2. The horse and rider

Thinkers across cultures and centuries have recognised our inner conflict, and reached for the same metaphor:

• Plato likened the mind to a charioteer steering two horses — one disciplined, one chaotic. Life was the art of harmonising these forces.
• The Katha Upanishad describes the body as a chariot, the intellect as the charioteer, the mind as the reins. Without understanding, the senses become wild horses.
• Buddhism compared the untrained mind to an untamed elephant — powerful, reactive, wandering wherever desire pulls it. Training it required patience, attention, and discipline.
• Freud revived the image for the modern age: the ego as rider, the id as the animal beneath. "One might compare the relation of the ego to the id," he wrote, "with that between a rider and his horse."

The metaphor endures because it captures something we all recognise: the careful planner clashing with the instinctive, animal self. The plurality we explored has shape.

But why does the battle persist?

After millions of years of evolution, shouldn't our minds be unified by now, free from inner turmoil?

It's tempting to imagine we're halfway through an upgrade, that reason will eventually conquer impulse. But the split isn't a flaw. It's required.

Long before humans existed, our ancestors had already evolved fast, reactive intelligence — instant evaluation of what's desired or feared, learning from experience, and acting quickly and decisively. This is the horse of the metaphor: quick, decisive, attuned to danger and opportunity.

Much later, expanding brains developed the capacity to see higher-level patterns, and predict a little further ahead, eventually creating symbols of the world, and manipulating them with thought and reason. We developed the rider: the capacity to understand, predict and control the future.

But the rider didn't replace the horse. It couldn't.

A bigger, more complex brain reaches further but decides slower. A simpler brain keeps you alive now but forgoes those gains. That tension helps explain why “more intelligence” doesn’t simply increase in every species: deliberation is costly, and selection rewards action that arrives in time.

Evolution’s brilliant solution wasn’t to merge the systems into one compromise, but to keep them separate — loosely coupled — and arbitrate between them. Fast habitual control when there’s no time, or point, and slower deliberation when there is.

This architecture long predates humans; it shows up clearly in mammalian control circuits. What our ancestors added was scale: symbolic abstraction, language, and the ability to simulate distant futures. The split was already there. We extended what the deliberative side could reach.

Your inner conflict is what that architecture feels like from the inside.

With two systems of control, there will always be disagreements.

Sometimes the rider overrides the horse.

You hold back the angry words. Push through the fear. Stick to the diet one more day. This feels like victory, like the rational self winning.

But override is suppression, not transformation.

Suppression takes energy. It doesn't last. And it changes nothing underneath. When the grip loosens — when you're tired, stressed, or caught off guard — the pattern returns, as if the decision never happened. The horse was never persuaded. It was restrained.

Sometimes the horse overrides the rider.

Under strong enough drive or threat, the rider doesn't steer at all. It watches. It narrates. It produces explanations for decisions it didn't make to maintain at least a feeling of control.

You've felt this. You decided to stay calm — and didn't. The anger moved faster than your intention. Or you swore you wouldn't check your phone, reach for the drink, say the thing you'd regret — and watched yourself do it anyway.

This isn't a malfunction. This is the architecture working as designed. When the horse reads urgency, or things it wants or fears, it acts. The rider catches up later, story in hand. The rider's voice is the one you hear. It's easy to assume it's in charge, but it rarely is.

So the clashes you feel inside aren't signs that you're broken. They're signs that you're running a hybrid system — ancient survival machinery paired with the capacity to think and reason.

Neither system is superior. The skilled horse keeps you alive. The rider lets you plan and choose. The problem isn't that one exists — it's that loose coupling means they are often misaligned, each doing its job, neither wrong, but you caught in the middle.

The rider can't simply overpower the horse — that's suppression, not change. The horse can't be argued out of what it knows — it doesn't speak the rider's language.Recognising the split as architecture, not failure, is where change begins.

But the split in control is only half the story. Think of biting into a lemon—your mouth responds even when the lemon is only imagined. So there's more here than speed and control.