A few years ago, writer and cartoonist Tim Urban started becoming troubled by what he saw going on in the world around him. He noticed that while technology was progressing in unbelievable ways—people were going to space on private rocket ships and computers were the size of Starbucks coffee cups—it seemed like people were unhappier than ever before. We were petty. We were turning against each other. We were tribal. And he noticed that the very things that had allowed for unbelievable technological progress—things like democracy, liberalism, and humanism—were under siege.
Why was everything such a mess? When did things get so tribal? And why do humans do this stuff to each other? Urban’s new book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies, is an answer to those questions and more. Like his other work on his blog, Wait But Why, Urban uses comically simple drawings, stick figures, and charts, to make the most complex and profound questions that humans face tangible and affecting. In this book, Urban looks back at hundreds of thousands of years of history and explains how we are now living through more change, more rapidly, than at any other time—the stakes of that are almost too high to comprehend—but what he argues is that the danger we face in the end is not global warming. It’s not an asteroid racing toward Earth. It’s not an impending alien invasion. It’s ourselves.
On today’s episode, Tim Urban explains how we got ourselves into this mess, and how we can also get ourselves out of it.
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My moment of clarity came when I was sitting with my parents in my college's executive suite and a set of administrators told us that there was no need for them to explain what events they were disciplining me for and that they could simply decline to answer any questions about the subject, and my mother told them that this would never stand up in a court of law.
And the administrator's response came: "We're not in a court of law".
My mother replied that we could get it there, and we did, and we won, but it just astonished me that for all the high pretenses of colleges in general and this one in particular, they weren't even interested in arguing that they were doing the right thing. Saying that they had some reason for their actions, even a flimsy reason, even a lie, would have cost them nothing. But they couldn't even be bothered. And I felt like in their eyes, it would have been demeaning to even admit that they were bound by any notions of due process or more broadly of telling the truth. They had the power, and that was all that mattered. Or so they thought.
So many things are like this now.
Speaking as a grateful fan of Bari and the Free Press, I don't have a lot of confidence in systems which purport to distinguish between two kinds of political speech: upper brain rational and low brain tribal.
I think it will end up like the "fact checks". We'll acknowledge there's a few low brains on our side of the rivalry (whichever side that is) but clearly there's many more low brains among our opponents.
Our constitution, wisely, doesn't expect us bring our best intentions to the table. It acknowledges what a bunch of self-righteous, self-deceiving bums we are.
I was born in 1960 in a college town. Everyone thought their political opinions were well informed and rational. They were just as biased and intolerant as anyone else.
Human beings engage in politics to be superior.
Instead of pretending to be rational and lying to ourselves about our true intentions, I suggest we take a look at the most obnoxious one of our rivals and say, "If I were as mean spirited as that person, I would still see myself as the good guy so I better express my opinions with humility."