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.