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

by Tim Urban

The motte-and-bailey is often used alongside the straw man fallacy. Political Echo Chambers use the straw man to make their opponent’s position seem weaker than it is, and they use the motte-and-bailey to make their own position appear to be more ironclad than it is.

Perhaps the easiest way to squash a dissenting argument is to just disqualify it right off the bat based on who said it, without ever addressing the argument itself. The infamous ad hominem fallacy.

People in Political Disney World slap a “bullshit” sticker onto an argument the second it leaves the wrong person’s mouth, regardless of the argument’s substance.

Intellectual dependence An Echo Chamber makes its members feel perfectly informed while crippling them as intellectuals. It teaches them that knowledge is easy and gets them hooked on the feeling of knowing the truth about everything without having to work for it.

being repeatedly exposed to weak arguments for a particular position makes people dismissive of all arguments for that position.

any version of dissenting arguments—even the strong ones—will be disregarded as nothing more than better-worded versions of the well-known absurd arguments. People will have become “immune” to changing their mind.

For a political golem, narrative-confirming information is welcomed, spread by social incentives, boosted by fallacy distortions, and accepted uncritically. Dissenting information is hindered by the media and sharing filters, weakened by fallacy distortions, and blocked by a wall of skepticism. It’s a terrible system for discovering truth, but it works great for protecting belief in a guiding narrative.

Modern democracies weren’t built to eradicate low-rung psychology or low-rung culture. They were built to ensure that low-rung giants wouldn’t be able to do what they’ve done throughout history: conquer the country.

Challenges to nonpolitical beliefs lit up regions of the brain involved in decision-making, while political challenges generated more activity in the emotional, fight-or-flight parts of the brain, as well as the Default Mode Network, a group of brain regions associated with creating a sense of self and with disengagement from the external world. In the face of political dissent, participants were more likely to withdraw from the external world and go into the internally focused parts of their brains that deal with their identity, as well as the parts of their brains that deal with danger, fear, and other primal emotions. And while thinking this way, their minds were far less likely to change.

It's human nature to start taking things for granted again when danger isn't banging loudly on the door. – David Hackworth

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.

While an alien attack would suck overall, it would do wonders for species solidarity.

When people are surrounded by ideologically homogeneous groups, their views become more extreme.

Narrowcast media caters to homogeneous audiences, which decreases the incentive to worry about neutrality and heightens the incentive to provide viewpoint confirmation. Rather than tell people which candidate is likely to win the next election like the old days, narrowcast media reaps huge rewards for telling people why their favorite candidate ought to win.

With little risk of reputation damage for biased coverage, narrowcast media can continually bash one side while giving the other side a free pass and end up with a more loyal audience for it.

Many businesses have learned that a great way to make money is to sell directly to the simple, predictable Primitive Mind. To sell food to the Higher Mind, you have to worry about quality and nutrition, which is expensive and hard.

Reality is interesting sometimes. Reality shows are interesting all the time. And what’s the reality TV producer’s best trick? Drama and negativity.

As soon as you realize that news media is also entertainment media,14 the constant coverage of conflict and drama makes perfect sense. In the U.S., many of us are addicted to a trashy reality show I call The Real Politicians of Washington D.C. The cast changes from year to year, but the formula is the same: there are whole teams of heroes and villains, lots of ongoing storylines, and endless conflict. It’s a perfect vehicle for a dramatic, super-addictive soap opera.

Actual politics, like actual reality, is boring to most people. So tribal media brands do what reality TV producers do—they manufacture a carefully edited, fictional version of politics that’s wildly entertaining.

Internet algorithms are profit-maximizing mechanisms that want to spoon-feed me whatever I’m most likely to click on. This is a win-win, symbiotic relationship—until it’s not. When an algorithm is jibing with your Higher Mind, it’s your friend. When it’s luring in your Primitive Mind against your Higher Mind’s will, the relationship is parasitic.

What happens on social media often determines what happens in the actual media.

News media is infamous for what we could call “destructive cherry-picking”—a selection bias that sees negative stories as the most newsworthy, because they draw the most interest.

Destructive cherry-picking spreads fear and pessimism, and over the past 20 years, it’s been steadily on the rise.

Presenting people with a steady stream of “they hate you” jolts awake their Primitive Minds, in many cases filling them with reciprocal disdain, clouding their humanity, and flipping on that ancient tribal switch that makes people want to band together into golems. Portraying a society where everyone hates each other becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The reason I call disgust the scariest of all human emotions is that it’s a trigger for dehumanization, and dehumanization is the doorway to the worst things humans do. It’s not a coincidence that two of the most horrifying events in recent human history—the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide—were made possible by disgust.

Disgust fills our mind with a special kind of primitive fog—one that turns ordinary humans into psychopaths who can commit or condone unthinkable harm without remorse. Scary shit.

Geographic sorting and political junk food make a lethal combo, ripe for disgust. It’s hard to feel dehumanizing disgust for people you know personally. Less hard when you rarely see your enemies in person. Less hard still when destructive cherry-picking teaches you only the worst about them.

We like to think of bigotry as something that other people do. But we’re all capable of rank bigotry when our environment pushes the right buttons in our psyche.

Bigotry is at its most dangerous when it goes unrecognized. The best tools to combat bigotry are social norms that penalize its expression—but

as the media’s political coverage has morphed into a reality TV show, it has created an incentive system that rewards politicians who use inflammatory rhetoric.

Politicians who act like children are great TV, which incentivizes the media to give them more airtime, which helps those politicians win elections, which encourages more of the same behavior.

Hypercharged tribalism turns thinking, feeling human beings into loyal colony ants, overriding their intellect, their humanity, even their love of family and friends. It’s a form of group madness—a contagion that spreads like an epidemic, awakening the ancient survival instincts in millions of minds all at once, as huge groups of people slip into golem mode in lockstep.

America’s two sides hate each other so much that whenever one of them emphasizes the danger of a foreign rival, the other instinctively downplays the threat and frames the concern as dishonest political maneuvering or bigotry. Even the American flag is, today, increasingly viewed by many on the left as a right-wing symbol.

When a society is in the clutches of hypercharged tribalism, it invades workplaces, dinner tables, churches, schools. It becomes inescapable.

Idea Lab mode, asking yourself, “What if I’m wrong about some of what I think?” Hopefully, this process can help open some closed doors in your mind and leave you a little more clearheaded than you were before.

When people are so fixated on the horizontal political battle that they stop caring about the vertical axis entirely, they forget who they are. They forget what actually matters.

Since its founding, people have immigrated to the U.S. because they were being treated unfairly somewhere else. What made America different was the ability for unequally treated groups to do something about it, non-violently, and actually see results.

the classic Marxist notion of false consciousness—the idea that revolution is prevented by the oppressed believing that the status quo is simply the natural order of things.

As influential Frankfurt transplant Herbert Marcuse (often called the father of the New Left) wrote in 1965, “It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don't have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise.”

Bell believed that progress for Black Americans happened only when the progress served white interests, and that the progress would be taken away as soon as it no longer fit with the self-interested white agenda.

Liberals and Marxists fundamentally disagree about liberalism, but they both subscribe to the basic ideas of modernity. Modernity, as I mentioned, emphasized the notion of objective truth that anyone, anywhere could work toward using scientific methods.

In pre-modern times, it was common for different humans to believe in different denominations of truth—like, for example, the prominent religious doctrines, each of which had its own version of the truth. Modernity replaced faith-based thinking and divine authority with the idea of a single objective truth and a universal process for discovering it.

Postmodernists are radical skeptics who see nearly all beliefs as false consciousness. They believe that power is exerted not only through economic oppression or cultural brainwashing but through every element of a society—through all layers of the pyramid. The whole society is permeated with a “metanarrative” that’s so well embedded in the minds of citizens that it feels like the natural order of things.

All members of society are socialized to participate in the system of racism, albeit within varied social locations. All white people benefit from racism, regardless of intentions. No one chose to be socialized into racism, so no one is quote-unquote "bad," but no one is neutral. To not act against racism is to support racism.

The racial status quo is comfortable for most whites. Therefore, anything that maintains white comfort is suspect.

intersectionality provided SJF with something physicists haven’t yet discovered: a unifying theory of everything. Intersectionality weaves the fundamental forces of social justice into a single exertion that permeates all aspects of human existence—every interaction, every assumption, every social norm. I call it the Force.

When the premise is that oppression is etched into the very DNA of a nation, the only way to truly fix things is to get out the wrecking ball, overthrow the entire system, and start from scratch. Both Liberal Social Justice and Social Justice Fundamentalism want to make major change, but the kind of change SJF wants to make goes far deeper and is much more revolutionary.

High-rung thinking is data-driven, working off the idea that strong beliefs must be capable of being supported or falsified by evidence. But SJF’s vague, all-encompassing claims (e.g., “All members of society are socialized to participate in the system of racism”) are neither provable nor falsifiable—yet the SJF narrative is utterly certain in its worldview. This makes SJF a matter of faith more than science.

This will be a theme: extreme assumptions and extreme policy prescriptions, applied only when they fit within the SJF worldview.

The scientific method is hard and the SJF way of thinking removes that burden. But this ease comes with a tradeoff because certainty is a burden of its own. When a group of people relies on total belief in a single narrative, they must go to great lengths to control the flow of information and enforce intellectual conformity within their ranks.