The Ape Inside the Machine

On What We Forgot, What Never Changed, and How to Live Without Illusion

There was a time in my life when the world felt coherent.

Not perfect. Not painless. But coherent.

I was small. I lived with my grandmother. When I was afraid, I could go to her. When I was curious, she welcomed it. We cooked, sang, walked in forests, went to museums, watched films, made art. There was rhythm. There was safety. There was a sense that being human was not a performance but a condition you were allowed to inhabit.

Then I left that house, and the world that replaced it felt… wrong. Not just cruel. Dislocated. As if I had stepped into a reality that asked me, again and again, to betray something basic in myself in order to survive.

For years, I thought this meant I was naïve. Or broken. Or too sensitive.

Now I think something else was happening.

I think I was slowly waking up from a story.

And I am grieving deeply…

We Never Became What We Pretend to Be

Modern humans like to tell ourselves a comforting narrative: that we are fundamentally different from our ancestors. More civilized. More ethical. More enlightened. That the atrocities of the past belong to a darker, more primitive time, and that what we are witnessing now, war, repression, mass violence, cruelty, is a deviation from our true nature.

It isn’t.

Biologically, we are the same species we were forty to fifty thousand years ago when we coexisted with Neanderthals. We are still great apes. Social mammals shaped for small groups, direct feedback, embodied trust, and immediate consequence. Our nervous systems have not meaningfully changed. Our emotional capacities have not fundamentally expanded. Our threat responses, dominance hierarchies, tribal loyalties, and capacity for violence remain intact.

What changed was not what we are.

What changed were the constraints.

Agriculture created surplus. Surplus enabled hierarchy. Hierarchy enabled abstraction. Abstraction enabled distance. Distance enabled scale. And scale allowed harm to be committed without being felt.

This was not a moral failure. It was an evolutionary trade.

Civilization is not proof of ethical advancement. It is proof that symbolic systems can override biological limits….temporarily.

Empires Were Always Honest About What They Were

When you look at early empires, something striking appears: they were not ashamed of their violence.

The Roman Empire enslaved an estimated 10–20% of its population. Gladiatorial games were public entertainment. Conquest was openly celebrated. Order was maintained through terror, spectacle, and law. Rome did not fall because it became immoral. It fell because its extraction outpaced its capacity to sustain itself, economically, ecologically, militarily.

Ancient China cycled through dynasties that rose through consolidation and fell through corruption, famine, rebellion, and over-centralization. Forced labor built walls, canals, palaces. Dissent was crushed. Stability was maintained until it wasn’t.

The Mongol Empire expanded through mass slaughter, psychological warfare, and total devastation of cities that resisted. It created unprecedented connectivity, and unprecedented death.

The Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Islamic Caliphates, the Aztec and Inca empires, the Egyptian dynasties, different cultures, different cosmologies, same pattern. Control of surplus. Control of bodies. Control of narrative. Violence justified by order, God, destiny, or civilization itself.

These societies did not pretend to be humane. They told creation myths that made hierarchy cosmic and suffering necessary.

Modern societies are different in only one crucial way: we deny what we are doing.

The Modern Failure: Bureaucracy Without Accountability

The contemporary world did not invent violence. It refined it.

We replaced visible brutality with administrative distance. Killing became policy. Starvation became “supply chain disruption.” Detention became “border security.” Collective punishment became “deterrence.” Civilian deaths became “collateral damage.”

Modern bureaucratic empires, whether American, European, Russian, Chinese, or otherwise, operate through the same mechanisms as ancient ones, but with better language, better technology, and more insulation from consequence.

What is happening in Gaza is not new.

What is happening in Israel is not new.

What is happening at borders, in prisons, in sweatshops, in mines, in refugee camps across Africa, Asia, and Latin America is not new.

What is new is the moral dissonance.

We insist we are civilized while outsourcing brutality. We declare human rights while structurally violating them. We perform outrage selectively while remaining dependent on the very systems we condemn.

This does not make people evil.

It makes them human under abstraction.

We Forgot That We Are Apes

At some point, we collectively forgot something essential: that we are animals.

Not metaphorically. Biologically.

Great apes do not function well under constant symbolic threat. They do not regulate under chronic abstraction. They do not thrive in environments where feedback is delayed, relationships are transactional, and survival depends on compliance with impersonal systems.

Our nervous systems evolved for faces, voices, touch, rhythm, reciprocity. Instead, we gave them screens, metrics, debt, surveillance, and moral overload. We asked them to care about millions while barely being able to protect a few.

The result is not enlightenment.

It is dysregulation.

Burnout, anxiety, polarization, despair, moral absolutism, numbness—these are not personal failures. They are predictable outcomes of asking mammalian nervous systems to live inside inhuman scales.

Waking Up Is Not Becoming Better

Many people are “waking up” right now. But waking up does not mean becoming kinder overnight. It does not mean humanity is evolving past violence.

It means the anesthesia is wearing off.

People are realizing that progress did not change our nature. It only changed the efficiency of our systems. That moral language does not restrain power. That justice is not a feature of the universe but a fragile human invention. That no empire has ever collapsed gently. That no system this large can be reformed without loss.

This realization can turn people cruel, or honest.

What Can Actually Change

The answer is not saving the world. That fantasy collapses people.

The answer is not retreating into numbness. That preserves harm.

The answer is smaller, quieter, and older than any ideology.

Humans have always survived collapse the same way: through local coherence.

Grandmothers. Midwives. Caretakers. Story keepers. Teachers. Gardeners. Quiet healers. People who create pockets of predictability, warmth, and truth inside brutal systems. People who shorten the distance between action and consequence. People who protect children. People who tell the truth without needing to win.

This is not regression.

It is alignment.

You do not need to believe humanity is good to act with care.

You do not need to believe the future will be better to reduce harm.

You do not need innocence to practice compassion.

You only need to remember what you are.

A social mammal.

A great ape.

Capable of tenderness. Capable of violence.

Bound by constraints. Responsive to care.

Living Without Illusion

We are not special in the way we like to think.

But we are not meaningless either.

We matter because we can reduce suffering locally. Because we can protect coherence where it appears. Because we can refuse lies without becoming monsters. Because we can choose fewer people and love them well.

The world will not return to the one my grandmother gave me.

But that world existed because someone embodied it anyway.

That is still possible.

Not everywhere.

Not at scale.

But here.

And now.

And that is enough.

Let’s explore what that looks like…