Why Everyone Around You Seems to Have Become an Idiot

This is a question that comes up during periods of collective stress: why do people around me seem to be suddenly making irrational, inexplicable decisions? Why does fact-based argument stop working? Why does everyone seem to be operating on a different logic?

The answer is not that the people around you have changed. It is that their cognitive system has shifted to a different mode of operation — one that is much older, much faster, and significantly less accurate.

Two Systems

Daniel Kahneman documented what are now called System 1 and System 2 — two processing modes that operate in parallel within the human brain.

System 2 is slow, deliberate, and analytical. It is the system that does long division, evaluates competing arguments, and resists the first available answer in favor of a more accurate one. It has one significant weakness: it is effortful. It fatigues.

System 1 is fast, automatic, and pattern-based. It recognizes faces, catches a ball in flight, and produces intuitive judgments without conscious effort. It also produces consistent, predictable errors — cognitive biases — because it substitutes simple heuristics for complex analysis.

System 2, when it is functioning, acts as a gatekeeper. It catches the errors System 1 produces and corrects them before they determine behavior. When System 2 fails — when it is exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, or occupied with something else — System 1's outputs go unchecked.

The Overload Mechanism

System 2 has a limited capacity. This is demonstrable: if you walk alongside someone at a brisk pace and ask them to calculate 72 multiplied by 98, they will slow down. The calculation requires System 2 resources; those resources are diverted from regulating gait speed.

Now extend this to a population experiencing economic anxiety, job loss, constant news consumption, fear about health, uncertainty about the future. Every one of those inputs is occupying System 2 capacity. A brain managing this volume of genuine concern has very little System 2 left for evaluating information quality.

Under these conditions, whatever enters the information environment is processed entirely by System 1. System 1:

• Trusts information it has seen repeatedly (information cascade)
• Trusts information delivered by confident, authoritative-seeming sources (halo effect)
• Trusts information that aligns with what it already believes (confirmation bias)
• Cannot process statistical data correctly

Information designed to be manipulative is designed for exactly this condition — because that is when the gatekeeper is unavailable and the shortcuts are fully exposed.

What This Means

The people who seem to have become idiots are not idiots. They are people whose cognitive resources are genuinely saturated, which means their behavior is temporarily driven by System 1 exclusively.

This is not a moral failure. Knowing about cognitive biases helps, but it does not make you immune — it just raises the threshold at which you notice you're being manipulated. If your System 2 is sufficiently depleted, even the awareness of your own biases doesn't protect you in real time.

The practical response: when you are under high emotional load, treat your own conclusions with extra suspicion. You are operating in a mode that is more vulnerable, not less. Delay high-stakes decisions. Reduce information input. Let System 2 recover.

And be slower to judge the people around you who appear to be having difficulty thinking clearly. The difficulty is real. The cause is physiological.

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