The Comfort of Control and the Violence of Simplicity: Cognitive Efficiency Against the Truth

The human brain was not built for truth. It was built for survival, and those two imperatives do not always converge. What we do, compulsively and across contexts, is collapse complexity into something more manageable: we personify, we exaggerate, we flatten. Not out of intellectual failure, necessarily, but because the world as it actually is, sprawling, impersonal, governed by feedback loops and unintended consequences, places demands on the mind that feel close to unbearable. Cognitive efficiency, in this sense, is not a virtue. It is a coping mechanism, and like most coping mechanisms, it distorts what it touches.