If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal

Have you ever wondered if being highly intelligent actually makes life better? In If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Justin Gregg flips our usual assumptions about human superiority. He argues that what we call 'intelligence'—our capacity for abstract thought, reflection, language, and moral reasoning—might not always be a blessing. In fact, Gregg suggests that humanity’s brilliance has created as much suffering and destruction as it has progress and innovation.

Gregg’s provocative idea begins with philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s tortured intellect. Through Nietzsche’s life and breakdown, Gregg asks: what if being less reflective—like a cow, a narwhal, or a crow—actually leads to more happiness and evolutionary success? This question drives the book: is human-style thinking evolution’s greatest triumph, or its biggest mistake?

The Core Argument: Intelligence Isn’t Necessarily Good

Gregg contends that our complex reasoning, consciousness, and moral awareness come with heavy costs. Unlike most animals who live in the moment, we carry existential dread, guilt, denial, and the relentless need to justify our actions. Our cognitive sophistication enables science, art, and technology—but also genocide, climate change, and anxiety. Intelligence might make us exceptional, but it rarely makes us wise.

To illustrate, Gregg contrasts Nietzsche’s suffering mind with a narwhal’s simple contentment. A narwhal doesn’t lament meaninglessness, doesn’t create elaborate moral rules, and doesn’t destroy its habitat for philosophical ambition. It just lives and thrives. The book, therefore, asks readers to question whether our obsession with thinking, progress, and meaning truly improves life—or whether stupidity, in its animal forms, is underrated.

From Cows to Consciousness: Rethinking Intelligence

Over seven main chapters, Gregg explores different facets of 'human stupidity,' each measured against the more adaptive, sustainable behaviors of other species. He dives into our 'why specialist' nature—our compulsive drive to ask questions—and shows how that curiosity, though powerful, often leads to bad reasoning and destructive inventions. He examines lying, death awareness, morality, consciousness, short-term thinking, and our tendency toward self-delusion.

Throughout, animal intelligence becomes a mirror for human folly. Crows solve puzzles without philosophy. Dolphins grieve without existential despair. Bees display consciousness-like focus without self-torment. By comparing human cognition to simpler creatures, Gregg paints intelligence as one evolutionary path among many—not the pinnacle we imagine it to be.

Why This Matters

Gregg’s argument matters because it cuts to the root of ecological and psychological crises. Humanity’s unique mental tools give us immense creative power—but they also make us anxious, exploitative, and shortsighted. Our intelligence lets us destroy forests for lawns, invent nuclear weapons, and rationalize moral atrocities like genocide and slavery. Meanwhile, animals—driven by instinct and simple cognition—maintain balance with their ecosystems. Their “stupidity” becomes a form of survival wisdom.

Gregg’s core message is not anti-human but deeply humbling: we are exceptional, yes—but perhaps not in ways that serve our long-term survival. Our mental gifts may be evolution’s most catastrophic mistake.

What You’ll Learn

In this summary, you’ll explore:

• How our obsession with asking “why” makes us more self-destructive than wise
• Why lying and deceit are central to human success—and our undoing
• How our understanding of death, morality, and the future sets us apart but also makes us miserable
• Why other species’ simpler cognition might be more adaptive and sustainable
• Whether intelligence should be seen as valuable—or simply as evolution’s failed experiment

Gregg invites you to rethink what it means to be “smart.” Maybe, he suggests, being a narwhal—or living with animal-like simplicity and acceptance—is the sanest way to exist. His sharp humor and scientific grounding make this philosophical journey as entertaining as it is unsettling—a reminder that the smartest species on Earth might also be the stupidest.

Humans are the only species obsessed with asking “why.” Justin Gregg calls us the “why specialists,” a species driven by curiosity—but also plagued by it. From toddlers questioning everything to investors analyzing market trends, our hunger for causality defines us. Yet this trait, Gregg argues, isn’t an evolutionary upgrade—it’s a mixed blessing that often leads to chaos.

The Story of Mike and Orlando

Gregg opens with the story of Mike McCaskill, a day trader who became a millionaire during the GameStop frenzy—through luck. After losing everything twice, his gut instinct finally scored him $25 million. He later admitted, “It’s a hundred percent all luck.” Gregg compares Mike’s gambling to that of Orlando, a house cat that once “beat” human fund managers in stock picking by batting a toy mouse at random. Orlando’s success suggests that relying on calculated “whys” sometimes performs worse than blind chance. Humans crave explanations, but the universe doesn’t always reward them.

Why Asking Why Isn’t Always Wise

Our quest for causality gave rise to civilization. Gregg traces its origins back 240,000 years—when early humans began using fire and crafting stone blades. Yet for most of our evolutionary history, we didn’t use this ability extensively. Humans wandered for hundreds of millennia before asking “Why are we here?” or “Why do we die?” Only 43,900 years ago did cave paintings begin to reveal symbolic thought—evidence of abstract “why” questions. Once we started asking, it was unstoppable: religion, technology, science—all born from seeking cause and effect.

Associative Learning vs. Causal Reasoning

Gregg contrasts human curiosity with animals’ simpler “how” learning. A dog hears a rustle and associates it with danger, reacting effectively without understanding why. A philosopher, in contrast, might theorize about meteorites, bears, or dragons—all leading to more complex, but not always better, decisions. The key difference is imagination: humans collect endless “dead facts”—information we don’t use but fill our heads with. This web of possibilities lets us build bridges and particle accelerators but also concoct unproven theories, like medieval medicine’s chicken-butt snakebite cure. Our need for answers created humorism, racist pseudoscience, and climate-destroying combustions—all examples of causality misfiring.

Curiosity makes us inventive—and delusional. The same mental machinery that solved gravity also invented genocide.

The Biological Backfire

Gregg argues that understanding causality doesn’t always help species survive. Bettongs, marsupials who must be taught to fear predators, need few cognitive skills—yet thrive through simple associations. Humans, meanwhile, rationalize superstitions and technologies that threaten survival. Our internal combustion engines answer “why heat moves things,” but their carbon fallout may kill us all. Evolution, Gregg warns, hasn’t decided whether “why-specialism” is a triumph or a mistake. Asking “why” may have led to medicine and math, but it also propels extinction-level errors like climate change.

In the end, Gregg suggests that a cat choosing stocks at random might embody a wisdom beyond human reason: doing without overthinking. Intelligence, he says, is not measured by asking “why,” but by surviving. Narwhals don’t need theory—they just live.

Humans are the planet’s most accomplished liars. In To Be Honest, Gregg argues that deception—far from a moral flaw—is the bedrock of civilization. Russell Oakes, the fake veterinarian who fooled Britain with forged degrees and dangerous surgeries, isn’t an anomaly but a reflection of our species’ mastery of falsehood. Lying, Gregg explains, evolves naturally from animal communication—but humans perfected it with language and imagination.

From Frogs to Falsehood

In nature, deception is survival. Frogs mimic dangerous species; birds feign injury to lure predators from nests. These acts are instinctive, not deliberate. But in humans, lying becomes intentional—a tool of manipulation. Gregg traces this evolution through “tactical deception,” from mourning cuttlefish that disguise themselves as females mid-courtship to dogs that trick food thieves by feigning interest in empty bowls. Such behaviors foreshadow human deceit—and show that lying, at its core, is about control.

Language and Theory of Mind

Our greatest leap came when communication evolved into language. Unlike animal calls that signal simple states (“angry,” “danger”), language lets us describe anything—including impossible things. Pair that with “theory of mind”—our ability to guess and manipulate others’ beliefs—and lying becomes limitless. Gregg shows how great apes already grasp deception, anticipating false beliefs. Humans extend this mastery through words, crafting political propaganda, fake science, and personal excuses. We lie to others, and, like Oakes, to ourselves.

The Truth-Default Trap

Gregg cites Timothy Levine’s “Truth-Default Theory”: humans are wired to believe others. We depend on trust to build societies—yet that trust makes us easy prey for deception. Our species thrives on falsehoods precisely because believing them sustains cooperation. When everyone assumes honesty, liars can flourish. Gregg links this to the internet’s “firehose of falsehood,” from Russian troll farms to corporate spin: propaganda that exploits our innate credulity. Countries like Finland teach media literacy to resist it, but most humans remain “hardwired to be duped.”

Lying is our superpower—and our downfall. It builds civilizations of shared imagination but destroys them with self-deception.

Bullshit: Evolution’s Bonus Skill

Gregg examines “bullshit,” defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt as speech unconcerned with truth. Studies show that convincing bullshit correlates with higher intelligence. Corporations and politicians reward persuasive liars with promotions and power. This isn’t failure—it’s adaptation. Our evolution favored confidence over correctness. From Russell Oakes to Leo Koretz’s Ponzi schemes, Gregg warns that lying fuels wealth and influence but corrodes trust. Societies dependent on deception eventually eat themselves alive.

For Gregg, the moral isn’t to condemn lying—it’s to recognize it as a feature of human intelligence. Animals deceive to survive; humans deceive to rule. But one day, as misinformation overloads democracy and truth collapses, lying may prove our final evolutionary misstep.

In Death Wisdom, Gregg asks a haunting question: are humans better off knowing they will die? His answer is no. Awareness of mortality—what he calls “death wisdom”—is uniquely human and deeply destructive. Other animals recognize death’s reality but not its inevitability. They grieve without despair. We, however, cannot stop imagining our own end—and suffer for it.

Tahlequah’s Grief and Human Projection

Gregg begins with Tahlequah, a mother orca who carried her dead calf for seventeen days. Scientists called it mourning; skeptics called it anthropomorphism. Gregg argues both are partly right: animals experience grief, but not existential dread. They possess what philosopher Susana Monsó calls a “minimal concept of death,” recognizing nonfunctionality and irreversibility—without imagining their own demise. Only humans internalize mortality as personal and inevitable—a cognitive upgrade that doubles as a curse.

How Self-Awareness Created Death Terror

This awareness relies on uniquely human traits: episodic foresight, temporal understanding, and mental time travel. Gregg explains how chimpanzees can plan hunts but not envision death; humans, by contrast, imagine coffins and afterlives. He introduces the mythical “Kassandra,” the first hominid to grasp mortality—a child tormented by knowledge no one else shared. For Kassandra’s mind to survive evolution, humans had to evolve psychological denial, as Ajit Varki’s theory suggests. Thus, death awareness demanded self-deception to coexist.

We are intelligent because we can foresee death—and insane because we can’t stop thinking about it.

The Terror and Creativity of Mortality

Gregg connects death wisdom to human creativity. Fearing extinction, we invent “immortality projects”—art, religion, science—to justify existence (echoing Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death). These pursuits birth cathedrals, space programs, and genocides alike. The same need for meaning fuels progress and tragedy. Depression, anxiety, and suicide, Gregg argues, are costs of cognitive awareness. Evolution allowed death wisdom to survive only by pairing it with denial—our ability to ignore mortality long enough to function.

Narwhal Over Nietzsche

Unlike Nietzsche, who embraced suffering, animals live with pragmatic acceptance. They don’t foresee extinction or agonize over afterlives. They perish peacefully, like Tahlequah’s calf slipping into the sea. For Gregg, this simplicity is sanity. If Nietzsche had been a narwhal, he concludes, he’d have avoided despair entirely. Death wisdom brought us culture—but also misery. In evolutionary terms, the wise species might be the one too stupid to contemplate its end.

In The Gay Albatross Around Our Necks, Gregg dismantles one of humanity’s proudest claims: moral superiority. He contrasts human ethics with animal norms, showing that animals often behave more ethically—less violent, less hypocritical—than people armed with moral philosophy.

From Seppuku to Social Norms

Gregg recounts the 1868 Sakai incident, where Japanese soldiers performed ritual suicide after killing French troops. To them, honor demanded death; to the French, mercy demanded pardon. This cultural collision exposes morality’s subjectivity. Morality, Gregg argues, is culturally constructed—not universal truth. Animals, by contrast, follow instinctive norms. Stump-tailed macaques reconcile by holding each other’s bottoms—a comically effective form of forgiveness devoid of ideology.

Animal Norms vs. Human Morals

Gregg builds on Frans de Waal’s idea that human morality evolved from animal normativity—the emotional codes of fairness and empathy. Capuchin monkeys protest inequality, chickens respect pecking orders, and dolphins comfort grieving companions. These behaviors maintain social harmony without moral doctrines. Humans add layers of justification—religion, law, philosophy—that transform instinct into dogma. Once “why” questions enter morality, cruelty follows: we invent reasons to kill, colonize, and oppress.

Morality’s Dark Side

Using Canada’s residential schools, Nazi genocide, and anti-LGBT laws, Gregg shows how moral reasoning can rationalize atrocity. Believing we act “for good” makes our violence righteous. Animals may fight, but never exterminate entire groups for ideological purity. They practice reconciliation, not genocide. From same-sex Laysan albatross pairs raising chicks to bonobos solving conflict through sex, animals embody compassion unclouded by doctrine.

“Human morality,” Gregg writes, “kind of sucks.” Our ethical reasoning shows sophistication—but causes more suffering than instinct would.

When Ethics Backfires

In evolution’s eyes, success means survival, not virtue. Gregg suggests that our moral complexity might be maladaptive—a cognitive spandrel. While it enables justice systems and empathy, it also enables hate crimes and war. Animals, limited by instinct, may be better balanced. The “gay albatross” thus symbolizes moral humility. Simpler minds, Gregg argues, rarely commit moral atrocities. Maybe less conscience means more kindness.

In The Mystery of the Happy Bee, Gregg untangles consciousness—the “C-word”—and argues that it’s more widespread than we think. Bees, birds, and cephalopods may be conscious, just differently so. Humans aren’t uniquely aware; we’re just aware of more things—and sometimes that makes us miserable.

How Consciousness Works

Gregg simplifies neuroscience through an improv-theater metaphor. Consciousness is the spotlight on stage—the part of the mind broadcasting sensations to the rest. Unseen stagehands (unconscious processes) support the performance. Every living creature with a nervous system runs a similar show, though the number of “actors” differs. Dolphins echolocate with sound images, bees “feel” magnetic patterns, humans imagine hypothetical futures. Consciousness exists to aid decision-making, not metaphysics.

Do Animals Feel?

Experiments show animals experience pleasure, pain, and intention. Drunk elephants sway from fermented fruit, parrots use tools to preen feathers, and fruit flies seek alcohol when deprived of sex—all implying self-awareness and motivation. Bees even learn by observation—rolling balls for sugar in Chittka’s famous study—displaying “intentionality” once reserved for humans. Such evidence supports the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness: mammals, birds, and many invertebrates possess subjective experiences.

If even insects have inner worlds, then consciousness isn’t rare—it’s one of evolution’s favorite tricks.

The Human Difference

Gregg distinguishes between types of awareness: temporal (future self), body (physical existence), and social (status and relationships). Humans have all three—and can think about thinking itself, a process called metacognition. Dolphins show glimpses of this self-reflection; bees likely do not. But while consciousness lets humans orchestrate complex reasoning and art, it also spawns anxiety and overthinking. We aren’t “more conscious,” Gregg concludes; we’re just burdened by more thoughts under the same fragile spotlight.

Bees and narwhals might be happier precisely because they don’t overcomplicate their awareness. Gregg suggests simplifying our inner stage—experiencing life as animals do: consciously, but calmly.

Prognostic myopia is Gregg’s term for humanity’s greatest cognitive flaw: the ability to foresee the future coupled with an inability to care about it. We build civilizations on foresight but make choices driven by the present—like burning fossil fuels or trimming lawns while ignoring climate doom.

The Lawn and the Banana

Gregg starts with “Capability Brown,” whose eighteenth-century English gardens inspired America’s lawn obsession—a status symbol that wastes water, emits CO₂, and contributes to climate change. Similarly, bananas symbolize global short-sightedness: their convenience hides rainforest destruction and pesticide pollution. These examples illustrate how everyday pleasures mask catastrophic consequences. We can anticipate harm but simply don’t feel its urgency.

Why We Fail to Feel the Future

Drawing on cognitive psychology (Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow), Gregg explains that our decisions stem from automatic System 1 thinking—ancient, emotional, and immediate—while our rational System 2 plays catch-up. We evolved to handle short-term threats, not distant ones. His “Prognostitron” thought experiment shows how even intelligent adults make poor choices—staying up late for fun or watching movies instead of working—despite knowing future costs. Our brains unconsciously prioritize now over later.

We can imagine tomorrow’s disaster—but can’t feel it enough to change today.

The Industrial Version

This blind foresight scales up catastrophically. From atomic bombs—whose creators ignored moral consequences—to oil executives who denied climate science since 1968, humans systematically prioritize short-term profit. “Our house is on fire,” Greta Thunberg warns, but Gregg shows why we ignore her: evolution didn’t equip us to emotionally engage with the far future. The further away an outcome, the weaker our empathy for it. Prognostic myopia may be the cognitive mechanism behind extinction.

Gregg’s solution is sobering: we must design laws, policies, and technologies that bypass human psychology—forcing us to act in our descendants’ interest. Otherwise, intelligence will accomplish what stupidity never could: our self-inflicted collapse.

Gregg closes with a paradox: humans are both evolution’s pinnacle and its potential undoing. Our complex cognition allows science, art, and self-reflection—but not sustainable happiness. Intelligence, he concludes, is not success measured by longevity or population, but by pleasure—the ability to minimize suffering.

The Exceptionalism Paradox

Gregg contrasts humans with creatures like crocodiles and bacteria—species that thrive through simplicity. Crocodiles, unchanged for 95 million years, succeed not through innovation but stability. Humans, overloaded with complexity, risk extinction within centuries. Our inventions, like DDT and atomic energy, reveal how intellect causes harm faster than instinct can recover. Intelligence makes us dominant, not durable.

Pleasure as the Measure of Value

Borrowing from utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, Gregg redefines success: the species that experiences—and spreads—the most pleasure wins. Under this standard, humans fare poorly. Our cognitive gifts create depression, inequality, and ecological ruin. Chickens in battery cages suffer from our progress, while wild chickens live happier lives than many humans. Intelligence amplifies misery as easily as joy.

Evolution doesn’t reward cleverness—it rewards contentment. The cow in the field may be wiser than Nietzsche.

Hope or Delusion?

Gregg contrasts Steven Pinker’s optimism—that reason and science can still create progress—with philosopher John Gray’s cynicism, who sees civilization’s cycle of creation and collapse as inevitable. Gregg leans toward Gray: unless we overcome prognostic myopia, our intelligence will perish with us. Yet he holds a faint hope—that understanding our stupidity may be the first step toward survival.

The epilogue, with Gregg saving slugs from his driveway, closes the circle. Compassion—the simplest instinct—might be intelligence’s only redemption. In the end, he suggests, evolution’s smartest minds may belong not to humans, but to those creatures too “stupid” to destroy their world.