Since the late 20th century, we’ve spent decades telling people they lacked the willpower to stop overeating.1 Then, a novel hormone treatment did what 40 years of shame and stigma could not. GLP-1 medicines didn’t just treat obesity2—they exposed a profound cultural mistruth. Overeating and obesity were never primarily about willpower or personal choice.3-4 All along, biology, satiety hormones, and poor hunger control were the real drivers behind the obesity epidemic and countless failed diets.
Yet even now, with the biological underpinnings of weight control finally revealed, the willpower myth doggedly persists in U.S. culture. In this post, we’ll explore how this pattern of misinterpretation—condemning the person when their biology is to blame—long predates the recent GLP-1 medicine revelation about obesity. And why we will probably make the same mistake again.
Five Centuries of the Same Mistake
The above obesity example alone represents decades of misplaced blame and immeasurable human harm. But what if it’s just the tip of the iceberg? What if we’ve been committing the same error for centuries, mistaking biology for behavior and neurochemistry for character, without ever recognizing the pattern? As you can see from the table below, we have.5-6
The above pattern is striking precisely because the circumstances vary so widely—different health conditions, different centuries, different cultural contexts. Yet the same error recurs. If Mesopotamians were making the same misinterpretation as modern humans, this suggests the mistake is rooted in something deeper than ignorance or malice. Perhaps something more fundamental about human nature itself. If we’re ever to interrupt this pattern, we must first understand it and improve our speed of recognition. Here are three potential explanations.
To Err Is Human
Whether discussing obesity or ulcers, we appear predisposed to blaming people over biology for all the reasons below. And this human reflex runs deep enough that we’re almost certainly making the same mistake about other conditions right now.
Humans are moral beings. Biology isn’t. Biology has no values, no religion, no belief system. Yet people do. And so we inevitably inject our moral frameworks into explanations for conditions that remain mysterious. Unfortunately, these moral explanations are frequently sticky, persisting even after contradictory evidence emerges.
People love a good story. Given the choice between an emotionally satisfying fable and a lifeless fact, we choose the fable. And what makes a compelling story? A protagonist with agency and free will who can therefore be blamed, not a person quietly controlled by their own biology.
Knowledge and the event horizon. We cannot see beyond the boundaries of what we currently know. Throughout history, we have always explained the unknown through the lens of existing knowledge, unconsciously mistaking the edge of our understanding for the edge of reality itself.
Together, these three tendencies don’t describe a failure of intelligence. They describe something more insightful about our nature: an error pattern that is fundamentally, and perhaps inescapably, human.
We’re probably doomed to keep making the same mistake. But if we can learn to see the pattern, perhaps we can at least accelerate the correction cycle.