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

Over the past generation, Americans have become more educated, which has made them more mobile. The Economist notes that “45% of young Americans with a college degree moved states within five years of graduating, whereas only 19% of those with only a high-school education did.”

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

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.

Humility is looked down upon in an Echo Chamber, where saying “I don’t know” just makes you sound ignorant and changing your mind makes you seem wishy-washy. And conviction, used sparingly in an Idea Lab, is social currency in an Echo Chamber. The more conviction you speak with, the more knowledgeable, intelligent, and righteous you seem.

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.

Your brain is a giant of its own, made up of a network of 86 billion neurons.10 An isolated neuron is pretty useless. But by communicating with one another, a group of neurons can move upward on the Emergence Tower and combine into a single thinking system that’s far more powerful than the sum of its parts: the brain.

For most beliefs, we’re so concerned with where people stand that we often forget the most important thing about what someone thinks: how they arrived at what they think. This is where the Ladder can help. If the Idea Spectrum is a “what you think” axis, we can use the Ladder as a “how you think” axis.

But wisdom lessons don’t always seem to stick. Unlike technological growth, wisdom seems to oscillate up and down, leading societies to repeat age-old mistakes.

High-rung politics relies on a shared sense of reality—a shared understanding of What Is. In Political Disney World, the beliefs and viewpoints of people in different tribes are premised on entirely different versions of reality.