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Surrounded by Mowglis

· Thoughts · 18 min read

Valentyn Solomko · November 2026

A short semi-neuroscientific manual on how to stop being angry at humanity

Everyone has at least once caught themselves in quiet horror in the middle of a drawn-out meeting, under a social media comment thread, or in the morning crush of the metro: “God, why are there so many hopeless idiots around?”

Everyone has days when reality looks like a low-budget surrealist performance. You ask a bank operator why your money was charged twice, and they read you a script about how grateful they are that you called. Someone parks an SUV across the tram tracks. A colleague sends a four-minute voice message at one in the morning in which the word “urgent” is present and the word “what” is not. And you are hit by the feeling: everyone around has lost their mind.

This feeling is so widespread that it has become folklore. There is a saying that the amount of intelligence on the planet is constant while the population keeps growing. It is attributed to everyone, and nobody can name the author. Schiller at least really did write that even the gods struggle in vain against stupidity: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

But there is news that is both comforting and frightening: you are not surrounded by fools.

You are surrounded by Mowglis of varying degrees of wildness. For the most part they are neither evil nor insane. They did not learn something basic at the time when it was easiest, and life moved on.

The author is not a neuroscientist. They put into one text what they had long suspected and had heard somewhere. Below, where possible, it is marked what of this is known and what is only the author’s version. There are more versions here than facts.

1. Terms first

In his essay The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo Cipolla sorted people along two axes: what their action gives to themselves and what it gives to others. That yields four types:

  • Intelligent: both they and others gain.
  • Helpless (the simpleton): others gain, they lose.
  • Bandit: they gain, others lose.
  • Stupid: others lose, and they themselves gain nothing either.

Cipolla’s first law: we always underestimate the number of stupid people around us. The second: the probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other trait, so workers, students, professors and Nobel laureates all have the same share of them. That is, stupidity is not a matter of education but a property of behavior.

This is a soothing theory. It lets you sigh, drink some coffee and move on. But Cipolla was too humane: he describes what a person does and does not ask why. And “why” is exactly what interests us. So our topic is a little different: not stupidity but gaps in learning. One person can be both stupid and a Mowgli, but these are different questions.

Let’s name the rest of the drawers.

The dense repeat the same action hoping for a different result. This formula is attributed to Einstein, although he apparently never said it, and the original aphorism was about madness. An aphorism about repeating without checking is itself repeated without checking.

Morons, imbeciles, idiots are, in the medical sense, people with a congenital or acquired organic brain pathology: their hardware was assembled with missing parts from the start. This is a separate category, and Mowglis do not belong to it.

Mowglis are something else. A Mowgli was born with a healthy brain and the ability to learn. Unlike the stupid person, they can think clearly. Unlike a person with organic damage, they have the full set. They simply were not given a certain load on time: nobody spoke to them in complex sentences, nobody answered their fear, nobody let them fall and get up. A few years passed, and what would have been learned easily now takes more time and effort.

The key word is “on time”. A Mowgli is not stupid, not dense and not sick. They are under-taught. If this were an engineering system, we would say a module was not shipped in the release and now has to be installed on top of legacy.

2. What is actually known about “windows”

Neuroscience has the concept of sensitive, or critical, periods: stretches of time when the brain is especially receptive to a certain kind of experience. This is not an invention. But between “easier now” and “the door is closed” there is a lot of room, and almost everything interesting happens there.

Age (approximately) What is formed What is known
up to ~1 year Phonemes of the native language During the first year an infant stops distinguishing sounds it does not hear around it
1–3 years Attachment, emotion regulation Children from Romanian orphanages: the earlier they were moved into families, the better the outcome. There is no sharp boundary
3–5 years Understanding that another person has their own knowledge and intentions The typical age at which children pass the “Sally and Anne” test. This is a developmental stage, not a window that closes
up to ~6–7 years Absolute pitch Occurs almost only in those who started music early, although heredity also matters
up to ~17 years Grammar of a second language The ability to acquire grammar stays high until about age 17, then declines. To sound like a native speaker, it is worth starting much earlier. Adults do learn languages, but by a different route
up to ~25–30 years Prefrontal cortex (planning, inhibition) Matures until the end of the third decade. “25” is a convenient round number, not a closing date

Extreme deprivation is a separate story: Genie, who was kept locked up for years, or Victor of Aveyron. These cases show the limits, but they are mixed with cruelty and possibly other disorders. They are not a model of your Slack colleague, just as the Romanian orphanages from the table are not.

Now the main thing the table is silent about. The brain after 25 is not frozen. Older people were taught to juggle: they learned worse than twenty-year-olds, but they learned, and their gray matter changed (although without practice these changes faded). In an experiment with over a thousand adults, personality traits shifted after a few months of working with an app. The neuroscientist Sue Barry learned to see stereoscopically as an adult, although this was long considered impossible.

With age it is not the possibility that changes but the price. There is a hypothesis from predictive processing theory: the longer a brain lives, the stronger its prior models of the world and the more expensive they are to update. This is not a breakdown, it is a strategy. An experienced doctor makes a diagnosis in a second precisely because they do not recompute everything from scratch. But the same property also produces stubbornness.

So the formula is: late does not mean impossible. Late means more expensive.

Below are five recognizable types. The age ranges in the headings are tentative. Each has two parts: what, in the author’s version, was missed, and what the data say about it. The second part often spoils the first.

The emotional one (tentatively, 1–3 years)

What was missed. An adult who responded to the child’s fear and rage. Instead: “they’ll cry and stop,” “don’t come near until you calm down.”

What it looks like. A person in an expensive suit answers a calm remark in the task tracker with fury, caps lock, or a week of “silence.” For their nervous system a work correction feels like a threat, not like a fact.

What the data say. The consequences of early deprivation and attachment disorders are well described. Whether a colleague reacts this way because of them, and not because of a bad week or a public reprimand at a meeting, is unknown.

The one who does not see other minds (tentatively, 3–5 years)

What was missed. The understanding that another person has their own plans, knowledge, sleep and private life.

What it looks like. They assign a task at 23:45 and are offended that you are not rushing to do it. Disagreement is for them not a different opinion but betrayal.

What the data say. Here the author’s version is weakest. Adults with an intact ability to see another perspective often simply do not use it. There are experiments showing that power reduces this tendency, although they do not always replicate. More likely, the boss is not deprived of the ability but has unlearned using it because nobody makes them. This is good news: what is unlearned can come back. But it won’t be you who brings it back.

The one who thinks in slogans (tentatively, 9–12 years)

What was missed. Complex, extended texts, reading, discussions with causes and effects.

What it looks like. A sentence like “this measure is necessary, although it will bring losses in the short term, unless we revise the regulations” causes a freeze and defensive aggression. The world consists of pairs: “betrayal / victory,” “ours / enemies.”

What the data say. That such thinking is underdeveloped because of a lack of practice with abstractions is plausible. But more often the explanation is simpler: fatigue, motivation, format. A news feed does not make you think for long. “Not able” and “has no energy or desire” look the same from the outside.

The eternal teenager (tentatively, 15–20 years)

What was missed. The need to bear the consequences of one’s own decisions. Guardians either controlled every step or shielded them from the consequences. That is how a “mommy’s little flower” grows up, after whom someone still has to clean up at thirty-five.

What it looks like. A microloan at 800% for a new iPhone to celebrate Friday. Failure is explained by karma, toxic people or Mercury in retrograde.

What the data say. Executive functions, that is planning and inhibition, mature last and depend on practice. But an “infantile thirty-five-year-old” is often just a person in whose environment the price of a mistake is inflated or hidden.

The cemented one (tentatively, 25+)

What was missed. The habit of updating one’s own beliefs.

What it looks like. “We’ve done it this way for forty years and nothing happened, no need to invent things here.” A new fact is perceived as hostile noise.

What the data say. This is our case from section 2. Strong prior models give an expert speed and that same stubbornness. A “cemented” person is often just an expert using what works for them.

4. Where they come from

Often from a difficult childhood. Upbringing and circumstances matter a lot, and far from all children get what they need.

There is also a modern reason to look at screens. A live face gives a child feedback: expression, tone, words like “you’re scared.” A cartoon on a tablet does not. In one well-known experiment, nine-month-old American infants learned to distinguish Mandarin sounds from a live person, but not from a video recording.

More screen time is linked to poorer language and attention development, but what is cause and what is effect is unknown: tired parents hand over the tablet more often. It seems that what matters is not the screen itself but what it displaces: live conversation, play and boredom.

Another mechanism is overprotection. A child who is never allowed to fall, lose a game in the yard, or resolve a conflict without mom’s lawyer has nothing to train their tolerance for mistakes on.

5. Those who made it despite everything

A natural question: if a child’s environment matters this much, how do some people from troubled families grow up to be scientists, engineers and people who care about others?

There are three well-known explanations, and all three have limits.

  1. One stable adult. A long study in Hawaii (Emmy Werner) followed children from vulnerable families for decades. A significant share grew up well, and what they had in common was that there was at least one stable adult nearby: a grandmother, a teacher, a coach, a librarian.
  2. Books. They provide complex syntax and other people’s heads outside the home. This is a plausible exoskeleton for the cortex, although it is harder to test than romantics would like.
  3. Temperament. There is a hypothesis that some children are like “orchids”: they die in poor soil and bloom in good soil. Others are like dandelions: they push through even asphalt.

There is also news about adults. A study of nuns (David Snowdon) showed that in some of them the brain after death had typical signs of Alzheimer’s disease, although during life their cognitive functions remained intact. The idea of cognitive reserve says: someone who has solved complex problems all their life builds detours. There are data on bilingual people too: their dementia symptoms appear on average several years later. True, not all studies confirm this.

So a Mowgli is not a verdict but a price. You can learn a lot of things, although sometimes it takes more practice and support. It’s just usually cheaper on time.

6. Look in the mirror: we are all Mowglis

The temptation to come out in a white coat and look at passersby as primates is great. So let’s switch on self-irony.

Each of us is a Mowgli in one of the rooms of our own brain.

  • You design distributed system architecture, but you have been learning English for fifteen years, and your pronunciation sounds like an interrogation. You are a linguistic Mowgli.
  • Fourier series or topology make you sleepy and slightly nauseous. You are a mathematical Mowgli.
  • You can’t hear a wrong note and only sing after the third shot. You are a musical Mowgli.
  • You bump into furniture corners in your own apartment and get lost at parallel parking. You are a motor Mowgli.

People compiled without errors do not exist. Each of us is an archipelago: a few developed megacities and a jungle the roads never reached.

And here a question should be asked: why do we sympathize with ourselves for an accent and not with a colleague for caps lock? Partly because we see our own circumstances and not other people’s. This is called the fundamental attribution error: we tend to explain other people’s behavior by character, underestimating circumstances. “That’s just how he is” demands zero effort. “What happened to him?” demands asking.

7. How to work alongside them

Start by giving up pedagogy: your task is not to bring them up but to build a process that withstands failures. All the rules below work regardless of the diagnosis, so you do not need to know the cause.

  • In writing and without an audience. Text gives time to cool down, and a dressing-down in front of everyone helps nobody. Answer caps lock dryly, after a pause (15–20 minutes is a technique, not a law of nature).
  • Feedback about the artifact, not about the author. Not “you forgot to close the transaction” but “the logs show an unclosed transaction; an auto-close timeout is needed.”
  • Tasks by a template: input, expected action, definition of done, when I’m reachable. “Done” means the criterion is met. Small iterations of a few hours help keep this under control.
  • Do not appeal to conscience, translate into the language of consequences: “if you pull developers in on weekends, on Monday they’ll make mistakes, the build will fail, and you won’t be able to show the demo to the client.”
  • Record agreements in writing. “If there are no objections by 16:00, we consider it accepted” works only with a prior agreement about this rule; otherwise it is just silence.
  • Automation instead of promises: green CI, a protected main, linters, limits on cards, notifications turned off after six in the evening. This is not about distrust.

These checks are needed by everyone, in proportion to risk. The author included.

A separate word about organizations. There is the cargo cult (Feynman’s name for science that imitates the methods without the substance): we build a plane out of straw (sticking notes in Jira), put on headphones made of coconuts (a standup at exactly 10:00), and for some reason the plane does not land. The tribe’s conclusion: we did not beat the drums hard enough, let’s hire two more coaches. This is not a defect of anyone’s brain. It is the usual reaction to a method whose meaning was lost along the way: imitating visible motions is easier than understanding an invisible system.

8. So what the hell do we do?!

The question is nervous and a little despairing. It arises after closing yet another chat, watching the news, or coming back from a parent-teacher meeting.

The answer is this: with most people around you, you do not need to do anything. People change, but changing them is not your job. But with your own reactions there is quite a lot to do. You could call it neuro-stoicism: change what depends on you and do not wait for the rest to change.

Mowgli’s razor

There is “Hanlon’s razor”: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I propose a younger sister:

Do not attribute to malice what is explained by under-teaching. And do not attribute to under-teaching what is explained by the absence of agreements.

The second sentence applies to the author too. Half of the “Mowglis” around us we created ourselves by forgetting to send the spec.

Wind down the missionary work

A typical mistake: the belief that an adult can be “taught” from the tenth explanation. Adults learn when they themselves have a motive, not when they are lectured. Treat the other person not as an opponent in a debate but as a weather front. When it rains, nobody lectures the cloud about fluid dynamics. They take an umbrella.

Cultivate your “reserve of fifteen”

Robin Dunbar suggested that our social capacity is limited: about 150 stable connections, and usually no more than 5–15 close relationships (the exact numbers are disputed). Your brain is not evolutionarily obliged to understand, heal and rescue billions of strangers.

If in your life there are even three to five people who will hear an argument, doubt their own rightness and laugh at their own stupidity, you have won the evolutionary jackpot. Hold on to them. Watch the rest of the biosphere calmly, from a safe safari jeep. Although for someone, you yourself are part of that landscape.

Don’t let your own garden get overgrown

And the last thing. The risk after this article: deciding that you have already reached enlightenment. Your brain is right now saving effort and switching to ready-made models.

As soon as you catch yourself thinking that all new music is “degradation,” new tools are “a useless toy,” and an unfamiliar position triggers not curiosity but instant irritation, sound the alarm. That is your own Mowgli scratching at your door.

Feed your brain controlled discomfort. Read books you have to fight your way through. Learn languages, however slowly, however accented, with a pile of mistakes. Studies of nuns and bilingual people are consistent with the idea that whoever keeps working builds a reserve, and it comes in handy exactly when things would be bad without it.

Exhale. The world has not gone mad, it just never quite managed to climb down from the branch. Pour some coffee and check that the work chat is closed for the evening. All of civilization rests on a thin film of prefrontal cortex, and our only task is to keep that film alive, at least inside our own head.

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