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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Urban
Read between
February 21 - February 24, 2023
It’s what our Primitive Minds are programmed to do because it was the best way to survive in our distant past. Low-rung thinking, low-rung culture, and low-rung giant-building are all ancient survival behavior—behavior that was necessary a long time ago but today seems a lot like moths flying toward streetlights.
None of this means the system isn’t working. Modern democracies weren’t built to eradicate low-rung psychology or low-rung culture. They were built to ensure that low-rung giants wouldn’t be able to do what they’ve done throughout history: conquer the country.
“Small individual bias can lead to large collective
people prefer diversity significantly more than they dislike being in the minority.
So cultural sorting yields political sorting as a byproduct, and the resulting homogeneity then makes everyone’s political views more extreme.
Women have spent a huge part of the past—in the U.S. and nearly everywhere else—living under a slanted seesaw. For centuries, women have been prohibited from learning how to read, attending university, voting, and entering the workplace. They’ve been treated like lower caste members within their own marriages, expected to “honor and obey”52 their husbands and to endure marital physical abuse that for a long time was largely considered tolerable (and legal) behavior. Women have suffered at the hands of cultural norms that believed “boys will be boys” and that accepted a certain level of sexual
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When a conflict occurred in the U.S., all parties, regardless of who they were, would be subject to the same due process and given a fair trial.
At times in U.S. history, the justice system has been overwritten with invisible ink.
“believe white people.”
But here again, SJF aims to remedy one form of double standards by applying new double standards in the reverse direction.
or “Automatically believe women.” This absolutism is wrong, unhelpful, and impossible to defend. The slogan should have been “Don’t dismiss women,” “Give women a fair hearing,” or even “Due process is great.”54
direction to apply a counterforce.
With today’s awareness about blackface, that Mr. T portrayal would be an open defiance of a widespread taboo and a dismissal of the well-known reasons for the taboo.
This kind of thing happens a lot in a rapidly changing society. Much of what’s considered racist or misogynist or homophobic today was broadly culturally acceptable in the past.
Even if the harm of meat-eating practices is the same across time, the people engaging in those practices should be judged with their times in mind.
a necessary corrective response to the pervasive systemic injustice we’ve been referring to as the Force.
and the job of the radical left is to be intensely critical of the status quo and skeptical about traditions and institutions.
continually push more moderate progressives to keep their attention on those possibilities.
This traps the populace in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma.
tremendous viewpoint diversity, you may start to wonder if you’re the only person thinking what you’re thinking. Seeing only everyone’s orange exterior, you might assume everyone actually believes the orange viewpoint.
The newer narrative had truth on its side, and in a free marketplace of ideas, truth usually prevails. The same process that makes the national giant more knowledgeable can also drive its moral growth.
violence. Free speech offers a better way.
But free speech gives the powerless a voice—the ability to spark a mind-changing movement that gains so much momentum, it moves our beliefs and our cultural norms, which in turn moves the Overton window, which moves policy, and then law.
Humans, individually, are often bad at truth.
they form a genie and collectively can be pretty good at truth.
“We’re operating on like, five or ten different definitions of racism simultaneously at the moment as a society. And yet the word ‘racist’ carries a severe stigma. So the stigma is very precise, but the definition is very vague.”
As Ronson puts it: “The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.”
To be a good liberal means to criticize, not cancel. But it also means that you stand up for liberalism—when you see cancel culture happening, you try to stop it. This is what Popper’s Paradox calls for.
An institution is only what it is willing to stand up for.
Homicide is the leading cause of death among young Black men in America,171 while growing up in a single-parent home is one of the best predictors of poverty.172 But violence and one-parent homes aren’t phenomena easily explained by SJF's notion of the Force, so they are left out of much of today’s progressive discussion.
These bills are a classic example of fighting illiberalism with more illiberalism, and it adds credibility to the straw man argument that the whole countermovement to “CRT in schools” is a front for eradicating all discussion of race in K-12 classrooms.
The modern era’s political Echo Chambers have a special knack for making all times seem desperate, which makes the breaking of shared rules seem like justified desperate measures.⬥
On the other hand, the actual enemy of a political golem is the genie above it. The real threat to SJF comes not from white supremacy or Fox News mockery or Republican bans but from vocal pushback from principled progressives.
The real threat to Trump’s mission to discredit the electoral process comes from vocal conservatives who value conservative principles over loyalty to Trump.
Most high-rungers don’t have the stomach for this, so they go silent. Those who continue to speak up for position B mostly have their voices drowned out in the chaos. What’s left is a battle of good-vs-evil narratives. Few people have the time to dig deeply into the nuances of the topic, so millions end up adopting these low-rung narratives as their reality by default.
This is how American society is being conquered. Not by a foreign enemy. Not by the Left or by the Right. But by its own worst nature.
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.
It would not surprise me if a decade from now, the lion’s share of cancel culture stories were the work of the political Right and it was the Left electing the demagogue president.
Silence is contagious, and as it spreads, the big brain loses its ability to think straight and society grows ever more confused.
The exhausted majority is a sleeping giant with immense potential energy.
There’s a reason liberal democracies have persisted for centuries: they’re remarkably robust and resilient.
Conversely, if you’re hiding your Inner Self out of fear, you’re going to end up surrounded by people who like the person you’re pretending to be. Meanwhile, the people who actually like you don’t realize they like you.
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,
