I get a lot of messages from lots of sources — most of them I don’t even see. Emails, DMs, comments from this site’s “contact me” form, etc. I can’t respond to all of them, but between other things it’s fun to answer a question or tell someone thanks. The best is when I’m in my inbox already and a new email comes in from a reader and I respond RIGHT AWAY. That usually gets a funny response.

The other thing that happens is someone asks the right question and it hits me at the right moment and they get back a MUCH LONGER reply than they probably wanted. I’m pretty sure a few readers have gotten responses from me and been like, “dude, I ain’t reading all that.” When this happens, I usually hit “send” and think to myself: I probably should’ve just made that a blog post.

Today’s such email came from bookmotionhouse, asking:

Hi Hugh, what made you choose the rule against expressing a desire to go outside as the silo’s most unbreakable boundary?

And I realized that, surprisingly, I don’t get asked this very often. And I think the answer is kinda fascinating, even if it’s wrong.

It started with an observation I made many years ago as an optimistic liberal. Any time I’d talk about things getting better, fellow liberals would look at me like I was smoking crack. Things are only getting worse, obviously. You weren’t really allowed to be optimistic. And this was back when things were clearly getting better!

The other thing I noticed that went along with this observation is my very conservative father idealizing the past. I noticed that most conservatives do this. Things were better back when.

Here are two diametrically opposed political ideologies, and they both seemed to agree on something but disagreed on how to express it. Try to wrap your head around it for a moment:

Liberals fully understood the past was worse than the present. Slavery used to be a thing, women couldn’t vote, war was more rampant and global, social safety nets didn’t exist at all, modern medicine is a miracle, etc.

Conservatives, meanwhile, lust for a past precisely because of some of these things. Women should vote with their husbands, vaccines are the devil, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and stop taking hand-outs, and some people were happier being slaves.

Here’s where it gets weird: Liberals think the present is better than the past, but that the future is going to be worse. And Conservatives think the present is worse than the past, but the future is going to return to the good times.

I mean, what the fuck is that all about? It’s two people seeing a curve bending a different way and both feeling like TODAY is the inflection point where shit does a 180. Help it make sense.

The best I’ve come up with is that conservatives are ANGRY NOSTALGICS. There’s a lot of research to back up the angry part. Early research in this area categorized the conservative brain as fearful, which also works but I think is less exact. Newer research backs this up. The fear is usually a trigger to lead to the anger (they’re eating cats and dogs, caravans of rapists are coming, Sharia Law soon, we can’t cook with gas). The other finding that comes out of this research is that people with conservative viewpoints are seeking comfort and safety. The past is KNOWN. We were younger then and life seemed easier. Going back further, life must’ve been even easier! Nostalgia fools us into thinking things really were better back then. Seeking reassurance within this group, you are required to talk about how much better things used to be and pine for an imminent future where we return to the good times (heaven, make American great again, down with woke).

Now for the mindfuck that is liberalism: The same field of research that finds fear and anger in conservatives finds a circus of monkeys in the liberal brain. Okay, kinda. What it actually finds is increased gray matter in an area of the brain called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (or the ACC, not to be confused with the AOC, or the SEC). This is the part of the brain that wrestles with discordant facts. Nuance. Emotional and social stressors. It’s also where complex decision-making happens.

You may have heard that Republicans are single-issue voters and Democrats are just as likely to eat their own over some purity test as go after their opponent? Well, fear and anger are the ultimate cohesion tools. That’s how bands of bickering tribes form up to go to war, or root for their favorite team pretending to go to war. Liberals, meanwhile, are the ones agonizing over how many people should be picking berries, who should go look for antelope, whether the tents should be moved to higher ground, and did someone forget to wash their spearpoints? That’s how people get sick!

Tribes need both kinds of people, and it does a good job of not only making both but keeping the balance pretty even. That’s why no matter how crazy either (or both) sides get, popular votes are generally quite close. It has less to do with the platform positions and more to do with tribe membership. I’m with my guy Reagan and down with Russia, but now my guy is all pro-Russia and maybe they’re the good guys now? Okay!

The part of all this twisty insanity that always got me the most is the liberal view that the past was worse than the present but the future is going to also get bad. Somehow, we made it better up until now, but all that progress will soon be lost. I ran into this all the time working in a university bookstore. I’d be my chipper, upbeat self (it was easier back then), and fellow liberals would chastise me for being upbeat. I wasn’t allowed to talk about the future being a brighter place. I wasn’t allowed to suggest that it was beautiful outside. Or that we should look forward to going there. In fact, this felt like the most sacred view of the liberal ideology: You aren’t allowed to be optimistic. Shit is going to shit. I mean, look around!

Even though, so far, things have mostly gotten better. And the same people also recognized that if pressed. Nobody on the left wanted a time machine to go back in time. But they were also afraid of the future.

On the right, EVERYONE wanted a time machine to go back to the way things were. They were also pretty sure we would get back there.

It was like rubberband ideology. Liberals seeing it as a pretty-okay-now-all-things-considered. Conservatives seeing it as a this-is-hell-but-it’s-only-temporary. That’s what both agreed on, even though their curves are opposite: The NOW is temporary. Just wait. Things will get worse/better soon.

I’m convinced evolution stumbled upon this bifurcation of society as a solution to a very vexing problem. The problem is that the world can shift suddenly, but it can also sit idle for a very long time. Punctuated equilibrium, they call it in the evolutionary sciences. Stasis for many years, and then a change in the environment causes an explosion of change. How do you manage both?

Well, you have half the tribe saying “The way we always do things is the best way to do things. Don’t change shit. Hey, put that back where it belongs.” While the other half is saying, “Yo, what if we tinker with this just a little? Or have you ever considered? Or what if we tried…?”

Here’s the thing: Either one of those philosophies WILL GET YOU KILLED. Tinker with things during a period of stasis, and your evolutionary fitness will suffer. Another tribe or organism not doing this will eat your lunch. Or eat you. Likewise, being unable to tinker and try new things will leave you in the dust (literally) when the world shifts beneath your feet.

One of the classic studies in evolution is the peppered moths of the UK. Most morphologies of this moth were white with sparse black spots. They hid on lichen-covered trees, blending in so birds couldn’t see them as well. These were the conservative moths. Keep doing the same old. Meanwhile, a bunch of liberal moths were trying the “let’s be mostly black with white spots” and getting eaten alive. Tinkering. Along came the industrial revolution, trees became covered in black soot, and suddenly the liberal moths looked like geniuses. The white moths got devoured. Population shifts happened in just a few generations. Of course, things went back eventually and now it was the white moths who saved the species. The point is that without a mix, they would’ve gone extinct. Evolution has been doing this for billions of years to solve complex problems. The hubris and blindness of humans is thinking somehow we don’t work the same way.

This is the maddening part of our wars, our disagreements, parents and kids no longer talking, the violence over political differences: It’s all baked into our psychologies. Nobody wants it to be this way. We wish we could get along (or some people just wish the other side would disappear so we could be surrounded only with like-minded people). But it doesn’t work that way! If every liberal died right now, half of the conservatives who are left would become the new liberals, and the in-fighting would resume. Elections would still be close. Bitterness and anger wouldn’t change. These aren’t failures of the system: THIS IS THE SYSTEM.

It doesn’t have to be, of course. There are oddities within the system, little moths with purple and green spots. I think they (we) also serve some kind of purpose, maybe like a thermometer, testing the waters of our own side of the pond, pushing back on the status quo within the cliques. For me, with my purple spots, it meant that I was a conservative Republican in the deep South buckle of the Bible belt, raised on a farm, growing my hair long while I read Ayn Rand and carried a gun everywhere asking maybe if God made a mistake and what if we were the bad guys during the Civil War? Later, in my 20s and as an adult, I became a liberal who drove a pickup truck, wondered if recycling was mostly a scam, and didn’t we need something like religion to help hold our communities together? Whatever side I was on, I was pissing people off! I went from an anti-nuke conservative to a pro-nuclear-power liberal. Both were contradictions.

As a side note, one of the reasons I fell in love with Stewart Brand as both a writer and a person is the same weird purple spots. Stewart is a liberal environmentalist who became pro-city and pro-nuclear power long before it was obvious that these are good things. Stewart would’ve been one of the people sent to clean because he was telling people the future is bright and only getting brighter. In the liberal silo I was living in twenty years ago, you weren’t allowed to say such things.

Hence the rule in the Pact. I hope this answers your question. Let’s click on another email!