The best adventures are with your kids. Standing in the rain, with Braden, West Papua, Indonesia, 2019
How Did We Get Here?
One of the most pressing questions of our time is deceptively simple: how did so many of the world’s problems seem to sneak up on us? How does chaos accumulate unnoticed until it’s already everywhere?
To answer that, we need to understand how mental models operate inside the human mind — and how our psychosocial development shapes the brain itself.
You Are Not As Conscious As You Think
Start with an uncomfortable fact: most of the time, you are not in direct, conscious control of your own thoughts.
Your thinking runs largely on what neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network (DMN) — a web of interconnected brain regions including the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the angular gyrus, the hippocampal formation, and the lateral temporal cortex. These areas show sustained activity during rest, daydreaming, self-reflection, and social reasoning. If conscious, deliberate thought were the whole story, your brain would go quiet the moment you stopped concentrating. It doesn’t. The DMN keeps running.
That persistent activity isn’t random noise. It is the brain doing something important.
The DMN as Relational Operating System
It’s a short step from there to a significant insight: the DMN is heavily involved in relational programming — the deep, largely automatic patterns that govern how we engage with other people.
And those patterns are shaped by what developmental theorists call the Value Meme (vMeme): the meta-level framework that structures how we participate in social organization. Your vMeme isn’t just what you believe — it’s the operating system beneath your beliefs, determining how information moves between you and others, and how you read social situations in the first place.
Put simply: your vMeme is the default programming running in your DMN. It is what your brain practices most of the time, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Two Kinds of Relationships, Two Kinds of Mind
To understand why this matters, consider that human relationships fall into two broad categories.
The first are independently generated, data-driven relationships — built through direct experience, observation, and personal judgment. These are rational, agency-driven, and form the foundation of genuine empathy. Friendship is the clearest example. You chose your friends based on how they actually behave toward you.
The second are externally defined relationships — organized around authority, rules, and social role rather than personal experience. These are belief-based and non-agentic. A doctor is a doctor regardless of your personal experience with them; a judge commands a certain deference regardless of your opinion of their character.
Neither type is inherently bad. Both are necessary. But which type dominates in your thinking depends on your social environment and your own level of development.
When data-driven relationships dominate, your thinking tends toward nuance and multi-dimensionality. You can hold complex assessments: “I’d trust that person with my life, but not my wallet.” When externally defined relationships dominate, your thinking tends toward rules and authority. You respond to categories — rank, role, label — rather than to the person in front of you. Think of the mental adjustment required when an American first drives in England: the road rules are so deeply encoded that conscious override is genuinely hard work.
Permission Structures: Engineering the DMN
In turbulent political times, the DMN comes under sustained pressure. Forces across the social landscape push individuals away from agency — away from calibrating their responses to information gathered directly from their own experience — and toward pre-packaged interpretations of reality.
This is the core function of permission structures: narrative frameworks designed to guide people toward a predetermined conclusion while allowing them to feel they arrived there freely. The term was popularized by David Axelrod, a media consultant prominent during the Obama administration, and the technique was refined extensively in that era’s political communications.
The mechanism is psychologically precise. A permission structure doesn’t argue with your existing identity — it provides scaffolding around it, allowing your DMN’s self-coherence machinery to reorganize around a new attractor without triggering the identity-threat response that would otherwise cause rejection. In short: it lets you change your mind without feeling like you were wrong.
The danger is that this process disconnects your reasoning from your own direct sensory and relational experience. It substitutes an externally constructed narrative for the data you are actually gathering from your surroundings. Over time, this produces a drift from reality — a gap between the social script you’ve been handed and the world you actually live in.
DEI: An Evolutionary Force That Overreached
The arc of DEI policy illustrates this dynamic clearly.
Early-stage DEI confronted real, documented bias. It forced individuals to reckon with out-group prejudice that operated below conscious awareness, and in doing so opened the door to more independently generated, data-driven relationships across racial lines. This was genuinely evolutionary — it reprogrammed DMN patterns that had calcified around historical social hierarchies and pushed societies toward greater complexity and trust.
Late-stage DEI emerged after many — though not all — of those original targets had been substantially addressed. At that point, the institutional momentum carried on, but the animating data no longer matched the intervention. Ideological rigidity replaced adaptive responsiveness. The framework became easier to exploit by those with little interest in its original goals, and increasingly imposed on individuals scripts that didn’t match the reality of their daily relational lives.
The consequences were visible even within minority communities themselves. Professional-class black families followed earlier white flight patterns to the suburbs — the memetic pressures of the late-stage agenda created new conflicts within, not just between, racial groups.
Worse, the framework became a tool in a separate dynamic: elite overproduction — the intensifying competition among credentialed elites for a shrinking number of top-tier institutional positions. Demanding that a fixed percentage of elite university admissions go to underqualified candidates could be framed as moral virtue, while functionally reducing competition for the remaining spots among elite-class families. The moral language of inclusion became cover for a classic competitive maneuver in the game of institutional musical chairs.
The deeper damage, however, was to the underlying social substrate. The kind of broad innovation and creative collaboration that drives societal advancement depends on individuals freely seeking out their own partners, collaborators, and networks — based on independent assessment of trust, competence, and compatibility. Mandate those relationships from the outside, and you erode the high-trust relational infrastructure that makes complex, decentralized cooperation possible. Creativity and complexity don’t survive the removal of genuine agency in relationship formation.
Immigration and the Relational Immune System
Similar dynamics apply to rapid, large-scale immigration from societies with fundamentally different relational architectures.
Consider the Haitian immigration into Springfield, Ohio. The surface-level conflicts — even the infamous “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!” moment — were symptoms of something deeper. When tribal social organization (in which loyalty, authority, and justice are structured around kin and clan) is introduced rapidly into a community organized around civic, rule-based trust, the friction isn’t merely cultural. It operates at the level of the DMN itself.
When authorities then enforce pro-social interpretations of that friction — insisting that residents’ discomfort reflects bias rather than legitimate relational signals — it creates a double-bind. The DMN is receiving direct experiential data that conflicts with the socially mandated interpretation. The result is cognitive gaslighting at scale. And that can lead to civil war.
The contrast with other immigration patterns is instructive. Ukrainian refugees in Poland share language roots, religious tradition, and social mores close enough that integration, while not effortless, doesn’t require the receiving community to override its own relational immune system. The Springfield situation is categorically different — not in the worth of the people involved, but in the scale of relational distance being bridged without adequate time, infrastructure, or honest acknowledgment of the challenge.
The long-term trajectory of forcing such mismatches without support is predictable: societal devolution. You want to generate violent ethno-nationalist backlash? Introduce a large tribal population into a stable community without preparation, honest communication, or adequate integration support, then gaslight the residents when the predictable conflicts emerge. The relational immune system will respond — and what it reverts to, in the absence of better options, is historical sectarian identity.
The DMN Doesn’t Lie — Eventually
A final note on authenticity.
People are skilled at performing higher-level, pro-social values when they have an audience and nothing is at stake. But under pressure — in genuine crisis, in moments of real conflict — the DMN reasserts itself. The deep programming runs.
A recent case from Dundee, Scotland illustrates this. Bulgarian Muslim men were accused of sexually harassing two pre-teen girls, aged twelve and thirteen. A number of conservative commentators, performing centrist rationality for their audiences, publicly suggested the girls were fabricating the accusations. The jury concluded the attacks were real. The commentators have since apologized.
What does this reveal? That even self-styled rational voices will sacrifice lower-status individuals on the altar of status competition — reaching for the position that elevates them in their particular pecking order, rather than the one that reflects honest judgment. When you watch a journalist position themselves as uniquely reasonable, watch what they reach for when the cost of accuracy is social. Their DMN will out.
The pattern across all of these cases is the same. When permission structures systematically override the DMN’s capacity to generate independent, data-driven relational assessments, the result is not a more just or more functional society. It is a more manipulable one — and eventually, a more fragile one.
A procedural note – I wrote this entire piece myself, then dumped it into Claude to streamline the flow. As such, I can tell it does change tone a bit — it’s been Claude-ified. If you’re a regular reader, let me know what you think. I take a lot of flak from folks for too much complexity, too many unique terms, and such. Let me know if this helps or hurts.
I’m going to write a piece on my interactions with Claude. It often does a great job of clarifying my stuff, and that’s impressive. I can also tell when I say more radical stuff that it does run up against some kind of AI sidebars inside acceptable discourse. Nothing is perfect.
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 