Too Dumb for Democracy? Why your brain struggles with good political decision-making

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**Natasha Mitchell** (0:37)
Welcome to Big Ideas on ABC Radio National. I'm Natasha Mitchell, bringing you big thinkers, provocateurs, leading minds at the best live events. Let's meet today's big thinker. David Moscrop is the author of Too Dumb For Democracy. Why we make bad political decisions and how we can make better ones.

**David Moscrop** (1:05)
Think about the person you liked the least. Now, imagine they have a political decision they're going to make, you're going to make in a democracy. We've got to figure out how to live together.
You've got to not only decide for yourself how to project in the future what that's going to be about, but then negotiate that disagreement with another person. And we have decided in all of our stories and we have decided in all of our splendour and all of our resource, the bountiful resources, that what we prefer to do is bash the other person over the head instead of trying to sit down, recognise them as an equal, even if we disagree with them, and project that forward. What this all amounts to is effectively we're asking our brains to do things that it can do, but we've built a world in which it's very hard to do those things.

**Natasha Mitchell** (1:49)
Is there a gulf to be bridged between the brains we have and the world we've built?
Asking why do we make irrational political decisions? Can our stone age brains process democracy in the digital age? And why is the political decision making process more important than ever to our survival? Is Canadian writer, podcaster, political commentator, Dr. David Moscrop is joining freelance broadcaster and writer, Dr. Sally Warhaft. She's host of The Fifth Estate event series with The Wheeler Centre. This one held as part of the 2026 Melbourne Writers Festival on Kulin Nation Country.

**Sally Warhaft** (2:31)
I read a great quote recently from a journalist called Rachel Donald.
And she said, Our brains are wired for finding bananas with friends.
And I want to ask you if that's true.

**David Moscrop** (2:48)
It is true. Yes. The answer is yes. We've done all of these extraordinary things with our brains. And I like to say we've done all these extraordinary things despite our brains. And part of it is that if you study the structure of the brain, it isn't a single organic thing that was just plopped into our heads from on high. It was something that has evolved over a very long period of time in layers. And those layers sometimes cooperate with each other. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they compete with one another. And so you've got the old layers at the bottom and the back, the kind of lizard brain, the kind of something is rustling in the bush. I better move because I don't know what it is. And I don't think it's wise to stick around to find out.
And then you've got the kind of newer bits at the top and the front, the executive bits that do the thinking, but they're intention. And anyone who's ever procrastinated or done something and afterwards thought, oh my Lord, I know better, or been really hungry and said something or done something with someone they love that wasn't kind, you get hangry, you get frustrated. You think, well, that's not me, but it is you. It's this brain intention. And so the same brain that can create these institutions and the same brain that can do complex mathematics and create concertos or whatever, is the brain that says, people who aren't like me, I don't know what to do about that.
And so a lot of contemporary politics is trying to find ways to build institutional and other structures that get around this fundamental problem that we still have fundamentally a brain that is at least in part bound up in the time when we were collecting bananas with friends. But to add to that, trying to keep enemies away from stealing those bananas.
And so to build off that quote a little bit more, the contemporary challenge is, well, what do you do in a world of plenty where you're still worried about not just collecting bananas with friends, but keeping other people from stealing your bananas, which is a good title for a book. Nobody take that. I'm going to use that.

**Sally Warhaft** (4:50)