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

by Tim Urban

Christianity isn’t born until page 993. Page 1,000, which goes from the early 1770s to the early 2020s, contains all of U.S. history. We’re now collectively venturing into the mysterious new world of page 1,001. This excites me—and also scares me—because of three concurrent

wisdom? This wouldn’t be the first time. In 1905, philosopher George Santayana issued a warning to humanity: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat

The worrying thing about that quote is that the philosopher Edmund Burke issued the same warning over a century earlier, in 1790: People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

There is a great deal of human nature in people. – Mark Twain

The issue is that the animal world isn’t really an animal world—it’s a world of trillions of strands of genetic information, each one hell-bent on immortality. Most gene strands don’t last very long, and those still on Earth today are the miracle outliers, such incredible survival specialists that they’re hundreds of millions of years old and counting.

Animals are just a hack these outlier genes came up with—temporary containers designed to carry the genes and help them stay immortal.

You know how moths inanely fly toward light and you’re not really sure why they do this or what their angle is? It turns out that for millions of years, moths have used moonlight as a beacon for nocturnal navigation—which works great until a bunch of people start turning lights on at night that aren’t the moon. The moth’s brain software hasn’t had time to update itself to the new situation, and now millions of moths are wasting their lives flapping around streetlights.

Philosophers and scientists have been grappling with the “multiple minds” idea for millennia. Plato wrote about a “charioteer” (intellect) that managed the “horses” of rational modesty and passionate insolence. Sigmund Freud’s structure consisted of the “id” (primitive instinct), the “superego” (the conscience), and the “ego” that balances the two with external reality. More recently, social psychologist

Drift down any further, though, and you cross the Ladder midpoint and become a different kind of thinker entirely. Down on the low rungs, the Primitive Mind has the edge in the tug-of-war. Whether you’ll admit it or not (you won’t), the desire to feel right, and appear right, has overcome your desire to be right.

High-rung thinking is productive thinking. The humility of the high-rung mindset makes your mind a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom. On the other hand, the arrogance of low-rung thinking makes your mind a rubber shell that life experience bounces off of. One begets learning, the other ignorance.

This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We can visualize it using an Emergence Tower.

animal world is a stressful place to be because there are no morals, no principles, no one to make sure things are fair. The rules are simple: Everyone can do whatever they want, if they have the power to do

Human nature is a constant, and when you put that constant into different environments, it produces different behavior.

They actually died long ago up on the high rungs, but they live on down below.

In contrast, the extremist rejects the complexity of the moderate’s world. His is a state of mind that insists on dividing reality into two antithetical halves. The gray is resolved into black and white. Men are either good or evil. Policies are either Communist or anti-Communist.

Postmodernists are radical skeptics who see nearly all beliefs as false consciousness. They believe that power is exerted not only through economic oppression or cultural brainwashing but through every element of a society—through all layers of the pyramid. The whole society is permeated with a “metanarrative” that’s so well embedded in the minds of citizens that it feels like the natural order of things.

The quest for success is intergenerational, as wealth and connections accumulate over long periods of time. In the case of Black Americans, slavery ended around five generations ago.