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John Wylie ’64 writes on “How Truth Was Hijacked by Loyalty”
July 25, 2025
How Truth Was Hijacked by Loyalty
What Mental Illness Reveals About Our Deepest Political Divide
by John V. Wylie, MD
After decades as a psychiatrist, I’ve come to recognize what may be history’s most audacious heist — one that happened 10,000 years ago and still divides America today. The crime? Evolution stole humanity's most precious asset: our truth-seeking machinery. The victims? All of us. The evidence? Hidden in plain sight within the minds of my manic and schizophrenic patients.
Like any good detective story, this one began with a puzzle that didn't add up. In 2018, MIT and Harvard's Brainstorm Consortium analyzed 1.2 million genomes and discovered something unexpected: while neurological diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and multiple sclerosis share virtually no genetic overlap with each other — each being a distinct form of brain damage — psychiatric conditions share 40-70% of their genetic architecture. Most striking: bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, conditions seemingly opposite, share 67% of their risk genes. Even more telling — they frequently co-occur in the same person, mixed together in ways that baffle traditional diagnosis. Bipolar disorder drives people into euphoric connection — the patient both riveting performer and captive audience, intoxicated by their own brilliance. Schizophrenia creates profound isolation — the patient both captive receiver and sole believer, consumed by their own revelations. Why would such opposite conditions share so much genetic material and even appear together in the same person when true brain diseases never merge like this?
This massive overlap, combined with their systematic complexity — whole programs rather than broken parts — suggests something profound: they're not hardware failures but two distinct modalities operating within a shared larger system. Like hot and cold settings on the same thermostat, they use the same machinery to produce opposite results. This proved mental illnesses aren't “broken brains” but dysregulation of normal human systems — the same motivational architecture pushed to opposite extremes.
This was my first clue: we weren't looking at two distinct diseases, but two settings of the same cognitive machinery.
The Origins of the Liberal Mind
When I describe “liberal” and “conservative” minds, I don’t mean political ideologies or parties. I’m describing two ancient modes of thinking — each forged by evolutionary pressures, and each still operating in us today.
Sarah, a teacher, hadn't slept in three days, desperately emailing lesson plans worldwide, giving away years of work. "How else will children learn?" she asked, genuinely confused when her husband suggested protecting her intellectual property. The emotional tone was unmistakable: the pathologically exaggerated experience of euphoric vanity — the intoxicating pleasure of being seen, appreciated, recognized for one's gifts.
In 2022, Mark Lipson from David Reich's lab at Harvard published unprecedented evidence in Nature. Ancient DNA from 18,000-year-old infants revealed that knowledge-sharing networks spanning from Ethiopia to South Africa existed for at least the past 80,000 years. People chose mates thousands of miles away, not for resources but for what they knew. The study couldn't determine when this unusual mixing pattern first began — 80,000 years was simply as far back as their evidence could reach.
This gregariousness was uniquely human. While Homo sapiens created continent-spanning networks, Neanderthals remained in isolated, inbred enclaves. They had the same brain size and tools but lacked the compulsion to connect with strangers. They went extinct. We flourished.
Here’s the revolutionary insight: This intermixing didn’t just spread ideas — it transformed human evolution. For the first time in our lineage, collective intelligence outpaced individual survival. When enough minds share enough knowledge, culture becomes the dominant driver of change.
Here's the revolutionary insight: This mixing created the first knowledge pool large enough to initiate cultural evolution. For the first time in primate evolution, collective benefits overwhelmed individual benefits. Consider this: the Acheulean hand axe remained virtually unchanged for 1.5 million years. When Homo sapiens appeared 300,000 years ago, tools began improving — slowly, locally, incrementally. But then, around 80,000 years ago, when continent-spanning networks formed, innovation exploded. What had been a trickle became a flood.
But this wasn't just about sharing — it was about reaching critical mass. When enough minds share enough knowledge, the knowledge itself begins to evolve — combining, mutating, generating new discoveries faster than any biological process. Ideas build on ideas, tools inspire better tools, insights spark deeper insights. The networks were just the infrastructure; the revolution was that accumulated knowledge came alive, becoming a self-evolving system. What took genes millions of years, cultural evolution could achieve in generations.
The archaeological record confirms this: exactly when these networks formed, material culture exploded — complex tools, symbolic art, musical instruments, and ornamental objects suddenly appeared and spread across Africa within generations. The payoff for contribution dwarfed the gains from hoarding. This wasn’t altruism — it was evolution recalibrated. Sharing wasn’t self-sacrifice. It was the most advantageous strategy in a system where collective knowledge accelerated everyone’s survival.
This created a new kind of evolutionary winner. Sexual selection went wild for teachers. The currency was approval — what Heinz Kohut, founder of self-psychology, identified as our deepest narcissistic need: the drive to matter through giving. This created the liberal mind: designed to participate in cultural evolution by thinking as 'we,' compulsively sharing information, seeking recognition through contribution — what Kohut would discover 80,000 years later as our deepest narcissistic drive.
The Original Treasure: Truth-Seeking as Social Glue
But this required sophisticated machinery — not merely sharing, but collective belief formation. When someone discovered a medicinal plant or new hunting technique, the group needed mechanisms to evaluate, debate, and reach consensus about its truth value. Does this root actually cure infection? Can we trust this weather pattern?
The liberal mind evolved exquisite capacity for provisional belief — constantly testing claims against reality, updating collective understanding, building shared maps of what works. Truth-seeking became humanity’s superpower — the force that unified strangers more powerfully than blood. Prestige came from solving problems others couldn’t, and consensus built through evidence became the new social glue.
Even liberal intellectuals have misunderstood our origins. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, argues that Enlightenment reason tamed our violent instincts. But the values he celebrates — compassion, cooperation, universal rights — are far older. They weren’t invented in the 1700s. They evolved in us 80,000 years ago. The philosophers weren’t inventing these ideals — they were rediscovering humanity’s original code.
The Crime Scene: 10,000 Years Ago
Then agriculture arrived, and with it, the motive for history's greatest theft.
In their groundbreaking book Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past (2018), anthropologists Nam Kim and Marc Kissel argue that while humans always had capacity for violence, it remained relatively limited throughout the Pleistocene. Then, as Lawrence Keeley notes in War Before Civilization (1996), the shift to agriculture fundamentally changed conflict dynamics: "Hunter-gatherers could afford to run (not much to take). Farmers had to stay and fight." The archaeological record confirms this transformation — showing systematic fortifications, mass graves, and evidence of chronic warfare emerging with agricultural settlements.
Agriculture's arrival was catastrophic. Keeley's archaeological evidence demonstrates how agriculture transformed sporadic conflict into systematic warfare. Rousseau captured it perfectly: "The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say 'this is mine' and found people naive enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society." But Rousseau didn't know the mechanism — that this claim required a new kind of mind capable of generating absolute belief in ownership and willing to kill for it.
Agriculture shattered cultural evolution's logic. When you can accumulate more than you need, individual benefits can outweigh collective ones — restoring the winner-take-all dynamics that rule the rest of nature. But accumulation requires defense. Defense requires soldiers who believe absolutely in your right to hoard.
The Heist: Hijacking the Belief Machine
Evolution's solution was breathtaking in its perversity: steal the very mechanism that unified humanity through truth-seeking and repurpose it to create something that barely existed before — organized warfare. The war mind recognized that belief was already humanity's most powerful cohering force — it just needed to be severed from reality-testing.
Schizophrenia reveals this belief-generating system as if under a microscope. The mind produces convictions so vivid, so emotionally charged, they become adamantine — brilliant and impervious, but isolating and painful. In everyday minds, this same system powers patriotism, martyrdom, and reverence for wealth. Its emotional signature is fierce pride: the deep satisfaction of absolute belonging, forged through shared certainty.
Why did this work so well? Because the machinery for generating deep, unifying belief already existed. The conservative mind didn't create new software; it corrupted the liberal mind's truth-seeking program into a loyalty-testing program. The same neural circuits that once generated passionate consensus about which plants heal now generated absolute certainty about which people deserve to die. No longer "Does this work?" but "Are you with us?" Belief remained a unifying force — but now it unified through shared fiction rather than discovered truth.
My schizophrenic patients, paying a terrible price for evolution's theft, expose this stolen machinery operating at maximum volume. David, an engineering student, knew with absolute certainty that defense contractors were communicating through TV commercials. His suffering was real, his isolation profound — schizophrenia brings terrible pain. And yet, in illuminating ways, it can also expose the raw machinery of belief, magnified past the limits of ordinary function. His condition revealed, in pure form, the belief-generation system that creates soldiers willing to kill for abstractions.
Belief Rewired: Religion’s Attempt to Restore Moral Vision
But evolution’s theft didn’t go unchallenged. During what psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age (800–200 BCE), something remarkable happened: humanity began to repurpose its altered belief machinery — not to seek truth, but to reassert moral vision. Religions like Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism — and later Christianity and Islam — didn’t restore truth-testing. But they used the same capacity for absolute belief to promote compassion, justice, and human dignity.
But even these peace-bringing religions weren’t immune. The belief machinery that once sought truth had already been co-opted for war — and now it was commandeered again. Authoritarian leaders learned to turn faith into allegiance. Universal love was rewritten: “God loves us, not them.” Salvation was weaponized: “We’re saved, they’re damned.” The engine of compassion had been turned once more — toward righteous domination.
The Perfect Crime: Money as Proof
But here's the ultimate irony: Money itself is pure belief. The conservative mind created the perfect demonstration of its own power. Money has zero inherent value. Yet we believe in it so absolutely that without this faith, the economy would collapse overnight. Money is the conservative mind's masterpiece: collective delusion maintained by pure faith.
This created twin altars: God (supernatural belief) and Money (material belief). Both require the same mental machinery revealed in schizophrenia — the ability to believe absolutely in something unprovable. Both can create hierarchies — from popes to peasants, from billionaires to beggars. David's delusions about defense contractors used the same belief-generating system that creates faith in both divine providence and dollar bills.
The conservative mind converted humanity's need for approval into frozen tokens you could count, hoard, and fight over. Money is crystallized social approval, the 'likes' of the agricultural age made material.
The Ongoing Investigation
The 67% genetic overlap between mania and schizophrenia is our fingerprint evidence. It reveals the same machinery in two modes: mania displaying the revolutionary knowledge-sharing state, schizophrenia revealing the hijacked loyalty-testing state.
The precision is remarkable. Liberal political positions mirror manic mentality: information wants to be free, approval comes from sharing, we're all joyfully connected — all expressions of euphoric vanity. Conservative positions mirror schizophrenic belief-generation: money becomes sacred truth, ownership becomes absolute reality, hierarchy becomes natural law — all creating adamantine certainties, all expressions of fierce pride.
Democracy forces both programs to coexist — neither side can help these reactions that run deeper than conscious thought. The liberal mind excels at generating novel solutions. The conservative mind excels at creating stable systems. Both produce real value — one through change, one through continuity.
Hierarchies work. They coordinate millions efficiently. The conservative mind's war software, repurposed for business, creates extraordinary productivity. We're rich beyond our ancestors' dreams. We're also armed for mutual annihilation, cooking the planet, and treating wealth inequality as natural law. The same program that wins wars and builds fortunes drives us toward extinction.
The Verdict
At 84, after decades of investigation, I see clearly: we're all victims of this theft, embodying both the revolutionary and hijacked programs. Your MAGA uncle isn't purely conservative any more than your socialist niece is purely liberal. The uncle who guards his wealth may secretly fund scholarships; the niece who rails against property may fiercely protect her creative work. We each carry both programs, switching between them moment to moment.
Understanding these ancient programs doesn't erase our conflicts but helps us see them for what they are — not moral failings but competing evolutionary strategies. Our future depends on recognizing both programs within ourselves and choosing wisely between them.
Recognizing this heist doesn't undo it — but it helps us comprehend what was stolen and why we feel deeply divided. The essential question isn't who's guilty, but how we move forward knowing our deepest political instincts originate from evolution's greatest theft: when belief abandoned truth for loyalty.
The challenge isn't to restore some imagined past or declare one program superior, but to consciously engage both modes. When we need innovation, connection, and new solutions, we can access our original truth-seeking heritage. When we need stability, security, and coordination, we can employ our newer organizing systems. The theft can't be undone — but awareness lets us choose which ancient program serves the moment, rather than being unconsciously driven by either.
John Wylie holds a BA in History from Yale, an MD from Columbia, and completed a psychiatric residency at Georgetown University. His career started at a maximum-security prison in Maryland, followed by 35 years in the private practice of psychiatry in Washington, DC. During this time, he also served as chair of the department of psychiatry at Sibley Memorial Hospital. He was involved in the early stages of evolutionary psychiatry in the 1980s and has contributed to the field through a clinical handbook on psychiatric treatment, two books on evolutionary psychiatry, and numerous lectures on the subject. Dr. Wylie resides in Olney, Maryland, with his wife, Ann.