---
description: Markets, democracy, science, and liberal individualism all assume rational actors -- Kahneman, Tversky, and Dunbar show we are minimally sufficiently rational creatures running systems beyond our cognitive capacity
type: claim
domain: cultural-dynamics
created: 2026-02-16
confidence: likely
source: "TeleoHumanity Manifesto, Chapter 3"
---

# civilization was built on the false assumption that humans are rational individuals

The Enlightenment replaced the soul with reason as humanity's defining attribute but preserved the core claim: humans are rational beings whose individual judgment, properly informed, converges on truth. From this single assumption, everything in the modern world followed. Free markets assume rational actors optimizing through price signals. Democracy assumes informed citizens choosing wisely. Science assumes reason prevailing over superstition. Liberal individualism treats the autonomous rational self as society's basic unit.

The evidence against this model is now overwhelming. Kahneman and Tversky documented systematic, predictable deviations from rationality: loss aversion, anchoring, substitution, overconfidence, hyperbolic discounting. These are not bugs in an otherwise rational system. They are the system. Human working memory holds four to seven items. We have no intuitive grasp of exponential growth. Dunbar found we can maintain roughly 150 stable social relationships, a limit hardwired into the neocortex. Every institution larger than 150 people is a workaround for a cognitive limitation.

E.O. Wilson captured it: "We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology." Our brains are virtually identical to those of ancestors who hunted mammoths 300,000 years ago. We did not become smarter. What changed was our collective capability -- our ability to accumulate knowledge across generations and coordinate action across vast networks.

This misunderstanding is what makes the existing institutional architecture unable to handle existential risk. Since [[the internet enabled global communication but not global cognition]], the mismatch between our institutions' assumptions and our actual nature is growing, not shrinking.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[the scientific method is a scaffold compensating for human irrationality not a product of rationality]] -- the strongest evidence for minimal rationality comes from science itself
- [[useful fictions have shelf lives and the rational individual fiction has expired]] -- the institutional consequences of discovering the assumption is wrong
- [[intelligence is a property of networks not individuals]] -- what actually produces the intelligence our institutions attribute to individuals

Topics:
- [[livingip overview]]
- [[civilizational foundations]]