Harari and defaulting Baser instincts - JSR

Joseph Riggio Steven, I think the way Harari is pointing to in his books is the actual trail of evidence. The "stupidity" is the default to resolution of self-interest and passion that most humans use as their default decision-making pattern, i.e.: "I want this and I want it now." without the interest and ability to consider the long-term implications. 

Add to this the tendency to regress to tribal/clan/kin relations under stress and you have a recipe for any given group to believe if they don't use up limited resources then the "others" will take them and use them instead. So there is no limit to how much of the resources available get used, and the more quickly the better.

l agree with you that the more primitive response will always override the more evolved responses when the stress is increased in any given context, except for those exceptionally trained to do otherwise. We see our president, Donald Trump, defaulting lower level value sets when "caught" like proactively and pathologically lying to "save face" (a Graves Three behavior BTW if you're going there). 

So we have to expect that these are the patterns that will play out over time, unless we saw a very significant cultural shift, and I'm not seeing that ... yet.