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

by Tim Urban

My society is currently acting like a poopy-pantsed four-year-old who dropped its ice cream

Looking at politics horizontally often misses the real story. Calling the Republican Fundamentalists the “far right” suggests that they were defined by their conservatism. But a bunch of their stances—their openness to nuclear war, their support for racial apartheid, their anti-democratic tactics at the convention—were a direct affront to conservatism. The RFs weren’t the far right—they were the Lower Right.

The scary thing about the Republican story isn’t that there is a red political golem that does golem things like trying to grab power by breaking the rules, by enforcing conformity, by undermining trust in the electoral process. Political golems are an inevitability within any liberal democracy. The scary thing is that it’s succeeding.

Free speech means that even the most vile and objectionable ideas can be aired freely. This is critical, because governments that enact censorship policies rarely call them “censorship” policies—they usually say they’re banning some form of vile or objectionable speech.

As the cultural tide shifts, the cost of open resistance grows.

So an identified target is, with or without evidence, a guilty villain—which also means a villain necessitating severe punishment.

American poet Carl Sandburg once wrote: “When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.”

Do a self-audit. Where in your internal life is your Primitive Mind holding the reins? What are the triggers that activate your Primitive Mind and leave you buried in fog? Where do you tend to be at your best—consistently high rung, wise, and grown up? What is it about those moments that gives your Higher Mind such a strong advantage? Can you replicate that elsewhere? Think about your beliefs. Play the “why” game with them, like an annoying four-year-old. Why do you believe what you believe? When did those ideas become your beliefs? Were they installed in you by someone else? Are they beholden to some tribe’s checklist of approved ideas? If they are authentically yours, when were they last updated? Your Primitive Mind thinks your beliefs are sacred objects carved in stone, but they’re not—they’re hypotheses written in pencil, and if you’re thinking up on the high rungs, you should probably be pretty active with the eraser.