It’s human nature to trust strongmen, but we’ve also evolved the tools to resist them
A recent piece of research commissioned by Channel 4 suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.
The results shocked a lot of people concerned about the rising threat of autocracy across the world, including me. Yet, on reflection, I don’t think we should be surprised. The way we evolved predisposes us to place trust in those who often deserve it least – in a sense, hardwiring us to support the most machiavellian among us and to propel them into power. This seems like an intractable problem. But it’s what we do in the face of that knowledge that matters.
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