The usual explanations – economic anxiety, cultural backlash, social media – capture something real, but they miss a deeper problem. We are losing the mental wiring for abstract thought itself.
In Britain, voters chose to leave the European Union. What followed were years of negotiation, parliamentary votes and legal challenges. The public reaction, from Leave and Remain voters alike, was impatience hardening into fury: “We voted Leave, so leave.” The idea that a referendum might require years of constitutional process to implement was not contested so much as incomprehensible. Parliamentary scrutiny became “blocking Brexit.” Legal objections became “elite trickery.” Just get on with it.
In Australia, a 2017 postal survey asked whether to legalise same-sex marriage. The public said yes. Almost immediately, public expectation shifted: Parliament should now “just do its job” and change the law. That the survey was not legally binding, that legislation required debate – all this was swept aside. MPs who hesitated were not deliberating; they were obstructing what the people had plainly said they wanted.
In America, the pattern is starker. The president issues executive orders that courts rule unlawful, and his supporters shrug: he won the election. The notion that winning does not suspend the constitution barely registers.
In each case, the demand is the same: that the machinery of democracy deliver the result without the process. This is not a disagreement about policy. It is an inability to grasp why process exists at all.
These are symptoms of something deeper – a growing inability to think using the general principles that free societies require. That inability has a cause.
In Britain, only one in three children now enjoy reading for pleasure – the lowest level in two decades, according to the National Literacy Trust. The share fell nine percentage points in a single year.
In America, just 14 per cent of thirteen-year-olds read for fun “almost every day,” half the rate of a decade ago.
The decline in reading is not just about how young people spend their spare time. It is about how societies think.
There is no gene for reading. Unlike speech, which unfolds as naturally as walking, literacy is a cultural invention. To learn to read, the brain must re-purpose circuits that evolved for other tasks and link them in new ways – a process that takes years. A child learning to sound out words is doing something as unnatural as learning to play the violin.
Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls the result the “reading brain”: an adaptation of the ‘natural’ brain that allows us to follow long chains of argument.
We are not born with reading brains. Because our brain is largely built by practice rather than genes, it depends on what we feed it. A child raised on dense, linear text builds circuits for focus and deep understanding. A child raised on scrolling feeds builds circuits for distractibility and skimming. We become what we read.
Wolf’s warning in her book Reader, Come Home is that we are dismantling cultural conditions that enable the reading brain to develop. The digital world rewards speed and snap judgement. It does not reward what Wolf calls “cognitive patience” – the ability to follow a long chain of reasoning and stay with a question even when the answer is not yet clear. This kind of thinking is slow and effortful, and we are losing the habit of it.
Her concern is not merely literary. She notes a 40 per cent decline in empathy among American college students between 1979 and 2009, with the steepest drop in the final decade – as digital devices became ubiquitous. Empathy requires patience too. As we lose the ability to follow an argument, we lose the ability to inhabit another mind.
I have spent more than twenty years in think-tanks, and before that completed a doctorate in law and economics. My world is one of abstractions: rules, incentives, institutions, costs and benefits – not faces and stories. I inhabit a world of policy, and I have watched it drift ever further from everyday politics.
There has always been a gap, of course. But the distance has widened. I remember when politicians could explain a policy to their voters and expect some grasp of basic logic in return – some understanding of how institutions work.
That knowledge has eroded – and not only among voters. Politicians are themselves products of the same culture. Many of them feel their way through rather than thinking in principles. What remains is a public that lacks the vocabulary and concepts for serious policy arguments, and a political class that increasingly cannot supply them. More and more, I find myself explaining not just a policy but the assumptions behind it – and more often than not, I fail.
The skills that deep reading builds are exactly the skills that a free society requires.
Friedrich Hayek understood this. We remember him as an economist, but he began as a lawyer and wrote a book on theoretical psychology. It was the psychology that mattered here. He knew that what he called the “Great Society” – a free civilisation of strangers cooperating through impersonal rules – is psychologically unnatural. We evolved in small bands where everyone knew everyone. Morality was concrete: help your kin, punish your enemies. Goals were visible and rewards immediate.
Civilisation asks us to break this mould. We must respect the property of strangers we will never meet. We must tolerate the blindness of justice – a blindfolded goddess who looks at the act, not the actor.
This is the architecture of freedom, but it is cold. It demands that we stand alone and bear the weight of our own choices. Hayek saw something crucial: we hate this coldness. We want to see the bad people punished. We want outcomes that feel just, not processes that merely are just.
If the ability to think using general principles is a foundation of free citizenship, then losing it will have political consequences. A people trained for emotional reactivity will demand emotional and reactive politics.
We have seen a society slide this way before, and we know how it ended.
In 1939, shortly after arriving in London as an exile, the German lawyer Sebastian Haffner began a memoir explaining how his nation had surrendered to barbarism. Published posthumously as Defying Hitler, it is one of the sharpest accounts of that collapse. It is powerful not because it paints the Germans as wicked, but because it shows them as lost.
Haffner’s central observation concerns the Stresemann years – the brief stability when the Weimar Republic finally offered Germans peace, prosperity and the freedom to pursue a private life. When the Republic invited Germans to “arrange their affairs according to their own tastes,” the invitation was, in effect, declined.
A whole generation was, Haffner noted, “at a loss as to what to do with such free private lives.” Peace bored them. They needed the drama of politics to feel alive.
When the Nazis arrived with their marches, flags and chants, the people felt relieved. They could stop thinking and start feeling. They dissolved their brittle private selves into the warmth of the collective.
The Nazis did not win by rational argument. They won through sensations – the drumbeat, the torch, the sea of raised arms, the roar of the crowd. They offered not a better policy but a better feeling.
The tribe offered what impersonal rules could not: a sense of direction, belonging and moral clarity.
Most chilling is Haffner’s observation about conscience. “Comradeship,” he wrote, “relieves men of responsibility for their actions... before their consciences.” The group tells you what is right, so you feel innocent whatever you do. This is the deepest appeal of the herd – not merely warmth, but the relief of never having to judge yourself.
There is a more unsettling point. Haffner’s generation still read. The reading brain was intact. Yet the tribal instinct was still powerful enough to overwhelm it.
If that could happen then, when literacy was strong, how much more powerful will the pull be now – when the very capacity for abstract thought is being eroded?
The Nazi experience shows us that reading alone cannot save us. Haffner’s generation read more than ours, and many still surrendered. Deep literacy is necessary, but without the will to stand apart it is not sufficient.
In one respect, our situation may be worse than Haffner’s. His generation chose the tribe because their politics had failed and the vacuum was unbearable. We are choosing the tribe because our mental habits are changing. The screen trains us. When we scroll, we are not citizens thinking about policy. We are scanning for threats and rewards.
If you cannot think in general terms, you cannot understand why the examples I opened with are dangerous. “We voted Leave, so leave” feels like a complete argument. “The people voted yes” feels like a trump card. The concrete thinker cannot grasp that a referendum does not suspend the need for legislation, that a postal survey is not a law, and that winning an election does not override the courts. To them, these constraints feel like tricks – ways to frustrate what the people have clearly said they want.
The error runs deeper than impatience. It is rooted in a belief that a majority vote creates legitimacy by itself. But in a free society, legitimacy comes from general rules, not from any single expression of popular will.
Try explaining this to someone who has lost (or never acquired) the habit of thinking in principles. You are not arguing about facts. You are arguing about the rules of the game, not the score. To them, you are just making excuses. It does not help that process institutions sometimes appear to be pursuing agendas of their own. They cannot see past the case in front of them to the structure behind it.
We call this polarisation, but the word does not capture it. It is a slide from the hard order of civilisation back into the comfortable, default order of the tribe, because thinking in principles is hard and belonging feels good.
At the very moment we are giving up slow, careful reasoning, we are building machines that can do it. The latest artificial intelligence systems are designed to pause before they answer, go through the steps of an argument, check their logic. They are being trained to do what we are forgetting how to do: think slowly.
They are becoming what we once aspired to be: patient, calm, able to think in principles without the itch to make exceptions for friends.
Wolf had hoped we might become “biliterate” – able to switch between the speed of the screen and the depth of the book. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests we are failing.
Meanwhile, the same engineers who gave us infinite scroll are spending billions on teaching machines to pause. It is hard to know whether to laugh or weep.
We are creating a world where machines reason patiently while we fight over symbols. The danger is not that they will become too powerful but that we will become too weak to understand them.
Hayek feared a planner who would force us into serfdom. He also warned that many of us would choose the planner, simply to escape the burden of thinking and standing alone.
The only way to resist is to refuse the comfort of the tribe. Resistance does not look like a protest march; marching is just another form of herd behaviour. Resistance looks like a chair in a quiet room and a book that is hard to read.
We must rebuild the habits of careful thought. We need to reclaim the ability to be bored, for it is in boredom that the solitary self is born. We have to accept the invitation that Haffner’s generation declined – the invitation to a private life, with all its lonely liberty. Most importantly, we must build back the reading brain in the next generation.
This is not beyond us. Brains can be retrained. Habits can be rebuilt. The reading brain is artificial, which means it can be constructed again if we choose to do the work.
The populist wants you to feel. The algorithm wants you to click. One of the most subversive acts left is to sit still, be patient … and think.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
In Australia, a 2017 postal survey asked whether to legalise same-sex marriage. The public said yes. Almost immediately, public expectation shifted: Parliament should now “just do its job” and change the law. That the survey was not legally binding, that legislation required debate – all this was swept aside. MPs who hesitated were not deliberating; they were obstructing what the people had plainly said they wanted.
In America, the pattern is starker. The president issues executive orders that courts rule unlawful, and his supporters shrug: he won the election. The notion that winning does not suspend the constitution barely registers.
In each case, the demand is the same: that the machinery of democracy deliver the result without the process. This is not a disagreement about policy. It is an inability to grasp why process exists at all.
These are symptoms of something deeper – a growing inability to think using the general principles that free societies require. That inability has a cause.
In Britain, only one in three children now enjoy reading for pleasure – the lowest level in two decades, according to the National Literacy Trust. The share fell nine percentage points in a single year.
In America, just 14 per cent of thirteen-year-olds read for fun “almost every day,” half the rate of a decade ago.
The decline in reading is not just about how young people spend their spare time. It is about how societies think.
There is no gene for reading. Unlike speech, which unfolds as naturally as walking, literacy is a cultural invention. To learn to read, the brain must re-purpose circuits that evolved for other tasks and link them in new ways – a process that takes years. A child learning to sound out words is doing something as unnatural as learning to play the violin.
Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls the result the “reading brain”: an adaptation of the ‘natural’ brain that allows us to follow long chains of argument.
We are not born with reading brains. Because our brain is largely built by practice rather than genes, it depends on what we feed it. A child raised on dense, linear text builds circuits for focus and deep understanding. A child raised on scrolling feeds builds circuits for distractibility and skimming. We become what we read.
Wolf’s warning in her book Reader, Come Home is that we are dismantling cultural conditions that enable the reading brain to develop. The digital world rewards speed and snap judgement. It does not reward what Wolf calls “cognitive patience” – the ability to follow a long chain of reasoning and stay with a question even when the answer is not yet clear. This kind of thinking is slow and effortful, and we are losing the habit of it.
Her concern is not merely literary. She notes a 40 per cent decline in empathy among American college students between 1979 and 2009, with the steepest drop in the final decade – as digital devices became ubiquitous. Empathy requires patience too. As we lose the ability to follow an argument, we lose the ability to inhabit another mind.
I have spent more than twenty years in think-tanks, and before that completed a doctorate in law and economics. My world is one of abstractions: rules, incentives, institutions, costs and benefits – not faces and stories. I inhabit a world of policy, and I have watched it drift ever further from everyday politics.
There has always been a gap, of course. But the distance has widened. I remember when politicians could explain a policy to their voters and expect some grasp of basic logic in return – some understanding of how institutions work.
That knowledge has eroded – and not only among voters. Politicians are themselves products of the same culture. Many of them feel their way through rather than thinking in principles. What remains is a public that lacks the vocabulary and concepts for serious policy arguments, and a political class that increasingly cannot supply them. More and more, I find myself explaining not just a policy but the assumptions behind it – and more often than not, I fail.
The skills that deep reading builds are exactly the skills that a free society requires.
Friedrich Hayek understood this. We remember him as an economist, but he began as a lawyer and wrote a book on theoretical psychology. It was the psychology that mattered here. He knew that what he called the “Great Society” – a free civilisation of strangers cooperating through impersonal rules – is psychologically unnatural. We evolved in small bands where everyone knew everyone. Morality was concrete: help your kin, punish your enemies. Goals were visible and rewards immediate.
Civilisation asks us to break this mould. We must respect the property of strangers we will never meet. We must tolerate the blindness of justice – a blindfolded goddess who looks at the act, not the actor.
This is the architecture of freedom, but it is cold. It demands that we stand alone and bear the weight of our own choices. Hayek saw something crucial: we hate this coldness. We want to see the bad people punished. We want outcomes that feel just, not processes that merely are just.
If the ability to think using general principles is a foundation of free citizenship, then losing it will have political consequences. A people trained for emotional reactivity will demand emotional and reactive politics.
We have seen a society slide this way before, and we know how it ended.
In 1939, shortly after arriving in London as an exile, the German lawyer Sebastian Haffner began a memoir explaining how his nation had surrendered to barbarism. Published posthumously as Defying Hitler, it is one of the sharpest accounts of that collapse. It is powerful not because it paints the Germans as wicked, but because it shows them as lost.
Haffner’s central observation concerns the Stresemann years – the brief stability when the Weimar Republic finally offered Germans peace, prosperity and the freedom to pursue a private life. When the Republic invited Germans to “arrange their affairs according to their own tastes,” the invitation was, in effect, declined.
A whole generation was, Haffner noted, “at a loss as to what to do with such free private lives.” Peace bored them. They needed the drama of politics to feel alive.
When the Nazis arrived with their marches, flags and chants, the people felt relieved. They could stop thinking and start feeling. They dissolved their brittle private selves into the warmth of the collective.
The Nazis did not win by rational argument. They won through sensations – the drumbeat, the torch, the sea of raised arms, the roar of the crowd. They offered not a better policy but a better feeling.
The tribe offered what impersonal rules could not: a sense of direction, belonging and moral clarity.
Most chilling is Haffner’s observation about conscience. “Comradeship,” he wrote, “relieves men of responsibility for their actions... before their consciences.” The group tells you what is right, so you feel innocent whatever you do. This is the deepest appeal of the herd – not merely warmth, but the relief of never having to judge yourself.
There is a more unsettling point. Haffner’s generation still read. The reading brain was intact. Yet the tribal instinct was still powerful enough to overwhelm it.
If that could happen then, when literacy was strong, how much more powerful will the pull be now – when the very capacity for abstract thought is being eroded?
The Nazi experience shows us that reading alone cannot save us. Haffner’s generation read more than ours, and many still surrendered. Deep literacy is necessary, but without the will to stand apart it is not sufficient.
In one respect, our situation may be worse than Haffner’s. His generation chose the tribe because their politics had failed and the vacuum was unbearable. We are choosing the tribe because our mental habits are changing. The screen trains us. When we scroll, we are not citizens thinking about policy. We are scanning for threats and rewards.
If you cannot think in general terms, you cannot understand why the examples I opened with are dangerous. “We voted Leave, so leave” feels like a complete argument. “The people voted yes” feels like a trump card. The concrete thinker cannot grasp that a referendum does not suspend the need for legislation, that a postal survey is not a law, and that winning an election does not override the courts. To them, these constraints feel like tricks – ways to frustrate what the people have clearly said they want.
The error runs deeper than impatience. It is rooted in a belief that a majority vote creates legitimacy by itself. But in a free society, legitimacy comes from general rules, not from any single expression of popular will.
Try explaining this to someone who has lost (or never acquired) the habit of thinking in principles. You are not arguing about facts. You are arguing about the rules of the game, not the score. To them, you are just making excuses. It does not help that process institutions sometimes appear to be pursuing agendas of their own. They cannot see past the case in front of them to the structure behind it.
We call this polarisation, but the word does not capture it. It is a slide from the hard order of civilisation back into the comfortable, default order of the tribe, because thinking in principles is hard and belonging feels good.
At the very moment we are giving up slow, careful reasoning, we are building machines that can do it. The latest artificial intelligence systems are designed to pause before they answer, go through the steps of an argument, check their logic. They are being trained to do what we are forgetting how to do: think slowly.
They are becoming what we once aspired to be: patient, calm, able to think in principles without the itch to make exceptions for friends.
Wolf had hoped we might become “biliterate” – able to switch between the speed of the screen and the depth of the book. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests we are failing.
Meanwhile, the same engineers who gave us infinite scroll are spending billions on teaching machines to pause. It is hard to know whether to laugh or weep.
We are creating a world where machines reason patiently while we fight over symbols. The danger is not that they will become too powerful but that we will become too weak to understand them.
Hayek feared a planner who would force us into serfdom. He also warned that many of us would choose the planner, simply to escape the burden of thinking and standing alone.
The only way to resist is to refuse the comfort of the tribe. Resistance does not look like a protest march; marching is just another form of herd behaviour. Resistance looks like a chair in a quiet room and a book that is hard to read.
We must rebuild the habits of careful thought. We need to reclaim the ability to be bored, for it is in boredom that the solitary self is born. We have to accept the invitation that Haffner’s generation declined – the invitation to a private life, with all its lonely liberty. Most importantly, we must build back the reading brain in the next generation.
This is not beyond us. Brains can be retrained. Habits can be rebuilt. The reading brain is artificial, which means it can be constructed again if we choose to do the work.
The populist wants you to feel. The algorithm wants you to click. One of the most subversive acts left is to sit still, be patient … and think.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
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