My society is currently acting like a poopy-pantsed four-year-old who dropped its ice cream.
I picture society as a giant human—a living organism like each of us, only much bigger.
Tribalism and political division are on the rise. False narratives and outlandish conspiracy theories are flourishing. Major institutions are floundering. Medieval-style public shaming is suddenly back in fashion. Trust, the critical currency of a healthy society, is disintegrating. And these trends seem to be happening in lots of societies, not just my own.
When we learn a technology lesson, we tend not to forget it. The invention of the integrated circuit in 1959 was a breakthrough that launched a new paradigm in modern computing. This isn’t the kind of thing we later forget, finding ourselves accidentally going back to making computers with vacuum tubes. But wisdom lessons don’t always seem to stick. Unlike technological growth, wisdom seems to oscillate up and down, leading societies to repeat age-old mistakes.
I picture our societies as giants trudging upward on a mountain ridge toward a glorious future—but as they move upward, the ridge gets thinner and the cliffs on either side grow steeper. The higher we go, the more deadly a fall we risk. I see those giants losing their composure and becoming more erratic in their steps, at the worst possible time.
As the authors of The Story of Us, we have no mentors, no editors, no one to make sure it all turns out okay. It’s all in our hands. This scares me, but it’s also what gives me hope. If we can all get just a little wiser, together, it may be enough to nudge the story onto a trajectory that points toward an unimaginably good future.
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.
For millions of years, moths have used moonlight as a beacon for nocturnal navigation—which works great until a bunch of people start turning lights on at night that aren’t the moon. The moth’s brain software hasn’t had time to update itself to the new situation, and now millions of moths are wasting their lives flapping around streetlights.
Your Higher Mind is aware that humans are often delusional, and it wants you to be not delusional. It sees beliefs as the most recent draft of a work in progress, and as it lives more and learns more, the Higher Mind is always happy to make a revision. Because when beliefs are revised, it’s a signal of progress—of becoming less ignorant, less foolish, less wrong.
Most of the info we use to inform ourselves is indirect knowledge: knowledge accumulated by others that we import into our minds and adopt as our own. Every statistic you come across, everything you read in a textbook, everything you learn from parents or teachers, everything you see or read in the news or on social media, every tenet of conventional wisdom—it’s all indirect knowledge.
Trust, when assigned wisely, is an efficient knowledge-acquisition trick. If you can trust a person who actually speaks the truth, you can take the knowledge that person worked hard for—either through primary research or indirectly, using their own diligent trust criteria—and “photocopy” it into your own brain. This magical intellectual corner-cutting tool has allowed humanity to accumulate so much collective knowledge over the past 10,000 years that a species of primates can now understand the origins of the universe.
Echo Chambers equate a person’s ideas with their identity, so respecting a person and respecting their ideas are one and the same. Disagreeing with someone in an Echo Chamber is seen not as intellectual exploration but as rudeness, making an argument about ideas indistinguishable from a fight.
Billions of years ago, some single-celled creatures realized that being just one cell left your options pretty limited. So they figured out a cool trick. By joining together with other single cells, they could form a giant creature that had all kinds of new advantages. This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. .
Individual ants in a colony are kind of like the cells that make up your body, which cooperate with each other not because they’re nice, but because they’re part of a bigger life form.
You might wake up in the morning with your psyche firmly on the bottom of the tower, feeling like a lone individual. You head to work, where you brainstorm a project with five other people, becoming part of a six-person thinking machine. After work you join a political protest outside, losing your sense of self in the exhilaration of being a tiny piece of a thousand-person megaphone.
Language is so important because it allows individual brains to connect, like neurons, to form a larger thinking system: a communal brain.
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. The result is a multi-mind thinking system that’s superior to any of its individual members at learning new things and separating truth from fiction.
In modern day America, the Left usually makes the case for globalization while the Right makes the argument for national interests. The Left stays wary of unchecked capitalism while the Right is wary of over-reaching government. The Left focuses on protecting and lifting up marginalized groups while the Right worries about how such efforts could potentially backfire. In each case, the blind spots of one side are seen clearly by the other side, allowing the complete system to function more wisely than either side could on its own.
People engaged in high-rung politics, without the burden of rigid attachment to any one ideology, can combine ideas from across the spectrum to form a nimble political superbrain that can respond in nuanced ways to changing times.
Overriding ancient software is not easy. Each of us has a Primitive Mind in our head, and even the skilled high-rung thinkers among us are prone to morph into childish low-rungers when it comes to politics. That’s no surprise: politics deals with fairness, resource distribution, and groups of people competing for power—concepts that the Primitive Mind is programmed to freak out about because they were fundamental to ancient survival.
There is a vibrant world of high-rung politics. There’s just an even larger world down below, where politics is less about working together to build a more perfect union and more about the good guys triumphing over the bad guys in a political war.
People who surround themselves with Idea Lab culture get constant practice defending their ideas and challenging others. In the Echo Chamber’s safe-from-dissent space, people remain amateurs.
We’ve talked about how our beliefs can become intertwined with our identity because the Primitive Mind has a hard time distinguishing between the two. When we associate ourselves with our most fervent beliefs, doubting those beliefs feels like an existential crisis. So dissent can send our Primitive Minds into fight-or-flight mode, where we lock our beliefs in a protective bunker.
In a way, the U.S. is like an ecosystem.
When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to forget that we’re living in a rare anomaly within human history—an anomaly held up only by trust, cultural norms, and shared assumptions.
Broadcast TV news aimed to be a show about reality. Narrowcast news tries to be a reality show. Big difference. Reality is interesting sometimes. Reality shows are interesting all the time. And what’s the reality TV producer’s best trick? Drama and negativity. Would anyone watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills if the characters got along most of the time? Of course not. That’s why every five minutes of the show includes a conflict of some kind. As soon as you realize that news media is also entertainment media, the constant coverage of conflict and drama makes perfect sense.
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.
Social media doesn’t just amplify political junk food, it plays a role in shaping it. When a new political news story makes waves, thousands of hot takes quickly bubble up. It’s not necessarily the most accurate takes that rise to the topg.18 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. Through an almost evolutionary process, complex topics are dumbed down and packaged into irresistible nuggets for our Primitive Minds.
Geographic sorting means many people barely spend time with anyone on the other political side, so the only information they have on what those people are like comes through distorted media and social media filters. The right-wing narrative floods right-wing people with anecdotes that make it seem like everyone on the left positively despises them and everything they stand for, and vice versa. Outrage about these messages then spreads like wildfire on social media.
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.
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.
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.
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. These wise decisions protect future society from the kind of bad times they experienced. But when times are good for long enough, we start to get cocky. We forget that the only reason times are good is because of principles fervently agreed upon by people who had been through hell. When we grow complacent about those principles, the safeguards put in place by older generations deteriorate. And the people of good times never see the rise of new bad times until it’s too late to stop them.
When a person is intimidated into silence, their mind’s light disappears from the world and is contained only to their head. As millions of people have gone dark, the light in the national brain has dimmed.
The most important thing for us to remember is that we do our rational and moral thinking with a not-that-smart tool that was designed to keep an ancient primate alive. Staying aware of this can help us be our wisest selves and reach our potential.
Every time a silent skeptic starts speaking out and becomes a vocal skeptic, it has a huge impact.
This isn’t an encouragement to become the insufferable person who always brings up politics. But if you’re in a setting where a conversation is happening and your Inner Self is screaming “I disagree!”—start saying, “I disagree.” I can almost guarantee that at least some other people in the room will secretly be harboring the same thoughts, and they’ll respect the shit out of you for saying it out loud.
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.