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

by Tim Urban

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 four thinking rungs are all distinct, but they fall into two broad categories: high-rung thinking (Scientist and Sports Fan) and low-rung thinking (Attorney and Zealot).

Those who challenge the sacred ideas are seen not just as wrong but as bad people. As such, violators are slapped with the social fines of status reduction or reputation damage, the social jail time of ostracism, and even the social death penalty of permanent excommunication. Express the wrong opinion on God, abortion, patriotism, immigration, race, or capitalism in the wrong group and you may be met with an explosive negative reaction. Echo Chambers are places where you must watch what you say.

So what’s the deal? Are ants nicer than spiders? No. It’s just that spiders stop doing the emergence thing at the individual organism level, while ants go up a level higher—to the ant colony.

You can live in a flourishing high-rung utopia with clear, civilized rules, but when a golem arrives at your gates, none of those rules matter if you can’t beat the golem at the Power Games.

In the U.S., people in the Democratic Disney kingdom see themselves as righteous citizens in a continual struggle to deliver the country to a progressive utopia even as the mean, bigoted Republicans try to pull the country backward into the land of all-powerful corporations and a government run by gun-slinging misogynists and white supremacists.

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.

In Political Disney World, when a cleverly worded tweet or op-ed straw mans the opposing side, it goes viral, and soon, the farce boxing match is played on loop throughout the Echo Chamber, ad nauseam.

if an opposing candidate has mostly mainstream views but holds a few extreme positions, people tend to assume that the candidate’s supporters voted for them because of, not in spite of, the candidate’s extreme positions—despite no evidence that this is true.

Golems rely on a common enemy for unity and for might. The stronger and more dangerous the rival Them seems, the stronger and more united the Us group will typically be.

If lots of people have the means to choose where they settle down, and those people tend to have even a slight preference to live near other people like them, everyone ends up totally segregated.

Depicting both sides as equal when they’re not (aka “bothsidesism”) is not neutral, but is biased toward “presenting the sides as equal.”

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

SJF tends to simplify a messy gray world into binary 1s and 0s: white/POC, privileged/oppressed, colonizer/colonized, racist/antiracist. It’s the kind of digital thinking characteristic of Political Disney World narratives.

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.

So the words of people from oppressed groups should carry extra weight, because they carry more knowledge.39 Standpoint theory is the philosophical backdrop behind the popular four-word SJF reprimand: stay in your lane. “Stay in your lane” means: If you’re white, your words carry little authority on race issues. If you’re a man, you should refrain from weighing in about women’s movements like #metoo and the debates around rape culture on campuses.

I’m not Black, but when I hear people talk about what it’s like to be Black in America, I don’t think, “I can’t imagine what that must be like!” I can imagine it. Because I remember what it was like when, as a Jewish kid, I first learned that antisemitism was a thing.

These are all different ways to say the same thing: if you are a member of a privileged group, any disagreement from you is invalid. At best, it’s ignorance. At worst, outright bigotry.

Popular websites like Everyday Feminism hold trainings like Healing From Internalized Whiteness, wording that sends a clear message: it’s not that some white people do bad things, whiteness is bad.

Rather than try to level the justice seesaw, “believe women”—or, sometimes, “believe all women”—flips the seesaw in the other direction to apply a counterforce.

Hitler didn’t only talk about the Jews as outsider scum, he also talked about them the way left-wing movements talk about their enemies: as powerful, privileged manipulators who were pulling the strings of society in secret, hard-to-see ways.

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people. ―William Howard Taft

In recent years, in certain pockets of the Western world—certain SJF-y pockets—dignity culture has been replaced by what Campbell and Manning call victimhood culture. 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.”

This broader phenomenon is intensified within the world of Social Justice Fundamentalism, where victimhood has come to be treated as a form of status.

A second form of victimhood—experience victimhood—is based on having experienced harm. Experience victimhood grants people an elevated social position throughout society, not just within SJF, as it is human nature to treat a suffering person with extra kindness.

It’s as if we like to keep our perception of the world at a constant. So when the world changes, instead of allowing our perception of the world to change, we alter our standards and our definitions to keep our perception the same.

When concept creep gets out of control, it allows a far wider range of behaviors to qualify as bigotry, abuse, and trauma, which means a far wider range of people viewing themselves as victims of bigotry, abuse, and trauma. It also turns a far wider range of people into bigots, abusers, and traumatizers. Many more victims = many more villains.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a second-wave feminist who is very vocal in her criticism of third-wave feminism and other elements of Social Justice Fundamentalism. When she came to speak at Lewis & Clark Law School, a group of students crashed the event and interrupted the talk with chants and shout-downs.

“The truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is ‘offensive’ even to consider it?"

This tenet, combined with SJF’s notion of the all-encompassing Force, generates the SJF axiom we discussed last chapter: Any disparity of outcome between groups must by definition be the result of injustice.⬥

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.

A modern social media smear campaign does this too, using similar tactics. Concept creep can make someone into a villain by expanding the definition of damning labels—racist, misogynist, white supremacist, groomer, etc.—to include lesser offenses and a broader range of behavior.

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.

“Silence is violence” did not come out of nowhere. It is a core principle of SJF.

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.

Talk about issues with the 18% wage gap figure, be branded a misogynist who believes women belong in the kitchen.

like. My 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.

I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods. When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind. This kind of language, which speaks directly to people’s Higher Minds, builds the broad coalitions that can create seismic change.

As SJF concept creep has continually expanded the definitions of critically important terms like “racism,” “misogyny,” and “violence,” it has diminished the impact of those words and cheapened their meaning. When a movement continually cries wolf, it weakens our defenses against actual wolves.

a list of “common cognitive disorders” that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy practitioners believe cause anxiety and depression, and they note that many of today’s young people are actively being trained into the precise kinds of thinking CBT aims to eradicate—like overgeneralizing, all-or-nothing thinking, blaming others, and focusing on the negatives.