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

by Tim Urban

The human cognitive weaknesses a genie tries to mitigate are the golem’s strengths. Confirmation bias tricks like cherry-picking, motivated skepticism, and motivated reasoning benefit hugely from economies of scale, as the snappiest and most convincing articulations of the sacred ideas spread quickly through the system. Individual biases, all pointing in the same direction in an Echo Chamber, scale up to make the golem’s ultra-biased macro-mind. And while individual minds inside a golem may have doubts about the sacred ideas, the social pressure of Echo Chamber culture keeps the giant as a whole steadfast in its beliefs. If the genie is the ultimate Scientist, the golem is the ultimate Zealot—a giant that’s totally certain of itself, totally unable to learn or change its mind, and worse at thinking than the average human.

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. When I look out at the world today, I see a rising epidemic of low-rung thinking and behavior. Too many of the Ladder struggles that exist in our heads, in our communities, in our political parties, and in our societies are slipping in the wrong direction.

And there’s neurological evidence that politics really does ignite parts of our brain we’d associate with low-rung thinking.⬥ There’s no shortage of studies showing that politics tends to turn people into low-rung thinkers—and this is most pronounced in people with high levels of education.2

Internet algorithms are profit-maximizing mechanisms that want to spoon-feed me whatever I’m most likely to click on. This is a win-win, symbiotic relationship—until it’s not. When an algorithm is jibing with your Higher Mind, it’s your friend. When it’s luring in your Primitive Mind against your Higher Mind’s will, the relationship is parasitic.

Separate realities are a natural consequence of market incentives moving from the North Star region closer to the lower corners of the Media Matrix, where there’s almost no overlap in coverage between the two sides. It makes sense that those most hooked on political media would be the most delusional, the same way consumers of political news in dog-raccoon-ville left the pro-dog and pro-raccoon crowds with totally different perceptions of reality.

By the time Barack Obama came to office, these trends had only intensified. The Tea Party movement burst into prominence,37 and with the help of right-wing media (by 2010, Fox News profits had crossed $700 million—more than the combined profits of MSNBC and CNN38), Republicans in 2010 elected a wave of the most conservative representatives in almost 200 years.

President Obama’s actions cannot be understood except as an expression of “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Liberals constitute a “secular-socialist machine” that is “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.” There is “a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us” and “is prepared to use violence.” … In San Antonio, Gingrich declared, “I am convinced that, if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America,” his grandchildren will live “in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”40

There was a brief moment, in the run-up to the 2016 election, when many prominent Republicans stood firmly opposed to Trump. Ezra Klein writes: Ted Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” Rick Perry said Trump’s candidacy was “a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.” Rand Paul said Trump is “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag. A speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president.” Marco Rubio called him “dangerous” and warned that we should not hand “the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.”63 But once it was clear the tide was turning, nearly all major Republicans—including Cruz, Perry, Paul, and Rubio—pulled a 180 and backed Trump.

The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place, as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.65 This has been

Growing up, when I observed the Republicans and thought, “Whatever my problems with the Left, the Right is definitely not for me,” I wasn’t entirely wrong. The Republican Party I grew up with was, for the most part, what I thought it was. But I was missing the real story. 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. I also mistakenly thought that, since the problem was on the right, there could never be reason to worry about the other side of the spectrum. But the low rungs span the whole political spectrum, and the vortex affects the whole country. I didn’t understand at the time that the same ecosystem changes that had disabled the high-rung immune system on the right could do the very same thing much closer to home.

Crenshaw uses Black women as her primary example, but she points out that the idea of intersectionality could be applied to two or more social justice movements of any kind. Taken to its full extent, intersectionality can be used to arrange every demographic group in society into a hierarchy of oppression, which she explains with this metaphor: Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked—feet standing on shoulders—with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling. Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way reside.18

In 1938, blues musician Lead Belly sang a song he wrote about “the Scottsboro boys,” a group of Black teenagers who were sent to jail after being falsely accused of raping two white women on a train (one of the women later admitted it was a made-up charge). After the song, Lead Belly talked about the case and advised fellow Black Americans “to stay woke—keep their eyes open.” Stay woke. The term has been a part of the Black American lexicon for a very long time. In more recent years, the term has evolved from the way Lead Belly was using it—warning Black people to stay alert to dangerous situations that might arise—to a broader meaning about staying aware of racist systems of oppression. After the release of Erykah Badu’s 2007 song Master Teacher, with a chorus that repeated the line “I stay woke,” the term exploded into the mainstream.