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

sprite 7up pepsi,
this book is sexy.

The best book i've read in the last year. it was so cathartic reading this, and described so much of what i disliked about university. It's also a page turner! I was finding reasons to walk around so i could listen to it. Which, btw, i would highly recommend because Tim has the most soothing voice and the way the images are linked makes it easy to pull up your phone when you get a chance to see the visuals.

I also genuinely think this made me a better thinker, even though it's about political tribalism I could feel how so much of this applied to more than political tribalism and just _thought_ tribalism in my own life, ideas that i had become an attorney for, for no reason i could think of.

It has made me so much more self aware about the areas of my life i am closed minded and in unconvincable land and given what feels like a path forward to leaving this kind of attachment to idea behind me.

Tim Urban's “What's Our Problem?” asks two very important questions: what is fundamentally broken with our society at present, and how can we fix it? As it turns out, Urban has a framework for looking at the world that, albeit devoid of any foundation, works to an extent. He suggests adding a vertical axis (up vs down) to the horizontal axis of politics (left vs right), where your place on the ladder denotes how rational or irrational you're acting. He argues that the world is slipping into low-rung thinking, where confirmation bias leads people to favour one ideology over another, or they become completely closed off to others' viewpoints, creating an echo chamber called a golem. This unchecked golem absorbs high-rung people who can't or won't speak up.
To be honest, that's where the book's good parts end. After some amazing, nuanced discussion, it becomes annoyingly USA-centered – astounding for a book that claims to know our problems, not just the USA's in particular. The next chapter is a short, emotionally-detached Wikipedia-style summary of how Republicans in the US are forming their own low-rung golem, with little to no detail as to the why.
The meat of the book, however, focuses on wokeism and social justice fundamentalism, which Urban sees as a huge problem disintegrating society. I've encountered this topic online numerous times (mostly discussed by right-wingers and “enlightened” centrists), and I have never found a convincing argument in support of it - and Urban fails to provide one. Believing that inequality is not only structural is one thing, but pretending that it is not structural at all is another. Maybe it's just me, but I think high-rung thinking should also involve not becoming excessively angry when confronted with topics one dislikes, a fact that Urban conveniently forgot.
After an excruciating discussion on how progressives are responsible for the US's downfall and how (renamed) social justice warriors are bad for everyone, and why even progressives who believe in social justice should stop doing so, the book concludes with a contemplative redemption. It suggests that people should strive to find common ground even when it doesn't exist, treat political opponents as humans, and remember that we're all in this together.
All idealistic and logical and sufficiently high-rung of you, Tim. Wish the rest of the book was like that, though.

Well that was disappointing. The “self-help” part, promised in the title, takes less than 10 pages in the end of the book. Not that those aren't good ideas - but to get them, you have to wade through the previous part. And that's a half-book-long rant about how most things being wrong is the fault of wokeness and cancel culture.

The “societies” part is also, very clearly, a missed promise - this book does not look, at all, outside the USA borders. Not in terms of problems it looks at, not in terms of influences.

Insightful Ideas

This book offers a compelling analysis of the underlying causes of dysfunction in our society. Tim draws on a wide range of disciplines, including history, sociology, psychology, and economics, to explore the root causes of societal problems such as political polarization, income inequality, and systemic racism. He emphasizes the roots of our problems are based in our mental tools that served us well in antiquity but are getting hijacked in our modern age. He goes into depth on the on issues afflicting both sides of the political spectrum and how human psychology is preventing society from not catering to our basest impulses. And the drawings are fun but deeply thought provoking. Loved it.