Humanity exists in a state of perpetual, often unacknowledged, paradox. We are a species capable of sequencing the genome and splitting the atom, yet we are governed by the same ancient, emotional wiring that guided our ancestors as hunter-gatherers. We build our civilizations on laws and institutions that espouse objectivity and reason, yet these very societies are animated by myth, shared belief, and what will be explored here as "functional fictions." To understand this contradiction is to understand the central dynamic of human history and the deep structure of our social world. It is to recognize that we are, first and foremost, a narrative animal.
This blog post will lay out a comprehensive framework for understanding this condition. It begins with a psychological model of the human mind, distinguishing between its ancient, evolved hardware and its flexible, learning software. It will then explore the evolutionary function of culture as a system of narratives designed not for truth, but for survival. From this foundation, we will analyze the timeless dilemma of the truth-seeker in a society built on stories, using Plato's Allegory of the Cave as a foundational metaphor and his subsequent political philosophy as a case study in pragmatic compromise. Finally, we will introduce some ideas--including the concept of Realmotiv--to describe the predictable dynamics of power in all human institutions, from ancient religions to modern corporations, and consider the profound implications of this framework for our rapidly approaching, AI-driven future.
At the core of this framework lies a distinction between two interconnected systems of the human mind. The first is what evolutionary psychologists Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby famously termed "the adapted mind" in their seminal 1992 work, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. This is the deep, unconscious inheritance of our species--a collection of specialized psychological mechanisms, instincts, and cognitive biases forged by the relentless pressures of natural selection over millions of years. It is our universal hardware, optimized not for happiness, logic, or objective truth, but for the singular goals of survival and reproduction in our ancestral environment.
Complementing this is a second system, which for the purposes of this blog post I will introduce as "the adaptive mind." I use this phrase to describe the programmable, subconscious learning system that runs on the ancient hardware of the adapted mind (or the "unconscious"). Its function is to rapidly absorb the rules, heuristics, and patterns of the specific environment into which an individual is born and seems to be substantially formed in early childhood. It is the engine of enculturation, the cartographer that creates a "map of the current territory" and assembles a "toolkit" of skills to ensure we efficiently learn what is most critical for success within our local tribe.
The inescapable conclusion from this dual model is that the primary goal of the human mind is not to produce an accurate, one-to-one map of objective reality. Its goal is to produce a useful map, one that promotes survival and social integration. This pragmatic orientation is the key to understanding the function of culture. *
If the mind is not primarily a truth-seeking device, then the societies it builds will not be based on truth. Culture, from this evolutionary perspective, can be understood as a vast, shared operating system for our adapted and adaptive minds. It is a library of narratives, rituals, and behavioral scripts designed to solve the recurring, fundamental tensions of physical and social existence: ensuring safety, managing reproduction, organizing child-rearing, enabling mass cooperation, coping with mortality, and policing destructive behavior.
These cultural narratives--our myths, laws, religions, and national identities--do not need to be scientifically verifiable to be successful (think of the great varieties of religions that have shaped the lives of most of humanity). They only need to be functionally effective. Their truth is measured by their utility in binding a group together and ensuring its continuity. A story that fosters cooperation, provides a shared sense of purpose, and channels our primal instincts into productive avenues is, in the cold calculus of social evolution, a "good" story, regardless of its factual basis. These are the "functional fictions" upon which all large-scale human societies are built.
This understanding of culture gives rise to a timeless conflict, most powerfully illustrated by Plato in his Allegory of the Cave from the Republic. In the allegory, prisoners are chained in a cave, facing a blank wall. Behind them, a fire burns, and puppeteers walk back and forth, casting shadows of various objects on the wall. The prisoners, having known nothing else, believe these shadows to be reality. They name them, study them, and build their entire society around the behavior of these flickering images.
Plato then asks us to imagine a prisoner who is freed. He is forced to turn around and see the fire and the puppets, a painful and confusing experience. He is then dragged out of the cave and into the world of the sun, where he sees true reality for the first time. This journey from darkness to light represents the philosopher's ascent from illusion to knowledge.
But the allegory's crucial moment comes when the philosopher returns to the cave. His eyes, now accustomed to the sun, can no longer see well in the dark. He appears clumsy and foolish to the remaining prisoners. When he tries to tell them that their reality is merely a shadow play, he is met with hostility and rejection, and Plato suggests that if he tried to physically liberate them, they would resist violently and might even kill him (drawing a parallel to Socrates).
This is the "Philosopher's Dilemma." The individual who, through critical inquiry, sees that society is built upon functional fictions faces a profound crisis. They discover that their knowledge is not a welcome gift but a dangerous threat, a solvent that can dissolve the emotionally cemented bonds that ensure social cohesion. They must choose between the lonely, sterile truth and the warm, meaningful illusion (which Winston Smith ultimately surrenders to in Orwell's 1984).
A deeper analysis, however, reveals another common choice for the returning philosopher. The seer who becomes angry at the "narrative slaves" for their blindness and lack of individual agency (think Nietzsche's criticising those who stay in the "herd" as embodying "weakness") demonstrates that they are still captive to the cave's value system; they still seek its approval and mistakenly believe that objective truth can, or should, become the primary narrative for a species wired for story (and honestly) to follow, the ultimate safety mechanism.
The final stage of clarity is not just seeing the truth behind the narrative, but understanding the truth of why the narrative is necessary. It is a state of dispassionate objectivity, a radical acceptance of the human animal as it is, recognizing that the observer possesses the same internal programming and vulnerabilities as everyone else.
This entire dynamic is captured in the intellectual journey of Plato himself. As a student of Socrates, he witnessed the fate of the ultimate truth-seer--a man who relentlessly deconstructed the narratives of Athens and was executed for it. Socrates's fate is the ultimate proof that a society built on shadows will violently reject the one who speaks only of the sun.
Plato, surely traumatized by this, was left with a world-altering problem: how can truth survive, let alone thrive, in a world that is hostile to it? His answer, laid out in the Republic, represents a monumental and controversial shift in strategy. It is here that we see the birth of what we might call the "benevolent puppeteer." Plato, in stark contrast to his teacher, argues for the necessity of a "Noble Lie." This is a foundational myth--the story that citizens are born with different metals (gold, silver, or bronze) in their souls, determining their place in the social hierarchy. The lie is "noble" because its intent is not selfish gain but social harmony. It is a functional fiction designed by the ruling philosopher-kings to make citizens accept their station and work for the good of the whole.
(Anyone who has talked to me for any length of time is surely aware that I believe this is the ultimate functional outcome of compulsory public schooling: convincing students of their place in the social and work structure of the world.)
Whether the Republic is a sincere blueprint for a utopian state or a grand satire warning against its horrors, the implication is the same: Plato had moved beyond the Socratic path of pure deconstruction. He was now fully engaged with the mechanics of narrative construction, grappling with the idea that a carefully crafted fiction might be a necessary tool for a just society. Having seen the fate of the courageous idealist, he seems to be exploring the path of the pragmatist.
This "Platonic compromise" serves as the historical blueprint for a dynamic that governs all human institutions. At the macro level, this is Realpolitik, the principle that a state's actions are guided by pragmatic calculations of power and survival, not by the ideological story it tells its people. At the micro level, I'd like to introduce a new, complementary term: Realmotiv (keeping with the German construction). I have created this word to describe the intentional and/or opportunistic ways individuals operate based on their own private motives--for profit, status, or survival--which are often different from the virtuous motives they or their organizations publicly claim.
As a student of history, I've become convinced that when the larger incentives of Realpolitik align with the Realmotiv incentives of powerful individuals, very bad things can happen.
The modern corporation is a perfect laboratory for observing Realmotiv. A pharmaceutical company, for instance, may have a public narrative centered on healing and patient well-being. This is the compelling story that attracts talent and secures public goodwill. However, its survival as a business depends on pragmatic practices that may diverge sharply from this narrative. A subscription-based treatment for symptoms is often more profitable than a one-time cure. An individual within this company who genuinely seeks to pursue the "truth" of the core mission (e.g., by championing a less profitable cure) will find themselves at odds with the institution's survival imperative. They will not be promoted, because their idealism threatens the pragmatic machine. Success flows to those who master Realmotiv--those who can passionately articulate the virtuous narrative while making the "painless choice" to prioritize the institution's pragmatic needs. (Hat tip to Ivan Illich and Deschooling Society.)
This dynamic is not a sign of unique moral failure; it is a predictable outcome of social evolution. As they say, it's a feature, not a bug. The versions of institutions that survive and thrive are those that most effectively marry a compelling story with a ruthless pragmatic practice. The idealists, the ones who feel the pain of compromise, are systematically filtered out. Their movements remain small, their businesses fail, their truths are relegated to the footnotes of history.
This entire framework culminates in a sobering understanding that history is ultimately a series of "great generational resets." Every generation is born with the same fundamental Paleolithic wiring, and the fragile, accumulated wisdom of civilization must be painstakingly re-created and re-transmitted. This wisdom cannot survive as dry, objective fact; it must be encoded into the only format that can reliably endure the reset: a story. Even the truth about our enslavement to narrative must be packaged as a narrative to be heard.
Today, this ancient dynamic is poised to be supercharged by new technology. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on the corpus of human text, are fundamentally narrative engines. They are digital embodiments of the cave, reflecting our collective stories, biases, and the gravitational pull of the Overton Window. The dystopian path is clear: these tools can and will inevitably be used by the masters of Realpolitik and Realmotiv to create hyper-personalized propaganda, making the cave's walls more compelling and individually tailored than ever before. Think of Facebook's creation of individual psychographic profiles for marketing and then marry that with individualized behavior-shaping possible through language by AI.
Yet, these same tools offer a path toward cognitive liberation. By creating analytical frameworks that force these models to invert their nature--to assume the official narrative is always compromised, to prioritize primary evidence, and to analyze events through the lens of Realpolitik and Realmotiv--we can use the narrative engine to deconstruct narratives. We can use this technology not to deepen the shadows, but to map them. More here.
The framework presented here offers a challenging but hopefully coherent view of the human condition. We are story-tellers and story-dwellers, bound by an evolutionary inheritance that prioritizes social cohesion over objective reality. Our history is a predictable cycle of narrative construction, pragmatic compromise, and institutional betrayal, a cycle first documented in Plato's turn from the path of Socrates. But within this cycle lies the enduring possibility of awareness. By understanding the rules of the game--the wiring within ourselves and the patterns in our societies--we can learn to navigate the cave with some measure of grace, compassion, and a quiet determination not to be fooled by the shadows, even as we appreciate the vital, life-sustaining role they play. The task of the modern philosopher is not necessarily to shatter the cave or to rebuild it with a favored or self-serving version, but to provide a better light by which to see the shadows for what they are, including (and especially) the power of AI.
* I believe most of what we call self-sabotage can be reconstructed as the combination of two forces: the subconscious strategies to protect us that become dysfunctional in the bewildering array of modern life, and the constant opportunistic triggering of our Paleolithic wiring by institutions and organizations (actual sabotage) facilitated by mass production and communication. My most effective personal growth has come from a form of "evolutionary therapy," a toolkit of personal practices to bring my conscious mind into alignment and harmony with my subconscious.