Since the late 20th century, we have spent decades telling people what they lack will power to stop overeating.1 Then what did the new hormone treatments do in 40 years shame and stigma didn’t get it. GLP-1 drugs not only treat obesity2– they exposed a deep cultural distrust. Overeating and obesity were never primarily about willpower or personal choice.3-4 In general, biology, saturation hormonesand poor hunger control was the real driver behind the obesity epidemic and countless failed diets.
Even though the biological basis of weight control has finally been discovered, the myth of willpower remains firmly entrenched in US culture. In this post, we explore how this pattern of misinterpretation—blaming someone whose biology is to blame—dates long before the recent GLP-1 medical revelation about obesity. And why we keep making the same mistake again.
Five centuries of the same mistake
The above example of obesity alone represents decades of false accusations and untold human harm. But what if this is only the tip of the iceberg? What if we’ve been making the same mistake for centuries, mistaking biology for behavior and neurochemistry for character and failing to recognize the pattern? As you can see from the table below, we have.5-6
The above pattern is very surprising because the conditions are so different – different health conditions, different ages, different cultural contexts. Again, the same error is repeated. If the Mesopotamians were as misinterpreted as modern humans are, this suggests that the root of the error is deeper than ignorance or malice. Perhaps something more important about human nature itself. If we want to stop this pattern, we must first understand it and increase our recognition rate. There are three possible explanations here.
To err is human
Whether we’re talking about obesity or peptic ulcers, we tend to blame people on biology for all of the reasons listed below. And this human reflex is deep enough that we make the same mistake in other circumstances now.
- Humans are moral beings. Not biology. Biology has no values, no religion, no belief system. Yet people do. Thus, we inevitably include our moral reasoning in explaining conditions that remain mysterious. Unfortunately, these moral explanations are often sticky, persisting even after contrary evidence emerges.
- People love a good story. Given the choice between an emotionally satisfying tale and inanimate fact, we choose the tale. And what makes an interesting story? The main character with the agency and free will So who’s to blame, not the man who is quietly controlled by his biology.
- Knowledge and the event horizon. We cannot see beyond it boundaries from what we know now. Throughout history, we have always explained the unknown through the lens of existing knowledge, unconsciously mistaking the edge of our understanding for reality itself.
These three trends together do not describe failure intelligence. They describe something more understandable about our nature: a pattern of fundamental and perhaps human fallibility.
Perhaps we are doomed to make the same mistake. But if we can learn to see the pattern, maybe we can at least speed up the correction cycle.
