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

by Tim Urban

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.

For most beliefs, we’re so concerned with where people stand that we often forget the most important thing about what someone thinks: how they arrived at what they think. This is where the Ladder can help. If the Idea Spectrum is a “what you think” axis, we can use the Ladder as a “how you think” axis.

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.

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 most of the info we use to inform ourselves is indirect knowledge: knowledge accumulated by others that we import into our minds and adopt as our own.

That’s why perhaps the most important skill of a skilled thinker is knowing when to trust.

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.

When you’re thinking like an Attorney, you don’t start at Point A at all. You start at Point B. The client is not guilty. Now let’s figure out why.

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 can define “culture” as the unwritten rules regarding “how we do things here.”

Living simultaneously in multiple cultures is part of what makes being a human tricky. Do we keep our individual inner values to ourselves and just do our best to match our external behavior to whatever culture we’re currently in a room with? Or do we stay loyal to one particular culture and live by those rules everywhere, even at our social or professional peril? Do we navigate our lives to seek out external cultures that match our own values and minimize friction? Or do we surround ourselves with a range of conflicting cultures to put some pressure on our inner minds to learn and grow?

A culture that treats ideas like sacred objects incentivizes entirely different behavior than the Idea Lab. In an Echo Chamber, falling in line with the rest of the group is socially rewarded.

Idea Labs can simultaneously respect a person and disrespect the person’s ideas. But Echo Chambers equate a person’s ideas with their identity, so respecting a person and respecting their ideas are one and the same.

If the genie is the product of human collaboration, the golem is the emergent property of human obedience. Golems are what happen when humans act like ants.

Going full binary makes sense in Disney movies. Their core audience is little kids, who aren’t ready to sort through too much gray. Before a person learns to think in nuance, they first need to learn the basic concepts of good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, safe vs. dangerous, happy vs. sad.

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.

High-rung political thinkers will disagree about what’s morally right and wrong as vigorously as they disagree about what’s factually right and wrong. But whatever their conclusions, they apply their moral standards consistently—to themselves, to friends, to strangers, to foes. They work hard to avoid falling into the tribal mindset and try to maintain a balance of empathy and criticism when dealing with people on other parts of the political spectrum.

The litmus test comes when the middle section isn’t an option—when your team and your principles are in conflict.

Like the human hand or the human eye, the human brain is a tool developed by evolution for a specific set of purposes. Truth wasn’t one of those purposes.

We can do truth, but a human doing truth is like a dog standing on its hind legs—it’s a real effort and we’re not in our element. This is why we’re so susceptible to reasoning errors, aka logical fallacies.

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.

When you go to a [Wikipedia] page, you’re seeing the same thing as other people. So it’s one of the few things online that we at least hold in common. Now, just imagine for a second that Wikipedia said, “We’re gonna give each person a different customized definition, and we’re gonna be paid by people for that.” So, Wikipedia would be spying on you. Wikipedia would calculate, “What’s the thing I can do to get this person to change a little bit on behalf of some commercial interest?” Right? And then it would change the entry. Can you imagine that? Well, you should be able to, ‘cause that’s exactly what’s happening on Facebook. It’s exactly what’s happening in your YouTube feed.

When people are so fixated on the horizontal political battle that they stop caring about the vertical axis entirely, they forget who they are. They forget what actually matters.

This fusion was 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.

Racism is an institutionalized, multi-layered, multi-level system that distributes unequal power and resources between white people and people of color, as socially identified, and disproportionally benefits whites. All members of society are socialized to participate in the system of racism, albeit within varied social locations. All white people benefit from racism, regardless of intentions. No one chose to be socialized into racism, so no one is quote-unquote "bad," but no one is neutral. To not act against racism is to support racism. The default is racism. Racism must be continually identified, analyzed, and challenged. No one is ever done. The question is not, “Did racism take place?” but rather, “How did racism manifest in that situation?” The racial status quo is comfortable for most whites. Therefore, anything that maintains white comfort is suspect. … Resistance is a predictable reaction to anti-racist education and must be explicitly and strategically addressed.

Affirmative action or positive discrimination is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who are perceived to suffer from discrimination within a culture … intended to promote the opportunities of defined minority groups within a society to give them equal access to that of the privileged majority population.

SJF activists look at societal institutions through a zero-sum lens. Groups that are overrepresented got there by oppressing those who are underrepresented, and the only way to help those at the bottom is to take from those at the top. Ensuring equal outcomes trumps individual rights.

The SJF narrative doesn’t have room for this kind of messiness, so it applies its key tenets selectively to disparities that fit within the narrative. For disparities that favor a group higher up on the Intersectional Stack (say, white Americans out-earning Hispanic Americans, or men being over-represented among software engineers), it says injustice is the cause and equity boxes are a necessary remedy. For disparities that go in the other direction (say, Asian Americans outperforming white Americans on standardized tests, or women being more likely than men to attend college), correlation no longer implies causation, and no equity boxes are warranted.

This will be a theme: extreme assumptions and extreme policy prescriptions, applied only when they fit within the SJF worldview.

The scientific method is hard and the SJF way of thinking removes that burden. But this ease comes with a tradeoff because certainty is a burden of its own. When a group of people relies on total belief in a single narrative, they must go to great lengths to control the flow of information and enforce intellectual conformity within their ranks.

Over recent years, the word has evolved to take on yet a new meaning: believing and promoting the Social Justice Fundamentalist worldview. In contrast, 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.

The fundamentalists believe in a single narrative, and their movement is premised on shared certainty in that narrative. To be woke is to believe. It’s to abide by the SJF position on affirmative action, individual accountability, and historical injustice. It’s to define fairness, justice, equality, diversity, inclusion, and equity the precise way they’re defined by SJF doctrine.

The idea is that if society is a river and the Force is the current, oppressed groups, who spend their lives swimming against the current, develop intimate knowledge of the current that privileged people, always swimming with the current, can’t access. Put another way: The dominant perspective is understood by everyone, because it’s everywhere, all the time, while the oppressed perspective is only understood by the oppressed. So the words of people from oppressed groups should carry extra weight, because they carry more knowledge.

On one hand, most liberals would agree that standpoint theory gets at something undeniable: different people have different life experiences, some of which are related to their group identity, and these experiences offer them specific insights that people from other groups may not grasp.

But to the liberal mindset, specific life experience is only one form of knowledge, alongside another: the universal experience of being human. When trying to understand another person’s point of view, a liberal thinker aims for the humility sweet spot that acknowledges both each person’s uniqueness and all people’s shared humanness.

To use myself as an example, having a major procrastination/perfectionist problem opens an empathy window to anyone with any form of self-defeating tendency.

Imagining a different struggle than your own is an exercise in extrapolation—it’s an educated guess. But it’s not knowledge. At the humility sweet spot, a person gives themselves the right amount of credit for what they do know about someone else and also the proper level of respect for what they don’t know.

Social Justice Fundamentalism rejects this kind of balanced approach in favor of the more extreme take of standpoint theory: that having a certain skin color or gender or sexual orientation grants one full access to a set of experiences that others have no access to at all—not even a glimpse. Suggesting otherwise is seen as a microaggression

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.

One mark of high-rung morality is tolerance consistency. Humans are hardwired to be hyper-sensitive to the concept of fair vs. unfair,45 so whatever a society’s or community’s specific rules around what’s tolerable or intolerable, it’s usually a good sign if the same rules apply to everyone. We can think of this like a flat seesaw. When things aren’t morally consistent—when different groups are held to different standards—it’s like a slanted seesaw.

We talked earlier about the headline test as a way to measure moral consistency. The kinds of double standards we’ve just looked at—around language, judgment, forgiveness—leave SJF activists with the same headline difficulties as the white person in 1955 Mississippi. If shown a set of headlines that only referred to Person A and Person B, without the parties’ identities provided, SJF activists would be stuck in the “need more info” camp, not knowing how outraged to be.⬥ Looking at it that way, SJF morality might seem like the picture of low-rungness. SJF activists would probably counter that what I’m calling double standards are in fact a step in the right direction—a necessary corrective response to the pervasive systemic injustice we’ve been referring to as the Force.

Using different rules and lower standards for children makes sense. But when you apply different standards to different demographic groups in a society, you’re treating groups of adults like children. Which is awfully patronizing. This is what some call “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

The racism of low expectations: to lower those standards when looking at a brown person if a brown person happens to express a level of misogyny, chauvinism, bigotry, or anti-Semitism and yet hold other white people to universal liberal standards. The real victim[s] of that double standard are the minority communities themselves, because by doing so, we limit their horizons; we limit their own ceiling and expectations as to what they aspire to be; we’re judging them as somehow that their culture is less civilized; and of course, we are tolerating bigotry within communities and the first victims of that bigotry happen to be those who are weakest from among those communities.62

I would never want to live in a country where it was socially acceptable for my particular demographic group to engage in bad behavior. It would make me feel excluded, like I was sitting at society’s children’s table. And plenty of women, LGBTQ people, and people of color feel the same way.

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.

Throughout human history, clever opportunists have discovered that if you could control what people say, you could write the story people believed. You could dictate the values, the morals, and the customs. You could decide who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. You could create the laws, dole out the rewards, and inflict the penalties. If you could write the narrative, the group became your marionette.

The science and business worlds can advance quickly because bad ideas fail quickly.

Some researchers believe the rise of victimhood culture is part of a broader trend, partially explained by the changes in how young people in the West, or at least in the U.S., are raised.

Children today have far more restricted childhoods, on average, than those enjoyed by their parents, who grew up in far more dangerous times and yet had many more opportunities to develop their intrinsic antifragility. Compared with previous generations, younger Millennials and especially members of iGen (born in and after 1995) have been deprived of unsupervised time for play and exploration. They have missed out on many of the challenges, negative experiences, and minor risks that help children develop into strong, competent, and independent adults.9