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

by Tim Urban

More technology means better good times, but it also means badder bad times.

But humans are strange animals. A handful of cognitive superpowers, like symbolic language, abstract thinking, complex social relationships, and long-term planning, have allowed humans to take their environment into their own hands in a way no other animal can. In the blink of an eye—around 12,000 years, or 500 generations—humans have crafted a totally novel environment for themselves called civilization.

When you’re thinking like a Scientist—self-aware, free of bias, unattached to any particular ideas, motivated entirely by truth and continually willing to revise your beliefs—your brain is a hyper-efficient learning machine.

This is the magic of Idea Lab culture. While individual thinking suffers from bias, a diversity of biases helps the communal brain reduce blind spots. In a culture where changing your mind is encouraged, new findings spread quickly through the system, and all it takes is one member discovering a falsehood for the whole group to reject it. When disagreement is encouraged, new ideas can be tested as they’re being formed, in real-time, combining the knowledge-building efforts of each person into a single, dynamic process.

It’s not necessarily the most accurate takes that rise to the top⬥ but those that are most likely to make people click the retweet or share button—those that have the catchiest wording and hit the right emotional buttons.17 Through an almost evolutionary process, complex topics are dumbed down and packaged into irresistible nuggets for our Primitive Minds.

We see the same story again and again. A 2020 poll called Dueling Realities found that 81% of Republicans believe “the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists,” while 78% of Democrats believe “the Republican Party has been taken over by racists.” In 2022, Pew found that 72% of Americans believe that “on the issues that matter to them, their side in politics has been losing more often than winning” while only 24% felt that their side was winning more than losing—a natural result of political media that increasingly focuses on grievance and negativity.

Hypercharged tribalism happens when a concentrated tribal divide reaches such intensity that it resembles a religious war, subsuming the entire society and the people within it. 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.

The moderate recognizes that there are a variety of means available to him, but that there are no simple unambiguous ends. … The moderate chooses the center—the middle road—not because it is halfway between left and right. He is more than a non-extremist. He takes this course since it offers him the greatest possibility for constructive achievement. … Moderation is not a full-blown philosophy proclaiming the answers to all our problems. It is, rather, a point of view, a plea for political sophistication, for a certain skepticism to total solutions. … In contrast, the extremist rejects the complexity of the moderate’s world. His is a state of mind that insists on dividing reality into two antithetical halves. The gray is resolved into black and white. Men are either good or evil. Policies are either Communist or anti-Communist.

Reagan believed opposing politicians should work together and come to compromises, and he encouraged a culture of individual thinking and open disagreement. He demonstrated this in his governance (e.g., he raised taxes and levies multiple times while in office) and said it plainly in speeches. He’d preface calls for Republican unity with qualifiers like this: “The Republican Party, both in this state and nationally, is a broad party. There is room in our tent for many views; indeed, the divergence of views is one of our strengths. … Unity does not require unanimity of thought.”35

The Critical Social Justice premise that white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative power was embedded in cultural, institutional, and legal systems could stretch into a much farther-reaching premise that this power was embedded in the fundamental mechanisms of modern civilization: knowledge, language, discourse, science, reason, and the very notion of objective truth.

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.

One of the most common pleas from SJF activists is to “listen to people of color,” to “listen to women,” to “listen to LGBTQ people.” But when what these people say doesn’t jibe with the SJF narrative, SJF stops listening.

Controlling what people can say controls what the giant can think—which eventually leads to controlling what individuals think. Over time, a superintelligent genie turns into a mindless golem.

In honor cultures, it is one’s reputation that makes one honorable or not, and one must respond aggressively to insults, aggressions, and challenges or else lose honor. Not to fight back is itself a kind of moral failing … People socialized into a culture of honor often shun reliance on law or any other authority even when it is available, refusing to lower their standing by depending on another to handle their affairs.

Dignity, say Campbell and Manning, “exists independently of what others think, so a culture of dignity is one in which public reputation is less important. Insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same impact as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery.” They elaborate on this: It is even commendable to have thick skin that allows one to shrug off slights and insults, and in a dignity-based society parents might teach children some version of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”—an idea that would be alien in a culture of honor. People are to avoid insulting others, too, whether intentionally or not, and in general an ethic of self-restraint prevails.6

So in an honor culture, the cool kids go apeshit when their enemies insult them. In a dignity culture, it’s cooler to show a thick skin and shrug off disrespect.

In other words, victimhood cultures “combine the sensitivity to slight that we see in honor cultures with the willingness to appeal to authorities and other third parties that we see in dignity cultures. And victimhood culture differs from both honor and dignity cultures in highlighting rather than downplaying the complainants’ victimhood.”

Some researchers believe the rise of victimhood culture is part of a broader trend, partially explained by the changes in how young people in the West, or at least in the U.S., are raised. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt write: Children today have far more restricted childhoods, on average, than those enjoyed by their parents, who grew up in far more dangerous times and yet had many more opportunities to develop their intrinsic antifragility. Compared with previous generations, younger Millennials and especially members of iGen (born in and after 1995) have been deprived of unsupervised time for play and exploration. They have missed out on many of the challenges, negative experiences, and minor risks that help children develop into strong, competent, and independent adults.

People faking illness is so common that there’s a term for it: Munchausen syndrome.⬥ In their book Dying to be Ill, Marc Feldman and Gregory Yates explain that people who pretend to have cancer or other illnesses cannot “resist the pull of obtaining attention or sympathy … these patients fabricate disease and illness in order to reap the rewards of the sick role, which include entitlement to support from others, exemption from social obligations, and a general state of being in need of help, or deserving of special allowances.”

Psychologist Nick Haslam writes about “concept creep,” which describes the way that perceptions of harm have been rapidly evolving: Concepts that refer to the negative aspects of human experience and behavior have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before. This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena.15

“The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”

Study after study after study have come to the same conclusion: there is little evidence that diversity trainings work.

Either way, what certainly has entered hundreds of schools is Social Justice Fundamentalism, and everything that comes along with it: the idea that disparities always imply injustice and equality of opportunity must lead to equality of outcome; the view that identity characteristics like race, gender, and sexual orientation are the primary axes of advantage and disadvantage, and identity diversity is the only meaningful form of diversity; the equating of basic liberal values and institutions like free speech, science, and meritocracy with “whiteness”; the belief that oppression pervades every institution, every interaction, and every norm; the notion that disagreeing with SJF is violence and punishing such behavior is nothing more than self-defense; the gloomy outlook that sees a world where racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are forever present and barely improving.