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

The Scientist’s clear mind sees a foggy world, full of complexity and nuance and messiness, the Zealot’s foggy mind shows them a clear, simple world, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions.

In 1938, blues musician Lead Belly sang a song he wrote about “the Scottsboro boys,” a group of Black teenagers who were sent to jail after being falsely accused of raping two white women on a train (one of the women later admitted it was a made-up charge). After the song, Lead Belly talked about the case and advised fellow Black Americans “to stay woke—keep their eyes open.” Stay woke. The term has been a part of the Black American lexicon for a very long time. In more recent years, the term has evolved from the way Lead Belly was using it—warning Black people to stay alert to dangerous situations that might arise—to a broader meaning about staying aware of racist systems of oppression. After the release of Erykah Badu’s 2007 song Master Teacher, with a chorus that repeated the line “I stay woke,” the term exploded into the mainstream.

The human cognitive weaknesses a genie tries to mitigate are the golem’s strengths. Confirmation bias tricks like cherry-picking, motivated skepticism, and motivated reasoning benefit hugely from economies of scale, as the snappiest and most convincing articulations of the sacred ideas spread quickly through the system. Individual biases, all pointing in the same direction in an Echo Chamber, scale up to make the golem’s ultra-biased macro-mind. And while individual minds inside a golem may have doubts about the sacred ideas, the social pressure of Echo Chamber culture keeps the giant as a whole steadfast in its beliefs. If the genie is the ultimate Scientist, the golem is the ultimate Zealot—a giant that’s totally certain of itself, totally unable to learn or change its mind, and worse at thinking than the average human.

This highlights the massive difference between criticism and cancel culture. Criticism attacks ideas, cancel culture punishes people. Criticism enriches discussion, cancel culture shuts down discussion. Criticism helps lift up the best ideas, cancel culture protects the ideas of the culturally powerful. Criticism is a staple of liberalism, cancel culture is the epitome of illiberalism

We started this book talking about moths. 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.

But oversimplifying the real world is a bad idea—and unfortunately, that’s exactly what the Primitive Mind likes to do.

Progressivism is also the generation of lots of new ideas—most of them untested—and inevitably, many of them will be bad ideas. The conservative resistance to progressive ideas provides an important filter.

Your right to swing your arms ends just where another person’s nose begins.

Genes can’t talk to their animals, so they control them by having them run on specialized survival software I call the Primitive Mind:

Separate realities are a natural consequence of market incentives moving from the North Star region closer to the lower corners of the Media Matrix, where there’s almost no overlap in coverage between the two sides. It makes sense that those most hooked on political media would be the most delusional, the same way consumers of political news in dog-raccoon-ville left the pro-dog and pro-raccoon crowds with totally different perceptions of reality.

The powerful social incentives of Echo Chamber culture keep everyone in line. The culture rewards the continual expression of narrative-confirming sentiment, and brands ideas that threaten the guiding narrative as taboo.

It’s what our Primitive Minds are programmed to do because it was the best way to survive in our distant past. Low-rung thinking, low-rung culture, and low-rung giant-building are all ancient survival behavior—behavior that was necessary a long time ago but today seems a lot like moths flying toward streetlights. When I look out at the world today, I see a rising epidemic of low-rung thinking and behavior. Too many of the Ladder struggles that exist in our heads, in our communities, in our political parties, and in our societies are slipping in the wrong direction.

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.

The subjective emotional stresses and temptations to which we are exposed in our attempts to deal with this domestic problem … represent a danger within ourselves—a danger that something may occur in our own minds and souls which will make us no longer like the persons by whose efforts this republic was founded and held together, but rather like the representatives of that very power we are trying to combat: intolerant, secretive, suspicious, cruel, and terrified of internal dissention because we have lost our own belief in ourselves and in the power of our ideals. The worst thing that our Communists could do to us, and the thing we have most to fear from their activities, is that we should become like them.

People who live through bad times, like the world wars, witness the fragility of human civilization firsthand. This harsh dose of reality has them saying, “never again,” which gets their priorities in order and leads to wise decisions.

Rather than training people to avoid conflict—by teaching members of minority groups to be extra sensitive to perceived slights and leaving members of privileged groups walking on eggshells—trainings should teach people how to manage conflict. While conflict can bring people together and drive innovation when managed constructively, trying to rid the workplace of conflict is not only futile, it stifles creativity.

In case you’re thinking, “I’m a really smart person, so I’m safe from the low rungs,” Adam Grant has bad news for you: “Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.

Do a self-audit. Where in your internal life is your Primitive Mind holding the reins? What are the triggers that activate your Primitive Mind and leave you buried in fog? Where do you tend to be at your best—consistently high rung, wise, and grown up? What is it about those moments that gives your Higher Mind such a strong advantage? Can you replicate that elsewhere? Think about your beliefs. Play the “why” game with them, like an annoying four-year-old. Why do you believe what you believe? When did those ideas become your beliefs? Were they installed in you by someone else? Are they beholden to some tribe’s checklist of approved ideas? If they are authentically yours, when were they last updated? Your Primitive Mind thinks your beliefs are sacred objects carved in stone, but they’re not—they’re hypotheses written in pencil, and if you’re thinking up on the high rungs, you should probably be pretty active with the eraser.

American poet Carl Sandburg once wrote: “When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

So an identified target is, with or without evidence, a guilty villain—which also means a villain necessitating severe punishment.

As the cultural tide shifts, the cost of open resistance grows.

Free speech means that even the most vile and objectionable ideas can be aired freely. This is critical, because governments that enact censorship policies rarely call them “censorship” policies—they usually say they’re banning some form of vile or objectionable speech.

The scary thing about the Republican story isn’t that there is a red political golem that does golem things like trying to grab power by breaking the rules, by enforcing conformity, by undermining trust in the electoral process. Political golems are an inevitability within any liberal democracy. The scary thing is that it’s succeeding.

My society is currently acting like a poopy-pantsed four-year-old who dropped its ice cream

There was no shortage of ideas in this book, but I believe one stands out above all: Us vs. Them is always a delusion. The Story of Us isn’t a story of good guys vs. bad guys but one about the tug-of-war that exists within each human head, each community, each society. In this epic story, heading together toward an uncertain fate, there is no Them. Just one big Us.

Attaching a political category to your identity is a heavy piece of baggage to carry around, and putting it down makes learning and exploring much easier and less stressful.

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 begun stomping through our societies like Godzilla, growing more emboldened with each passing year. These golems have infected the societies’ vital organs—their institutions—impeding their ability to function properly and causing a mass crisis of trust. ⬥ In the chaos of exponential progress, our societies are beginning to lose their grip.

Earlier I compared the U.S. to a giant trudging its way up a mountain toward a more perfect union. At the heart of the U.S. is a macro version of the tug-of-war inside each of us, and right now, the warring golems are functioning as a unit pulling the whole system in the wrong direction. This is how American society is being conquered. Not by a foreign enemy. Not by the Left or by the Right. But by its own worst nature.

On the other hand, the actual enemy of a political golem is the genie above it. The real threat to SJF comes not from white supremacy or Fox News mockery or Republican bans but from vocal pushback from principled progressives. The real threat to Trump’s mission to discredit the electoral process comes from vocal conservatives who value conservative principles over loyalty to Trump.

The government isn’t supposed to be able to police content on private platforms. But as tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Yale Law School’s constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld wrote in a 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.” The spread of baseless conspiracy theories within the Right's bubble is a dangerous trend. An authoritarian response by the Left only makes the problem worse. It makes it much easier to convince Republican voters that Covid is a Democratic plot or that the 2020 election results were manipulated.