People Are Not Stupid. They Are Overloaded.

Across cultures and eras, there are countless sayings that point toward the same simple recognition: every stick has two ends, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, there are two sides to every story. Variations of this wisdom appear almost everywhere, across languages, traditions, and historical periods. We absorb it early, long before we can fully explain it. It belongs to the basic moral grammar of social life.

And most of us, in private life at least, act as if we know this. Especially in relationships, who has not at some point said, “it’s not that simple,” or tried to see things from the other person’s perspective? At the intimate level, complexity feels almost self-evident. We know that motives mix, that people contradict themselves, that situations rarely fit into clean categories.

And yet something strange happens the moment we step out of private life and into public life.

There, complexity collapses with surprising speed. What remains is usually some variation of “us” and “them” — left and right, progressive and conservative, the reasonable people and the dangerous ones, the enlightened and the blind. Entire populations that are perfectly capable of nuance in private suddenly begin to think in blocs, camps, and reflexes.

The public sphere becomes a machine for flattening.

At first glance, this looks irrational. And in many ways it is. It is perfect material for politics, because it gives politicians something extremely useful: simple keys for reading public emotion and organizing power around it. “We” stand for this, “they” stand against it, so you are either with us or against us. One could use that language to describe ancient tribal formations or early civilizational structures. And yet the same mechanism remains fully alive inside technologically advanced societies that like to imagine themselves as post-tribal.

What fascinates me is that this is not simply a story about ignorance. Individually, people are often curious, perceptive, and more internally complex than public discourse ever allows. In a single pair of eyes you can still glimpse something like a whole universe, to paraphrase George Carlin. But the moment a group appears, something narrows. Reflection weakens. The need for reflection weakens with it. The primitive grammar returns almost immediately: with us or against us.

The easy explanation would be evolution. We are social animals, wired for coalitions, threat detection, and belonging. And of course there is truth in that. But I do not think that is the whole story, especially not in the twenty-first century, with the internet, algorithmic feeds, and now AI intensifying the amount of information pressing against the human nervous system.

What seems more relevant to me is something closer to cognitive economy.

It would be very easy to say that most people are cognitively limited, lazy, or simply stupid. That explanation is always available, and the ego loves it because it ends the inquiry so cleanly. But it also explains very little. Life is rarely simple enough for contempt to count as analysis. A more serious possibility is that people are not primarily stupid, but overloaded.

The modern person lives under a kind of pressure that is historically unusual. The human mind was not built to process the entire world through one small glowing feed. It was not built to absorb war, inflation, layoffs, ideological conflict, technological disruption, celebrity scandals, climate anxiety, sexual politics, global markets, and personal insecurity in the same visual stream before breakfast. Whatever our intellectual capacities may be in theory, they now operate under conditions of constant compression.

And the pressure is not merely informational. It is material.

Especially in the years after the pandemic, as the old sense of order has continued to weaken, everyday life has acquired a harder edge. The squeeze on the middle class, rising costs, unstable work, energy prices, permanent geopolitical tension, and the quiet but relentless threat of technological replacement all form part of the same atmosphere.

Even before a person reaches the level of political thought, they are already metabolizing ambient instability.

Furthermore, most people work eight to ten hours a day, but the real structure of work is usually longer than that. Preparation, commuting, emotional recovery, basic functioning before and after the shift — in practice it is often ten or twelve hours, sometimes more. Then come the ordinary obligations of life: children, parents, partners, domestic tasks, paperwork, money, fatigue, food, sleep, the small repairs required to keep a life from falling apart. Under such conditions, nuance becomes expensive.

That, to me, is the real bridge that is often missing from discussions like this. People do not necessarily reject complexity because they hate truth. They reject it because, in practice, truth has become costly. It takes time, cognitive room, emotional regulation, and some tolerance for uncertainty. It demands an inner surplus. And more and more people no longer have that surplus.

From that angle, political tribes begin to look slightly different.

They are not only systems of loyalty. They are systems of compression. They offer ready-made packages of interpretation: who is good, who is dangerous, what matters, what can be ignored, which facts belong together, which emotions are permitted. They reduce processing costs. In an overloaded environment, that is not a small advantage. It is psychologically efficient.

This does not make such systems true. It does not make them noble. But it does make them functional.

Most people are not moving through social life in search of truth at every step. They are moving through it in search of orientation. And orientation is a much cheaper demand. Truth is layered, destabilizing, and often slow. Orientation only needs to be clear enough to get you through the day without collapsing into confusion. This same logic appears far beyond politics.

Take something more intimate and seemingly personal, like dating. When an overworked, cognitively saturated person opens a dating app, what exactly are they supposed to do with the scale of ambiguity in front of them? Faced with hundreds of profiles, fragments of identity, conflicting signals, curated images, and the impossibility of genuine depth at that speed, most people fall back on symbols. Appearance. Height. Signs of health. Education. Stable work. A declared desire for family. A list of interests. Small visible indicators of coherence.

And then, of course, both sexes complain that the other side judges too quickly, too shallowly, too harshly, or only by external traits. But the more interesting conclusion is not that people have suddenly become stupid or morally defective. It is that they are once again behaving economically under cognitively expensive conditions. Where real knowledge of another person is structurally unavailable, symbols take over. And this is true more broadly.

Most adults understand, at least intuitively, that symbols are not the same thing as the reality they point toward. To paraphrase Plato’s cave, we know that shadows are not the things that cast them. A title such as Dr. or Prof. may symbolize competence or wisdom, but does not guarantee it. A nice car may symbolize wealth, success, or stability, but may just as easily be rented, leased beyond one’s means, or used as compensation for something missing elsewhere.

We know that status can be inherited, manipulated, staged, or hollow. We know that political language is often strategic rather than honest. We know that people lie. And yet we continue to rely on symbols.

Not because we are unaware of their limitations, but because symbols remain one of the cheapest available interfaces with reality. They are imperfect shortcuts, sometimes laughably misleading, but often just reliable enough to remain usable. Under the pressures of ordinary life, approximation becomes more practical than depth. This is the danger as well.

The more we rely on simplified labels, symbols, and social packaging, the less we stand in truth and the more we stand in description. And description, in the worst case, can drift so far from reality that it becomes almost fraudulent. A label may refer to something real, or it may simply float above the void. But from a distance, and under pressure, both can look the same.

That is why I do not think the right conclusion is that people are uninterested in the world, fundamentally incapable of thought, or simply stupid. It seems more accurate to say that they are cognitively economical. They are making decisions under conditions that do not support sustained complexity. They do not have enough structure behind them — enough time, safety, material slack, or inner space — to constantly hold open the full ambiguity of social reality while trying to keep an already fragile life intact.

None of this changes the fact that the most truthful response to almost every social issue would still sound something like: it is more complicated than it looks. It depends on perspective. There are trade-offs. Every stick has two ends. Let us slow down before turning our first interpretation into certainty.

But one of the uncomfortable recognitions of modern life is that complexity may be true while still remaining inaccessible.

So no, these reflections do not make “us” and “them” tribalism rational. They do not redeem populism, flattening, or the social hunger for labels. But they do, at least, make them more understandable. And that matters, because understanding is one of the few things that can prevent critique from collapsing into contempt.

The real problem may not be people’s preference for simplification. It may be that more and more people no longer have the conditions for anything better.

And if that is true, then the task of those who do have some cognitive room left is not to mock the tribes from a distance, but to protect complexity where they can, translate it where possible, and widen the space in which nuance can still survive.