Paleolithic Emotions, Medieval Institutions, and God-like Technologies: A Reflection on the Human Condition in the 21st Century
By Professor Nalin Kulatilaka
The biologist E.O. Wilson once famously remarked, “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies” (Wilson, 2009). In this compact diagnosis of modern civilization, Wilson identified a dangerous asymmetry between the evolutionary design of the human brain, the political and cultural systems we still rely upon, and the extraordinary power we now command through science and technology. This quote, deceptively simple in form, has grown only more relevant in the decades since it was first uttered. Today, as humanity grapples with climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and deep political polarization, Wilson’s insight offers a powerful lens through which to examine our mounting crises—and our faltering ability to resolve them.
Paleolithic Emotions
By “Paleolithic emotions,” Wilson was referring to the fact that human beings evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in small, tribal societies. Our emotional toolkit—jealousy, rage, lust, fear, loyalty, altruism, vengeance—was honed not for life in globalized, densely populated, technologically saturated environments, but for survival in a world of scarce resources, constant threats, and tightly knit communities. The human brain is adept at forming in-groups and outgroups, responding instinctively to perceived threats, and reacting emotionally before reasoning deliberatively. Scholars like Jonathan Haidt (2012) and Joseph Henrich (2020) have shown how these ancient moral reflexes persist in modern societies and continue to shape behavior in ways that often clash with the universalist ideals of liberal democracies.
Haidt argues that moral reasoning is largely post hoc—our judgments are intuitive first, and only later justified by reason. He identifies six moral foundations that evolved to bind groups and ensure survival: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. While progressives tend to emphasize care and fairness, conservatives draw more evenly on all six, particularly loyalty and authority—traits that would have been adaptive in small Paleolithic bands. This helps explain the visceral tribalism seen in modern politics, where loyalty to group identity can override policy details or factual accuracy. Moreover, Haidt shows how digital platforms intensify these tribal reflexes by rewarding outrage and punishing nuance, exploiting emotional triggers that evolved for face-to-face life in small groups.
Henrich’s work complements this by showing how Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies are cognitive outliers in human history. He argues that many of the psychological traits common in the modern West—analytical thinking, individualism, and rule-based morality—are historically recent and culturally specific. Most of the world still relies on social intuitions shaped by kinship, reciprocity, and honor norms that evolved in Paleolithic and agrarian contexts. Even in the West, these older frameworks resurface under stress, especially in online environments that mimic pre-modern social conditions: close-knit groups, status competition, and instant retaliation. Henrich’s central insight is that human cognition is not universally modern; it is plastic, shaped by social institutions—and dangerously unmoored when those institutions break down or fail to keep up with technological change.
Together, these insights highlight why Paleolithic emotions remain powerful in modern life: they are biologically entrenched, socially reinforced, and increasingly exploited by technological systems that mimic our ancestral environments. In today’s world, where social media exploits these emotional reflexes, where political campaigns appeal to fear and tribal identity, and where the attention economy rewards outrage over nuance, our Paleolithic wiring often proves maladaptive. In a media and political ecosystem designed to provoke rather than deliberate, our ancient instincts are not just ill-suited to the challenges of the 21st century—they are actively destabilizing them.
Medieval Institutions
When Wilson speaks of “medieval institutions,” he points to the fact that many of our core governing systems—nations, religious authorities, laws, and bureaucracies—trace their origins to eras long before the modern age. Institutions like the U.S. Congress or the British Parliament, though updated incrementally, still operate within frameworks designed centuries ago. Even newer institutions, like the United Nations, struggle under the weight of outdated geopolitical assumptions.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama (2014) argues in Political Order and Political Decay that many liberal democracies, particularly the United States, have fallen into a state of institutional sclerosis. While their foundational principles remain sound—rule of law, democratic accountability, and bureaucratic competence—their adaptability has eroded. Fukuyama attributes this to a proliferation of “veto points” in the U.S. political system: courts, committees, regulatory hurdles, and interest groups that prevent meaningful reform. The result is a government capable of maintaining basic order but unable to act decisively in the face of new challenges like climate change, AI, or public health crises. Unlike 19th-century Prussia or postwar Japan, where states rapidly adapted to industrial shifts, modern liberal democracies often suffer from what
Fukuyama calls “repatrimonialization”—the capture of state functions by narrow interests. In the context of Wilson’s triad, the United States is not only emotionally underprepared for modern complexity—it is structurally inhibited from institutional renewal.
Today’s technologies, especially those associated with the digital and information age, are evolving at a pace never before seen in human history. Innovations in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, quantum computing, and digital surveillance emerge so quickly that even wellresourced governments cannot keep up. Generative AI, for example, went from lab demonstration to mass deployment in less than two years.
Speed of Change
Contrast this with past technological revolutions, which, though transformative, unfolded over decades or centuries, allowing time for cultural and institutional adaptation. In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein (1980) argues that the advent of movable type in the 15th century was a revolutionary technological shift that transformed not only the transmission of knowledge but the structure of authority in Europe. She identifies two main outcomes: the standardization and dissemination of texts, which enabled the rise of scientific inquiry and critical scholarship, and the destabilization of religious and political orthodoxy. The Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and eventually Enlightenment political philosophy were all catalyzed by the printing press’s ability to replicate and circulate dissenting ideas on a previously unimaginable scale. Eisenstein emphasizes that these institutional and epistemological shifts did not occur overnight; they unfolded over generations, often violently. Her work reinforces the idea that even earlier technologies perceived as “god-like” by contemporaries required significant institutional adaptation—a process now dangerously compressed in the digital age.
The steam engine and factory system transformed economic life during the Industrial Revolution, but also prompted the emergence of trade unions, mass education, and welfare institutions. Even medieval institutions were, in part, shaped by earlier technological shifts: Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) offers a classic example of how relatively simple technological innovations can have cascading effects on social institutions. He famously argues that the adoption of the stirrup in Western Europe revolutionized mounted warfare by stabilizing the rider, thus enabling the rise of heavily armored cavalry. This, in turn, gave rise to feudalism: in exchange for military service, mounted warriors were granted land, institutionalizing a system of decentralized political authority based on martial obligation. Similarly, the introduction of the heavy plow in Northern Europe improved agricultural yields, reshaping land use and incentivizing the formation of manorial estates. White’s thesis underscores the degree to which even modest technological advances can reshape institutions— suggesting that the far more disruptive technologies of today (e.g., AI, biotech) demand much faster and more deliberate institutional recalibration.
Today, we have no such buffer: technological upheaval happens in real time, but institutional change lags by decades. Artificial intelligence, in particular, lays bare the mismatch Wilson warned about. AI systems not only amplify our Paleolithic instincts—curating content that triggers outrage or anxiety—but also reveal the paralysis of our institutions. Legislatures struggle to understand the technical issues involved in AI, let alone regulate them. Meanwhile, emotionally charged reactions to AI— ranging from techno-utopian enthusiasm to fears of extinction—rapidly shape public opinion, often without grounding in evidence.
James Bridle (2022), in Ways of Being, presents AI not merely as a tool but as a fundamentally alien system of cognition—one that increasingly operates outside the scope of human comprehension. He describes how modern AI systems, particularly those based on deep learning, function as “black boxes”: they produce results that even their creators cannot fully explain. This opacity challenges not just regulatory oversight but epistemological authority itself—who gets to decide what is true, credible, or justifiable when machine logic supersedes human reasoning? Bridle’s broader philosophical claim is that AI accelerates a shift away from Enlightenment rationality and toward systems of inference and power that are non-transparent and non-human. In this view, the institutional crisis is not just one of speed or scale, but of worldview: our medieval institutions are premised on human discernment and accountability, while our god-like technologies are drifting toward inscrutability and autonomous agency.
Economic, Social, and Political Consequences
The economic consequences of this mismatch are equally stark. While digital technologies and automation have delivered remarkable gains in productivity and profit, the rewards have been captured disproportionately by a small elite. In the U.S., a handful of billionaires now own more wealth than the bottom half of the population (Saez & Zucman, 2019). This concentration of wealth translates into disproportionate influence over legislation, campaign finance, and public discourse. Acemoglu and Johnson (2023) describe this as a drift toward “automation-centric” capitalism, where labor loses bargaining power and democratic institutions come under pressure from oligarchic influence. If left unchecked, we risk entering a world of techno-feudalism: corporate control of digital infrastructure, algorithmic manipulation of public life, and a weakening of state capacity. Economically, this could mean declining real wages, eroded labor protections, and reduced upward mobility. Socially, it breeds alienation, polarization, and loss of civic trust. Politically, it opens the door to authoritarian populism and democratic backsliding, as disaffected citizens search for meaning and agency in a system that increasingly feels rigged against them.
(How) can we avoid a dystopian future?
To close this gap, liberal capitalist democracies like the United States must undertake structural reforms—not just to pass new rules, but to build institutions capable of adaptive governance. One mechanism would be the re-establishment of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, disbanded in the 1990s, to provide lawmakers with independent, forward-looking analysis (Stilgoe, 2015). Regulatory “sandboxes” could be established to test policy frameworks for emerging technologies in real-world conditions.
In Open Democracy, Hélène Landemore (2020) argues that traditional representative democracy
is no longer sufficient for managing complexity, rebuilding trust, or integrating plural perspectives—especially in an age of accelerated technological change. She proposes institutionalizing deliberative democratic mechanisms such as citizen assemblies, where randomly selected individuals deliberate on complex policy issues with access to expert input. These mini-publics, she contends, are not only more inclusive than elections (which tend to privilege elites and partisanship) but also better suited to long-term, reflective thinking. Empirical evidence from France’s Citizens’ Climate Convention and Ireland’s constitutional referenda supports her claim that ordinary people, when properly informed and insulated from lobbyists and partisanship, can generate reasoned and innovative solutions to problems like climate change or AI regulation. In Landemore’s model, democracy must evolve institutionally—toward more open and participatory structures—if it is to survive the pressures of Wilson’s triple mismatch.
Yet these reforms face formidable challenges. The U.S. political system is fragmented and prone to gridlock. The influence of corporate lobbying, particularly from large technology firms, discourages meaningful oversight. Media incentives reinforce partisan divides, reducing the space for thoughtful debate. And the public—emotionally exhausted, misinformed, and digitally fragmented—is often unable to sustain the attention and pressure required to push for systemic change. As Haidt (2012) notes, our political reasoning is driven more by tribal loyalty than rational deliberation—a tendency exacerbated by platforms designed to hijack attention and inflame passions.
If institutional reform is difficult, emotional self-governance becomes even more critical.
Emotional intelligence, unlike biological evolution, can be cultivated through deliberate effort. Daniel Goleman (1995) emphasized that empathy, self-awareness, and emotional regulation are learnable skills—and essential not just for private well-being but public life. Schools must go beyond STEM education to teach media literacy, civic empathy, and decision-making under uncertainty. Platforms, under regulatory and consumer pressure, can be designed to reward reflection over reactivity. And individuals must relearn habits of patience and restraint in a culture designed for instant gratification.
Ultimately, Wilson’s warning is not a prophecy of doom but a call for conscious evolution. If we are to live with technologies of divine power, we must transcend the instincts of the Paleolithic and the structures of the medieval. That means rewriting the rules of capitalism to reward inclusion, reimagining institutions to govern at the speed of change, and reforming ourselves to become emotionally resilient citizens. In the United States, this will require coalitions of reformers across political lines—activists, technologists, educators, and business leaders— committed to restoring the moral and institutional foundations of a democratic society. The future will be shaped not just by what we invent, but by whether we learn, finally, to govern both our tools and ourselves.
References
- Acemoglu, D., & Johnson, S. (2023). Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. PublicAffairs.
- Bridle, J. (2022). Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Eisenstein, E. L. (1980). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge University Press.
- Fukuyama, F. (2014). Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam.
- Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon.
- Henrich, J. (2020). The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Landemore, H. (2020). Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press.
- Saez, E., & Zucman, G. (2019). The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay. W.W. Norton.
- Stilgoe, J. (2015). Experiment Earth: Responsible Innovation in Geoengineering. Routledge.
- White, L. (1962). Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford University Press.
- Wilson, E. O. (2009). Remarks at the Harvard Museum of Natural History Symposium. Reiterated in The Social Conquest of Earth (2012).
