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

by Tim Urban

With the expansion of Title IX in 2011—the law is now being used, among other things, to police classroom content—even tenured faculty are sitting with a sword above their heads. … In a conflict between a student and a faculty member, almost nothing is at stake for the student beyond the possibility of receiving a low grade ... But the teacher could be fired.

Gerson likens the students whose sensitivities forbid the teaching of rape law to medical students who insist on being shielded from the sight of blood. She points out that the victims of these curriculum changes aren’t just the majority of students who expect to learn about rape law in law school: “If the topic of sexual assault were to leave the law-school classroom, it would be a tremendous loss—above all to victims of sexual assault.”

So you may be a brilliant, accomplished scholar in the life sciences, but if you’ve spent too much time studying biology and not enough on progressive political activism, you’re out. Even if you are a progressive activist, but instead of working on social justice activism, you spend your time on local politics, climate change activism, and gun control activism—you’re out. If you’re a social justice activist but subscribe to Liberal Social Justice, not SJF, you’re out.

When both sides of a case are properly represented, neither attorney can get away with too much BS because one attorney yells out “objection!” when the other tries something sneaky. Politically homogeneous universities are like courtrooms with only one attorney. Not only is the other side not properly represented, but the dominant side can get away with more bias, more straw man arguments, and more motte-and-bailey defenses when there’s no opposition there to yell “objection!”

the primary purpose of tenure is to protect professors from pressure to conform to whatever ideological fads would inevitably come, so they could remain independent. Firing tenured professors for offending the sensibilities of a particular political ideology directly contradicts that purpose.

Jonathan Rauch argues that institutions like universities are society’s only effective truth-discovery mechanisms: “Without the places where professionals like experts and editors and peer reviewers organize conversations and compare propositions and assess competence and provide accountability … there is no marketplace of ideas; there are only cults warring and splintering and individuals running around making noise. This is why the corruption of reality-based institutions is so dangerous.”

social media wasn’t just a fun place to hang out, it was a wildly profitable new business model. Social media platforms had struck the internet’s version of oil—attention—and the platforms’ early versions had only scratched the surface of what was possible.

Our Primitive Minds crave attention and status, and the new, evolved social media platforms now offered both of these in the form of a quantifiable gamified system.

When our psyches are down on the low rungs, consumed with this mix of exhilaration and fear, it’s easy to forget that something cruel is happening to a real human. The Primitive Mind specializes in dehumanizing members of its out-group,9 a delusion easier to sustain when the person is just an online avatar. This delusion is responsible for what Ronson calls “a disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment.”

It is impossible to effectively defend oneself against unethical critics. If nothing else, the law of entropy is on their side, because it will always be easier to make a mess than to clean it up.

Sam Harris regarding smear campaigns

In a liberal democracy, the hard cudgel of physical violence isn’t allowed. You can’t burn villains at the stake. But you can burn their reputation and livelihood at the stake. This is the soft cudgel of social consequences.

A group of people boycotting a business they disapprove of is totally fair game in a country like the U.S. Boycotts have been a powerful tool of peaceful activism many times in the past. 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.

Guilt by association doesn’t just travel from person to person—it also travels from people to ideas.

changes in the media landscape and shifting incentives, the advent of social media and Google search, and a whole lot of algorithms trying to maximize traffic and clicks—inadvertently brought a new weapon into the world: the digital cudgel. No one intended to create a new weapon, but once it came into existence, it was only a matter of time before people picked it up and started using it.

“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.”

history has shown us again and again that a small portion of the population, with a sufficiently large cudgel, can hijack a society.

Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

George Orwell called this “the sinister fact” about censorship: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”

“In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”

Popper believed that liberal societies have to be intolerant when people impede the workings of the marketplace of ideas. Not only is SJF idea supremacy not justified by Popper’s Paradox, it is exactly what Popper was warning about.

Criticism is a staple of liberalism, cancel culture is the epitome of illiberalism.

To be a good liberal means to criticize, not cancel. But it also means that you stand up for liberalism—when you see cancel culture happening, you try to stop it.

Confusion enables illiberalism, which enhances confusion, which leaves us in the exact kind of environment where golems thrive.

A single study should always be taken with a grain of salt,

Movements with a Power Games mindset, like animal species in an ecosystem, don’t have an “okay we’ve gone far enough” setting. If the high-rung immune system isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, they will push the envelope further and further until something stops them.

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

Critical pedagogy is fundamentally different from critical thinking. While critical thinking teaches students general thinking skills, critical pedagogy teaches students to analyze the world through the SJF lens, in the service of “resisting and transforming social injustices.” In critical pedagogy, the toolkit of critical thinking may itself be problematic.

In a liberal society, it’s totally okay to be silent on any topic, for any reason at all.

“Silence is violence”—in all its forms—is textbook coercion.

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

society’s “big brain” is made up of the brains of its individuals—those are its “neurons.” It’s why free discourse is so important: the big brain can only think when people are free to speak their minds.

ideas themselves barely matter. 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. When people lose the ability to speak openly or to criticize falsehoods, it becomes difficult to separate truth from fiction.

when a small group has the ability to bend the Speech Curve to their will and control what’s being said, people tend to assume that the viewpoints they’re hearing again and again must be “what everybody thinks.”

As more and more people come to believe the viewpoints, the social cost of being a vocal dissenter to that view rises. Delusion begets silence and silence begets more delusion.

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.

Talk about issues with the 18% wage gap figure, be branded a misogynist who believes women belong in the kitchen.

SJF is an ideology that thinks liberalism is inherently bad and should be replaced with a new system that limits freedom of speech and uses the law to ensure not equality of opportunity but equality of outcome.

An institution is only what it is willing to stand up for. If it lets an unscientific, anti-free-speech, morally inconsistent, illiberal ideology take over, the institution itself becomes unscientific, anti-free-speech, morally inconsistent, and illiberal.

In the lag time between when a brand is co-opted by an ideology and when the public’s trust in the brand has been eroded, the ideology spends that trust like currency and can do a lot of damage.

My problem is with SJF’s tactics—the fact that it’s an expansionist golem that attempts to spread itself not through persuasion but through bullying, smear campaigns, loyalty oaths, guilt by association, and other coercive measures.

For a progressive movement to prevail, it has to succeed on two fronts: its struggle against conservative resistance, and its struggle against Lower Left excess.

there’s no place for positivity in SJF, which is rooted in the idea that liberal societies are hopelessly and irreparably oppressive. When it comes to the state of our politics, negative sentiment like grievance and outrage are shorthand for righteousness in SJF, while positive sentiments like optimism and gratitude are taken as a sign of false consciousness, callous privilege, or both. When positivity is shamed out of the conversation, the air ends up filled with gloom, resentment, and nihilism—not sentiments that energize people to fix problems.

When a movement continually cries wolf, it weakens our defenses against actual wolves.

Creating a distorted perception of how dangerous cops are diminishes trust in law enforcement and makes police encounters potentially more dangerous and less effective, and making people feel like the system is hopelessly rigged against them logically makes them more likely to engage in criminal activity and other antisocial behavior.

Free speech is always most important to those not in power. Free speech is the only nonviolent tool for criticizing and challenging the status quo.

Through a high-rung lens, all people are worthy of compassion, and no one is above criticism. On the low rungs, people are either perfectly righteous 1s or morally reprehensible 0s. The problem with that is that no one’s actually a 1, and most people, deep down, know that about themselves.

people feeling worse about their society and their prospects has many negative effects, so it’s especially important that if a narrative is making people feel that way, it is solidly based in reality. I don’t think SJF passes that bar.

The fact that famous people on independent platforms can freely speak certain ideas does not mean those ideas can be freely spoken by millions of students, employees, and others without the same privilege. The “Joe Rogan” argument, to me, is akin to seeing Caitlin Jenner appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair as evidence that transgender people no longer face difficulties, or seeing Obama winning the presidency as evidence that Black Americans no longer face injustice.

Sexism: the woman should do the dishes Feminism: men or women can do the dishes Gender ideology: whoever is doing the dishes is a woman

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.