Leftist behavior is just ancient instincts

A comprehensive and optimistic theory

Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

The online right is dominated by performative bafflement: here’s leftists saying one thing but doing the opposite! MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!

But the left’s behavior always makes sense when interpreted in evolutionary terms.

Homo Sapiens became recognizable around 300,000 years ago, but we didn’t start to have any kind of cities until around 3,000 BC. For nearly 99% of our existence we lived exclusively in small tribes. In many parts of the world the transition to farming and cities hardly happened, and tribes that had barely changed for thousands of years were still in existence right up to the 20th century. That’s a lot of time for evolution to select for helpful behaviors.

A simple model of leftism¹ that makes accurate predictions asks, “what would a member of an ancient tribe do?” This isn’t the same thing as lamenting tribalism, a common complaint found in academia. Talk of tribalism is usually just a way to obfuscate complaints of the form: “why can’t everyone just nicely agree to be left wing like us?” Essays like that are ten a penny on Substack but never involve actual discussion of ancient lifestyles.

This essay is different. It shows how behaviors that are smart in an ancient context can surface inappropriately in the modern era. Sometimes these instincts just cause pathologies like obesity or agoraphobia, but mostly they cause leftism. By identifying the root causes we can gain a better understanding of how to address it. And addressing it is possible. We’ll study ways psychotherapists treat similar conditions at the end.

But if leftism is tribal instincts gone wrong, what do they perceive as their tribe? We don’t live in tribal societies anymore. Modern people live in close proximity but often don’t know each other and don’t share any specific goals. Survival is a solved problem. We depend on institutions that mostly follow systematic procedures, blind to who the customer is. The subconscious instinct to find a tribe thus locks on to the closest available groups: other people who also think tribally.

Let’s look at how this surfaces.

I. Zero sum thinking

Leftists have extreme difficulties with the idea that wealth can be created. They typically believe that rich people:

• Got rich by stealing from others.

• Are generically dangerous, heartless or evil.

• Should have their wealth taken away from them.

A typical leftist propaganda poster

This is the correct attitude to hold if you live in a primitive tribe. In tribal societies:

• There’s no progress and no expectation of progress.

• Trade is rare and insignificant.

• Wealth is synonymous with food which comes entirely from control of land.

This is a zero sum world. If you encounter someone conspicuously richer than you in a zero sum world it means they belong to a tribe that stole another tribe’s land, probably killing or enslaving them in the process. You should be suspicious of rich people in a zero sum world! Anyone who isn’t will probably do something dumb, like accidentally leading them back to their tribe’s home village and getting it razed.

Once we got serious about cities and trade it became possible to create positive sum interactions in which wealth was created, but such outcomes were still rare. It would take thousands of years more before this became the primary way people got rich. Today the richest people in the western world are always self made businessmen who started out as nobody special, but that’s a very new phenomenon. Up until very recently the richest people were always monarchs or (especially in Arabia) literally former tribal leaders.

Overriding our instinctual fear and suspicion of the rich is difficult. Well socialized people can do it, but leftists struggle.

II. Unlimited cruelty

The cruelest regimes of the twentieth century were all left wing. Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Kim Il Sung, Stalin, Honecker … if a regime was building fences covered in machine guns to stop people escaping the leader was a leftist, every single time.

The Berlin Wall death strip, 1986

In our era the woke are notorious for the extreme and often completely random displays of cruelty towards other people. For example, working together to destroy someone’s life because they cracked their knuckles whilst driving. Also very noticeable is how the woke do not forgive and they do not forget: once you’re tagged as an enemy, there’s no way back. You are cancelled for life.

Noted leftist Will Stancil gets a taste of his own medicine.

This makes sense. In tribal societies unlimited cruelty is the only winning strategy. Nothing governs inter-tribal relations, and because their existence is zero sum the people who end up with enough food to reproduce a lot are simply those who were more vicious towards their enemies. Mercy and weakness are the exact same thing and lead to your bloodline ending.

Evidence of massacres and genocides have been found by archaeologists at dig sites predating the first cities. Anthropologists who studied tribes before they were absorbed into modernity regularly remarked on their insane levels of violence. Raiding, feuding, honor killings and revenge killings were all common. In some groups up to a third of men died violently. This kind of total tribal warfare was still happening recently in places like Rwanda.

Christianity was revolutionary for European progress because it taught that it’s OK to forgive someone who wronged you and desirable to be the “good Samaritan” (i.e. to help members of other tribes). The Bible is full of references to long extinct tribes, so this teaching was highly relevant at the time and gave people a face-saving way out of endless warfare. But leftism rejects this. It encourages fighting unbound by convention or restraint. If someone is an enemy of the tribe then nothing is off limits.

III. Use of language

Leftists don’t use language the same way normal people do, and pointing this out is a common hobby on the right.

The well adjusted use words to communicate their feelings and thoughts to other people, but leftists don’t do this. To a leftist words are purely tactical tools. You make noises with your mouth and then other people do things for you. The right noises are those that make the tribe stronger.

This is much deeper than just being OK with the use of lying as a tactic. Normal people lie when they feel they can or must, but try to minimize the scale and frequency of their lies because they fear getting caught. But leftists don’t try to avoid getting caught and often tell the biggest lies possible, even if that makes it obvious what they’re doing. Doing otherwise would require believing words are supposed to represent something objectively true and consistent, even when it would be tactically unhelpful. But a leftist doesn’t agree with this framing of what words are for.

You see this in action when people like Megan Markle talk about “my truth”, “your truth”, “her truth” and so on. Academics do this a lot. Without objective truth there can’t be such a thing as lying or hypocrisy. Thus pointing out lying and hypocrisy is maybe a quarter of all right wing online content, but it’s hard to find examples of leftists responding. The accusation of hypocrisy or falsity isn’t even denied, it’s just ignored. If for some reason it can’t be ignored entirely the response will be just another stream of words chosen purely for tactical utility in the moment, not a defense. The Gillian Mackay example above was the first I found from a quick scroll through X, and as expected she hasn’t responded to the community note or replies pointing out that she’s contradicting herself. Leftists never do.

Using words this way is good for survival in tribal environments. Tribes have very little use for true words. They don’t do scientific research or host a marketplace of ideas. Their ability to lie to kin is limited: someone hunted the gazelle or they didn’t, you survive the sickness or you don’t, and the only utility of words is in making you feel better. To the extent words are useful beyond that it’s for determining the strength of people’s loyalty, in which case the most important thing is whether people repeat the words of the leaders. Whether those words are true or even mean anything doesn’t matter.

Once humanity reached the point of creating long distance trade networks honesty became more important. If you can trust that someone is describing market needs in another city honestly you can profit by supplying that need, but if they’re just telling you what you want to hear it could lead to starvation. To meet this need religions with strong commandments about truth started appearing. Before this time tribal gods were often more concerned with the accurate following of rituals, they could be tricked and often deceived each other. But by the time of ancient Egypt honesty and respect for private property is judged in the afterlife, and the gods can see everything.

IV. Loyalty to tribe over all else

Normal people juggle a variety of competing loyalties as they make their way through life. Friends, family, colleagues, institutions like their employer, abstract principles and the country where they live all place demands on people which are then balanced.

Leftists don’t think this way. They are loyal to their tribe above everything else. If the needs of the tribe are in conflict with their friends, families, employers or basic moral principles, those will be sacrificed in a heartbeat. If you see a story about a child cutting off their parents over politics you don’t need to read it to know that the child was a fanatical leftist cutting off their conservative parents, because it usually is.

Other examples are abundant. Hollywood leftists destroyed their own studios by making reams of woke propaganda, with the result that now iconic franchises like Star Wars and Indiana Jones have ticket sales far below what’s needed to break even. They destroyed their host institutions - the boat that kept them all afloat - because it granted temporary tactical advantage to the tribe.

IV. Exclusion

Tribes have very little concept of internal justice, because tribal strength relies so heavily on how many people you have. When tribes do need to punish someone they typically either kill them (for the worst crimes) or systematically exclude them. As it’s very hard for humans to survive on their own in tribal times this was nearly the same as a death sentence but less dangerous for the punishers to implement.

Leftists show no interest in the systematic rule of law because the Enlightenment ideal of justice is blind. Blindfolded judges ruling without reference to identity might side with a member of another tribe whilst hurting your own, which is a recipe for splitting and die-outs. Thus judicial activism is synonymous with leftism.

In the modern world justice is supposed to be both blind and monopolized by the state, so leftists have created parallel justice systems that rely on exclusion. These mechanisms are often awkward and ineffective because the modern world isn’t actually tribal, it’s just their maladaptive psychopathology telling them to do this.

V. Nonsensical coalitions

Leftists often create alliances of people who fundamentally hate each other. The most prominent example is getting lesbians/gays/transsexuals to march in support of radical Islamists, a group who would certainly kill them if in power.

To non-leftists this behavior is completely irrational. You can’t support the Palestinians and gay rights, they say. But you can if you’re a tribe because tribes are not defined by what they’re in favor of. They don’t have policies or political manifestos. They don’t stand for a position. Tribes ally with each other to attack other tribes, and then attack each other afterwards, because in a tribal society everything is about power and survival.

A historical example is the Delaware tribe of native Americans, who (pre European contact) were migrating east when they encountered the Allegewi tribe. The Allegewi granted the Delaware permission to cross their territory, then attacked mid-crossing (words are meaningless in tribal societies). The Delaware then formed an alliance with a third tribe, the Mengwe (later known as the Iroquois), and waged a vengeance war against the Allegewi, wiping them out and dividing their territory. The Delaware and Mengwe then soon were attacking each other, and the Mengwe subjugated the Delaware.

This behavior only looks irrational through the prism of the modern nation state society, in which there are no tribes but only historically arbitrary borders demarcating atomised individuals who ally based on policy and often move between regions at will, according to their own convenience. To ally with people you disagree with on policy makes no sense in the modern world (outside of being literally invaded), because alliances are by definition about policy, shared institutions or shared goals. Leftists are trying to jam an obsolete square peg into a round hole and it leads to insane outcomes.

Conclusion

This take may seem pessimistic. After all, if destructive leftism is truly caused by ancient instincts it sounds hard to address. But there is good ground for optimism.

Humans became the apex species on our planet because of our supreme adaptability and ability to work together. Most people are not leftists, even though leftists dominate and control society. The average person is well socialized to the realities of the modern world: they don’t view the world as a zero-sum series of tribal alliances and wars. And people routinely overcome and control ancient survival instincts for all kinds of reasons, even just for fun. Sky diving violates every survival instinct we have but people regularly do it. Clearly, controlling our evolved instincts isn’t that hard for us.

There are forms of therapy that have proven able to control maladaptive mental habits. The most effective is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT can be summed up as encouraging people to take control of their own lives. Many psychological disorders seem to share a common root in an ‘external locus of control’ (ELOC), in which people don’t believe they control events in their own lives. An extremely ELOC is standard in tribal societies which explain nearly everything as the result of intervention by natural spirits, sky gods, luck etc. That’s a reasonable belief to evolve because they have very little control of their environment. In contrast, well adjusted people have a much more internal locus of control: they recognize that although bad luck and external events can affect them, in modern societies life outcomes are strongly connected to decisions.

An ELOC is highly correlated with pathologies like depression, a feeling of helplessness, anxiety - all of which are also strongly correlated with left wing beliefs. Leftists regularly try and enforce an ELOC via legal or cultural norms, e.g. explaining outcomes via invisible forces like “systemic bias”, creating rules that blame third parties for your own emotional state and so on. Although administering CBT to whole swathes of the population is impractical, creating a culture that subtly but continuously reinforces an internal locus of control is possible. A future essay will address the question of how to create and reinforce such a culture.

1. By “leftism” I mean the ideology of those actually dedicated to left wing beliefs, not simply anyone who votes for a left wing party. All old political parties pick up a lot of casual votes over time from people who aren’t really committed to or even aware of the core ideas, e.g. the classic Labour Family in which members vote left because their fathers did, as did their fathers before them and so on.