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

by Tim Urban

Many ideologies prey on people’s worst instincts. SJF also preys on people’s best—their empathy, their desire to help the marginalized and make the world a better place, their determination to stand up to forces of evil.

Social Justice Fundamentalism is bad for those who are canceled by it, for those who are silenced by it, for kids and employees indoctrinated by it, for those affected by its illiberal policies, and for everyone relying on the core values of companies and institutions across the country. SJF is also bad for social justice itself, for progressivism in general, and even for the people who believe and promote it.

Nothing has been more of a boon to America’s big red golem than the rise of Social Justice Fundamentalism.

Just as the rise of Donald Trump was the greatest gift to SJF activists, SJF is continual fuel for right-wing low-rungness, providing endless content for Fox News segments, political campaigns, and QAnon forums.

The enduring goal of white supremacists is to get as many white people as possible to view themselves as part of a white identity group—a mission hugely aided by SJF forcing concepts like whiteness, white privilege, white complicity, and white silence into the mainstream.

The spread of baseless conspiracy theories within the Right's bubble is a dangerous trend. An authoritarian response by the Left only makes the problem worse.

It's said that desperate times call for desperate measures, but it turns out that “desperate measures” are quite useful in normal times as well. 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.

Low-rung movements are driven by fear and hatred of a common enemy, and each low-rung narrative centers around its most important character—its Disney villain. The red golem and blue golem, while hating each other, also need each other. They are each other’s greatest asset.

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.

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.

My problem isn’t with progressivism or conservatism but the fact that, at the moment, Americans are being deprived of the high-rung version of both by low-rung groups wearing blue and red uniforms.

across the political spectrum, high-rungness seems to be losing its grip on our society’s thinking, its norms, its behavior. Across the whole country—and across many parts of today’s world—low-rungness is on the rise.

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.

We looked at story after story of companies and institutions facing what we called “a moment of truth”—situations in which leaders were forced to choose between integrity and popularity. In story after story, these moments went wrong, not because leadership didn’t know the right thing to do but because they lacked the courage to lead.