Book Review: What’s Our Problem
Tim Urban (WaitButWhy) dives into the causes and cures for the ailing American Political Society
If there is one book I would want everyone in the USA to read (and read this year), it’s this one.
It’s not often that a book changes my perspective, and I was not expecting this one too. I already read WaitButWhy and tend to agree with Tim’s other writings. I was already familiar with similar frameworks for high-brain/low-brain (for example, from reading Thinking Fast and Slow), groupthink Golems vs. liberal Genies, etc. I didn’t have the same vocabulary (Tim made up new terms to simplify and avoid any previous connotations, where possible), but I came into this book with all of the main concepts in the back of my mind from previous forays into psychology, politics, history, and of course recent experiences living in the US.Yet it did change my perspective.
It made me more open-minded, more critical of rhetoric I usually agree with, and more eager to talk to and discuss with (the “high-rung”) people on the “other side”.
These are, of course, exactly the effects Tim intended, and exactly what we need to “save the world”. So that’s good.
Although I already had a vague idea of the Main Points, I would not have been able to articulate them clearly. More importantly, I didn’t have a “feel” for them. The details, examples, anecdotes, and references provided go a long way to forming a concrete foundation of intuition for how the frameworks have actually played out in US society over the last few years.
The beginning and end of the book are the fun parts, but the middle (“SJF” sections) is where the message is hammered home, and where I got the most out of it.
What I hope people will appreciate about this book as that when Tim makes an potentially controversial assertion (like “SJF (AKA Wokeism) is net-bad for society”, is is presented in a least-political way possible, and backed up by heaps of evidence and examples. The pages are strewn with link and references to the data and sources cited. Arguments are built up logically, consistently, and as objectively as possible (I think.) It’s hard to argue with the points made in this book without resorting to, well, demagoguery or anti-liberal debate rules.
A common thought I had reading this book was “oh good I’m not crazy, they are”. That’s a comforting thought. Indeed, one of the Main Points is that the majority of people in society can be — and currently are — forced to conform completely to a mainstream narrative that they don’t internally fully agree with for fear of conflict with the fringes of their own party, which are far more vocal and far less willing to abide by Liberal rules than the moderates/centrists. As Tim aptly points out, it is the Prisoner’s Dilemma writ large on society, a political Tragedy of the Commons. But the good news is, when more people say “wait, by why”, we can start to have real debate again, real solutions, and save our society.
Another thought I came away with was “I really do have a decent understanding of the Red Golem (the rise of far right extremists), but vastly underrated both the power and threat of the “SJF” (cancel culture/political-correctness/far-left-extremists) infecting my own political back yard. Tim’s takedown of SJF is even more convincing and alarming than that of the far-right, which is surprising considering how easy it is (in my opinion) to (deservedly) vilify the far-right. I have been hearing similar statements warning about the influence of [“SJF”] from many different people and places (a good way to tell that a phenomena is real is when it’s described by multiple different sources in different contexts in different ways). People are raising concerns about the disintegration of the universities, media, and other institutions (esp. of “sensemaking” institutions) but didn’t have a good model for why or how this was happening. Tim put everything into psychological and historical perspective.
As I finished this book, I had a strong urge to teleport through space and time, back to a freshman activities fair at my undergrad university in 2011, so I could walk up the to Republicans Club and be like “Hey guys, I know we disagree on most stuff, but we gotta do something about them — *points to SJF and literal nazis coming down the road in a few years*. Let’s schedule some public debates before they take over our parties.”. In other words, it made me want to seek out and debate with “high-rung” conservatives that could actually defend their policies and vision for society with — and attack mine — with reason and evidence. It made me yearn to get out of echo-chambers and get back to a real Idea Lab. If enough people read this book and come away with similar feelings, perhaps we still can…
P.S. Just after finishing the epilog, I turned on the news and immediately saw a story involving a conservative arguing a point I don’t agree with, but asking (ghasp) a fair question. The liberals appropriatly disparaged his position, belittled his opinion, disregarded his perspective and…ignored the question. (And it wasn’t even a complex or nuanced question of opinion, it was a relatively easy to answer factual question that could have been quickly addressed with figures they should have had on hand.) I was like “FML”. Once you start noticing the “Disney World” frame control…
