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

by Tim Urban

there was a burgeoning movement to replace class politics with identity politics as the organizing vehicle of modern Marxism.

In pre-modern times, it was common for different humans to believe in different denominations of truth—like, for example, the prominent religious doctrines, each of which had its own version of the truth. Modernity replaced faith-based thinking and divine authority with the idea of a single objective truth and a universal process for discovering it. Postmodernist thinkers take issue with this. A philosophy that emerged in France during the 1960s, postmodernism takes Critical Theory to the next level. Postmodernist thinkers like the critical approach but they don’t think Critical Theory takes it far enough.⬥

While postmodernism offered broad analysis rather than ideas for real-world action, the Critical Social Justice framework was specifically geared toward making change. The fusion of the two created a new beast—one with both the deconstructive capability of the postmodernists and the political drive of Marxists and Critical Theorists.

the genesis of a new ideology I call Social Justice Fundamentalism (SJF). SJF is a philosophical Frankenstein. It’s the Marxist framework, applied to American social justice, merged with the postmodern rejection of modernity, while swapping out postmodern skepticism toward all metanarratives with a total embrace of the SJF metanarrative.

intersectionality provided SJF with something physicists haven’t yet discovered: a unifying theory of everything. Intersectionality weaves the fundamental forces of social justice into a single exertion that permeates all aspects of human existence—every interaction, every assumption, every social norm. I call it the Force.

The narrow focus on the Force is a key distinction between Social Justice Fundamentalism and Liberal Social Justice. In the world of Liberal Social Justice, the Intersectional Stack is indeed a valid lens to examine one form of justice discrepancy in society. But it’s only one of many such axes, along with others which arrange people according to wealth, intelligence, talent, attractiveness, temperament, age, geography, family structure, family connections, quality of upbringing, education, and others. Each axis burdens certain people with baggage and lifts others up with balloons. But SJF, depicting society through the lens of the Force, sees the Intersectional Stack as by far the most meaningful axis of advantage and disadvantage. We see this in the way it defines key terms: While Liberal Social Justice considers many forms of diversity—racial, ideological, socioeconomic, geographic, etc.—in SJF, “diversity” almost always means “racial diversity.” Along the same lines, believers in Liberal Social Justice see society as a product of many social elements—power, culture, competition, integrity, altruism, persuasion, compassion, forgiveness, etc.—while SJF views society mostly in terms of power. In SJF, power among groups is the governing force that determines why things are the way they are, how they got that way, and how things will go in the future. The two lines of thinking also differ in their approach to solutions. While Liberal Social Justice tries to make improvement...

This distinction lies behind a major difference between the liberal and SJF worldviews. The liberal mindset aims for equality of opportunity, and any affirmative action measures are geared toward that goal. This mindset assumes that, for lots of potential reasons, equality of opportunity may often yield inequality of outcome. But SJF, believing that any disparity between groups can only be the result of injustice, sees equality of opportunity and equality of outcome as one and the same. Any instance of inequality of outcome between groups is, in SJF, evidence of the presence of a wooden fence—and therefore, a just society should take measures to ensure equal outcomes.

Liberal Social Justice has no single narrative. It’s a big Idea Lab—a supergenie made up of collaborating smaller genies, which are made up of independent individual minds. It’s a messy space that includes libertarians, socialists, and all the ground in between, arguing about everything from affirmative action to individual accountability to the lingering effects of historical injustice to the nuanced definitions of concepts like fairness, justice, and equality.

There’s a lot of data showing that progressive activists, as a group, are overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and college educated.41 So it’s unsurprising that SJF activists, many of whom hail from high-ranking universities, often seem to match these demographics. This creates an odd contradiction: Most of the people speaking with authority about how members of privileged groups should take a backseat on issues of oppression are members of privileged groups. Standpoint theory is supposed to invalidate what these mostly white scholars have to say about a topic like racism. But for their own ideas, these scholars make an exception. Likewise, standpoint theory would have these scholars defer to the opinions of more oppressed people—even when those people disagree with SJF. But again, we see an exception.

In SJF, sacred object becomes any object. Mockery or disrespect becomes any form of usage. Because they are adding the Force into the equation.

While it’s certainly admirable to have been ahead of your time on a moral issue, punishing or disgracing someone for saying or doing something in the past that was prevalent at that time but considered taboo today makes little sense.

A phenomenon that psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance” begins to set in: when no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes. Over time, hearing everyone expressing the same viewpoint, people start to doubt their own beliefs and assume that if everyone is saying it, there must be something to it.

Controlling what people can say controls what the giant can think—which eventually leads to controlling what individuals think. Over time, a superintelligent genie turns into a mindless golem. This is the true power of censorship. And once a society succumbs to censorship, they can get stuck in it for a long time.

When the national brain changes its mind, politicians follow. The Overton window is a newish term—named after late political scientist Joseph Overton—but it’s a concept as old as democracy itself: that for any political issue at any given time, there’s a range of ideas the public will accept as politically reasonable. Positions outside of that range will be considered by most voters to be too radical or too backward to be held by a serious candidate.

Oppression has been a regular feature of human societies since the dawn of time, and in the Power Games, the primary tool to fight oppression has been violence. Free speech offers a better way. The rich are protected and empowered by their money, the elite by their connections, the majority by their vote, while minority views often end up left out. 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.

A veritas campus trains students to think like top-rung Scientists who are conscious of their own biases, adept at the arts of balanced skepticism and intellectual humility, and suspicious of unearned conviction.

Idea supremacy = low-rung thinking + authoritarianism.

Idea supremacy extends beyond friendships. An idea supremacist tries to enforce their Echo Chamber upon a much wider space. A classroom, a company, a social media platform.

Victimhood culture “rejects one of dignity culture’s main injunctions—to ignore insults and slights—and instead encourages at least some people to take notice of them and take action against them. The idea is that such offenses do cause harm, just like violence.”

In other words, victimhood cultures “combine the sensitivity to slight that we see in honor cultures with the willingness to appeal to authorities and other third parties that we see in dignity cultures. And victimhood culture differs from both honor and dignity cultures in highlighting rather than downplaying the complainants’ victimhood.”

it’s pretty hard to picture Black Americans in South Carolina in 1925 orchestrating fake attacks. Or Jews in Germany in 1938. Or LGBTQ people in Afghanistan today. We have fake hate crimes in the U.S. because they’re socially rewarded by a culture in which victimhood enhances one’s status.

Concept creep has then taken those powerful words, so loaded with negative meaning, and cheapened their meaning without cheapening the punch they pack. As journalist Coleman Hughes put it, “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.”

Frederick Douglass once said, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” That’s why “censorship” isn’t really the right word for what’s happening here. People aren’t banning speakers from speaking; they can go speak elsewhere. They’re preventing their fellow students from hearing the ideas. Students pay a lot of money for the privilege of being in a place that expands their intellectual horizons, and SJF idea supremacy robs students of a critical element of their college experience.

The real power of idea supremacy is that you only have to achieve a little of it through punishments and public shamings. In an environment soon infused with fear, self-censorship does most of the heavy lifting. The stories that make the headlines give just a hint of the problem, because there will never be any headlines about the speakers not invited, the conversations not started, the hands not raised in the first place.

While these discrepancies may partially account for the gender ratio disparity in STEM professions, social psychologist Sean Stevens notes an additional possibility: Of all people qualified to work in STEM fields, “the women in this elite group generally have much better verbal skills than the men in that elite group. This means that these women may be better employees than men who match them on quantitative skills, but because they have such superior verbal skills they have more choices available to them when selecting a profession.”75 Qualified women, perhaps with a more diverse set of cognitive talents, may distribute themselves among fields more widely than their male STEM equivalents.

So you may be a brilliant, accomplished scholar in the life sciences, but if you’ve spent too much time studying biology and not enough on progressive political activism, you’re out. Even if you are a progressive activist, but instead of working on social justice activism, you spend your time on local politics, climate change activism, and gun control activism—you’re out. If you’re a social justice activist but subscribe to Liberal Social Justice, not SJF, you’re out.

The Social Justice Horse that SJF rides around in talks about noble-sounding things like diversity, inclusion, justice, and safety. But inside the Social Justice Horse are all kinds of low-rung, illiberal things like tribalism, bullying, bigotry, censorship, witch-hunting, anti-intellectualism, indoctrination, discrimination, and hypocrisy. All the signs of a big, lumbering golem.

The dramatic shift from Idea Lab campuses to Echo Chamber campuses has mostly happened over the past decade (people who have seen it happen firsthand point to late 2013 as the moment when the shift began to accelerate).137 Instead of pushing students off Child’s Hill toward more mature thinking, today’s colleges are nailing their feet to the top of it.

people are at their most politically and ideologically impressionable between their mid-teens and mid-20s—so what they’re taught in college can stick with them forever.138 When, during those years, students are encouraged to think like political Zealots, it makes tomorrow’s society more politically polarized. And when millions of young people are encouraged to act like idea supremacists, idea supremacy quickly spreads into other parts of society.

The Liberal Games is an artificial construct built to protect us from the Power Games. When a major part of a liberal society falls off the wagon and gets swallowed up by the Power Games, it is an ominous sign. Social Justice Fundamentalism evolved inside of a progressive space and continually mutated until it had developed a resistance to academia’s high-rung immune system. It’s not a coincidence that the first schools it conquered were the softest targets—those farthest left, like Oberlin and Evergreen. As the golem continued to mutate, developing sneakier ways to become more impervious to attack and more lethal to challengers, it began to conquer the next softest targets, and then the next after that. Each time it learned to more finely tune its takeover abilities. If you zoom out on all of society, academia is among the farthest-left sectors—the Oberlin of liberal institutions. The decades of evolution in the college incubator did more than optimize the SJF golem to resist the immune systems of progressive universities. It optimized it to conquer all progressive institutions.

the important difference between refusing to go see a campus speaker and actually shutting down the event itself, which prohibits all students from hearing the speaker. One is a person making individual choices; the other is idea supremacy.

a smear, even when applied to a genuine asshole, can spider out into a web that ends up punishing non-assholes and hindering productive discussion.

The incident: Someone writes or says something that’s acceptable to most of society but blasphemy within SJF. The backlash: A major protest occurs both within the institution and on social media, often equating the offender’s words with harm and demanding punishment in the name of safety. The moment of truth: Leadership within the institution—in each case, an institution specifically built to play by liberal rules—is forced to either stand up for its liberal ideals or cede to mob demands. Leadership cedes to SJF: In many cases, leadership initially stands up for liberal values. But when the backlash persists, to avoid being guilty by association, leadership fires the target or retracts their words. Leadership affirms allegiance to SJF: Public statements say something like, “The incident is antithetical to our values. We vow that it will not happen again. We reaffirm our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

We’ll never hear about the article that sits on the editor’s desk and never gets published, or the movie that never gets bought. The science too risky to research. The book too risky to write. The memo too risky to send. The op-ed too risky to pen. The opinion too risky to voice. George Orwell called this “the sinister fact” about censorship: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”

“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 meaning when you add on the “of ____.” If the blank is, say, “people who look different than you,” then tolerance sounds great. If instead the blank is, “a religious practice that involves sacrificing children,” then intolerance suddenly sounds a lot better. When you leave the “of ___” unspecified, Popper’s Paradox is inevitably twisted by political or religious groups into some version of: In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of [people, ideas, and practices that we don’t like]. By labeling their ideological opponents as “intolerant,” whoever has the most cultural power in any environment can use Popper’s reasoning to justify authoritarianism.59

The problem is that diversity trainings aren’t very effective. Al-Gharbi writes: Unfortunately, a robust and ever-growing body of empirical literature suggests that diversity-related training typically fails at its stated objectives. It does not seem to meaningfully or durably improve organizational climate or workplace morale; it does not increase collaboration or exchange across lines of difference; it does not improve hiring, retention or promotion of diverse candidates. In fact, the training is often counterproductive with respect to these explicit goals.

Al-Gharbi points to mountains of research that suggest ways to make diversity trainings more effective and less damaging. Rather than focus trainings on the broader problems in American society and American history, or on often controversial progressive stances like equality of outcome or the myth of meritocracy, “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.

Critical pedagogy is fundamentally different from critical thinking. While critical thinking teaches students general thinking skills, critical pedagogy teaches students to analyze the world through the SJF lens, in the service of “resisting and transforming social injustices.” In critical pedagogy, the toolkit of critical thinking may itself be problematic.

Most Americans would have no problem with their children being taught, unequivocally, that Black lives matter, that racism is an enduring problem, and that racial equality is a goal we should all be striving for—because these reflect broad liberal values. But it’s something very different when students are taught that the particular neo-Marxist, postmodern political lens of the Black Lives Matter movement is the only acceptable worldview, as opposed to one of many competing ideologies.

CRT originated in law schools and explores how America’s history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination may be embedded in the nation’s laws in ways that continue to marginalize and oppress people of color. Whatever might be taught in K-12 classrooms wouldn’t be a perfect representation of CRT, but a simplified version of it or something that shares its principles—what John McWhorter has termed “C.R.T.-lite.” These organizations also typically talk about “applying” CRT’s lens to education, which isn’t necessarily the same as actually teaching CRT to students. Either way, what certainly has entered hundreds of schools is Social Justice Fundamentalism, and everything that comes along with it: the idea that disparities always imply injustice and equality of opportunity must lead to equality of outcome; the view that identity characteristics like race, gender, and sexual orientation are the primary axes of advantage and disadvantage, and identity diversity is the only meaningful form of diversity; the equating of basic liberal values and institutions like free speech, science, and meritocracy with “whiteness”; the belief that oppression pervades every institution, every interaction, and every norm; the notion that disagreeing with SJF is violence and punishing such behavior is nothing more than self-defense; the gloomy outlook that sees a world where racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are forever present and barely improving.

“Silence is violence”—in all its forms—is textbook coercion. The same exact “you’re with us or you’re against us” mentality Grover Norquist used to coerce 1990s Republicans into signing his pledge. The same “struggle session” technique 1960s Maoists used to force their opponents to declare their allegiance to the movement, or else. No neutrality allowed is a trademark of every low-rung movement with way too much power.

In another realm, the SJF narrative says that women are routinely paid significantly less than men for doing the same work. But the statistics this claim is based on—often cited as “77” or “80” or “83 cents on the dollar for the same work”—are highly misleading. Namely, the figure compares the median wages earned by all American women who worked full-time year-round to the median for all American men who worked full-time year-round. Under that crude calculation, the average working woman earns 82% of what the average working man earns. This number doesn’t account for specific occupations, positions, education, or a number of other relevant variables. 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.

When the big brain isn’t working correctly, zealotry can look like righteousness. Nuance can look like bigotry. Free speech can look like violence, and violence can look like free speech. Fairness can look like discrimination, and discrimination can look like fairness. Anecdotes look like trends and trends look like anecdotes. Bullying can look like self-defense. And censorship can look like civility.

We’re not living in the Jim Crow Era. We don’t have a social credit score or a Department of Antiracism. We’re not in the surveillance state of North Korea or the dystopian world of George Orwell’s 1984. But we’re closer to all these worlds than we should be.

Like so many other institutions, the ACLU is no longer itself. 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.

problem is with SJF’s tactics—the fact that it’s an expansionist golem that attempts to spread itself not through persuasion but through bullying, smear campaigns, loyalty oaths, guilt by association, and other coercive measures. Liberal societies are built to constrain this kind of threat, and they’re usually great at it, which is why so few expansionist golems succeed. The fact that SJF is succeeding, to the amazing extent that it is, is evidence that something is very wrong. The high-rung immune system that normally keeps movements like SJF in check has gone MIA. With that counterforce missing, SJF has pushed the envelope farther and farther down the illiberal staircase. This is what we have to remember when we read about some high-profile person getting canceled for defying SJF. No political group in a liberal society should have the power to destroy a person’s livelihood or reputation at will. When a group does have that power, it reveals a big crack in the society’s liberal armor. Once that crack becomes apparent, it will be exploited again and again, to increasing degrees, like a spear pushing deeper and deeper into the society’s vital organs.

During the hammer phase of a progressive movement, it can be hard to tell the difference between the Upper Left and the Lower Left, as both are charging ahead fiercely. But when it’s time for the subtler “sandpaper phase,” the difference becomes crystal clear. Golems don’t use sandpaper. They only know how to hammer. As the Upper Left tries to get nuanced, the Lower Left keeps charging full steam ahead breaking things. For a progressive movement to prevail, it has to succeed on two fronts: its struggle against conservative resistance, and its struggle against Lower Left excess. 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. In failing to stand up to SJF, the Upper Left has allowed SJF to take sandpaper out of its toolkit. When the high-rung world has attempted to engage in productive discussions around complicated topics like fairness, accountability, bias, discrimination, diversity, forgiveness, and affirmative action, SJF has smeared every argument other than its own doctrine as a right-wing attempt to uphold the status quo.