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

by Tim Urban

She could accept the prevailing culture. She’d probably be uncomfortable with all of the disagreement, and with the inevitable offensive views that would be part of it. Or she could issue a challenge to the culture by becoming openly offended. This would be an attempt to impose the rules of Lola’s preferred Echo Chamber on Heidi’s dinner party.

In the second scenario, High-Rung Heidi and her other guests would have two options: Temporarily cede the culture to Lola. Accommodate her sensitivities and after the initial conflict, avoid controversial topics for the rest of the night. Refuse to cede the culture to Lola. Tell Lola they think she’s being overly sensitive and go on with their discussion.

Reacting to decreases in the prevalence of harms like racism, sexism, and homophobia by expanding the definition of those concepts can help activists address the nuanced ways oppression can persist long after the more blatant instances have been curtailed.

When concept creep gets out of control, it allows a far wider range of behaviors to qualify as bigotry, abuse, and trauma, which means a far wider range of people viewing themselves as victims of bigotry, abuse, and trauma. It also turns a far wider range of people into bigots, abusers, and traumatizers. Many more victims = many more villains.

The Belief axis has to do with the Inner Self: what people actually think about Ideology X. The Authenticity axis is about what people say they believe—i.e., how well their Outer Self matches their Inner Self.

The 1950s saw an unusual wave of illiberalism: the Red Scare. The specifics of that moment—post-war uncertainty, widespread fear of the threat of foreign influence and nuclear war, loyalty and patriotism being elevated to sacred values—left a liberal society especially vulnerable to a particular kind of accusation: Communist. On today’s college campuses, the combination of ideological homogeneity and the sacredness of social justice, alongside the backdrop of the country’s hypercharged political tribalism, similarly created an unusual vulnerability to a particular golem: Social Justice Fundamentalism.

In suppressing the Nuanced Story, SJF idea supremacy hindered the path toward knowledge and, if anything, slowed progress in the arena of women and STEM. But it also did further harm, causing these other two stories to spread: one that feeds misogyny; another that fuels anger and hopelessness.

In a conflict between a student and a faculty member, almost nothing is at stake for the student beyond the possibility of receiving a low grade ... But the teacher could be fired.104

A fear of being targeted by the mob induces us to signal publicly that we are part of it.8

But the critics seemed to be forgetting the difference between using and mentioning a word—what’s known as the “use-mention distinction.”

In his 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies, philosopher Karl Popper describes a “Paradox of Tolerance” like this: If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

This is only part of Popper’s Paradox, but it’s the part that’s most widely referenced—often quoted more colloquially as, “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”

The problem here is that tolerance, in itself, is not a principle. “Tolerance” and “intolerance” only take on moral mean...

Not only is SJF idea supremacy not justified by Popper’s Paradox, it is exactly what Popper was warning about.

This highlights the massive difference between criticism and cancel culture. 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.

CNN: A rock that students call a symbol of racism has been removed from University of Wisconsin (2021)

Study after study after study have come to the same conclusion: there is little evidence that diversity trainings work.⬥82 On the other hand, there is significant evidence that the trainings can be counterproductive. Diversity trainings can reduce sympathy,83 reinforce bias and stereotypes,84 cause claims of discrimination to be taken less seriously,85 drive a wedge between demographic groups,⬥86 and decrease morale.87

“training should instead be tightly connected to specific organizational objectives and the specific tasks different team members are responsible for.”

Rather than discuss bias and prejudice exclusively in the context of how privileged groups perceive oppressed groups, he says, discuss these phenomena as what they really are: general cognitive tendencies that all people are susceptible to. Rather than training people to avoid conflict—by teaching members of minority groups to be extra sensitive to perceived slights and leaving members of privileged groups walking on eggshells—trainings should teach people how to manage conflict. While conflict can bring people together and drive innovation when managed constructively, trying to rid the workplace of conflict is not only futile, it stifles creativity.

A company can and should demand that employees are not racist at work. But whether employees reject racism for SJF reasons, for liberal reasons, or for any other reasons is not a company matter.

swapping out teacher training with ideological training is not basic social progress. Infusing schooling for children as young as four with politics, using one and only one political lens, is not basic social progress. Indoctrinating students, instead of teaching them critical thinking skills, is not basic social progress. Imposing severe penalties on teachers, parents, and students who stray from the orthodoxy is not basic social progress.

One tweet in June 2020 read: My friend is being told by higher ups at her work that silence on her personal social media accounts is her being complicit in perpetuating injustice…how is this not harassment?116

Silence is violence. “Not racist” is racist. Different wording—same idea. Both reduce the world to good vs. bad and eliminate the possibility of neutrality, equating the neutral position with the “bad” position.

According to the website Payscale, when controlling for “all compensable variables”—i.e., when comparing apples to apples—the gender wage gap drops dramatically, from 18% to 1%. Women earn 99 cents—not 77 or 80 or 83 cents—for every dollar a man makes, for the same work.

SJF hinders productive discussions on complex social topics in two ways: it spreads Position C far and wide, and it makes it taboo to take Position B. It is a Political Disney World narrative with no room for gray area—you’re either part of the in-group and fully aligned with SJF, or you’re Person A—an out-grouped right-winger and an enemy of social justice. By conflating Person B with Person A, SJF puts a target on the back of anyone who pushes back against its gospel.

In 2020, The New York Times published an article arguing that orchestras should end blind auditions, because they produced orchestras that were not diverse enough, with too many Asian and white musicians. The writer was adhering to Kendi’s definition of an antiracist. The policy of auditioning musicians without seeing who they were was producing an outcome with a racial disparity—and was therefore a racist policy. The proposed solution—to get rid of blind auditions to ensure proportional racial representation among orchestra musicians—would inherently discriminate against some Asian and white musicians who would have made the cut under blind auditions. This is, according to SJF, the antiracist way.

This is the distinct feeling I’ve had reading about what’s happening at companies and institutions across society—from Harvard to the New York Times, Disney to Google, the American Medical Association to the American Booksellers Association. So many institutions are suddenly behaving nothing like themselves—and often in direct contradiction to their stated values. The reason, in each case, seems to me to be the same: the entity’s telos—its core founding purpose—has been superseded by Social Justice Fundamentalism.

And it’s here that America’s Upper Left has faltered in recent years. Instead of engaging in the full two-front battle, they only engaged with their conservative opponents, losing their nerve when it came to a major threat down on the Lower Left: Social Justice Fundamentalism.

Look at a successful progressive movement of the past and you’ll hear a lot of “common-humanity” rhetoric—the kind captured by civil rights activist Pauli Murray in her essay An American Credo: I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods. When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.

Ben Appel writes: Young boys and girls, not to mention impressionable adults, are being led to believe that if, say, a boy likes to wear skirts or put on makeup, he might really be a girl on the inside; or if a girl would rather play football than cheerlead, then perhaps she’s not a girl, but really a boy, or nonbinary. By means of this “progressive” ideology, we regress to a time in which the categories of “boy” and “girl” were defined in a narrow and reactionary manner.

The American Psychological Association, for example, defines “transgender” as “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.” So if you were born a girl but you behave or express yourself in a way typically associated with boys (aka a tomboy), the APA definition seems to imply that this makes you less of a girl.

The exhausted majority is a sleeping giant with immense potential energy.

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.

I can pretty much guarantee that your Inner Self has some major admirers out there. Why not find out who they are?