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

by Tim Urban

As the times get better, they also get more dangerous. More technology makes our species more powerful, which increases risk. And the scary thing is, if the good and bad keep exponentially growing, it doesn’t matter how great the good times become. If the bad gets to a certain level of bad, it’s all over for us.

Unlike technological growth, wisdom seems to oscillate up and down, leading societies to repeat age-old mistakes.

have no mentors, no editors, no one to make sure it all turns out okay. It’s all in our hands. This scares me, but it’s also what gives me hope. If we can all get just a little wiser, together, it may be enough to nudge the story onto a trajectory that points toward an unimaginably good future.

humans are strange animals. A handful of cognitive superpowers, like symbolic language, abstract thinking, complex social relationships, and long-term planning, have allowed humans to take their environment into their own hands in a way no other animal can. In the blink of an eye—around 12,000 years, or 500 generations—humans have crafted a totally novel environment for themselves called civilization.

As great as civilization may be, 500 generations isn’t enough time for evolution to take a shit. So now we’re all here living in this fancy new habitat, using brain software optimized to our old habitat.

modern humans are like modern moths, running on a well-intentioned Primitive Mind that’s constantly misinterpreting the weird world we’ve built for ourselves.

Primitive bliss is great, as long as it’s managed by the Higher Mind, who makes sure it’s done in moderation, it’s done for the right reasons, and no one gets hurt.

History happened the way it did because of what people believed in the past, and what we believe today will write the story of our future.

Your Higher Mind is aware that humans are often delusional, and it wants you to be not delusional. It sees beliefs as the most recent draft of a work in progress, and as it lives more and learns more, the Higher Mind is always happy to make a revision. Because when beliefs are revised, it’s a signal of progress—of becoming less ignorant, less foolish, less wrong. Your Primitive Mind disagrees. For your genes, what’s important is holding beliefs that generate the best kinds of survival behavior—whether or not those beliefs are actually true.1 The Primitive Mind’s beliefs are usually installed early on in life, often based on the prevailing beliefs of your family, peer group, or broader community. The Primitive Mind sees those beliefs as a fundamental part of your identity and a key to remaining in good standing with the community around you. Given all of this, the last thing the Primitive Mind wants is for you to feel humble about your beliefs or interested in revising them. It wants you to treat your beliefs as sacred objects and believe them with conviction. So the Higher Mind’s goal is to get to the truth, while the Primitive Mind’s goal is confirmation of its existing beliefs. These two very different types of intellectual motivation exist simultaneously in our heads. This means that our driving intellectual motivation—and, in turn, our thinking process—varies depending on where we are on the Ladder at any given moment.

But trust assigned wrongly has the opposite effect. When people trust information to be true that isn’t, they end up with the illusion of knowledge—which is worse than having no knowledge at all.

Unconvinceable⬥ Land is a world of green grass, blue sky, and a bunch of people whose beliefs can’t be swayed by any amount of evidence. When you end up here, it means you’ve become a disciple of some line of thinking—a religion, a political ideology, the dogma of a subculture. Either way, your intellectual integrity has taken a backseat to intellectual loyalty.

While the Scientist’s clear mind sees a foggy world, full of complexity and nuance and messiness, the Zealot’s foggy mind shows them a clear, simple world, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions. When you’re thinking like a Zealot, you end up in a totally alternative reality, feeling like you’re an omniscient being in total possession of the truth.

We're social creatures, and as with most things, the way we think is often intertwined with the people we surround ourselves with.

When the rules of a group’s intellectual culture mirror the values of high-rung thinking, the group is what I call an Idea Lab.

people and ideas are separate things. People are meant to be respected, ideas are meant to be batted around and picked apart.

An Echo Chamber is what happens when a group’s intellectual culture slips down to the low rungs: collaborative low-rung thinking. While Idea Labs are cultures of critical thinking and debate, Echo Chambers are cultures of groupthink and conformity. Because while Idea Labs are devoted to a kind of thinking, Echo Chambers are devoted to a set of beliefs the culture deems to be sacred.

Echo Chambers equate a person’s ideas with their identity, so respecting a person and respecting their ideas are one and the same. Disagreeing with someone in an Echo Chamber is seen not as intellectual exploration but as rudeness, making an argument about ideas indistinguishable from a fight.

When you take the already impressive power of human cognition and combine it with the capability of mass cooperation, you have a species with superpowers. But here we come back to our Ladder, because the human Higher Mind and Primitive Mind each have their own way of doing emergence. Idea Labs and Echo Chambers are more than just group cultures—they’re two very different ways to build a human giant.

We talked about how genies can seamlessly combine their forces with other genies to create supergenies. Golems scale up too, but in a very different way—based on conflict. Golems don’t just prefer the Us vs. Them mindset, they rely on it. The presence of a rival golem is a critical part of what holds them together. The way golems combine forces is by sharing a common enemy. If a group of golems vanquishes their common enemy, the alliance will often fracture into smaller rival golems to maintain the Us vs. Them structure.

given that the high rungs are so awesome, why are we so inclined to be down on the shitty low rungs? 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.

Liberal Games freedom isn’t really freedom as much as it’s a freedom-safety compromise. What matters is harm: if an action is harmful, citizens must be protected from it; if it’s not harmful, it’s a right that must itself be protected.

“Liberal” vs. “Progressive” In the U.S., we often use the words “liberal” and “progressive” interchangeably to mean “politically left.” I’m not sure why we started doing this, but I wish we hadn’t. As I mentioned, in this book, I’ll use “progressive” to refer to “politically left.” I’ll use “liberal” in a much broader sense, referring to the Enlightenment philosophy that values individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise. The majority of Americans on both the political Left and Right would call themselves “liberals” under this definition.

Many disagreements are about What Is, because figuring out what’s true is anything but obvious. Sometimes thinkers who agree philosophically will disagree strategically. Some will disagree on all fronts.

Progressivism: concerned with helping society make forward progress through positive changes to the status quo. That progress can come from identifying a flaw in the nation’s systems or its culture and working to root it out, or by trying to make the nation’s strong points even stronger. If the country is a car, progressives are in charge of the gas pedal. Conservatism: concerned with conserving what is already good about society, either by fighting against the erosion of the nation’s strong qualities, or by pushing back against well-intentioned attempts at positive progress that may actually be changes for the worse. In the country car, conservatives manage the brakes (and occasionally the reverse pedal).

country without making changes. Progressivism drives that change. But conservatism is just as important. There are usually some aspects of a country that are already working well—and in these cases, the conservative impulse to resist change will be wise. Progressivism is also the generation of lots of new ideas—most of them untested—and inevitably, many of them will be bad ideas. The conservative resistance to progressive ideas provides an important filter. These aren’t binary positions but rather a spectrum that generates a rich ecosystem of disagreement on any given political issue.

As fierce as the debates can be, high-rung political culture reminds its members that ultimately, they’re all on the same team, working together to navigate their way up the same mountain. People engaged in high-rung politics, without the burden of rigid attachment to any one ideology, can combine ideas from across the spectrum to form a nimble political superbrain that can respond in nuanced ways to changing times.

Up on the high rungs, people know the world is a mess of complexity. They know that people are little microcosms of the messy world—each person an evolving gray smattering of virtues and flaws. Political Disney World is much more fun. Everything is crisp and perfectly digital. Good guys and bad guys, with good ideas and bad ideas. Good politicians and bad politicians with good policies and bad policies, winning their seats in good or bad election outcomes. Right and wrong. Smart and ignorant. Virtuous and evil. 1s and 0s. When a bunch of adults are pretty sure that they live in a Disney movie, it’s usually a sign that primitive psychology has taken over and we’re dealing with golems.

High-rung political thinkers stay inside the circle on the right, criticizing their own teammates or even standing up for the other team when doing so aligns with their principles. But low-rung political culture encourages people to stay inside the left circle, keeping true to their team, even when doing so flies in the face of their principles.

Low-rung thinking, low-rung morality, and low-rung tactics all stem from the same concept: When the Primitive Mind is running the show, our minds are in ancient survival mode, and politics becomes a vehicle for tribalism. When our heads are here, truth, moral consistency, and fair play all go out the window.

A common practice is what we might call trend-anecdote swapping. It’s simple: If you come across an anecdote that supports the narrative, you frame it as evidence of a larger trend to make it seem representative of broader reality. Meanwhile, if there’s an actual trend happening that really is representative of broader reality—but it’s a trend that makes your narrative look bad—you frame it as nothing more than a handful of freak anecdotes.

the straw man fallacy. To straw man your opponent, you invent a weak counterargument to your position and pretend that it’s your opponent’s position, even though it’s not. It’s the real-world version of what shitty college students do in their papers: conjure up a weakling opponent, pound it to the floor, and then declare victory.

Philosopher Nicholas Shackel popularized the motte-and-bailey as a metaphor for a cheap argument tactic, whereby someone holding a convenient but not-very-defensible “bailey” viewpoint could, when facing dissent to that viewpoint, quickly run up the motte and swap out the viewpoint with a far stronger “motte” position.

The motte-and-bailey is often used alongside the straw man fallacy. Political Echo Chambers use the straw man to make their opponent’s position seem weaker than it is, and they use the motte-and-bailey to make their own position appear to be more ironclad than it is.

There’s also the “inoculation effect,” a term coined by social psychologist William McGuire in 1961. The trick of many of our vaccines is to expose a person’s immune system to a weak version of a dangerous virus. After the body defeats the weak version of the virus, it develops an immunity against all versions of the virus, including the strong ones. McGuire found that people’s beliefs worked in a similar way: being repeatedly exposed to weak arguments for a particular position makes people dismissive of all arguments for that position. In other words, if straw man arguments are repeated enough inside a political Echo Chamber, people come to believe they are representative of what the opposition thinks. After enough of this, any version of dissenting arguments—even the strong ones—will be disregarded as nothing more than better-worded versions of the well-known absurd arguments. People will have become “immune” to changing their mind. The same goes for motte-and-baileys—when people continually hear their own views reframed as ironclad mottes, it can make them feel so overconfident in their beliefs they become immune to self-doubt.

As in every natural ecosystem, small changes in our social ecosystem can throw it into chaos. Remembering our big question—what’s our problem?—I believe this concept offers us our first clue: Our environment has been changing at breakneck speed.

if golems are on the rise, it’s not because people have changed biologically—it’s because something has changed about the environment.

This is how a trickle of realignment can quickly accelerate. Conservative Democrats and progressive Republicans are driven to switch parties by their party’s growing hardline ideological faction, which shrinks the area of overlap. Politicians respond in kind by catering their messages more to the hardliners, which causes more defections, and ideological plurality within the parties slowly morphs into ideological purity. In the terms of our proverb, conflict between “brothers” melted away as the parties increasingly became ideologically unified. With the “strangers” mostly gone and the “brothers” more united, the distributed tribalism of the 1950s began to rapidly collapse into a single, concentrated tribal divide between the American Left and the American Right.

the notion that American voters have become ideologically polarized, pointing out data that suggest Americans, while more sorted in a partisan sense, have not grown more extreme in their views (i.e., there aren’t fewer people in the center than there used to be). This is true—ideological sorting is far more prevalent among politicians than voters. But when many of us talk about how politically polarized America seems to be today, we’re talking about something different: affective polarization, i.e., people not trusting or liking those from the other party. This has been on the rise—and

With little risk of reputation damage for biased coverage, narrowcast media can continually bash one side while giving the other side a free pass and end up with a more loyal audience for it. If broadcast media functions like a top-rung Scientist, narrowcast media functions like a third-rung Attorney. Because when the environment changes, so does behavior.

Actual politics, like actual reality, is boring to most people. So tribal media brands do what reality TV producers do—they manufacture a carefully edited, fictional version of politics that’s wildly entertaining.

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.

The 2011 debt ceiling fiasco Every year, after a bunch of squabbling, the two parties attempt to agree on a budget for the next fiscal year. If the budget involves spending more money than the U.S. will make in revenue during that period, the result is a deficit—something that has become commonplace for the U.S. Let’s say in a given cycle, the deficit is X dollars. That means that the agreed-upon budget will entail the U.S. borrowing X at some point during the cycle in order to fully fund the obligations dictated by the budget. This will raise the cumulative national debt, and the way the rules work, increases to the debt must be approved by Congress. So Congress approves the “debt ceiling increase,” the Treasury borrows X, and all payment obligations are made.

the fact that in the recent political environment, Republicans have been more likely to win elections without capturing a majority of the vote. Both parties have done their fair share of gerrymandering, but the Republicans, who control more state legislatures, had until 2022 been more egregious about it.54 Throughout the 2010s, Republicans only needed to win about 45% of total votes for Congress to win the House majority, compared to the Democrats needing to win more than 55% of voters to be the majority party.55 The same phenomenon exists in the Senate, where all states have the same two seats, leaving low-population states (which typically vote Republican) over-represented.⬥ With their ability to win rural states, Republicans have been able to win the Senate majority while losing the aggregate popular vote for Senate. Likewise in presidential elections where, because of the electoral college system, two of the past three Republican victories have come while losing the popular vote, something that hadn’t happened since 1888. All of this has stuck the Democrats with the burden of having to win the center and freed up Republicans to be more ideological. By the end of Obama’s presidency, the Republican Party had sold off so many little pieces of itself that it bore little resemblance to the party of Reagan. Republican tribalism had become the party’s most sacred value. What mattered most was Republican victory in a war against the Democratic enemy, even if that victory had t...

Political transformations don’t happen because everyone in the party changes their mind. They happen because at some point, a movement within the party builds enough support that a tipping point is crossed, like a tug-of-war where the status quo side finally loses its footing. Supporting the new movement, rather than criticizing it, starts to become the winning political strategy. Momentum keeps building until campaigning for the party’s old values and against the new movement’s values becomes political suicide. Old-school politicians are forced to jump on board with the new values,⬥ switch parties, or retire.

No political party will ever be a shining example of high-rungness. But the modern Republican Party has allowed itself to become defined by low-rung thinking, morality, and tactics.

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.

The story of wokeness⬥ is about so much more than wokeness: It’s about individual and group psychology, about cowardice and courage, about battling narratives. Above all, it’s about how societies work, and how they can stop working.

The essence of Liberal Social Justice is the two-part belief that America has made great strides away from its oppressive past and that there is still much work to be done. This kind of self-critical patriotism has been a consistent feature of modern American progressivism, from Martin Luther King’s speeches3 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.

The thing the liberal progressive considers the foundation of a good society, liberalism, is the very thing the Marxist wants to dismantle.

believed traditional Marxism needed an update. So they came up with a kind of Marxism 2.0: Critical Theory. Critical Theory updated the Marxist model by broadening the focus beyond economic class oppression to subtler deceptive systems, like pop culture, education, and institutional structures. They wanted to understand how these systems might entrench uneven power dynamics and leave the oppressed classes so blind to their own oppression that they even embraced it.