The Reductionistic Fallacy: Everyone is susceptible to it — including Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay
The Reductionistic Fallacy is the mistake of trying to explain a complex, emergent system by reducing it to the traits or intentions of its parts. It’s the error of assuming that if a system behaves a certain way, it must be because some individuals within it possess and inject that behavior into the system.
But some properties don’t exist at the level of the parts. Wetness, for example, isn’t a property of individual water molecules. It only arises when enough molecules interact in the right way. Trying to explain wetness by inspecting a lone H₂O molecule is like trying to explain consciousness by studying one neuron. The emergent property simply vanishes.
Psychopathy
We fall into the same trap with sociopolitical systems. When faced with mass hysteria or psychosis, we assume some individuals must be clinically deranged, seeding the madness. But mass delusion doesn’t require madness in its participants. It can emerge from sane people navigating incentives, copying peers, punishing dissenters, and signaling loyalty—none of whom see themselves as irrational. (Jordan Peterson has been pushing this view this week. Bizarre. He usually has good intuitions about totalitarianism. James Lindsay turns out to have similar views as Jordan on this. 🤦♂️)
Evil Intent
When societies engage in widespread harm—through censorship, purges, persecution—we often search for evil individuals, bad actors pursuing power or wealth. And yes, those exist. But much of the harm is enacted by people who believe they’re doing the right thing. They’re enforcing norms, obeying rules, protecting others. The evil emerges from the system, even when no one sets out to cause it. (They’re still culpable for their evil, but that’s another story.)
Top-Down Puppeteering
And nowhere is the reductionistic fallacy more glaring than in conspiracy theories. When people observe coordination or narrative alignment—across media, institutions, or governments—they assume it must have been designed from above. There must be a secret group, a plan, a puppet master. But what they’re seeing is not necessarily orchestration. It’s often emergence: social conformity, shared incentives, and reputational cascades that align behaviors without central planning.
In all these cases—mass hysteria, totalitarian evil, conspiracy theories—we fall for the same fallacy: assuming that emergent group behavior can only be explained by the intentions or traits of a subset of individuals. It’s like trying to explain the wetness of water by blaming it on a few unusually damp molecules.
Evil and Culpability Playlist at Science Moment channel
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHmody2xNMCt6cZy_LDhBi2K_DZh20igB