If you’ve spent any time watching the political or social landscape over the last few years, you’ve probably noticed something unsettling: everyone seems to be losing their minds.
Whether it’s the left or the right, the vaccinated or the unvaccinated, social media threads, or family dinner tables—the world feels like it’s teetering on the edge of a collective nervous breakdown. People are at each other’s throats, entirely convinced that they are the sole guardians of righteousness, while the people on the “other side” are irredeemable monsters.
We love to blame politicians, media algorithms, or the internet. But if you strip away the noise and look at human psychology, the root cause is much simpler, much deeper, and much scarier:
Most of us have absolutely no idea how human behavior actually works.
Instead of dealing with reality, we’ve built an entire civilization on a massive psychological myth—and like puppies chasing slippers, we keep running after cheap ideology just to get a quick hit of dopamine.
The Great Lie: “I Am 100% in Control”
Ask almost anyone on the planet if they have free will, and they’ll tell you: “Of course I do. I choose what I think, what I believe, and how I act.”
In philosophy, this belief in absolute personal autonomy is closely tied to libertarianism—not just the political party, but the foundational worldview that humans are completely unconditioned, independent agents. Easily 75% to 80% of the population walks around operating on this exact assumption.
It sounds empowering, doesn’t it? There’s just one huge problem: it completely ignores basic behavioral science.
When you actually study behavioral psychology—people like B.F. Skinner or depth psychologists like Carl Jung—that myth of absolute free will gets blown to pieces. Human behavior isn’t spawned out of thin air by a magic “free choice” button in your head. Your behavior is constantly shaped by your environment, your trauma, your conditioning, your biology, and the reinforcement schedules around you.
Believing you have 100% unconditioned free will without understanding how your mind is shaped is like trying to drive a car with your eyes closed because you “believe” you know where the road is.
The “Moral Superiority” Dopamine Trap
When you believe that everyone operates with 100% pure, unconditioned free will, something dangerous happens to your brain.
If someone does something you don’t like, or holds a view you disagree with, you don’t look at their environment, their history, or their conditioning. You default to what psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error:
“They aren’t just reacting to their circumstances… they are actively choosing to be evil, stupid, or dangerous.”
This is where society turns toxic. The moment you frame human conflict as a simple choice between “Good People” and “Evil People,” you open the door to moral superiority.
When you sit on your digital high horse and judge someone else as inferior, your brain registers a sudden bump in relative social standing. That triggers a rush of dopamine—the brain’s reward chemical.
When you join a crowd of like-minded people to dunk on the “out-group,” you get a double cocktail: dopamine from the high-ground win, and oxytocin from tribal bonding.
It feels amazing. It feels like virtue. But in reality, it’s just a cheap, addicted brain chasing a hit.
The Nazi Inside All of Us: Facing the Shadow
Carl Jung warned us explicitly about this trap. He pointed out that true morality isn’t just about believing you’re a good person. In fact, if all you see in yourself is “the good,” you are not moral—you are naive and dangerous.
Jung talked heavily about The Shadow—the dark, ugly, aggressive capacity for evil that exists inside every single human being.
Jung’s point was simple: Unless you acknowledge your own capacity to do terrible things, you cannot call yourself a moral person. True morality is knowing you have a dark side, understanding what triggers it, and consciously choosing to keep it in check.
When a society forgets this, mass hysteria takes over. Look at what happened during the peak of COVID:
- People ratting out their neighbors over regulations.
- Calls to ban fellow human beings from hospitals or basic social life.
- Unchecked hatred, public shaming, and dehumanization—all done with a smile because people felt morally justified.
That self-righteous urge to crush the “other side” while feeling completely noble doing it? That is the exact psychological mechanism that fuels historical atrocities. It’s the hidden authoritarian inside us all.
When people refuse to look at their own Shadow, their cruelty doesn’t disappear—it just puts on a costume called “duty.”
How the Myth of Free Will Makes You Easy to Control
Here is the ultimate irony: The people who believe most fervently in their own complete immunity to manipulation are always the easiest to manipulate.
If you believe every thought in your head was generated purely by your own free will, you will never question why you believe what you believe.
- You see a meme on social media.
- It appeals to your tribal group.
- It gives you a little hit of outrage or validation.
- You accept it as absolute truth without a second thought.
- You share it, and the next person does the same.
Social media algorithms are literally built on Skinnerian operant conditioning. They use variable reinforcement schedules—the exact same mechanics as a slot machine—to condition your behavior, outrage, and attention.
Because society lacks basic behavioral literacy, millions of people walk straight into these psychological traps while proudly declaring, “Nobody controls my mind!”
Stopping the Chase
Both sides of the modern political aisle are losing their minds in a cycle of groupthink and moral outrage. Both sides are adopting authoritarian tactics while accusing the other side of being fascists.
We’ve stopped caring about what actually matters—truth, human connection, environmental realities, self-examination, and actual problem-solving. Instead, like puppies chasing slippers, we chase whatever cheap ideology or moral outrage delivers that next hit of dopamine.
If we want to stop going down this destructive path, we have to wake up to psychological reality:
- Drop the illusion of moral perfection: Acknowledge your own capacity for bad behavior, tribal bias, and cruelty.
- Understand conditioning: Stop treating every conflict like a war between pure good and pure evil, and start looking at the environmental inputs driving human behavior.
- Recognize the dopamine loop: The next time you feel a surge of self-righteous rage on the internet, ask yourself: Am I actually helping, or am I just getting high on feeling superior?
Until we learn how our own minds actually work, we’ll keep letting our worst instincts drive the bus—all while believing we’re completely in control.
Is it actually possible to teach people to spot their own shadow and dopamine addiction, or are we just wired to keep chasing the slipper until the whole system crashes?