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

by Tim Urban

The Founders’ hope was that something like high-rung America would prevail in the long run—that for every step backward, there would be two or three steps forward. And U.S. history has mostly proven this correct. For all our current problems, few Americans would prefer to live in 1920s America. But ecosystems can change. In nature, when something changes in an ecosystem—say a species goes extinct—it has a ripple effect on the other species. The extinct species’ predators may starve and go extinct, or be pruned down, while its prey, no longer being pruned by predators, grows and expands. Eventually, the chaos settles into a new equilibrium. When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to forget that we’re living in a rare anomaly within human history—an anomaly held up only by trust, cultural norms, and shared assumptions. It’s easy to become overconfident in the stability and permanence of that environment and forget that the natural human habitat—the Power Games—is always lurking just beneath the surface.

We think of censorship as control over what people can say. But the concept of emergence reminds us that human giants only “think” by way of conversation—which means that censorship is really control over what the giant can think. For a giant, censorship is mind control.

“The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.”13

No neutrality allowed is a trademark of every low-rung movement with way too much power.

Moths navigate using moonlight, and in the world they were programmed to live in, that system worked fine. The issue for today’s moths is that their environment has changed but their programming has not, so now they spend their nights doing pointless circles around your porch light. I’m pretty sure this is our situation too. Human nature is a specific software program optimized for a specific purpose: survival in a small tribe, a long time ago. The modern world is nothing like the environment we were made for. This is why we made liberal democracies. Remember this? The liberal democracy is an artificial environment, carefully crafted to both contain human nature and convert it into an engine of progress. Like all environments, it’s a behavior-shaping mechanism. It’s natural to take our environment for granted—to assume that that’s “just the way things work.” But a liberal democracy is a human construct, held in place not only by laws but by the “support beam” of the high-rung immune system—by shared notions of what is and isn’t tolerable or harmful and by shared determination to uphold those standards. When that support beam weakens, the environment can quickly collapse back to the more natural human habitat of the Power Games. In our era of exponential progress, rapid changes to our environment have put liberal democracies under great strain. Primitive Minds have instinctually rushed in to fill many of the new power vacuums. New golems have congealed together and have beg...

The stories we’ve talked about—of the decline of the Republican Party and the election of a demagogue willing to undermine trust in the electoral process; of Social Justice Fundamentalism hijacking institution after institution and rewriting the way our children are educated—aren’t really stories about political parties or political movements. They’re stories of millions of people standing on the sideline as people bully their Idea Labs into becoming Echo Chambers, as companies betray their founding missions, as politicians fail their constituents, as mass shaming roars back into fashion; silently thinking, “that’s not how we do things here!” When a person is intimidated into silence, their mind’s light disappears from the world and is contained only to their head. As millions of people have gone dark, the light in the national brain has dimmed. Mass confusion allows divisive ideologies to indoctrinate more people, who join their armies of intimidation, causing more people’s lights to go dark as the danger of speaking your mind rises. Silence is contagious, and as it spreads, the big brain loses its ability to think straight and society grows ever more confused. This is the vicious cycle that makes a society forget history.2 This is how good times can lead to foolish people, who create bad times.

No society wants to enter the “bad times” phase of the merry-go-round. In a super high-tech era like ours, it’s an especially scary prospect. We live in a time of magical technology, and the power of the human species grows more godlike every year. This power is a double-edged sword, simultaneously paving one road to utopia and another to dystopia. As we move into the deeply uncertain future of page 1,001 of The Story of Us, there’s never been a more important time to have our wits about us. Which is also why there’s never been a worse time for us to be spiraling down a vortex of confusion and fear. Exponential technology has given us countless gifts. But in the frenzy, we’re forgetting the most important lesson of all: the worst of our nature never lies far beneath the surface. We really can’t afford to get ourselves from foolish to wise the usual way, via bad times. Somehow, we have to figure how to become wise people directly.

Think about the beliefs of those you disagree with. Do they have any merit? Could you state them to your opponent, in all their complexity, in a way that would make your opponent say, “Yup, that’s what I believe”? Or would you oversimplify or misrepresent those beliefs? If you can’t steel man your opponent’s beliefs, you don’t yet know whether you disagree with them or not. Everyone believes they are fighting on the side of the good, the right, the vulnerable—even your opponents.