When we really zoom out, we see that most of what we consider ancient history is really just the very last pages of the story. The Agricultural Revolution starts around page 950 or 960, recorded history gets going at about page 976, and Christianity isn’t born until page 993. Page 1,000, which goes from the early 1770s to the early 2020s, contains all of U.S. history.
The jump in technology from page 1,000 to 1,001 should prove to be even more extreme than the jump from 999 to 1,000—maybe many times more so. This could be unfathomably awesome. We could conquer every problem that ails us today—disease, poverty, climate change, maybe even mortality itself. But if the catastrophes of page 1,000 were the most devastating yet, what does that mean about catastrophes on page 1,001? The same technology that has made our world magical has also opened a large number of Pandora’s boxes: rapidly advancing AI, cyber warfare, autonomous weapons, and bioweapons, to name a few.
Genetic mutation is like a bug appearing in the software from time to time, and every once in a while, a certain bug makes the software better—an accidental software update.
In the blink of an eye—around 12,000 years, or 500 generations—humans have crafted a totally novel environment for themselves called civilization. As great as civilization may be, 500 generations isn’t enough time for evolution to take a shit. So now we’re all here living in this fancy new habitat, using brain software optimized to our old habitat.
You know how moths inanely fly toward light and you’re not really sure why they do this or what their angle is? It turns out that for millions of years, moths have used moonlight as a beacon for nocturnal navigation—which works great until a bunch of people start turning lights on at night that aren’t the moon. The moth’s brain software hasn’t had time to update itself to the new situation, and now millions of moths are wasting their lives flapping around streetlights.
Like the moth flying toward a streetlight, the human Primitive Mind thinks it’s a great decision to eat Skittles. In the ancient human world, there was no such thing as processed food, calories were hard to come by, and anything with a texture and taste as delectable as a Skittle was surely a good thing to eat.
Plato wrote about a “charioteer” (intellect) that managed the “horses” of rational modesty and passionate insolence. Sigmund Freud’s structure consisted of the “id” (primitive instinct), the “superego” (the conscience), and the “ego” that balances the two with external reality. More recently, social psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote about “System 1” (fast, involuntary thinking) and “System 2” (slow, complex thinking that requires effort). Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote about the emotional “elephant” and its rational “rider” which appears to be in control but often is not. Harvard’s Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman wrote about the conflict between the “want self” and the “should self.”
Our beliefs make up our perception of reality, drive our behavior, and shape our life stories.
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.
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. This means that our driving intellectual motivation—and, in turn, our thinking process—varies depending on where we are on the Ladder at any given moment.
Rung 1: Thinking like a Scientist
But when Scientists want to learn something new, they try to soak up a wide variety of information on the topic. The Scientist seeks out ideas across the Idea Spectrum, even those that seem likely to be wrong—because knowing the range of viewpoints that exist about the topic is a key facet of understanding the topic.
That’s why perhaps the most important skill of a skilled thinker is knowing when to trust. Trust, when assigned wisely, is an efficient knowledge-acquisition trick. If you can trust a person who actually speaks the truth, you can take the knowledge that person worked hard for—either through primary research or indirectly, using their own diligent trust criteria—and “photocopy” it into your own brain. This magical intellectual corner-cutting tool has allowed humanity to accumulate so much collective knowledge over the past 10,000 years that a species of primates can now understand the origins of the universe.
When people trust information to be true that isn’t, they end up with the illusion of knowledge—which is worse than having no knowledge at all.
But people do this with ideas all the time. They feel sure they’re right about an opinion they’ve never had to defend—an opinion that has never stepped into the ring. Scientists know that an untested belief is only a hypothesis—a boxer with potential, but not a champion of anything.
Rung 2: Thinking like a Sports Fan
Weird things happen to your thinking when the drive for truth is infected by some ulterior motive. Psychologists call it “motivated reasoning.” I like to think of it as Reasoning While Motivated—the thinking equivalent of drunk driving.
Confirmation bias is the invisible hand of the Primitive Mind that tries to push you toward confirming your existing beliefs and pull you away from changing your mind.
Being biased skews your assessment of other people’s thinking too. You believe you’re unbiased, so someone actually being neutral appears to you to be biased in the other direction, while someone who shares your bias appears to be neutral.
Down on the low rungs, the Primitive Mind has the edge in the tug-of-war. Whether you’ll admit it or not (you won’t), the desire to feel right, and appear right, has overcome your desire to be right. And when some other motivation surpasses your drive for truth, you leave the world of intellectual integrity and enter a new place.
Rung 3: Thinking like an Attorney
A Sports Fan wants to win, but when pushed, cares most about truth. But it’s as if it's an Attorney’s job to win, and nothing can alter their allegiance.
But sometimes, there are beliefs that your Primitive Mind holds so dear that your Higher Mind has no influence at all over how you think about them. When dealing with these topics, ideas and people feel inseparable and changing your mind feels like an existential threat. You’re on the bottom rung.
Rung 4: Thinking like a Zealot
When Zealots argue, things can quickly get heated, because for someone who identifies with their ideas, a challenge to those ideas feels like an insult. It feels personally invalidating. A punch landed on a Zealot’s idea is a punch landed on their baby.
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.
When someone who often says “I don’t know” does express conviction about a viewpoint, it really means something, and others will take it to heart without too much skepticism needed—which saves the listener time and effort. Likewise, unearned conviction is a major no-no in an Idea Lab. So someone with a reputation for bias or arrogance or dishonesty will be met with a high degree of skepticism, no matter how much conviction they express. Idea Labs also love arguments.
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.
A culture that treats ideas like sacred objects incentivizes entirely different behavior than the Idea Lab. In an Echo Chamber, falling in line with the rest of the group is socially rewarded. It’s a common activity to talk about how obviously correct the sacred ideas are—it’s how you express your allegiance to the community and prove your own intellectual and moral worth.
“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
In case you’re thinking, “I’m a really smart person, so I’m safe from the low rungs,” Adam Grant has bad news for you: “Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.”
Everyone can do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. Or, as it has been said: Your right to swing your arms ends just where another person’s nose begins.2 In exchange for handing over the cudgel and giving up the freedom to oppress others, you could live a life entirely free from anyone oppressing you. Pretty good trade, right? In the Liberal Games, no one would be completely free, but all citizens would be mostly free:
High-rung thinkers don’t usually lock themselves into political prisons by identifying as “a progressive” or “a conservative,” and individuals on the high rungs often hold progressive stances on some issues and conservative stances on others.
The litmus test comes when the middle section isn’t an option—when your team and your principles are in conflict. High-rung political thinkers stay inside the circle on the right, criticizing their own teammates or even standing up for the other team when doing so aligns with their principles. But low-rung political culture encourages people to stay inside the left circle, keeping true to their team, even when doing so flies in the face of their principles.
To straw man your opponent, you invent a weak counterargument to your position and pretend that it’s your opponent’s position, even though it’s not. It’s the real-world version of what shitty college students do in their papers: conjure up a weakling opponent, pound it to the floor, and then declare victory.
if straw man arguments are repeated enough inside a political Echo Chamber, people come to believe they are representative of what the opposition thinks. After enough of this, any version of dissenting arguments—even the strong ones—will be disregarded as nothing more than better-worded versions of the well-known absurd arguments.
fMRI data revealed that people actually processed challenges to their political beliefs with different parts of their brains than they used to process nonpolitical contradictions. Challenges to nonpolitical beliefs lit up regions of the brain involved in decision-making, while political challenges generated more activity in the emotional, fight-or-flight parts of the brain, as well as the Default Mode Network, a group of brain regions associated with creating a sense of self and with disengagement from the external world.
So cultural sorting yields political sorting as a byproduct, and the resulting homogeneity then makes everyone’s political views more extreme. You end up with increasingly partisan people, holding increasingly negative perceptions of people from the other party, which makes everyone even more determined to surround themselves with people from their own tribe. It’s a classic vicious cycle.
Then there was the end of the Fairness Doctrine. In 1949, the FCC (the U.S. Federal Communications Commission) established the Fairness Doctrine, which required anyone who held a broadcast license to present “controversial issues of public importance” in a “fair and balanced” manner, giving airtime to “contrasting viewpoints.”10 In 1987, in the face of arguments that the Fairness Doctrine was in direct conflict with the First Amendment’s freedom of the press clause, it was repealed.
Broadcast TV news aimed to be a show about reality. Narrowcast news tries to be a reality show. Big difference.
In the past, audience members had limited ability to influence what news was covered. But social media changes the equation. “In the modern era,” Klein writes, “a shortcut to newsworthiness is social media virality; if people are already talking about a story or a tweet, that makes it newsworthy almost by definition.”22
News media is infamous for what we could call “destructive cherry-picking”—a selection bias that sees negative stories as the most newsworthy, because they draw the most interest. It’s why, for example, Americans surveyed by Gallup since 1990 consistently think crime is increasing, even though in almost every one of those years, it decreased from the year before.
Scientists use the term “behavioral immune system” to describe the theory that disgust in humans is linked to xenophobia and discomfort with practices and rituals (especially sexual) that seem foreign or different to us—an ancient impulse we developed long ago, when contact with foreign people and practices often did put you at risk of disease.
“as late as the early 1990s, it was possible for justices to vote in ideologically unpredictable ways.” In an era of hypercharged tribalism, this is no longer the case. In close votes (5-3 or 5-4), today’s justices almost always vote along party lines.38
Of the two parties, the Republicans were a bit more supportive of the movement. Eighty percent of the Republicans in the House and 82% of those in the Senate voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964; for Democrats, it was only 60% in the House and 69% in the Senate.
“The spread of true and false news online,” a 2018 study that analyzed 126,000 stories tweeted by three million people, found that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”
“Progressive Republican” might seem like an oxymoron today, but for the first 50 years of the party’s existence—from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt—the party had a strong progressive streak.
Marxists, and their neo-Marxist descendants, don’t think this is progressive enough. They believe the founding liberal ideals of countries like the U.S. are fatally flawed and inevitably create a horribly lopsided structure whereby ruling classes use and abuse oppressed classes. They argue that the freedoms of liberal systems don’t really make people free—rather, they give the upper classes the freedom and the tools to exploit everybody else.
In pre-modern times, it was common for different humans to believe in different denominations of truth—like, for example, the prominent religious doctrines, each of which had its own version of the truth. Modernity replaced faith-based thinking and divine authority with the idea of a single objective truth and a universal process for discovering it.
Standpoint theory, a concept that emerged from Marxist theory and has since been adopted more broadly by Social Justice Fundamentalism, argues that different identity groups have special access to different kinds of knowledge.