completely different direction, sitting in an Edinburgh study in the eighteenth century with no experimental psychology available to him whatsoever. His bundle theory of the self — the argument that when he looked inward he could find no unified self, only a bundle of perceptions following one another with great rapidity — anticipates the neuroscientific picture by two hundred years. There is no stable observer behind the observations. There is only the stream. And his is/ought distinction is the epistemological foundation of everything the essay is building toward politically: you cannot derive what human beings ought to be from what they happen to be observed to be. The state of nature is an is/ought fallacy in a powdered wig.
Who decided? The neuroscience of the moment before the moment
In the early 1980s, the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet ran a set of experiments that have been disturbing people ever since, including people who feel they should by now have come to terms with them.
The setup was simple. Participants sat watching a clock and were asked to flick their wrist whenever they felt like it — spontaneously, without planning. They were asked to note the position of the clock hand at the moment they first felt the urge to move. Meanwhile, EEG electrodes measured their brain activity, and sensors detected the actual moment of movement.
The finding was this. Brain activity associated with the movement — a signal called the readiness potential — began, on average, about 550 milliseconds before the movement itself. The conscious awareness of the urge to move arrived about 200 milliseconds before the movement. Which means that the brain had already begun preparing the action roughly 350 milliseconds before the person was consciously aware of deciding to do it.
The decision, in other words, preceded the awareness of deciding. The subjective sense of ‘I am about to choose to move’ arrived after the neural machinery had already started. The feeling of authorship came after the process it claimed to be initiating.
Libet himself, perhaps understandably, was reluctant to accept the most radical interpretation of his own results. He proposed that even if the brain initiates the action before conscious awareness, consciousness retains a veto — the capacity to abort the movement in that 200-millisecond window. Free will survives, in his account, as the power of refusal rather than initiation. Free won’t. It is perhaps the most anxious rescue operation in the history of experimental psychology.
The debate about what the Libet experiments actually prove has been running for forty years and is not resolved. Methodological objections have been raised — the readiness potential may not be the initiating signal it appears to be; the experimental conditions are artificial; spontaneous wrist-flicking is not representative of complex deliberate choice. These are fair points. The experiments are not a simple proof that free will is an illusion, and anyone who tells you they are is oversimplifying.
But here is what they do establish, even conservatively read: the relationship between neural process and conscious experience is not the one ordinary intuition assumes. The story we tell ourselves — that we deliberate, decide, and then act — is, at minimum, a compression of something more complicated, in which the neural preparation precedes and in some sense constitutes the decision before the self shows up to claim credit for it. The machinery moves first. The sense of authorship arrives to narrate what has already begun.
Antonio Damasio arrives here from a different direction and with a complementary finding. His work on patients with damage to the emotional and interoceptive centres of the brain — specifically the ventromedial prefrontal cortex — showed that such patients, while retaining their reasoning capacity intact, became profoundly unable to make decisions in ordinary life. They could analyse options with perfect logical clarity, enumerate consequences, articulate pros and cons, and still be unable to choose what to have for lunch. The missing ingredient was not reason but feeling — the somatic markers, the bodily signals of approach or aversion, that in healthy brains guide decision-making below the level of conscious deliberation.
Descartes, Damasio argued, made an error. The separation of mind from body, of pure reason from the mess of physical sensation and emotion, does not describe how thinking actually works. Reason is not imprisoned in a body it would rather not have. It is constituted by that body — by its history, its feelings, its states. We do not think and then feel. We feel and think simultaneously, in a system where the boundaries between the two are considerably less clear than the Western philosophical tradition found comfortable.
The political implication of this is not that rationality is hopeless and therefore nothing matters. It is more interesting than that. It means that the model of the human being as a calculating rational agent — the model on which neoclassical economics, and a good deal of liberal political philosophy, is built — is describing a creature that does not exist. Or rather, is describing a thin slice of how real human beings occasionally operate, under specific conditions, while ignoring the vast substrate of embodied, emotional, socially-shaped processing that does most of the actual work. The consequences of that omission have been, as we will see, rather large.
The self: a convincing story told by a committee
There is, running through all of this, an uncomfortable question about the entity we keep calling the self. The hard problem assumes there is someone home. The confabulation research suggests the resident narrator is not always reliable. The Libet experiments suggest the author arrives after the first chapter has been written. Damasio’s work suggests the author is partly the body, which is not what the author usually claims.
So what is the self, exactly?
The answer that emerges from the converging evidence of neuroscience and cognitive psychology is not that the self doesn’t exist — that is the overcorrection that makes people feel the whole inquiry is nihilistic and not worth continuing. It is that the self is not the kind of thing it presents itself as being. It is not a unified, continuous, causally sovereign agent sitting at the controls. It is better understood as a narrative — a story that the brain generates, continuously and largely automatically, to make sense of the flow of experience, to create the useful fiction of consistent identity across time, and to present that fiction to the social world in ways that attract cooperation and avoid punishment. In that sense, the self is less a fact about you than an Instagram story you are constantly updating — curated, filtered, and posted for an audience that includes, not least, yourself.
William James, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, had a version of this: consciousness as a stream rather than a series of discrete states, the self as a process rather than a thing. Buddhist philosophy had something similar considerably earlier — the doctrine of anatta, or non-self, the argument that what we take to be a fixed individual self is actually a series of momentary mental events with no permanent underlying substrate. These convergences across very different traditions and methods are worth noting. They suggest that the intuition of a fixed sovereign self is doing something useful — holding the organism together, enabling planning, facilitating social life — but that it is an evolved tool rather than a metaphysical fact.
The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga‘s split-brain research adds a further layer of strangeness. Patients whose corpus callosum — the bundle of fibres connecting the two hemispheres — has been severed for medical reasons effectively have two semi-independent processing systems in their skull. The left hemisphere, which controls language, will confabulate explanations for actions initiated by the right hemisphere with complete fluency and apparent conviction, having no access to the actual cause. Gazzaniga called the language-producing system the interpreter — its job is to generate coherent narrative, and it does so regardless of whether it has access to the actual causal story. The interpreter is very good at its job. It is not always telling the truth, because truth is not primarily what it is for.
None of this should produce paralysis or despair. The self, understood as a useful and largely well-functioning narrative process, is what we have and what we are working with. The point is not to dissolve it but to understand it more honestly — which means understanding its vulnerabilities, its biases, its susceptibility to social context and institutional pressure. Which is exactly where the next rung of the ladder takes us.
Because once you understand that the self is a social construction as much as a biological one — that it is shaped, continuously, by the groups it belongs to, the authority structures it operates within, and the economic system it inhabits — then the question of how those external forces operate on it becomes not just philosophically interesting but politically urgent. The machinery considering itself discovers that it has not been considering itself in isolation. It has been considering itself inside a system that has very specific ideas about what it should conclude.
What anthropology found when it actually went and looked
The state of nature theorists had one significant problem in common: none of them had ever seen anything resembling a pre-social human being, and none of them had any means of doing so. Hobbes was describing the English Civil War and calling it nature. Locke was describing the propertied individual his political theory required. Rousseau was describing a fantasy of innocent simplicity that served his critique of Parisian corruption. They were all, in the precise philosophical sense, making it up.
Anthropology is the discipline that actually went and looked. Not at a pre-social baseline — that was always unavailable — but at the extraordinary variety of ways human beings have actually organised themselves across cultures and centuries. And what the ethnographic record shows is so much stranger and more varied than the armchair theories assumed that it effectively demolishes the claim that any particular arrangement of human social life is natural, inevitable, or given.
Margaret Mead‘s early work, however contested its methodology has since become, established the foundational point: that personality types, gender roles, and patterns of aggression and cooperation vary so dramatically across cultures that they cannot be expressions of fixed biological nature. What counts as masculine or feminine, competitive or cooperative, hierarchical or egalitarian — these vary. The baseline is not a fixed human nature. It is a biological organism of extraordinary plasticity, shaped by the cultural web it is born into.
Clifford Geertz developed this into a more systematic account. Human beings, he argued, are uniquely dependent on culture in a way that other animals are not — not because we are less natural but because our biology left the construction of meaning, value, and social arrangement unusually open. We are, in his formulation, incomplete animals who complete ourselves through culture. There is no human being outside of or prior to the cultural web of meaning — remove it and you do not have a natural man, you have a severely damaged one. The individual of liberal theory, who pre-exists society and then enters into it by rational contract, is not the baseline. He is one culturally specific production among many.
Marcel Mauss‘s work on the gift, extended by David Graeber, delivers the most direct blow to the economic model’s assumptions about human nature. The founding myth of market economics is that human beings are naturally inclined to truck, barter and exchange — that the market is the expression of a deep human propensity. The anthropological record does not support this. Pre-market societies organised exchange through gift and reciprocity systems of great complexity, in which the point was emphatically not to maximise individual advantage but to create and sustain social bonds. The gift that must be repaid, but not too quickly and not too precisely, because the relationship is the point — not the transaction. Debt, in Graeber’s account, predates coinage, markets, and states. It is the original social technology, and it is about obligation and relationship, not profit.
Perhaps most usefully for the state of nature question is Christopher Boehm‘s synthesis of the hunter-gatherer ethnographic record. The societies closest to pre-agricultural human arrangements — which is as close as we can get to the baseline — are characterised not by Hobbesian competition but by what Boehm calls reverse dominance hierarchies. Potential alpha individuals exist in every group. What is distinctive about these societies is the elaborate collective effort to prevent them from actually dominating — through ridicule, ostracism, refusal of compliance, and in extreme cases lethal collective action. Human egalitarianism, in this account, is not an achievement of civilisation imposed on a naturally competitive substrate. It is itself an evolved social technology, maintained by active collective effort. The state of nature was not a war of all against all. It was, among other things, organised resistance to the conditions that produce such wars.
The anthropological rung of the ladder, in short, confirms what the neuroscience and social psychology suggest from below: the individual is not prior to the social. The social is partly constitutive of the individual. The baseline human being is a relational, culturally embedded, cooperatively inclined animal whose specific expressions of those tendencies are shaped by the arrangements made around it. Which makes the arrangements — the politics, the economics, the institutions — not adjustments to a fixed underlying nature but active participation in producing the natures that are possible.
The state of nature: political philosophy’s untested premise
Every major tradition in Western political philosophy rests, somewhere near its foundations, on a claim about what human beings are like when you strip away society and institutions and get down to the baseline. The “state of nature”. Hobbes said the baseline was war — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short, the famous formulation that has done more work in political argument than almost any other sentence in the canon. Locke said it was rational self-interest plus natural rights to property. Rousseau said it was innocent and cooperative, corrupted by the institution of private property. Smith‘s economic theory assumed it was the propensity to truck, barter and exchange.
None of them had any evidence. This is not a minor methodological quibble. These are the founding assumptions of liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, and significant strands of socialist thought. The entire downstream architecture — what the state is for, what markets are for, what we owe each other, what happens if you remove the constraints — rests on claims about pre-social human nature that were invented, in armchairs, by men who had never seen anything remotely resembling a pre-social human being and had no means of doing so.
The state of nature is not a historical description. There is no record, anywhere, of human beings living outside social arrangements. Homo sapiens is a social primate. Our ancestors lived in groups for millions of years before anything we would recognise as political philosophy existed. The solitary individual of liberal theory — the one who pre-exists society and then enters into it by contract — has never existed. It is a thought experiment that got mistaken for a fact and then built into the foundations of several competing political systems simultaneously.
What the evolutionary biology and primatology actually show is considerably more interesting, and considerably more inconvenient for the Hobbesian tradition in particular. Frans de Waal spent decades studying chimpanzees and bonobos and found that the social instincts — empathy, fairness, cooperation, consolation of the distressed, reconciliation after conflict — are not human inventions. They predate us. Chimpanzees will refuse a reward if a companion receives a better one for identical work. They will console a distressed group member. They form coalitions, negotiate status, maintain long-term reciprocal relationships. Bonobos resolve tension through social and sexual contact rather than aggression. The picture is not of selfish individuals reluctantly cooperating under threat of punishment. It is of social animals for whom cooperation and connection are primary, not derived.
Darwin himself was clearer on this than his reputation sometimes suggests. In The Descent of Man, which gets considerably less attention than On the Origin of Species, he argued that the social instincts — including the moral sense — are themselves products of natural selection, that groups whose members cooperated and cared for each other outcompeted groups that didn’t. Social Darwinism, the ideology that appropriated his name to argue for ruthless competition as the natural order, was essentially the opposite of what he said. The confusion has been, from certain political perspectives, extremely convenient.
The implications for political philosophy are significant but often ignored. If cooperation, empathy and fairness are not achievements of civilisation imposed on a naturally competitive substrate, but are instead features of our evolved social architecture that predate civilisation entirely — then the Hobbesian argument for strong coercive authority as the only alternative to war loses much of its force. And the neoliberal argument that competitive markets are expressions of natural human drives, while solidarity and collective action are artificial distortions, is revealed as an ideological claim dressed as a natural fact.
This does not mean human beings are naturally good and society makes them bad — that is Rousseau’s overcorrection, and it has its own problems. What it means is that the question ‘what are human beings naturally like?’ does not have the simple answer that any of the armchair theorists assumed. We are, it turns out, naturally competitive and naturally cooperative, naturally selfish and naturally empathetic, naturally tribal and naturally capable of extending solidarity beyond the tribe. Which of these tendencies gets expressed, and to what degree, depends enormously on context, on institutions, on the conditions we arrange for ourselves. Which is, of course, exactly what politics is supposed to be about.
What the experiments showed: obedience, conformity, and the situation
In 1961, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram began a series of experiments at Yale University that were, in his own description, prompted by a simple question: could the Holocaust have happened in America? He was asking, in the aftermath of the Eichmann trial, whether ordinary people would comply with instructions to harm others if those instructions came from a legitimate authority. He expected to find that they wouldn’t, or at least that very few would. He was wrong in a way that has been difficult to process ever since.
The setup is well known but worth restating carefully, because the details matter. A participant — the ‘teacher’ — was instructed by a man in a white coat to administer electric shocks to another person — the ‘learner’ — whenever that person gave a wrong answer in a memory test. The shocks escalated with each wrong answer, from 15 volts up to 450 volts, past switches labelled ‘Danger: Severe Shock’ to ones labelled simply ‘XXX’. The learner was an actor. The shocks were not real. The screams, and then the ominous silence, were recorded.
Milgram asked groups of psychiatrists, students, and ordinary adults to predict how many participants would go all the way to 450 volts. The consensus was about one percent — the sadists, the pathological cases. The actual figure, in the original experiments, was sixty-five percent. Nearly two thirds of ordinary people, recruited from the general public, administered what they believed to be potentially lethal electric shocks to a stranger because a man in a white coat told them to continue.
What Milgram had demonstrated was not that people are secretly monsters. The participants were visibly distressed. They sweated, trembled, laughed nervously, begged the experimenter to let them stop. Some had what appeared to be minor breakdowns. But they continued. The lesson — and Milgram was explicit about this — was not about individual character but about the power of the situation. Put an ordinary person in a structure of legitimate authority, with incremental escalation and social pressure to continue, and the majority will do things they would describe, in the abstract, as unthinkable.
Solomon Asch had arrived at a related finding a decade earlier through a less dramatic route. His conformity experiments asked participants to judge which of three lines matched a reference line in length. The answer was always obvious. But when confederates of the experimenter unanimously gave the wrong answer, a significant proportion of real participants went along with it — not all the time, not every participant, but enough to establish that the pressure to conform to a group consensus could override the evidence of one’s own eyes. Some participants genuinely came to doubt their own perception. Others knew they were wrong and conformed anyway, unable to bear the social cost of dissent.
Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 extended the situational argument further and more disturbingly. Participants were randomly assigned to play guards or prisoners in a simulated prison in the basement of Stanford’s psychology department. The experiment was planned to run for two weeks. It was stopped after six days. The guards had become cruel — not all of them, and not identically, but the role and the institution had produced behaviour that the individuals would not have predicted of themselves and that their prior histories gave no reason to expect. The prisoners had become broken. The situation had consumed the person.
Zimbardo’s methodology has been criticised — legitimately — in the decades since, and the original findings were messier than the dramatic summary suggests. Some guards actively resisted the role. The experimenter’s own involvement shaped the outcome. The Stanford Prison Experiment is not the clean proof it was once presented as. But the core finding — that institutional roles and situational pressures can override individual character with alarming speed — has been replicated in enough different contexts to be taken seriously.
Henri Tajfel’s minimal group experiments complete this picture from a different angle, and in some ways are the most unsettling of the sequence precisely because they require the least. Tajfel divided participants into groups on the most arbitrary basis imaginable — preference for one abstract painter over another, or simply random assignment — and found that people immediately began favouring their in-group and discriminating against the out-group, even when doing so cost them personally and even when the groups had existed for minutes and had no shared history whatsoever. The in-group bias did not require conflict, competition, or any real difference between the groups. It required only a label.
Anyone who has spent an evening watching Love Island, or its dozen imitators produced by Endemol and its descendants in the reality television industrial complex, has watched Tajfel’s findings monetised at scale. The arbitrary groupings, the manufactured tribal loyalties, the voting-off rituals, the reduction of complex people to alliance and betrayal — these shows work not despite their artificiality but because of it. Strip away context, history, and consequence, put people in a house with cameras and a production team, and the group dynamics emerge with the reliable predictability of a laboratory finding. Endemol did not need to read the social psychology literature. They ran the experiment themselves and discovered you could sell advertising around it. The fact that the behaviour is partially performed, the editing manipulative, and the contestants selected for maximum friction does not make it less interesting as an illustration — it makes it more so. The conditions required to trigger in-group loyalty and out-group hostility are, as Tajfel showed, vanishingly thin. A TV format is more than sufficient.
Social identity theory, which Tajfel developed from these findings, proposes that group membership is not just a social arrangement but a psychological one: the group’s status becomes part of individual self-esteem, and people therefore have a motivated interest in seeing their group as superior. This is the deep mechanism behind nationalism, tribalism, and the extraordinary human capacity to treat people who are, in every relevant respect, identical to us as fundamentally other simply because they are on the other side of an arbitrary line.
Before we move on, there is a methodological question worth raising that sits across all of these experiments like a slightly awkward guest who turns out to have made several excellent points. The question is: would the results be different if no one was looking?
This is not as flippant as it sounds. It connects directly to the observer problem in physics that the preceding essay established — the finding that at the quantum level, the act of observation is not separable from the thing observed, that measurement is not a neutral recording of a pre-existing reality but a participation in its constitution. The social science version of this is called, variously, the Hawthorne effect, demand characteristics, or simply reflexivity. Human beings, unlike electrons, know they are being studied. They form theories about what the study is for. They adjust.
Milgram’s participants were not merely responding to the authority of the experimenter in the white coat. They were in a university — itself an authority structure — having volunteered for a study — which creates its own commitment — and being observed by someone with apparent scientific legitimacy. The experiment was inside the authority system it was trying to study. This does not invalidate the findings, but it qualifies them in an important way: the sixty-five percent figure is a measure of how people behave inside legitimate institutions with clear authority gradients, not a context-free measure of human obedience. Which is, of course, precisely the context most of us inhabit most of the time. So the qualification turns out to confirm the finding rather than undermine it.
The deeper point is that social science can never achieve the view from nowhere that physics at least aspires to, even unsuccessfully. The observer in social research is always inside the system being observed. The people being observed know this and respond to it. The results are always, to some degree, a joint production of the researcher and the researched. This is what the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle — understanding is always shaped by the prior understanding of the understander — and what sociologists call reflexivity. It is not a problem to be solved. It is a feature of studying a reflexive species. And it connects the social science, once again, to the physics: at both the quantum and the social level, the clean separation between observer and observed turns out to be an idealisation that reality does not honour.
What these experiments collectively establish — Milgram’s authority, Asch’s conformity, Zimbardo’s roles, Tajfel’s labels — is that the behaviour of individuals cannot be understood by studying individuals in isolation. The situation, the institution, the group, the authority structure: these are not external pressures on a pre-formed self. They are, in significant part, constitutive of what the self does, and often of what it believes itself to be doing and why. The self we established in the previous sections — narrative, socially constructed, not fully transparent to itself — turns out to be radically context-dependent in ways that have profound implications for how we think about responsibility, compliance, and political change.
We like to believe we would have been the ones who refused. Who didn’t press the button at 450 volts. Who told the group the line was clearly shorter. The evidence suggests this belief is, for most of us, a comforting story. It is, in Gazzaniga’s sense, the interpreter doing its job.
System One, System Two, and the wreckage of the rational actor
We have climbed from chemistry to consciousness, from consciousness to the unreliable narrator within, from the narrator to the social animal it turns out to be. We are now at the top of the ladder, and the view from up here looks directly down onto the foundations of the economic system we have been analysing throughout this project.
Daniel Kahneman spent decades, much of it in collaboration with Amos Tversky, doing something that should by rights have been unnecessary: demonstrating empirically that human beings do not reason the way the dominant economic model assumes they do. The rational actor of neoclassical economics — the agent who processes available information, calculates expected utility, and makes consistent choices in pursuit of well-defined preferences — turned out to be, in the laboratory and in the world, largely a fiction. Not an approximation. Not a simplification that works well enough for most purposes. A description of a cognitive process that is, in real human beings, the exception rather than the rule.
The framework Kahneman developed, most accessibly presented in Thinking, Fast and Slow, distinguishes between two modes of cognition. System One is fast, automatic, associative, and largely unconscious. It is the system that reads the emotion on a face before you have consciously registered the face, that completes ‘bread and…’ with ‘butter’ without deliberation, that forms instant impressions, jumps to conclusions, and generates the continuous flow of intuitive judgements that constitute most of our moment-to-moment mental life. System Two is slow, deliberate, effortful, and self-aware. It is the system that works through a logic problem, or reads a contract, or consciously overrides an impulse. It is what we think of when we think of thinking.
The crucial finding is not merely that both systems exist. It is that System Two is far less in charge than it believes itself to be. System One does the vast majority of the work, and System Two mostly endorses its conclusions — and then, in the manner we have already established from the confabulation research and Gazzaniga’s interpreter, constructs a rational-sounding account of how it arrived there. We are not rational agents who sometimes fall prey to emotional bias. We are fast intuitive processors who occasionally engage slow deliberate reasoning, mostly to justify what we have already decided.
The catalogue of systematic errors that follow from this architecture is long and has been extensively documented. Loss aversion: losses loom larger than equivalent gains, which is why people hold losing investments too long and why the framing of choices as losses rather than gains has such disproportionate power. Anchoring: the first number encountered in a negotiation or decision exercises an irrational influence on the final figure, even when the anchor is known to be arbitrary. The availability heuristic: we judge the probability of events by how easily examples come to mind, which means dramatic and recent events are systematically overweighted and mundane but statistically significant ones underweighted. Overconfidence: we consistently overestimate the accuracy of our own judgements and the quality of our own predictions. The planning fallacy: we systematically underestimate how long things will take and how much they will cost, even when we have direct experience of previous underestimates.
Return, briefly, to the finance world. Every one of these biases has a specific and measurable expression in investment behaviour. Loss aversion explains why retail investors sell winning positions too early and hold losing ones too long — the disposition effect, as the behavioural finance literature calls it. Overconfidence explains why active fund managers trade too frequently, generating costs that compound against performance. Anchoring explains why price targets cluster around round numbers and why analysts’ revisions trail behind reality. The availability heuristic explains why money flows into sectors that have recently performed well and out of those that have recently underperformed, systematically buying high and selling low. The planning fallacy explains virtually every corporate capital project in history.
The industry’s response to this evidence has been instructive. Some practitioners have genuinely incorporated the insights — the growth of index investing is partly a Kahneman-informed conclusion that beating the market systematically is harder than it looks and that costs matter more than skill. But the dominant culture has largely absorbed the vocabulary of behavioural economics while leaving the incentive structures intact. Knowing about overconfidence bias does not, it turns out, reliably reduce overconfidence, particularly in environments that reward confidence regardless of its accuracy. The interpreter simply adds ‘I am aware of my biases’ to the narrative of competence and continues.
The political economy implications extend well beyond finance. If human decision-making is systematically shaped by framing, anchoring, loss aversion, and the availability heuristic, then the architecture of choice — who designs it, with what defaults, presenting options in what order and framing — is a form of power. The discipline that emerged from this insight, behavioural economics in its policy application, produced the concept of the nudge: small, choice-preserving interventions that shift behaviour by changing the architecture of decision without restricting options. Set organ donation as opt-out rather than opt-in and donation rates increase dramatically. Change the default contribution rate for pension schemes and savings rates rise. Present food in a different order in a canteen and nutritional choices improve.
The nudge has been deployed by governments, mostly with good intentions and some genuine effect. But the same architecture of System One exploitation has been deployed far more comprehensively, and with considerably less benign intent, by the advertising industry, the financial services industry, the social media platforms, and every other commercial enterprise with an interest in shaping behaviour toward outcomes that serve the enterprise rather than the individual. The choice architect who designs the default for your pension is working, broadly, in your interest. The algorithm that determines which post appears at the top of your feed is not. Both are exploiting the same cognitive architecture. The difference is whose interests they are exploiting it for.
No things, only relationships: a convergence that deserves naming
There is a thread running through this essay — and through the physics essay before it, and through the political economy series alongside it — that has been present throughout without being named directly. It is time to name it.
From the physics: at the quantum level, particles do not have definite properties independent of their interactions. The structure of relationships is the reality, not the things that stand in those relationships. Carlo Rovelli‘s relational quantum mechanics holds that quantum states exist only relative to other systems. Ontic structural realism, in its most radical form, says there are no things with intrinsic natures underneath the relations at all. The map, in some sense not yet fully understood, is the territory.
From the neuroscience and psychology in this essay: the self is not a fixed, sovereign, intrinsically propertied entity that then enters into relationships. It is constituted by its relationships — with its body, its history, its social context, its cultural web. Remove the relationships and you do not have a purer, more essential self. You have damage.
From the anthropology: human beings outside of cultural and social arrangements are not the natural baseline of liberal theory. They are, as Geertz put it, incomplete animals. The arrangements are not external to what we are. They are part of what we are.
What is striking — and worth pausing on — is how many very different thinkers, working in very different traditions with very different methods, have converged on some version of this same insight.
Hegel got there through the master-slave dialectic: the master depends on the slave’s recognition for his own identity, which means identity is inherently relational, not self-sufficient. Spinoza got there through monism: everything is one substance, and what we take to be separate things are modes of relation within that substance. Nagarjuna, the Buddhist philosopher who appears in our thinkers library, got there through sunyata — emptiness — the argument that nothing has fixed, independent, self-sufficient existence; everything is relationally constituted, dependent on everything else. Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy, got there through language: meaning is not in things but in use, in the practice and the relationship, in the form of life.
In sociology, Bourdieu‘s fields are constituted by the positions of agents relative to each other, not by the intrinsic properties of those agents. Durkheim‘s social facts are real — more real, in some senses, than the individuals who instantiate them — precisely because they are relational rather than individual. In biology, the ecosystem rather than the individual organism is increasingly understood as the relevant unit of analysis: the organism is what it is partly by virtue of its symbiotic, competitive, and parasitic relations with everything around it. The human body contains roughly as many non-human microbial cells as human ones, which plainly raises questions about where the individual actually stops.
And then there is Foucault, who arrives at the relational point from yet another direction and with specifically political force. The individual — the bounded, self-owning, sovereign individual of liberal political theory — is not, in Foucault’s account, a natural baseline. It is a historical production. Specific institutions — the confessional, the clinic, the school, the prison — produced, over the course of several centuries, a particular kind of subject: self-monitoring, self-accounting, interiorised, governable. The individual did not pre-exist these institutions and then submit to them. The institutions produced the individual as the kind of thing that could submit to them. Power, in Foucault’s most important insight, does not just repress — it produces. It produces subjects, desires, norms, and the very concept of interiority that makes those subjects feel like they are being true to themselves when they are, in significant part, being true to the system.
This connects back to Gramsci‘s hegemony and to the Pig Iron series’s account of how capitalism reproduces itself not through force alone but through the production of subjects who experience its requirements as their own desires. It also connects back to Harvey‘s alienation — the severing not of a pre-existing self from its authentic nature, but of a relational being from the constitutive relations that make it what it can be.
The convergence matters because it is not a coincidence. The insight that there are no self-sufficient things, only relations — that identity is constituted rather than given, relational rather than intrinsic — keeps being arrived at independently by physics, philosophy, sociology, biology, and psychology, across centuries and traditions, because it is tracking something real about the structure of the world. It is the deepest thread in the project. And it has a direct political implication that is worth stating plainly: if there are no fixed natures, only arrangements, then the arrangements are everything. The political question is not how to manage a fixed human nature but how to organise the conditions within which human natures — plural, plastic, relational — are produced.
What the ladder was for: the political economy of the managed self
We have climbed the ladder. It is worth pausing at the top to look back down and see what the view actually tells us.
We started with chemistry — the electrochemical substrate of thought — and immediately hit the hard problem: we do not know why there is experience at all, why there is something it is like to be a brain rather than just a brain processing. We held that gap open and climbed. We found that the self built on that substrate is not the transparent, unified, sovereign agent it presents as — it confabulates, it arrives late to its own decisions, it depends on emotion and body in ways that pure reason cannot account for. We found that this already-compromised self is radically shaped by the social context it inhabits — by groups, roles, authority structures, and labels that can override individual character with alarming speed. We found that the anthropological record demolishes the state of nature fantasy and replaces it with a picture of an extraordinarily plastic, culturally dependent, cooperatively inclined animal. And we found that when this social animal makes decisions, it does so through a fast intuitive system that is systematically exploitable, with a slow deliberate system that mostly provides the post-hoc narrative.
And we found that this picture — of a relational, embodied, socially-shaped, cognitively limited being — is not the picture that the dominant economic and political model assumes. The rational actor is a fiction. The sovereign individual who pre-exists society and enters it by free contract is a fiction. The state of nature from which political philosophy derives its conclusions is an untested thought experiment that the evolutionary, anthropological, and psychological evidence suggests was wrong in all its basic premises.
These are not merely academic corrections. They have direct implications for how we understand the economic system we live inside and what it is doing to us. If human beings are as the evidence describes — relational, context-dependent, susceptible to authority and framing and social pressure, with a narrative self that confabulates its own coherence — then a system designed around the fiction of the rational individual is not merely theoretically mistaken. It is actively exploiting the gap between the fiction and the reality. It is selling the story of free choice to beings whose choices are systematically shaped by conditions they did not choose and often cannot see.
This connects back to Harvey’s alienation, which has been the spine of the Pig Iron series. Alienation, in Harvey’s account, is the severing of the constitutive relations that make us what we are — from our labour, from its products, from each other, from our own human potential. The neuroscience and social psychology give this a material grounding that Marx was gesturing toward but could not fully specify. We are relational beings — the physics essay established that at the cosmological level, and everything in this essay has confirmed it at the human one. Alienation is not a poetic complaint. It is a description of what happens to a fundamentally relational organism when the conditions of its life are organised to sever those relations and replace them with commodity exchange.
Damasio’s insight — that reason is constituted by the body, not imprisoned in it — means that the degradation of physical conditions, of health, of security, of the basic somatic experience of being adequately housed and fed and rested, is not merely an economic problem. It is a cognitive one. The brain that is managing chronic stress and insecurity is not the same brain that can engage System Two reasoning about long-term interests and political possibilities. Poverty and precarity are not just uncomfortable. They narrow the cognitive bandwidth available for the kinds of deliberation that democracy requires.
And Kahneman’s architecture — the systematic exploitability of System One — means that the vast resources deployed by the capitalist system to shape desire, manufacture preference, and frame choice are not merely annoying. They are operating on the actual mechanism of decision-making, below the threshold of conscious awareness, in ways that people cannot reliably detect or resist simply by being told about them. The interpreter will add ‘I know about advertising’ to the narrative and continue to be influenced by advertising. Knowing about the game does not automatically let you out of it.
None of this produces the conclusion that human beings are helpless, that agency is an illusion, and that resistance is futile. That would be the overcorrection, and it would be, among other things, extremely convenient for the system being described. What it produces is a more honest account of where agency actually operates and what conditions it requires. Agency is real but it is not the sovereign, unencumbered, context-independent thing the liberal tradition assumed. It is more like what the physicist’s relational universe suggests: not a fixed property of an isolated individual, but something that emerges from conditions, from relationships, from the quality of the social and material environment in which the self is embedded.
Which means that the political question — how we organise those conditions — is not a secondary question about optimising a system whose fundamentals are fixed. It is the primary question about what kind of selves it is possible to be.
A final loop, honestly acknowledged
The essay has been building toward a loop that it would be dishonest not to close. The machinery considering itself, we established early on, is confronted with the problem that the instrument of inquiry is the object of inquiry. The brain trying to understand the brain. The self trying to understand the self. The interpreter generating a coherent account of a process it does not have full access to.
This applies, with some precision, to the essay you have just read. It was written collaboratively, by a human being with specific prior knowledge, specific blind spots, and a System One that was doing a great deal of work before System Two arrived to shape and edit, and by a large language model that is, in Gazzaniga’s terms, something very like an interpreter at scale — generating fluent, confident, coherent narrative from patterns in training data, without full access to the causal process producing it. The physics essay noted this in passing, with a joke about heads. It deserves a slightly more direct acknowledgement here, given the subject matter.
The honest position is not that this collaboration is therefore unreliable and should be discarded. (Interminable maybe, but unreliable, no). It is that it is subject to exactly the limitations the essay has been describing, and that the reader should bring to it the same critical apparatus we have been recommending throughout — the awareness that confident narrative is not the same as accurate causation, that the interpreter’s fluency is not evidence of its access to the truth, and that the gaps, where the disciplines do not quite connect and the questions remain genuinely open, are features rather than failures.
We held the hard problem open. We held the free will question open. We held the gap between the social psychology and the political philosophy open, noting that knowing about our cognitive biases does not automatically liberate us from them. The essay does not resolve these. It tries to map them, which is the more honest and, in the long run, the more useful thing to do.
The ladder has been climbed. The gaps are visible. The view from the top is, as promised, directly onto the foundations of the political economy project. What happens next — how those foundations get rebuilt, or at minimum how we stop pretending they are something other than what they are — is largely what the rest of this blog is for.
Thinking still helps, however faulty the wiring. Thinking together is who we are.
Oh and you might want to check all of this. It could just be the narrative we wanted.
A note on method
This essay was developed through an extended conversation with Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant). The instincts, provocations, editorial judgements, and the personal material — the career in finance, the nagging suspicion, the Kahneman reckoning — are mine. Claude provides the scaffold, the synthesis across disciplines, and much of the prose. The thinking that shaped it is mine. The irony of using an interpreter to write an essay about the limits of interpretation has not been lost on either of us. Or at least on one of us. The question of whether it has been lost on the other is, appropriately, one the essay is not equipped to answer.
At Home He Feels Like A Tourist 
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