We Are DEVO: 50 Years of Devolution

I was just a kid when I bought my first album with saved birthday money: DEVO's "New Traditionalists." While other kids were discovering pop music, I was captivated by lyrics like "If you live in a small town, you might need a dozen or two young alien types who step out and dare to declare: We're through being cool!"

Even as a kid in Reagan's America, something about that rebellious manifesto against conformity struck me as profoundly true. The adults around me seemed to be sleepwalking through life, following scripts that made no sense, accepting authority without question.

It didn't take long before I discovered their earlier album offering the stark challenge: "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO!" That question, and its answer, would shape the rest of my life. The central thesis of the album—that humanity was systematically regressing into "pinheads," losing our capacity for independent thought and critical analysis—became my lens for understanding a world that increasingly seemed to reward ignorance over inquiry, conformity over courage.

All these years later, as DEVO embarks on their 50th anniversary tour, their prophecy reads less like avant-garde performance art and more like documentary evidence. What Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale diagnosed in the 1970s as incipient "de-evolution" has metastasized into a full-blown civilizational regression. We have become exactly what they said we would: an uncaring, unthinking species surrendering our humanity to the very forces they warned us about.

The Original Diagnosis: Jocko Homo

To understand how prescient DEVO was, we need to examine their core insight. The title of their seminal song "Jocko Homo" came from a 1924 anti-evolution pamphlet called "Jocko-Homo Heavenbound" by Bertram Henry Shadduck. In appropriating this term, DEVO created a brilliant ironic reversal: while religious fundamentalists denied human evolution from apes, DEVO argued we were actually devolving back toward a more primitive state—intellectually and spiritually.

Their use of "pinhead" became DEVO's symbol for humanity's voluntary mental regression. "We're pinheads now / We are not whole / We're pinheads all / Jocko Homo" wasn't just provocation; it was cultural diagnosis. Modern society, they argued, was systematically creating conditions that diminished human cognitive capacity and independent thought.

The mechanisms they identified were precise: conformity pressure that suppressed individuality, consumerism that replaced meaningful engagement with passive acquisition, technological alienation that isolated rather than connected, and perhaps most crucially, the breakdown of rational discourse in favor of emotional manipulation and blind obedience to authority.

Their question "Are we not men?" forced a confrontation with what it actually means to be human. Are we rational beings capable of independent thought and moral reasoning? Or have we surrendered those capacities, becoming part of an undifferentiated mass defined by our diminished state rather than our potential?

Answer: We are DEVO.

Evidence of Regression

Half a century later, we can evaluate DEVO's hypothesis against the data. The results are devastating:

Political and Moral Collapse

The recent (July 2025) congressional votes on releasing sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein-related files provide a perfect contemporary example of "Jocko Homo" behavior in action. Despite overwhelming evidence of a decades-long network facilitating child sexual abuse involving powerful figures, House Republicans have repeatedly voted to block the release of investigative documents.

The stated rationalizations reveal the depth of intellectual regression: evidence is dismissed as "fake," crimes are minimized as being "years in the past," and party loyalty takes absolute precedence over child protection. Even when the issue involves the sexual exploitation of minors—an area where moral clarity should transcend partisan considerations—tribal allegiance proves stronger than ethical reasoning.

This pattern isn't new—we've seen it repeatedly in religious organizations, educational institutions, and other power structures where loyalty to authority consistently trumps protection of victims. Meanwhile, the Republican base supports these votes enthusiastically, demonstrating the cult-like dynamics DEVO identified. Protecting "their" leader matters more than protecting children. Evidence becomes irrelevant when it conflicts with group loyalty.

This mirrors exactly what DEVO saw emerging in the late 1970s: the transformation of citizens into followers, of thinking individuals into pinheads—passive, uniform, and easily manipulated.

Climate Denial as Ultimate Pinhead Logic

Perhaps nothing demonstrates humanity's regression more overwhelmingly than our response to climate change. Faced with overwhelming scientific consensus about an existential threat to our species, to all species, large portions of the population choose to reject evidence in favor of tribal comfort.

The psychology is pure pinhead logic: rather than engage with complex, frightening information that might require difficult changes, millions of people simply deny the problem exists. Corporate and political authorities provide comforting lies, and the masses gratefully accept them rather than confronting reality.

This represents the ultimate failure of human evolutionary capacity. We developed large brains specifically to engage in long-term planning and complex problem-solving. Climate change is exactly the kind of challenge our cognitive abilities evolved to address. Instead, we're demonstrating a systematic retreat from those capacities, choosing immediate comfort over planetary survival.

The Power-Over Pathology

In a recent (July 2025) interview launching DEVO's "Devolutionary Times" series on YouTube, founding member Jerry Casale articulated a crucial dimension of their original thesis. Drawing on the work of a Yugoslavian anthropologist, he explained that humans had become "psychotic apes who had lost their fur and their tails and their sixth sense that threw us out of harmony with nature." This disconnection, Casale argued, is why "humans find it necessary to suppress and dominate all other life forms on the planet."

This insight illuminates the common thread running through all forms of systematic exploitation: the "power over" mentality that enables the strong to brutalize the weak without moral consideration. The same authoritarian psychology that protects child abusers, denies climate science, and celebrates political strongmen also normalizes the torture and killing of trillions of innocent, frightened animals for unnecessary consumption.

The connection isn't metaphorical—it's psychological and cultural. A society that systematically brutalizes helpless beings inevitably becomes desensitized to all forms of violence and exploitation. When suffering is treated as irrelevant if the victims lack power, this logic extends seamlessly from animal agribusiness to immigrant detention centers, from slaughterhouses to prison systems where rape becomes a cultural punchline.

The machismo culture that celebrates this domination—the performative toughness, the glorification of violence as strength—represents exactly the kind of primitive regression DEVO identified. Rather than evolving toward empathy and ethical reasoning, we've devolved toward the brutal hierarchies of our pre-rational ancestors.

Most tellingly, this "power over" pathology prevents us from addressing existential challenges that require cooperation and long-term thinking. The same mindset that justifies environmental destruction because "might makes right" also justifies social inequality and the systematic suppression of inconvenient truths. We've become what Casale described: a species so disconnected from natural harmony that we can only relate to other life through domination and control.

How We Became Devo

Although it feels like it, the transformation didn't happen overnight. DEVO identified the mechanisms that would gradually reduce thinking humans into passive cogs. We can trace their operation over the past five decades.

Consumer culture played a central role. Rather than engaging with ideas, products, or experiences as active participants, we increasingly became passive recipients of manufactured desires. DEVO's 'Freedom of Choice' mocked the illusion of meaningful options in a corporate-controlled society—the pretense that choosing between Brand A and Brand B, often owned by the same profiteers, constitutes genuine freedom.

The shift from "citizen" to "consumer" represents exactly the kind of diminishment DEVO anticipated—from active engagement to passive reception. Even social position and relevance are now attached to over-consumption. "My car is more expensive than yours" or "My shoes are more expensive than yours" have replaced moral decency, kindness, and emotional intelligence as measures of worth. DEVO sardonically lamented in "Beautiful World" the way people comb their hair and the importance of wearing new clothes—anticipating how identity itself would become defined by consumption.

Mass media accelerated the process by replacing information with entertainment, analysis with sensation, and debate and dialogue with spectacle. The rise of social media has completed the transformation, creating algorithms that reward conformity and emotional reaction over independent thought or careful analysis. As DEVO observed in 'Gates of Steel,' technology promised connection but delivered isolation and mechanized interaction.

Educational systems, rather than developing critical thinking skills, increasingly focus on standardized testing and compliance training. Students learn to provide expected answers rather than ask challenging questions. The very institutions supposedly designed to develop human cognitive capacity have become, in DEVO's terms, "pinhead factories."

Perhaps most insidiously, we've created a culture that actively celebrates ignorance. Personal beliefs are now treated as equally valid—often more valid—than factual evidence. "Common sense" is valorized over expertise. Religious conviction trumps scientific consensus. Gut feelings are treated as equivalent to rigorous analysis. The phrases "that's just your opinion" and “let’s agree to disagree” are used to dismiss empirical claims. We've systematically dismantled the intellectual frameworks that distinguish between knowledge and belief, evidence and assertion, reason and prejudice.

Research on authoritarianism explains exactly what DEVO predicted. Studies show that when people feel overwhelmed by complexity and uncertainty, they gravitate toward simple explanations and strong authorities, even when those authorities demonstrably lie to them. The cognitive load of processing climate science, economic inequality, and political corruption becomes so exhausting that millions of people simply surrender their analytical capacity to whoever offers the most comforting narrative. Ignorance is bliss… for the ignorant.

Isolated Thinkers: Spuds

Not everyone succumbed. Scattered throughout society are what DEVO called "young alien types" or "spuds"—individuals who somehow maintained their capacity for independent thought despite enormous pressure to conform. These are the people who read the research on climate change and demand action. Who see through religious mythology and political manipulation. Who prioritize evidence over comfort and truth over belonging.

This isolation reveals a key mechanism in mass conformity that social psychologists call 'pluralistic ignorance'—when individuals privately reject group beliefs but assume everyone else genuinely accepts them. Many see through the obvious lies and manipulations but remain silent, believing they're alone in their skepticism. This creates a feedback loop where the majority's public compliance reinforces everyone's private doubt about their own perceptions. DEVO understood that critical thinking becomes not just intellectually difficult but socially dangerous—a direct threat to belonging and identity.

The spuds find each other occasionally—in comment sections under old DEVO videos, in discussions about banned books, in small gatherings of people still capable of following evidence wherever it leads. But maintaining intellectual honesty in a pinhead culture requires enormous psychological strength. It means accepting social isolation, family rejection, and the constant stress of watching preventable disasters unfold because the majority lacks the cognitive tools to respond appropriately.

Beautiful World: The Endgame

Fifty years after DEVO's initial diagnosis, we can see the endgame clearly. Climate chaos accelerates while the masses deny basic science. Democratic institutions crumble while populations choose authoritarianism. Child abuse networks operate with impunity while voters protect the powerful rather than the vulnerable.

As existential threats multiply, more people slip into psychological survival mode, defaulting to cognitive shortcuts that prioritize immediate tribal protection over complex problem-solving. This regression fuels the very tribalism, nationalism, and "othering" that DEVO predicted. When people feel overwhelmed, they retreat to protecting "ours"—their group, their beliefs, their immediate interests—while abandoning any capacity to care for outsiders, for future generations, for nonhuman animals, or for our home planet itself. The suffering escalates exponentially and inescapably, as our diminished cognitive state prevents us from addressing the root causes creating the overwhelm.

What makes this collapse particularly tragic is how predictable it was. Just as the Easter Island civilization cut down their last tree, and the Roman Empire ignored infrastructure decay while focusing on spectacle, we're following the exact same pattern, but with global consequences. The difference is that we have the historical knowledge to recognize the pattern—and we're choosing to repeat it anyway.

A: We Are DEVO

"Are we not men?" Mark Mothersbaugh asked in 1978. Fifty years later, the answer is definitively clear: Nope. We are not human in the sense that DEVO meant—evolved beings capable of rational thought, independent judgment, and moral reasoning. We have become exactly what they predicted: "We are DEVO"—a species defined by our de-evolution rather than our potential.

We are the "pinheads," surrendering our most distinctively human capacities to the very forces DEVO warned us about. We've chosen conformity over individuality, authority over evidence, tribal loyalty over universal ethics, and immediate comfort over long-term survival.

The band's ultimate vindication as cultural anthropologists is complete. What seemed like provocative art in 1978 now reads as documentary footage of humanity's systematic regression. They weren't just making music; they were conducting a real-time study of civilizational collapse.

For those few "alien types,” the weary but dedicated “spuds” still capable of seeing clearly, DEVO's work provides both diagnosis and dark comfort. We are witnessing exactly what they said we would: a species choosing to abandon its evolutionary advantages in favor of primitive herd behavior.

Humanity developed consciousness, achieved the ability to understand reality, created art and science and philosophy—and then voluntarily surrendered it all for the psychological comfort of remaining unconscious. The cosmic joke is complete. (See The Unbearable Weight of Being).

There's a strange comfort in recognizing that beauty exists independent of consciousness. The patterns of physics, the structure of reality itself, the way light moves through space—all of this will continue whether or not there are minds here to contemplate it. If consciousness disappears, the universe doesn't become less beautiful; it simply becomes beautiful without witnesses.

Perhaps the end of human consciousness won't be tragedy, but mercy. The elimination of the capacity for both profound suffering and willful ignorance. The end of a species that achieved the ability to understand reality but chose comfortable delusions instead. (See The Compassionate Case for Extinction).

Some of us are through being cool. But it's too late—we are DEVO. And perhaps, finally—tragically or mercifully—we are through being anything at all.

______

*DEVO poster "Sue Nami" by Zoltron.

Zoltron.com