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

by Tim Urban

The one caveat a liberal society places on their guiding mantra—“live and let live”—is the harm principle. Everyone can do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. When harm is happening, “live and let live” no longer applies. This, of course, makes the definition of harm critically important. When concept creep turns dissent itself into an act of unacceptable harm—an act of racism, of transphobia, of violence—punishing those who dissent becomes not only justified but imperative in order to protect people’s safety. This is how idea supremacy, through the lens of SJF, can appear to be righteous activism.

Academic papers are supposed to be judged on rigor and accuracy. That’s what keeps research institutions pointed toward truth. When papers are instead filtered based on how well their conclusions align with a particular ideology, journals turn from truth-finding organs into political instruments.

Guilty because accused … tends to kick in during the "Terror and Virtue" phase of revolutions—something has gone wrong, and there must be a purge, as in the French Revolution, Stalin's purges in the USSR, the Red Guard period in China, the reign of the Generals in Argentina and the early days of the Iranian Revolution. The list is long and Left and Right have both indulged.7

When you are a public figure, people will write and say false things about you. It comes with the territory. Many of those things you brush aside. Many you ignore. The people close to you advise you that silence is best. And it often is. Sometimes, though, silence makes a lie begin to take on the shimmer of truth. In this age of social media, where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you.

What’s less fair game is pressuring others to boycott the businesses you disapprove of by promoting the notion that “anyone who doesn’t boycott this business is one of the bad guys.” Individual boycotting is what high-rung activists do. Coercive boycotting is what low-rung mobs do.

This is only part of Popper’s Paradox, but it’s the part that’s most widely referenced—often quoted more colloquially as, “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

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

This is because most Americans share a belief in secularism. British author Helen Pluckrose describes the essence of secularism like this: I don’t believe what you believe, and I don’t have to. I defend your right to hold, express and live by your own belief system, but you have no right to impose any of it on me.89

The problem in all these cases is not the inclusion of SJF ideas in a student’s education—it’s the teaching of those ideas as if they’re Bible verses in a religious school, not to be challenged or questioned.

If flat-earthers gained enough power to punish those who argued against the flat-earth worldview and intimidate most round-earthers into silence, continually amplify the flat-earth worldview from the most prominent and reputable platforms, teach people that the earth is flat in companies and schools, and pressure people to outwardly proclaim their belief in flat-eartherism, the number of people who believed the earth was flat would rise dramatically.

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.

In 2020, The New York Times published an article arguing that orchestras should end blind auditions, because they produced orchestras that were not diverse enough, with too many Asian and white musicians. The writer was adhering to Kendi’s definition of an antiracist. The policy of auditioning musicians without seeing who they were was producing an outcome with a racial disparity—and was therefore a racist policy. The proposed solution—to get rid of blind auditions to ensure proportional racial representation among orchestra musicians—would inherently discriminate against some Asian and white musicians who would have made the cut under blind auditions. This is, according to SJF, the antiracist way.

The ACLU even famously fought in 1977 for the rights of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois (a town with lots of Holocaust survivors). For David Goldberger, the ACLU lawyer who led the case at the time, doing so was a no-brainer. He wrote, “Though I detested their beliefs, I went into court to defend the First Amendment.”

Social justice activism is aimed, above all, at improving the lives of marginalized people. But Social Justice Fundamentalism has been shown time and again to be counterproductive to that cause.

When I think of the best kind of progressivism, I think of the ultimate safe space. There should be nowhere easier to be yourself, to be weird, or to be different than a progressive environment. Progressivism, at its best, celebrates difference.

And if the government can pressure tech companies to censor what they deem to be misinformation,207 there’s no reason to believe that their definition of “misinformation” or “disinformation” would be limited to Covid-related information.⬥ The government isn’t supposed to be able to police content on private platforms.

My problem isn’t with progressivism or conservatism but the fact that, at the moment, Americans are being deprived of the high-rung version of both by low-rung groups wearing blue and red uniforms. Plenty of people will disagree with my horizontal assessments, which is totally fine, but also beside the point. Whether the Lower Left or Lower Right is doing more damage is dwarfed by the much bigger phenomenon: that across the political spectrum, high-rungness seems to be losing its grip on our society’s thinking, its norms, its behavior. Across the whole country—and across many parts of today’s world—low-rungness is on the rise.

Most people—old and young, Black and white, progressive and conservative, American and non-American—are good-hearted, highly reasonable, and yearning for unity much more than division.3 Most people want free speech,4 dislike cancel culture,5 and prefer respectful elected officials.6 The exhausted majority is a sleeping giant with immense potential energy.

Think big. Read about the universe. Nothing makes hatred seem more ridiculous than internalizing how vast time and space are. Doing so makes me want to turn to anyone who will listen and hug them and say, “We both exist! On the same tiny planet at the same exact time! Hi!”

There was no shortage of ideas in this book, but I believe one stands out above all: Us vs. Them is always a delusion. The Story of Us isn’t a story of good guys vs. bad guys but one about the tug-of-war that exists within each human head, each community, each society. In this epic story, heading together toward an uncertain fate, there is no Them. Just one big Us.