Many of what we think of as hot-topic political divides today only became that way over the past 30 years. As recently as the mid-‘90s, for example, people from the two parties polled about equal in their support for legalized abortion.⬥39 It’s a similar story with the push for stricter gun laws, which was supported by parties in the early ‘90s

the “motte-and-bailey” fallacy6—which can be used as a defensive tactic. The name comes from a type of two-part medieval fortification common in Northern Europe between the 10th and 13th centuries. It looked something like this: The bailey was an area of land that was desirable and economically productive to live on but vulnerable to attack and

Most of us know the term “Echo Chamber,” and we’ll get to that in a minute—but we sorely lack a term for the opposite of an Echo Chamber. When the rules of a group’s intellectual culture mirror the values of high-rung thinking, the group is what I call an Idea Lab. An Idea Lab is an environment of collaborative high-rung thinking. People in an Idea

So the Higher Mind’s goal is to get to the truth, while the Primitive Mind’s goal is confirmation of its existing beliefs. These two very different types of intellectual motivation exist simultaneously in our heads.

It’s the great catch-22 of our species: the biggest threat to humanity is low-rung humanity, and low-rung humanity persists because it has often been the best defense against this very threat.

We can visualize a group’s culture as a kind of gas cloud that fills the room when the group is together. A group’s culture influences its members with a social incentive system. Those who play by the culture’s rules are rewarded with acceptance, respect, and praise, while violating the culture will result in penalties like ridicule, shame, and

In the real world, each turn of events is mired in potential positives and potential negatives, which is a mess to sort out. Disney movies get rid of that messiness. Aladdin gets ahold of the genie = 1. Jafar steals the genie away = 0. Disney even digitizes the weather, which is always either perfect or, when the bad guys are getting their way,

I appreciate the Google search algorithm. It filters results that are most relevant to where I live and what I’m typically interested in, and it can guess remarkably well what I want to search for after I type just a few letters, saving me the trouble of typing the whole search.

The further this cycle goes, the harder it is to reverse. Media brands that offer up one-sided tribal junk food end up alienating high-rung minds, which makes the brands that much more dependent on the junk-food-loving low-rung audience. And tens of millions of Americans end up with political diabetes.