Primal Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence

What Angus Fletcher’s myths reveal about the fragile boundary between human and machine

When I first picked up Angus Fletcher’s Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Think, I was disarmed by its opening promise. The book proposes that modern education and culture have over-trained us in logic and computation while neglecting four primal capacities: intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense. These, Fletcher argues, are the oldest and most natural ways of thinking, rooted in our biology and essential to resilience, creativity, and leadership.

This thesis is not only appealing, it is directly relevant to current debates about Artificial Intelligence. Fletcher suggests that these primal powers are precisely what AI will never replicate. The implication is clear: machines may compute, but humans will always possess something older and deeper.

That claim deserves attention, and scrutiny. Because if the framework is solid, it could strengthen arguments about the uniqueness of human intelligence. But if it rests on shaky ground, then it risks undermining the very defense it intends to offer.

I wanted to believe in this book. For a while, I did. But as the chapters unfolded, the promise of Primal Intelligence gave way to myth-making, exaggeration, and what I can only call academic snake oil. What follows is both a critique of the book and a reflection on what its failure means for how we think about AI.

The Hook That Seduces

To be fair, Fletcher begins from a real and resonant problem. For decades, schools and workplaces have privileged the forms of intelligence that can be measured, standardized, and tested. We reward students for solving equations quickly, for memorizing facts, for filling in bubbles on multiple-choice exams. We valorize “hard data” and computational logic.

Against this backdrop, Primal Intelligence arrives with a refreshing diagnosis: that we have neglected the more organic, embodied, and narrative ways of thinking — Intuition, Imagination, Emotion, and Commonsense. These four categories are simple enough to remember, yet broad enough to feel universal. They seem to restore dignity to forms of intelligence that most of us know we use every day but that education and corporate culture tend to sideline.

By Intuition Fletcher means the fast, pattern-based judgments we make without conscious reasoning; by Imagination, the capacity to project possibilities, create alternatives, and picture what is not yet there; by Emotion, the embodied intelligence that shapes how we perceive and respond to the world; and by Commonsense, the everyday practical knowledge we use to navigate social life and adapt to circumstances.

There is also rhetorical power in Fletcher’s language. He contrasts “defined strategy” with “unlimited tactics,” suggesting that what matters is not following rigid plans but improvising in context. He insists that primal intelligence is older than logic, rooted in the survival instincts of our species. These are evocative images. They invite the reader to rethink intelligence not as something abstract and computational, but as something human, alive, and adaptive.

At this stage, it is easy to be persuaded. I was. The categories gave me a framework I could immediately imagine applying in the classroom or in creative work. They felt liberating, as if they named something we already knew but could not articulate.

This is the hook. It works. And it deserves to be acknowledged.

But once hooked, the reader is carried into a narrative where these insights are less developed than exploited, inflated with myth, distorted with anecdote, and eventually undermined by contradictions.

A Rhetorical Machine

Once the reader is drawn in by the promise of the four primal powers, a formula begins to repeat itself. Each chapter follows the same rhythm:

1. An anecdote — often drawn from Fletcher’s own life, from military training, or from a pop-cultural reference.

2. A hero — Darwin, Einstein, Jobs, Clausewitz, Shakespeare, or another figure elevated as a solitary genius.

3. A heuristic — a lesson distilled into a catchy maxim.

4. A short exercise — a prompt or mental drill, presented as if it could train the reader in a primal skill.

This pattern gives the book pace and readability, but it also reveals its nature. It is not a sustained argument, nor an accumulation of evidence. It is performance.

The glue that holds this pattern together is authority by association. Military operators provide toughness and practical legitimacy; Shakespeare provides cultural prestige; Jobs and Einstein provide modern genius. By stitching these names and contexts together, Fletcher crafts an aura of inevitability: if soldiers, poets, and scientists all exemplify these four powers, then surely they must be real.

But aura is not evidence. The anecdotes are often unverifiable or trivial; the heroes are presented as if they acted in isolation, when in fact they worked within rich intellectual and social ecosystems; the heuristics are slogans rather than tested principles; and the exercises are primers at best, incapable of transforming the deep habits of intuition, imagination, emotion, or commonsense.

The result is a book that feels persuasive while one is inside it, but hollow once one steps back. Its power lies not in the solidity of its claims but in the repetition of its rhetorical cycle: anecdote → hero → heuristic → exercise. Once the reader notices the pattern, the spell begins to break.

This contrast is particularly visible if we compare Fletcher’s use of storytelling with Edwin Catmull’s in Creativity, Inc.. Catmull uses stories to expose fragilities, share mistakes, and strengthen collective practices at Pixar. Fletcher uses stories to inflate himself and his heroes, masking the absence of method.

The Myth of the Lone Genius

A central flaw in Primal Intelligence is the way it treats innovation as the product of solitary geniuses. Again and again, Fletcher elevates a small canon of names — Darwin, Einstein, Jobs, Clausewitz — as if they alone were able to see what others missed.

“Innovation has always depended on rare individuals who could see what others missed — Darwin in nature, Einstein in physics, Jobs in technology, Clausewitz in strategy.”

This narrative is seductive. It offers the reader a pantheon of figures to admire and, by implication, a model to emulate. But it is also historically and intellectually misleading.

Darwin did not discover natural selection in a vacuum. Einstein built on a network of physicists and mathematicians. Jobs depended on Wozniak, Xerox PARC, and Silicon Valley’s ecosystem. Clausewitz synthesized Napoleonic lessons into Prussian doctrine.

By singling them out as exceptions, Fletcher perpetuates the myth of the lone genius. Worse, he does so in a book that claims to celebrate primal intelligence, which, if it means anything at all, should be relational, embodied, and collective.

Catmull, by contrast, insisted that creativity was never the work of one genius, but of trust and feedback across teams, precisely the opposite of Fletcher’s mythology.

Shakespeare as Totem

If the military operators provide Fletcher with practical authority, Shakespeare provides him with cultural prestige. Again and again, the Bard is invoked as the source of imagination, the model of emotional intelligence, the universal blueprint for creativity.

“Storythinking has shaped human life for hundreds of millennia… But we can summarize its place in human life — then and now — via a single story: Shakespeare.”

From here, Fletcher constructs a sweeping genealogy: Einstein, Curie, Jobs, Clausewitz, Lincoln, Van Gogh — all allegedly awakened by Shakespeare. At one point he even claims:

“Albert Einstein listed Shakespeare as a prime example of a creative naturalist, the model for modern chemistry, medicine, and physics.”

“Marie Curie inherited Hamlet from the Polish Romantics Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki.”

“Steve Wozniak said of Steve Jobs: ‘From the day we met, he was talking about important people like Shakespeare. That have really changed humanity forever.’”

The effect is cumulative: Shakespeare is presented as the silent tutor of every great mind. But this is not history; it is hagiography.

The inflation peaks when Fletcher assures Nike executives that their famous advertisement was simply “lifting” techniques from Shakespeare:

“Sure, I said. I could provide a blueprint. It contained three main techniques. They were easy to see because Nike had lifted them from a famous source: the grandmaster of imaginative communication, William Shakespeare.”

None of these techniques originate with Shakespeare. In medias res is Homeric. Riddles are folkloric. Exceptions are narrative universals. Rebranding them as Shakespearean is not scholarship; it is manipulation.

Authority Without Evidence

The problem is not just Shakespeare. It is the very way Fletcher substitutes aura for evidence.

When Nike executives asked him for data, he writes:

“What, they asked, was the basis for my conclusion? What data was I drawing on? I didn’t have any data about the Nike ad. But I’d worked with Army Special Operators who specialized in marketing, or as they called it, psychological operations.”

In other words: no data, but psyops. And when scholars disagreed, the response was arrogance:

“It wasn’t what other scholars had said. They blinked, surprised.”

This is not science. It is branding. The military confers toughness, Shakespeare prestige, Jobs genius. Together, they create an aura meant to dazzle the reader. But aura is not evidence.

The Mirage of Universal Training

At best, Fletcher’s prompts serve as brief primers of attention. They may spark awareness, but they cannot rewire the deep habits of mind he claims to address. To present them as universal training is to reduce the very complexity he claims to honor.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have shown that these capacities develop slowly and socially: intuition as pattern recognition in domains of expertise (Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow), imagination as the recombination of cultural material (Sternberg and Lubart’s work on creativity), emotion as embodied regulation shaped by relationships (Damasio, Barrett), and commonsense as the fragile product of shared practices and social trust (Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild). These literatures make clear what Fletcher erases: there is no shortcut, no exercise on the page that can substitute for years of lived, collective practice.

“Primal Science”: From Cartoon Neuroscience to Autobiography

The final section of the book, titled Primal Science, is the most troubling. Here Fletcher tries to root his framework in biology.

In Chapter 11, Moto, he contrasts computers with humans:

“Computers think A = B. Humans think A → B.”

And he grounds this in the neuron:

“The difference begins with the neuron. A transistor is binary; a neuron anticipates action.”

This is tidy rhetoric, but it collapses under scrutiny. A single neuron does not “anticipate action”; networks do. Computers are not confined to A = B; modern models handle causality. This is not neuroscience. It is cartoon metaphysics disguised as mechanism.

In Chapter 12, Storythinking, the science gives way to autobiography. Fletcher admits:

“When I entered Yale’s PhD in Shakespeare, I didn’t know any Shakespeare… I was, in effect, a human chatbot of Shakespeare, trained on multiple choice.”

He recalls his military training:

“At Quantico, after my glasses broke, I loaded bullets backwards. I couldn’t see. I almost lost my foot. But I learned to survive by pretending I could.”

He narrates his father’s failures:

“My father was fired from dozens of jobs… He taught me that lying was survival.”

And he casts himself as a naturalist:

“I am a naturalist, not a scientist in the mathematical sense. Like Darwin or William James, I observe the exceptions, not the statistics.”

But here again, the invocation is hollow. William James united philosophy, psychology, and humility in the face of experience. Fletcher uses “naturalism” as a license to abandon evidence. Where James sought consequences and rigor, Fletcher seeks only narrative capital.

Primal Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence

One of the most ambitious claims in Fletcher’s book is that primal intelligence — intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense — cannot be replicated by artificial systems. The implication is clear: AI may compute, but it will never be human.

On the surface, this seems reassuring. But the problem is that Fletcher grounds this distinction not in evidence, but in myths: Shakespeare as blueprint of imagination, lone geniuses as avatars of intuition, neurons recast as storytellers. Once those myths are dismantled, the foundation collapses.

If primal intelligence is defined by such shaky narratives, then the supposed boundary between human and machine is just as shaky. To defend the uniqueness of human intelligence, we need better arguments than Shakespeare and Jobs. We need humility, rigor, and a recognition that both biological and artificial systems are complex, situated, and collective.

The danger of Fletcher’s approach is that it offers a comforting line — “AI will never do this” — but at the cost of intellectual integrity. And comforting myths, whether about AI or about ourselves, are just another form of snake oil.

Conclusion: Academic Snake Oil

In the end, Primal Intelligence is not science, despite its title. It is not philosophy, despite invoking James and Darwin. It is not history of ideas, despite parading Shakespeare, Jobs, and Einstein.

It is a performance of storytelling designed to sell. Fletcher has mastered the rhythm of self-help literature: anecdote, hero, heuristic, exercise. He knows the cultural tokens that impress — Shakespeare, special forces, Silicon Valley — and he strings them together to create an aura of inevitability. But aura is not evidence.

The book offends not because it is inspirational, but because it calls itself science while rejecting the humility, honesty, and rigor that science requires. It treats the reader as a dupe, dazzled by names without substance.

The contrast with Edwin Catmull and William James is stark. Catmull used stories to reveal fragility and strengthen collective creativity. James used pragmatism to evaluate ideas by their effects, not by their prestige. Both embody integrity. Fletcher does the opposite: he manipulates, inflates, and obscures.

When I began reading, I wanted to believe. The four primal powers spoke to something real: the sense that our culture undervalues imagination, intuition, emotion, and commonsense. But by the end, what remained was not insight but offense. Rarely has a book left me feeling so defrauded, so treated as a fool.

Primal Intelligence promised to reveal an older, deeper kind of human wisdom. What it delivers is academic snake oil, polished, confident, and ultimately hollow.