AI & Brand & Comms Strategy Leader | AI-Driven Storytelling, Behavioural Insight & Human Impact | The Curious Brain

December 9, 2025

What animals and nature can teach us about power, competence and the failures of modern societies

There is a quietly unsettling observation circulating in philosophical circles: animals, for all their supposed simplicity, do not let fools lead the pack.

Yet humans routinely do. This is not a sentimental comparison between nature and civilisation; it is a structural critique of how modern societies select those who command them.

In the natural world, leadership is costly. A wolf that cannot hunt, a lion that hesitates, a primate that misreads threat signals, does not retain status for long. The group corrects failure immediately. Competence is not aspirational. It is the prerequisite for survival.

Humans have inverted that logic.

Across cultures and political systems, many societies elevate figures who would not survive a day as leaders in the animal kingdom. Individuals rewarded not for judgement or restraint but for volume, confidence, and untested certainty. Spectacle becomes a substitute for substance.

This is not a moral failing; it is an economic and informational one. Modern leadership is often conferred through mechanisms that reward visibility over competence. Electoral contests, media ecosystems and corporate hierarchies are vulnerable to a simple bias: the ease of recognising noise over discerning wisdom.

In democracies, attention has become a form of capital. In corporations, charisma outperforms capability. In public life, performance frequently outranks understanding.

Animals select leaders based on demonstrated fitness. Humans select leaders based on perceived fitness, a perception shaped by narratives, algorithms, and increasingly polarised identities.

A phenomenon well-documented in organisational psychology compounds the problem: capable individuals tend to speak less frequently and more cautiously in public forums, while the least informed express themselves with the greatest confidence. This asymmetry creates fertile ground for what sociologists call “the prominence of the unqualified.”

When intelligence becomes quiet, stupidity does not remain idle. It fills the vacuum, often with remarkable force.

The political implications are visible across continents. Populist movements frequently rally around figures who embody frustration rather than competence. Corporate boards occasionally elevate leaders whose primary skill is self-promotion rather than stewardship. Even cultural debates reward rhetoricians who can generate reaction rather than resolution.

This is not because people admire incompetence. It is because the systems mediating leadership, digital platforms, party primaries, media amplification structures, reward traits animals would interpret as signals of danger.

To understand the divergence between humans and animals, one must examine the criteria for trust.

Animals rely on instinct because instinct, in evolutionary terms, is the accumulated memory of survival. A wolf does not need rhetoric to assess a leader; it observes outcomes. Strength, coordination, foresight and risk-reading determine status.

Humans, however, are shaped by appearances. The modern environment is too complex for instinct alone, yet too mediated for direct evaluation. As a result, citizens and employees judge leaders through proxies: confidence, fluency, symbolism, partisanship, tribal identity.

These proxies can be gamed.

A leader who presents certainty can outperform a leader who possesses competence. A leader who entertains can overshadow one who governs.

A leader who simplifies can defeat one who understands.

Animals correct misalignment instantly. Humans often do so only after crisis.

The consequences of faulty leadership selection manifest in predictable ways: institutional volatility, declining trust in governance, corporate fragility, and social fragmentation. When societies repeatedly hand authority to the least prepared, the costs compound across generations.

The comparison with animals is not an argument for instinct over intellect. It is a reminder that leadership, at its core, is a survival function. When the wrong individuals rule, the group suffers.

Animals recognise this intrinsically. Humans often learn it only in hindsight.

If societies wish to reverse the pattern, the solution is not to mimic the animal kingdom but to realign incentives. Systems must reward:

• proven judgement over theatrical certainty • outcomes over rhetoric • long-term stability over short-term spectacle • accountability over charisma

The problem is not that humans lack the ability to choose good leaders. The problem is that the mechanisms we have built for identifying them reward the opposite qualities.

Leadership is not entertainment. It is stewardship.

Until modern societies re-learn that distinction, animals may continue to show more wisdom than the people who claim dominion over them

Bullshit has always existed, but modern life has refined it into a near professional discipline. In offices, institutions and public discourse, people increasingly speak in ways that sound meaningful while being anchored to nothing. The performance of insight has overtake the practice of it. Bullshit succeeds because it imitates the structure of truth while carefully avoiding its weight.

Its language is recognisable. Sentences stretch beyond necessity. Certainty appears without evidence. Abstractions step in where specificity would expose the absence of substance. People elevate minor experiences into sweeping lessons and rely on tone to compensate for what content cannot carry.

Bullshit thrives in environments where image outruns competence and where saying something impressive matters more than saying something useful.

The conditions that enable this are systemic. Institutions reward confidence over depth. Audiences skim rather than read. Emotional resonance is valued above intellectual accuracy. In a crowded information environment, ambiguity becomes a feature rather than a flaw.

Bullshit spreads not because it persuades but because it demands very little from either the speaker or the listener.

This diffusion has consequences. Real expertise becomes harder to distinguish from imitation. Younger professionals internalise the idea that eloquence can substitute for competence. Organisations mistake polished rhetoric for strategy and gradually lose their capacity for honest internal discussion. In cultures shaped by bullshit, the signal collapses into the noise until even intelligent people begin to echo phrases that feel right rather than ideas that are right.

But if bullshit has become an art, so has the ability to recognise it. The tell-tale signs are surprisingly consistent.

How to recognise bullshit

Bullshit is not revealed by tone but by structure. Five markers expose it immediately.

First, there is the confidence evidence mismatch: bold claims supported by almost nothing. The style is assertive, the foundation fragile. When tone outruns proof, the substance is suspect.

Second, bullshit hides inside a vocabulary fog. It prefers inflated language because precise words would reveal the thinness of the underlying idea. If a sentence becomes clearer when shortened, the longer version existed to conceal, not explain.

Third, watch for lesson disproportion. A trivial event is inflated into a philosophy. A coincidence becomes a revelation. The conclusion is always larger than the experience that supposedly inspired it.

Fourth, bullshit relies on the emotional shortcut. It seeks to make you feel something quickly so you will not examine it slowly. When sentiment arrives before reasoning, scepticism is prudent.

Fifth, bullshit avoids accountability. It remains unfalsifiable. No trade-offs are acknowledged, no responsibility assigned, no scenario presented in which the claim might be wrong. It survives by never being specific enough to be challenged.

Once these patterns become visible, the spell weakens. The language stops feeling profound and starts reading like choreography. Ambiguity looks like evasion. Confidence sounds like theatre. What once felt insightful reveals itself as air.

The persistence of bullshit is often blamed on dishonesty, but insecurity is the deeper driver. Many people fear being ordinary.

Bullshit offers a shortcut to significance: a way to borrow the tone of wisdom without enduring the discipline required to become wise. In that sense, bullshit is less a cultural failure than a psychological crutch.

This comes with a quieter cost. Over time, bullshit erodes trust not only in institutions but in language itself. When words are used to impress rather than illuminate, they stop functioning as tools for understanding. They become packaging. They become costume and eventually, people stop listening.

There is a final irony: even analysing bullshit carries the danger of performing it. A piece attempting to expose the pattern can easily slip into the pattern….polished, persuasive, but not necessarily transformative. The boundary between clarity and cleverness is thinner than most writers admit.

This reflection might be an attempt at honesty, or it may simply be another carefully crafted piece of bullshit. You will judge the difference.

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At McKinsey Blog

What struck me most is that Anna Wintour’s real power isn’t instinct. It’s proximity.

Leaders lose their edge the moment they stop touching real life. She never did. Early walks, street-level curiosity, conversations outside the bubble. Instinct only works when you stay close enough to feel the world changing before the metrics can capture it.

Her take on mentorship is the part companies should pay attention to. She hires for humanity, not pedigree. She treats talent as an ecosystem, not a hierarchy. That is how culture gets built, not managed.

In an era obsessed with dashboards and quarterly certainty, it’s refreshing to see a reminder that relevance is emotional first, measurable second.

The future belongs to leaders who are present enough to notice what others overlook.