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

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.

“What happened in Germany didn’t happen because there was a good First Amendment there. It happened because there wasn’t.”159

In 2020, The New York Times published an article arguing that orchestras should end blind auditions, because they produced orchestras that were not diverse enough, with too many Asian and white musicians. The writer was adhering to Kendi’s definition of an antiracist. The policy of auditioning musicians without seeing who they were was producing an

A healthy marketplace of ideas (or research institution) has two basic rules: 1) all ideas are free to be expressed, and 2) all ideas may be criticized. To make it to the biggest stages, ideas have to be persuasive enough win people over and sound enough to survive a gauntlet of criticism.

To be a good liberal means to criticize, not cancel. But it also means that you stand up for liberalism—when you see cancel culture happening, you try to stop it. This is what Popper’s Paradox calls for.

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 c

We’ll never hear about the article that sits on the editor’s desk and never gets published, or the movie that never gets bought. The science too risky to research. The book too risky to write. The memo too risky to send. The op-ed too risky to pen. The opinion too risky to voice. George Orwell called this “the sinister fact” about censorship: “Unpo

Throughout this book, we’ve been building a richer language to talk about what’s going on in our societies, parsing the terms so we could make single-axis discussions multi-dimensional.

According to a comprehensive study, people are at their most politically and ideologically impressionable between their mid-teens and mid-20s—so what they’re taught in college can stick with them forever.138 When, during those years, students are encouraged to think like political Zealots, it makes tomorrow’s society more politically polarized. And