Someone I knew once said, with emphatic emotion, that Trump supporters do not deserve to live. What has struck me since is how many times I've heard similar statements in the last decade that seem not merely comfortable with the deaths of those with differing politics, but even celebratory of them.
My attempt today is to explore something extremely uncomfortable: how do we explain the ordinary acceptance of eliminating other humans, often at scale? To do so, I'm going to use my framework thinking:
Humans evolved to have a separated mind, and the fractal separation of narrative from operative function (reality) defines human culture and behavior.
The explanation below, in a nutshell, is that when a narrative sits far from reality, emotional defense becomes the primary mechanism for those who hold it, and a terrible escalation can occur that both feeds on and becomes the justification for the emotion.
The narrative-operative gap exists because we have a separated mind. Our evolved firmware (the adapted mind) carries ancient priorities regarding status, coalition, threat detection, and belonging. Our cultural software (the adaptive mind) rapidly installs whatever local consensus our environment requires for survival and acceptance. Consciousness — the rider on our subconscious elephant — can observe the system but operates from a menu heavily shaped by those deeper layers. The result is that we routinely hold and act on stories that feel true and coherent while the underlying functions they serve or the realities they navigate remain partially or largely obscured.
This gap is fractal. It operates at the level of the individual, the small group, the institution, the movement, and the nation. At every scale, the groups, organizations, and even nations that can tell stories appealing to conscious ideals — progress, justice, belonging, moral order — while simultaneously operating in ways that generate energy, growth, extraction, or advantage tend to survive and spread. Where environments demand close alignment between story and reality for survival (a farmer misreading the season starves; a small shop misreading demand fails), the gap stays small and the narrative stays under pressure to track operative outcomes. Where the underlying function benefits from an idealized story that provides cover or legitimacy, the entities that tell the most compelling story while maintaining the most effective extraction tend to thrive.
This is not a comforting observation. It suggests that much of our lived reality consists of beliefs and behaviors that are not strictly true, but that enable cooperation, status, and exploitation to coexist.
Plato's allegory of the cave remains one of the most accurate descriptions of this condition. We live in a world largely constructed and maintained by storytellers. The shadows on the wall are the idealized narratives; the puppeteers are the incentives, institutions, and coalitional dynamics that keep the machinery running. Most of us are reluctant to turn around because doing so threatens our sense of belonging, status, and the emotional coherence that the stories provide. The rider can see more clearly than the deeper layers allow, but the cost of sustained clarity is real.
Here is where things get profound: the width of the gap can be read in the emotional intensity that surrounds a story. When narrative and operative reality are closely aligned, emotion is usually moderate and proportional. When the gap is wide — when the story must do heavy lifting to conceal or justify extractive functions — intense emotional defense becomes necessary to maintain coherence. Fury, sacred outrage, moral certainty, or existential fear serve as diagnostic signals. They indicate how far the idealized story has drifted from operative reality and how much protective energy is required to keep the functional fiction intact.
When that intensity reaches the point of declaring that people who think differently need to die, or deserve to, it functions as a particularly strong signal. The narrative has become so detached from operative reality — or so existentially threatened — that only the most extreme mental defense can sustain it: dehumanization of dissenters and eliminationist certainty.
The cognitive systems involved — coalitional threat detection, emotional override of normal inhibitions, and the power of totalizing stories — evolved in small-band environments where the scope of violence was naturally limited. What has changed dramatically is the modern capacity to scale those same mechanisms. Bureaucracy, industrial technology, mass communication, and centralized administrative power allow eliminationist thinking to operate at distances and volumes that would have been impossible in ancestral conditions. The psychology remains recognizably human; the reach and efficiency have been multiplied by the tools and structures of the modern world. This is the Paleolithic Paradox at civilizational scale: identical evolved firmware running in radically mismatched environments, producing patterns that are fractal across all levels of human organization.
This architecture helps explain behaviors that resist ordinary moral accounting: the large-scale killing of civilians by governments, often their own. Scholars estimate that somewhere between 100 million and 250 million people were killed by state action in the 20th century alone — through execution, engineered famine, camps, and systematic policies. These numbers are difficult to comprehend and even harder to reconcile with the stories we prefer to tell about human nature and progress.
How does it happen? How do large numbers of people become not merely willing to look away but actively motivated to participate?
Periods of anocracy — unstable hybrid regimes that mix democratic and autocratic elements — or eroded institutional trust create the conditions in which leaders can successfully activate tribal hatred and totalizing narratives. The framework highlights the interaction between the separated mind and high-gap totalizing narratives. These narratives come in two main forms: utopian (futurist) visions of a perfected future that has never existed, and palingenetic (restorationist) visions of a pure or harmonious order that is believed to have been lost or corrupted. In either case, an abstract ideal is posited, and a contaminating class is identified whose removal is framed as necessary for the ideal to be realized.
Because the ideal is distant from operative reality, the narrative requires emotional intensity to remain motivating. Ancient coalitional and threat-detection systems are recruited: the contaminating group registers not as fellow humans with competing interests but as an existential danger to "us" and to the future or past we are defending. The adaptive mind installs the story as local consensus and survival requirement. Dissent feels like betrayal.
Many participants function as operators within bureaucratic and technological systems that allow killing at scale through routine, divided responsibility, and euphemism. Classic experiments on obedience to authority show how ordinary people, when placed in roles that diffuse responsibility upward ("I was just following orders"), can perform or enable acts they would otherwise find abhorrent. The underlying functions — power consolidation, resource extraction, status for some, ideological coherence for others — are advanced while the public story supplies moral cover and emotional fuel. The Law of Inevitable Exploitation explains why systems create roles and incentives that ordinary people fill, while the Exploit-Blame-Shame mechanism shows how accurate perception of the gap is pathologized or vilified.
The pattern visible in that single conversation — where a high-gap story about political opponents generated eliminationist intensity — scales to the institutional and historical level when the narrative gains power and encounters insufficient corrective feedback. Emotional defense fills the space where operative alignment would otherwise narrow the gap. Coalitional dynamics turn participation into belonging. Institutional structures turn ordinary people into effective participants without requiring them to originate the ideology.
This is not a claim that every person who participates is equally culpable or that every atrocity is identical in mechanism. It is an account of how the cognitive architecture that supports ordinary cooperation and meaning-making can, under conditions of widened gaps and totalizing framing, produce participation that feels internally coherent and even necessary to those inside the story. The intensity we observe or feel around certain narratives is often the clearest available signal of how far those stories have drifted from the realities they must navigate — and of how much protective energy is required to keep the functional fiction intact. Emotions are the chains that keep the prisoners bound in Plato's Cave.
Progressive Western philosophies of government frequently rest on a high-gap idealized narrative: the belief that large-scale institutions can and should deliver comprehensive provision, safety, fairness, and protection against harm through expert-managed systems and expansive moral commitments. When these stories meet operative realities — conflicting incentives, resource limits, uneven human agency, implementation costs, or unintended consequences — the dominant response is often not gap-narrowing adjustment but emotional defense of the narrative itself. Skepticism or questioning is frequently reframed as opposition to the underlying values (care, protection, equity), which can trigger strong vilification, moral exclusion, or coalitional pressure against dissenters. This pattern widens the narrative-operative gap, turns political disagreement into perceived existential threat, and can contribute to the very hardening and polarization the philosophy seeks to overcome.
The current Western moment illustrates the dynamic with unusual clarity. For years, the dominant institutional narrative has leaned strongly futurist — emphasizing managed progress, equity frameworks, and institutional legitimacy. When operative-oriented populations express skepticism (including around electoral processes, immigration, or institutional behavior), the emotional response is shaming and reframing rather than engagement. Questioning or disagreement becomes heresy. This inevitably invites a restorative movement as an adaptive defense mechanism against the dominant narrative's emotional and institutional behavior; the restorative movement is then framed as moral failure, and a terrible cycle starts to take place. The restorative narrative risks becoming as dangerous as the utopian.
A similar cycle of escalating competing restorative narratives has played out for decades in the Middle East, where mutual dehumanization and emotional intensity have rapidly compounded on both sides. Such escalating cycles represent among the most dangerous situations human societies face.
An explanation of these dynamics is not an absolution of them. Structural vulnerability does not erase individual moral agency. Standing against these forces in the moment is psychologically and socially costly — it often means risking ostracism, status loss, or direct danger by refusing the coalitional frame and the authority of the prevailing narrative. That difficulty is precisely why resistance is rare and why those who do resist — who hide the targeted, refuse orders, speak out, or simply maintain private clarity — often face severe consequences, including death, and gain recognition only posthumously or through historical retrospect.
Recognizing and explaining these dynamics does not lead to any easy answers. The answers that come are not direct but foundational.
Because our vulnerability is structural, the most reliable safeguards are also structural rather than purely narrative. Thomas Sowell's distinction between constrained and unconstrained visions is helpful here. The constrained vision, which is deeply fallibilist, emphasizes human limitations, trade-offs, incentives, and the value of evolved institutions that force operative alignment with reality through feedback and correction. The unconstrained vision prioritizes ideals and expert planning toward a better future, often widening the narrative-operative gap and requiring stronger emotional defense when reality intrudes.
Individuals who maintain operative alignment in meaningful domains of their lives — through tight feedback loops, small-scale decision-making with real consequences, and deliberate reduction of dependencies on high-gap institutions — tend to be less susceptible to leaders who exploit emotional narratives. The rider stays stronger when grounded in realities that are regularly audited by outcomes.
At larger scales, systems that preserve dispersed power, transparency, local accountability, and competition among different stories help keep gaps narrower and make totalizing emotional recruitment more difficult.
The goal is not perfect alignment or utopian reform, but enough operative pressure to prevent the gap from widening to the point where emotional defense becomes the dominant load-bearing mechanism. In practice, this requires choosing environments where reality has a stronger voice than story.
