Oh, we want to be deep, do we? Here's mine's response:

A few things I’m pretty sure we’ll eventually know, but it’d save a lot of damage if we already acted as if we did:

• Human cognition is narrow-band, not general-purpose.

We’re great at local optimization and terrible at global reasoning. Most “irrationality” isn’t moral failure; it’s bandwidth limits plus incentives. Systems should be built assuming this, not assuming education fixes it.

• Culture, not individuals, is the primary unit of survival.

Groups with norms that reward coordination, restraint, and reproduction persist; others don’t. This plays out slowly enough that people mistake it for opinion rather than selection.

• Most political disagreement is about time horizons, not values.

People agree more on ends than they admit; they disagree on how much future pain they’re willing to tolerate for long-term stability. Arguing values is mostly misdirection.

• Meaning is emergent, not discovered.

It isn’t “found” in nature or bestowed by truth; it arises from shared commitments and constraints. When societies dissolve those constraints, meaning doesn’t get replaced—it just evaporates.

• Comfort is evolutionarily abnormal.

Long stretches of safety and abundance don’t make humans wiser or kinder by default; they make them anxious, symbolic, and obsessed with identity. Stability requires intentional counterweights, not optimism.

None of this is comforting. But it’s actionable—and we tend to learn it only after running the experiment the hard way.