What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

by Tim Urban

Your Higher Mind is aware that humans are often delusional, and it wants you to be not delusional. It sees beliefs as the most recent draft of a work in progress, and as it lives more and learns more, the Higher Mind is always happy to make a revision. Because when beliefs are revised, it’s a signal of progress—of becoming less ignorant, less foolish, less wrong.

Only a minority of people are hyperpartisan.18 But internet algorithms make people who are already extreme even more extreme.19 On social media, these voices disproportionately drive the conversation, making people feel like things are even more nasty and polarized than they actually are.20

The reason I call disgust the scariest of all human emotions is that it’s a trigger for dehumanization, and dehumanization is the doorway to the worst things humans do. It’s not a coincidence that two of the most horrifying events in recent human history—the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide—were made possible by disgust.

Even the American flag is, today, increasingly viewed by many on the left as a right-wing symbol. When a nation’s Primitive Minds become maniacally fixated on a particular Us/Them divide, phenomena that would normally take some of the heat off the divide just become more fuel for it.

Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country. ―Molly Ivins

I mistakenly thought that what I objected to was “the Right.” But the Right wasn’t the problem. The problem was the Lower Right. The problem wasn’t too much conservatism, it was too little conservatism. I hadn’t understood that high-rung conservatism is a critical part of a healthy country and that the Republican Party I knew was actually depriving my country of it.

Criticism attacks ideas, cancel culture punishes people. Criticism enriches discussion, cancel culture shuts down discussion. Criticism helps lift up the best ideas, cancel culture protects the ideas of the culturally powerful. Criticism is a staple of liberalism, cancel culture is the epitome of illiberalism.

No neutrality allowed is a trademark of every low-rung movement with way too much power.

When people lose the ability to speak openly or to criticize falsehoods, it becomes difficult to separate truth from fiction.

The Lower Right and Lower Left both are illiberal. They’re both anti-science. They’re both hypocritical. They’re both authoritarian. They’re both bigoted. The political uniform that low-rung movements wear is just a façade under which lies a golem with all the trademark low-rung qualities.

The stories we’ve talked about—of the decline of the Republican Party and the election of a demagogue willing to undermine trust in the electoral process; of Social Justice Fundamentalism hijacking institution after institution and rewriting the way our children are educated—aren’t really stories about political parties or political movements. They’re stories of millions of people standing on the sideline as people bully their Idea Labs into becoming Echo Chambers, as companies betray their founding missions, as politicians fail their constituents, as mass shaming roars back into fashion; silently thinking, “that’s not how we do things here!” When a person is intimidated into silence, their mind’s light disappears from the world and is contained only to their head.

Mass confusion allows divisive ideologies to indoctrinate more people, who join their armies of intimidation, causing more people’s lights to go dark as the danger of speaking your mind rises. Silence is contagious, and as it spreads, the big brain loses its ability to think straight and society grows ever more confused. This is the vicious cycle that makes a society forget history.2 This is how good times can lead to foolish people, who create bad times.

The first part of our solution is awareness, and the gateway to awareness is humility. We all spend time in Unconvinceable Land as Attorneys, sometimes even as Zealots. We all identify a little too much with certain ideas. We’re all unknowingly standing on Child’s Hill with at least a few topics, where our level of conviction far exceeds our level of knowledge. When it comes to the beliefs we hold most sacred, we’re all prone to confirmation bias. In one way or another, we’re all gullible, all in denial, all delusional Disney protagonists. We all have out-groups and we all dehumanize the people in them. We’re all tribal. We’re all hypocrites. We’re all wrong. Because we’re all human. The most important thing for us to remember is that we do our rational and moral thinking with a not-that-smart tool that was designed to keep an ancient primate alive. Staying aware of this can help us be our wisest selves and reach our potential.

Think about the beliefs of those you disagree with. Do they have any merit? Could you state them to your opponent, in all their complexity, in a way that would make your opponent say, “Yup, that’s what I believe”? Or would you oversimplify or misrepresent those beliefs? If you can’t steel man your opponent’s beliefs, you don’t yet know whether you disagree with them or not. Everyone believes they are fighting on the side of the good, the right, the vulnerable—even your opponents.

When someone is acting like a monster, they’re not a monster, they’re a human mired in an internal tug-of-war and losing. We all have topics that bring out our most biased, irrational selves. We all have areas of embarrassing ignorance. You might be a better high-runger than they are about a particular thing—but they are almost certainly better at it than you in some other area.

Us vs. Them is always a delusion. The Story of Us isn’t a story of good guys vs. bad guys but one about the tug-of-war that exists within each human head, each community, each society. In this epic story, heading together toward an uncertain fate, there is no Them. Just one big Us.