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Why Liberals and Conservatives Can’t Agree: The Stone Age Village Explanation

By Nathan Gershfeld, co-host of the Beat Your Genes Podcast, Episode 5

Every election cycle, I watch friends, family, and coworkers turn on each other over politics. Smart people who agree on almost everything else suddenly can’t stand one another. I brought this to Dr. Lisle years ago because I genuinely thought I could argue people into changing their minds. He told me something that changed how I approach political conversations forever.

The left-right divide is not a modern invention, and it is not really about policy. It is a 100,000-year-old argument your Stone Age brain is still having about food.

Politics Is About Conflicts of Interest, Not Values

Dr. Lisle started by reframing what politics even is. “Politics is about conflicts of interest,” he told me. Two people cannot own the same car. Two families cannot live in the same house. The things people value are also valuable to other people, and that creates conflict.

Civilization is essentially the set of rules we invented to settle those conflicts without clubbing each other over the head. So when you watch the insults fly every election, that is not democracy failing. That is democracy working. The alternative is much worse.

And it has always been this way. Dr. Lisle pointed out that if you read American history, the elections of the last 200 years were far nastier than what we see now. By his read, we are actually more civil today than we have been in most of our past.

The Stone Age Village: Stingy vs. Lazy

Here is where the story gets interesting. Picture a Stone Age village. Ten men, ten women, twenty kids. The men hunt, the women gather. Meat is high risk, high reward, so kills get brought back to the center of the village and divided relatively evenly. That is standard operating procedure for hunter-gatherers.

Now imagine one man averages four kills a week and another averages one. Dr. Lisle pointed out the obvious tension this creates.

The good hunter thinks, “Why am I feeding this guy? He is lazy.”

The less successful hunter thinks, “Why won’t he share more? He is stingy.”

Dr. Lisle’s insight is that “stingy” and “lazy” are the two biggest insults found across Stone Age village life. Fast forward 100,000 years, and they are still the two biggest insults in American political discourse. The left looks at the right and sees stingy. The right looks at the left and sees lazy. Same argument, different century.

Share or Not Share: The Only Ideological Dimension That Matters

Dr. Lisle told me that most political issues are what he calls non-ideological accidents of history. Abortion, environmental policy, immigration. There is nothing inherent about conservatism that makes a person less protective of the environment. Those issues just happened to land on one side or the other for historical reasons.

The one dimension that actually runs through human nature is share or not share. And where you land on it is not random.

Dr. Lisle credits evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides at UC Santa Barbara for cracking this. Their argument is that in the Stone Age, the critical variable was how variable your food supply felt. If you were a marginal hunter getting one kill a week, the world looked capricious, and sharing looked like survival. If you were the guy bringing in seven kills a week, the world looked stable, and your instinct was that anyone who applies himself can succeed.

That same logic maps onto modern politics almost perfectly:

  • If your income feels variable and lucky, you drift liberal.
  • If your income feels like a steady payoff for discipline, you drift conservative.

Dr. Lisle used Hollywood as an example. An actor can do brilliant work and have it flop, then do throwaway work and make five million dollars. The economic world feels unfair, almost random, and many people in that world feel vaguely guilty about what they make. They vote accordingly. He sees similar dynamics in some young tech founders who became billionaires three years out of college.

The CEO who spent 20 years grinding through one good decision at a time has a very different gut read. He thinks anyone can get to the car wash, become the manager, save, and eventually own the car wash. He is not trying to be cruel. He is reporting what the world looks like from where he stands.

Why Pure Capitalism and Pure Communism Are Both Wrong

This is the part that most politically engaged people miss. Dr. Lisle is not defending either side. He is saying neither side has the correct answer, because there is no universal correct answer.

To make the point, he walked me through Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Endurance expedition. When the ship got trapped in Antarctic ice, Shackleton took his seven best men in a small boat across a thousand miles of open ocean to get help. In that lifeboat, there is only one rational allocation of food. If the small fisherman needs half as much to survive as the big oarsman, the big oarsman gets twice the fish. That is literally Karl Marx’s formulation, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The second those same men hit land as national heroes, the situation inverts. They are no longer interdependent. Now it is every man’s fame and career. They spontaneously become little capitalists.

Dr. Lisle’s point is that human beings run the correct strategy for the environment they are in. Hunter-gatherer societies were communistic because they had to be. Agricultural societies drifted toward private property, because tending crops from planting to harvest to market does not reward collective ownership. The United States sits somewhere in the middle, and Dr. Lisle thinks that is exactly where it should sit.

Personality Differences That Track the Divide

Beyond the share or not share core, Dr. Lisle laid out some personality trends that hold on average, with massive individual variation:

  • Liberals are more open to experience, less conscientious, and more agreeable.
  • Conservatives are less open to experience, more conscientious, and more disagreeable.

He also mentioned Arthur Brooks’s book Who Really Cares?, which found that conservative households donate around 30 percent more to charity than liberal households, even with lower average incomes. Dr. Lisle’s read is that conservative giving flows through conscientiousness and a sense of personal responsibility to specific people in need, rather than through the government as intermediary. Neither posture is morally superior. They are different strategies falling out of different personality profiles.

The Octopus Strategy: How to Survive Political Season with Your Relationships Intact

I asked Dr. Lisle the practical question. Election season is coming, and people are going to bait us into share or not share conversations. What do you actually do?

His answer was blunt. It is a total waste of time to argue.

Personality is genetically fixed. The history, temperament, and circumstances that landed someone on their side of the share or not share divide are not going to yield to your dinner table logic. You are not going to talk anyone out of it. They are not going to talk you out of yours.

So Dr. Lisle recommends what he calls the octopus strategy. When politics comes up, you put ink in the water. You signal that you are not sure anyone has this all figured out, including the people on your own side. You stay unfixed and opaque. That small signal takes enormous pressure off family and friend relationships because it tells the other person you are not their enemy in this fight.

He has used this approach for years with friends across the political spectrum, and he has taught it to vegans dealing with family who think their diet is weird. One line, “I’m not so sure that Dr. So-and-so is right about everything,” will reset a Thanksgiving table.

Beating Your Genes on Politics

Here is the Beat Your Genes takeaway. Your brain evolved in a village where you had to know who was with you and who was against you on the share or not share question. Life and death depended on it. That same circuitry fires at you in 2026 when your uncle says something about taxes at a barbecue.

Your genes are telling you he is a threat. He is not. He is a guy with a slightly different read on how variable the economic world is, because his history is different from yours.

Beating your genes on politics means recognizing that, not taking the bait, and saving your energy for the small circle of people whose minds actually overlap with yours. Since I took Dr. Lisle’s advice years ago and stopped arguing about politics, I have been dramatically happier. I suspect you will be too.

Listen to the Full Episode

This is Episode 5 of the Beat Your Genes Podcast. Dr. Lisle covers everything in this post in much greater detail in the audio.

Have a question for Dr. Lisle? Submit it at beatyourgenes.org and it may be answered on a future episode.

Beat Your Genes is an evolutionary psychology podcast co-hosted by Nathan Gershfeld, D.C. and Dr. Doug Lisle, PhD. It applies the science of evolutionary psychology to everyday questions about happiness, relationships, motivation, and self-esteem. Dr. Lisle trained at Stanford and the University of Virginia and has over 30 years of clinical experience. Nathan Gershfeld is the founder of Fasting Escape.