Rural Thinking
By
Oliver Kornetzke
They’ve learned that fear is easier to manufacture than hope, and far more profitable. That a brain wired for tribal survival will always choose the strong lie over the complicated truth. That it’s easier to sell paranoia than policy. In my town, like so many others, they claim to be patriots who love their country, but they’ll vote for the man who promises to burn it down. They don’t believe in climate change, but their crops are drowning and their wells are poisoned. They don’t want to be ruled, but they’re desperate to be led—by someone who speaks in absolutes, who confirms their suspicions, who reflects their anger back to them like a funhouse mirror.
And this is the part that stings the most: these are not all bad people. They are people trapped in a feedback loop that exploits the very instincts evolution gave them to survive. They have been trained to confuse subjugation with strength, cruelty with conviction. To them, surrendering their rights to a strongman is not cowardice—it is tribal loyalty. It is faith.
For 95% of our species’ existence, we lived in small, kin-based bands where survival was contingent on cohesion, predictability, and suspicion of outsiders. Tribalism wasn’t a flaw—it was a feature. It kept us alive. To be skeptical of the unfamiliar, to prioritize the known over the unknown, was adaptive. But we don’t live on the savannah anymore. The threats we face are no longer predators or rival clans, but climate collapse, income inequality, and information warfare. Still, the reptilian brain lingers. And it does not care about nuance. It cares about belonging.
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