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

Oppression has been a regular feature of human societies since the dawn of time, and in the Power Games, the primary tool to fight oppression has been violence. Free speech offers a better way. The rich are protected and empowered by their money, the elite by their connections, the majority by their vote, while minority views often end up left out.

If the genie is the product of human collaboration, the golem is the emergent property of human obedience. Golems are what happen when humans act like ants. Ant behavior has two components: strict conformity within the colony and total ruthlessness when dealing with other colonies.

But in the realm of low-rung politics, there’s also a third option: Change the rules of the game to a different one that you can win. If your ideas can’t win a fair fight in the boxing ring, start taking cheap shots and see if you can get away with it.

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.

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. Let’s call this

Throughout American history, free speech has been much more than protection against tyranny. It’s been the country’s brain, its compass, and its conscience.

There’s also the “inoculation effect,” a term coined by social psychologist William McGuire in 1961. The trick of many of our vaccines is to expose a person’s immune system to a weak version of a dangerous virus. After the body defeats the weak version of the virus, it develops an immunity against all versions of the virus, including the strong one

Removing the cudgel from the game-playing options (or, rather, adding in harsh-enough penalties for it that coercion becomes an undesirable game-playing strategy) changes the game from a contest of who can be the scariest, the most dangerous, and the most intimidating, to a contest of who can provide the most value to their fellow citizens.

People in an Idea Lab don’t usually take arguments personally because Idea Lab culture is built around the core notion that people and ideas are separate things. People are meant to be respected, ideas are meant to be batted around and picked apart. Perhaps most importantly, an Idea Lab helps its members stay high up on the Ladder. No one thinks li