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

by Tim Urban

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...