Or why you are probably smarter than your boss. Or why your political representative is never prepared for a crisis.
There are two ways of confronting the world: the first one is trying to understand it; the second one is to climb the social ladder so you have power over the people who try to understand it.
As it turns out, the second way (politics) is much more profitable than the first one (knowledge). The first way involves intelligence and hard work. Mathematics and science are here, but also art and humor. The second one involves gossip, deception and treachery. Which of them do you feel as your way to confront the world?
Don’t answer yet. Let me tell you a little story first.
K’no and P’ow were twin brothers in the Stone Age. K’no was quiet, introverted and a little absent. He was obsessed with the movements of the Sun and the stars, so much that he spent many nights observing the forms of the constellations and trying to guess their variations. He didn’t like very much the company of people and he was content with his thoughts.
P’ow was very different. He wasn’t interested in how the world works, but in how to have power over people. He found that in order to achieve his goal, there were a few useful abilities like deception, treachery and gossip.
Yes, gossip. If you know your neighbor’s secrets you can use them as leverage on your way to the top: how they live, who sleeps with whom, who is abusive, who’s a pushover, who is a liar and, more importantly, what lies they tell. Sometimes it’s not easy to remember, but P’ow’s mind had a special ability to store those seemingly irrelevant details and connect them.
When time passed and our two heroes grew up, one of them became king and the other one a pariah. Can you guess who became what? That’s right: P’ow’s rise was unstoppable. The world was young and people weren’t as jaded as today.
P’ow certainly enjoyed his life as a king. He had wealth, power and success. In particular, he had reproductive success: several children with different women who survived better than others because they had access to their father’s wealth.
K’no led what he perceived as a fulfilling life: away from people, quiet, dedicated to learning things. He didn’t have the success his brother had: his needs and his family’s were met, but he wasn’t wealthy, and he certainly had no power at all.
His reproductive success was also limited: he married a woman who, like him, was interested in how the world works. They had a couple of kids, but only one daughter survived. K’no and his wife ended up as the village witches, sometimes needed but usually rejected.
Side note: our protagonists are males, but our tale works exactly the same from a female point of view. Had K’no and P’ow been females, K’no would have ended as the village witch with just one daughter and P’ow as the village queen, with several children from different men.
A lot of generations passed. P’ow’s children had different degrees of success, but many of them shared their ancestor’s love for power and they reproduced a lot. K’no’s offspring, on the other hand, did not have much success and they didn’t reproduce as much.
According to evolutionary psychology, our way of thinking and our abilities are shaped by our evolutionary success. So if there are a few genes that are related to a better understanding of how the world works (that’s knowledge) and another few that are related to a better ability to climb the social ladder (that’s power), it’s likely that the latter had spread more than the former.
Let’s see if that prediction is true. Let’s compare interest in science and interest in gossip. If we add the followers of the top 10 science influencers on Instagram, we have less than 2 million. Kim Kardashian alone has 166 million followers. I rest my case.
There are a few moments when the sons of K’no have a great impact on the world: crises. When there’s an earthquake and you have to rebuild the village, or a drought and you have to carefully tend to your crops, or, why not, when there’s a pandemic and everyone looks for answers, the sons of K’no have their moment of glory. But not for too long, because the true expertise of the sons of P’ow is to capitalize moments of glory and use them for their own advantage.
When there’s a crisis, the sons of P’ow extract the information from the sons of K’no using different tactics:
1. They can ask the sons of K’no publicly what solutions they should adopt. This is called a committee of experts, and their answers tend to be ignored because the main function of the committee is not to solve the crisis, but to act as a scapegoat when the crisis is not averted.
2. They can ask privately for the solutions in exchange for some, not much, wealth. This is called a consultation.
3. They can give temporary power to the sons of K’no. This is called a commission, or in some places a statutory authority. It never lasts, because the sons of P’ow rarely relinquish power willingly.
As you can see, politicians are never prepared for a crisis and those prepared for a crisis are never politicians.
But, as always, things are not so simple. The sons of K’no and the sons of P’ow have been among us for so long that no one is purely a son of K’no or a son of P’ow anymore. All of us have mixed tendencies. The correct question is: how much of K’no or P’ow is in you?
I have news for you. If you have read this entire post, you probably carry a lot of K’no genes. Congratulations?