RS: I thought at the time that maybe I'm betraying my own cause but then I thought no, that's not true. What I'm saying is that what we are is what we become through conflict and resolution, and through understanding our position as others in a world of others like ourselves. This process is what makes us into self-conscious, truth-seeking creatures; our Pleistocene "adaptations" do not get us anywhere near so far. But we do have a tendency to lapse into those old and comforting adaptations. You cannot deny that we have evolved from something that was not what we are now. But what we are now is not animals but persons. 

Persons are things that exist in another way, have different conditions of identity, different aspirations, different ways of resolving disputes. They live under a rule of law and a rule of accountability, all the things that I think you, Ray, would agree with. As you say in your book, persons do things like point. I think it's important to note that animals don't do this — not even the dogs that we call pointers — because pointing is a highly sophisticated semantic notion which itself is the gift of life in community. It's not something you can achieve without the community of self-conscious beings who account to one another for what they are.

RT: But this belief in a tendency to regress to an earlier state lies at the heart of your pessimism, is why I want to worry at its foundations: the idea that we have ascended from our Pleistocene state almost against our natural primordial condition. I wonder why I don't quite buy that. Is it because I think we have moved so far that there is a different kind of dynamic going on when we do relapse into savagery? 

If you think of comparatively recent examples of barbarism, they are not usually mass uncontrolled outbreaks of primordial passions. The First World War or Auschwitz required an incredible amount of cold and careful bureaucratic calculation. So our regression to barbarism was mediated through the kinds of people we've become, rather than the kinds of people we once were and you fear we might relapse to. No one in the Pleistocene era could ever be as barbaric to organise the First World War or to dream up Auschwitz.

RS: That is true. Auschwitz and the gulag required an awful lot of planning but I do identify the planning fallacy as one of the principal fallacies that guided and misguided the 20th century. I want to trace it to an attitude that would have been useful, or adaptive, in Pleistocene conditions, which is the attitude of facing a collective emergency. It simplifies things, even when living in a large society, if you can represent your problems as an emergency. In an emergency, we all gather behind the leader who presents us with a plan. Then, we become intoxicated with the whole idea of planning, so we believe that we can solve all the difficult things and difficult questions that arise through our life by a plan. Hence the slogan with which Auschwitz was presented to the people: "the final solution". 

RT: Whether or not one accepts the notion that this is rooted in the Pleistocene era it seems to me a compelling diagnosis. It reminds me of something that bothered me when I read your book: your treatment of the planning fallacy. I was deeply impressed by your treatment of all the seven fallacies you identify. But they made me think of The Uses of Pessimism as pre-political rather than political.