The Master Betrayed

Exponential Growth

Growth that doubles feels slow until it is suddenly too late. What fills the jar is not speed, but blindness to scale.

Exponential Growth opens, not with theory, but with a small, telling detail: a postman’s van quietly recording how he brakes, how long he pauses, where he lingers. Something human and connective, the postman as a figure of community, memory, and care, is slowly being hollowed out by metrics designed to optimise, control, and surveil. What is lost is not efficiency, but relationship. We are not merely observed by machines; we begin to see the world as machines do.

McGilchrist returns to a theme threaded throughout these conversations: the difference between information and knowledge, and the more important difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowing where to find a poem is not the same as knowing a poem. Outsourcing memory is not neutral. What we carry within us silently governs our intuitions, our judgments, and our capacity to respond meaningfully to the world. A library on a shelf, or a database in the cloud, cannot guide perception in the way embodied knowledge does.

The danger is subtle. Access to vast information creates the illusion of understanding, while eroding the internal structures that make understanding possible. Navigation systems weaken our sense of direction; search engines weaken memory; algorithms weaken judgment. None of this happens catastrophically. It happens politely, incrementally, with promises of convenience.

Asked what a left-hemisphere-dominated world would look like, McGilchrist describes something uncomfortably familiar. Procedures become more important than the realities they were designed to serve. Paper becomes more real than people. Measurement replaces meaning; quantity displaces quality. We become obsessed with transparency — by which we mean explicitness — and in doing so lose the tacit knowledge that allows societies to function with trust and flexibility.

This mindset is deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity. It prefers black-and-white categories to lived complexity. It seeks control because it no longer understands relationship. Paradoxically, the more it attempts to control, the more control slips away, generating anxiety, paranoia, and ever-expanding systems of monitoring. Surveillance is justified as safety. Bureaucracy is justified as fairness. In reality, both are symptoms of a failure to perceive the whole.

McGilchrist draws on neurological cases to illuminate this cultural condition. Damage to the right hemisphere often results not merely in impairment, but in denial of impairment. A paralysed limb is disowned. Evidence presented directly to the senses is dismissed in favour of an internally consistent but false narrative. This is not madness; it is a profound disconnection from reality.

Here the metaphor turns collective. A society dominated by left-hemisphere thinking may deny its own paralysis. Faced with ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and existential risk, it insists that everything is fine because the forms say so. Data reassures where perception alarms. Models replace experience. The map is mistaken for the terrain.

This blindness is nowhere clearer than in our failure to grasp exponential growth. McGilchrist invokes physicist Al Bartlett’s simple illustration: a jar that appears half-empty one minute before it is completely full. Human intuition, shaped by linear experience, cannot easily comprehend exponential processes. By the time danger is visible, it is already too late.

This applies not only to population growth or resource depletion, but to technological acceleration itself. Systems scale faster than wisdom. Tools become environments. Decisions made incrementally accumulate into irreversible conditions. The tragedy is not that we lack intelligence, but that intelligence has become detached from humility.

Yet McGilchrist resists fatalism. Balance, he insists, is always the answer. The right hemisphere alone can become too tentative; the left alone becomes dogmatic, entrenched, incapable of revision. Health lies in their dialogue.

The episode closes not with solutions, but with a warning. The planet will survive. It always does. What is at stake is not Earth, but us: our capacity to perceive, to respond, to belong. If we continue to mistake control for understanding, and information for wisdom, we may find ourselves optimising a world in which we can no longer live.