Science Quote by Keith Henson

Henson smuggles a big moral claim into the cool tone of a lab note: our failures aren’t merely personal or political, they’re often mechanical. By casting “a substantial fraction” of today’s messes as “mismatch,” he reframes outrage as diagnosis. That move is doing strategic work. It doesn’t deny agency, but it does relocate blame from individual badness to inherited wiring rubbing against a world it wasn’t built for.

The tell is the parenthetical “not just cults.” Henson is known for thinking about memetics and group dynamics, and he’s pushing back against the comforting idea that cults are an exotic pathology affecting other people. The subtext: the same cognitive machinery that makes humans bond, imitate, obey, and seek certainty also makes us vulnerable to charismatic leaders, algorithmic feeds, conspiracy narratives, and identity-first politics. “Cult” becomes a limiting case of a broader pattern: coalitional instincts and threat responses scaled up by modern media and modern stakes.

The phrase “environment in which we evolved” quietly invokes evolutionary psychology without the macho certainty it sometimes carries. He’s not claiming a single hardwired story; he’s arguing that our institutions, technologies, and incentives changed faster than our psychology. That’s why the line works: it offers a unifying lens that can connect addiction, polarization, consumerism, and status anxiety without pretending they share one cause.

The implied prescription is both promising and unsettling. If problems are design mismatches, then solutions look like redesign: norms, interfaces, incentives, even “choice architecture.” But that also raises a political question Henson leaves hanging: who gets to do the redesign, and what stops it from becoming a cult of its own?