Story of us |
! August 26, 2019 By Tim Urban
The Story of Us: Intro
Chapter 0: IntroductionChapter 0: Introduction
This is society.
Now let’s zoom in on the left arm.
Further.
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Okay see those skin flaps on the elbow? Let’s zoom in on the bottom one.
Little more.
tiny dots that make up the skin flaps of the stick figure's left elbow
There! See me? Come closer.
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Hi. I’m Tim. I’m a single cell in society’s body. U.S. society, to be specific.
So let me explain why we’re here.
As a writer and a generally thinky person, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about the society I live in,
and societies in general. I’ve always imagined society as a kind of giant human—a living organism like
each of us, only much bigger.
When you’re a single cell in the body of a giant, it’s hard to understand what the giant’s doing, or why it
is the way it is, because you can’t really zoom out and look at the whole thing all at once. But we do our
best.
The thing is, when I’ve recently tried to imagine what society might look like, I haven’t really been
picturing this:
Giant stick figure: "I am grown up."
Based on what I see around me, in person and online, it seems like my society is actually more like this:
Individual humans grow older as they age—but it kind of seems like the giant human I live in has been
getting more childish each year that goes by.
So I decided to write a blog post about this. But then something else happened.
When I told people I was planning to write a post about society, and the way people are acting, and the
way the media is acting, and the way the government is acting, and the way everyone else is acting,
people kept saying the same thing to me.
Don’t do it. Don’t touch it. Write about something else.
Anything else. It’s just not worth it.
They were right. With so many non-controversial topics to write about, why take on something so
loaded and risk alienating a ton of readers? I listened to people’s warnings, and I thought about moving
on to something else, but then I was like, “Wait what? I live inside a giant and the giant is having a six-
year-old meltdown in the grocery store candy section and that’s a not-okay thing for me to talk about?”
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It hit me that what I really needed to write about was
that—about why it’s perilous to write about
society.
I ended up going with some combination of both of these things: society’s current situation and why it’s
an especially bad idea for me to write about it—and how those two things are related.
I knew this would be a deep rabbit hole. Did I think I’d follow some sick-ass rabbit down a hole for
three
years, deep into U.S. history, world history, evolutionary psychology, political theory, and neuroscience,
through dozens of books, hundreds of datasets and articles, and into literally thousands of
conversations, some very pleasant and some that made me want to pull my head o! and throw it into
the trash? No I didn’t.
I ended up going so deep because as I read through studies and watched the news and read opinion
pieces and listened to podcasts and heard people’s life stories, I kept feeling like in each case, I was only
seeing a small part of what was happening. And I became obsessed with trying to wrap my head
around whatever the
big story was that all of these smaller stories were a part of. So I went farther and
farther down the rabbit hole, trying to get in a mental helicopter and zoom out far enough to see the
complete picture.
After many months of listening and learning and a torturous amount of thinking, I’m finally ready to
share my ideas with you.
Sometimes, certain topics become hard to talk about because our conversations get stuck in a rut. We
hear the same arguments, using the same wording, again and again, until we become numb to them.
When the words we use become too loaded with historical baggage, they stop being useful for
communication. That’s what I think may be going on here. We’re all a little stuck in our viewpoints about
society and we don’t seem to have a way to make forward progress.
So part of what I’ve spent three years working on is a new language we can use to think and talk about
our societies and the people inside of them. In typical Wait But Why form, the language is full of new
terms and metaphors and, of course, lots and lots of badly drawn pictures. It all amounts to a new lens.
Looking through this lens out at the world, and inward at myself, things make more sense to me now.
This is the introductory post in a series of posts that will come out throughout the next few months. In
the early parts of the series, we’ll get familiar with the new lens, and as the series moves on, we’ll start
using the lens to look at all of those topics a sane blogger isn’t supposed to write about. If I can do my
job well, by the end of the journey, everything will make more sense to you too.
There’s a pretty worrisome trend happening in many of our societies right now, but I’m pretty sure that
if we can just see it all with clear eyes, we can fix it. The Wait But Why community is full of people
determined to make the future as good as it can be for as many people as possible. The goal of this
series is to enhance the clarity of that community, helping us better understand ourselves and the
world around us so that we can do our part in nudging the future in the right direction. As with all Wait
But Why posts, everything in this series is open for debate—it’s my latest draft in a never-ending work
in progress. As the posts come out, reading your comments will help enhance my own clarity.
One last thing. When I took this topic on, I decided to do my best to force humility and open-
mindedness on myself, even in places we’re all terrible at being humble, like politics. It’s amazing how
much intellectual progress you can make when that’s your starting point, and working on this post has
felt like an awakening in more than one area. So before we start, see if you can take your existing
convictions about all of this stu! out of your head. I’m not asking you to throw them away—just maybe
put them in a drawer somewhere nearby. If you still want them when you’re done, you know exactly
where they’ll be.
And away we go…
Chapter 1:Chapter 1: The Great Battle of Fire and LightThe Great Battle of Fire and Light
RECOMMENDED POSTS
! August 26, 2019 By Tim Urban
The Great Battle of Fire and Light
Note: This is the second post in a series. If you’re new to the series, start with the intro post. Visit the
series home page for the full table of contents.
Part 1: The Power Games
There is a great deal of human nature in people. – Mark Twain
Chapter 1: The Great Battle of Fire and LightChapter 1: The Great Battle of Fire and Light
The animal world is a stressful place to be.
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The problem is that the animal world isn’t really an animal world—it’s a world of trillions of strands of
genetic information, each one hell-bent on immortality. And in a universe that wants to turn order into
chaos whenever possible, the immortality of anything—let alone a delicate and complex genetic code—
is a constant uphill battle. Most of Earth’s gene strands don’t last very long, and genes that weren’t
talented enough at the immortality game are long gone. The genes on Earth today are the miracle
outliers on both the motivation and talent front—such incredible survival specialists that they’re
currently almost four billion years old and counting.
Animals are just a hack these outlier genes came up with—temporary containers designed to carry the
genes and help them stay immortal. If genes could talk to their animal, they’d probably issue a few
simple commands:
But genes can’t talk to their animals, so instead they control them by having them run on specialized
survival software.
Squat orange blob with stick figure arms and legs carrying a fire torch. Label: Animal Survival Software
this iswhy yourparents
care so much about you
it's more of abiological
rather psychological
or social
In simple animals, the software is an automated program that runs the animal on instinct. In more
complex animals, the software also includes a number of
feelings—higher-level behavior-manipulation
tools like pain punishments, pleasure treats, and emotion manipulations.
By sliding the animal’s feelings up and down, an animal’s software uses the feelings like reins to keep
the animal’s goals and the genes’ goals perfectly aligned.
Genes need animals to conserve all the energy they can, so the software’s default settings will have
“exhaustion” in a raised state.
Lizard lying flat on a rock
When everything is going smoothly, the software will run in the background on low-power mode. But at
some point, the animal will start to run low on energy, so the software will kick into gear and shift the
“hunger” setting steadily upwards until it eventually overpowers the “tired” setting.
animal cannot think
due to insificent
neurons theyonly
have hormones for
their function
Lizard pushing itself up from the rock
Lizard walking out of frame
The genes need their animal to protect itself, so the software ratchets up the fear feeling when it senses
danger and hits the animal with a physical pain punishment when it does something that damages
itself.
your hormonesjob is
to make you alive
no matter what if
forthat it has to make
you hungry horney
angry stressed so
be so
Lizard getting hit in the head with the falling acorn
Orange software blob sliding Pain up on the control panel
Sad lizard
But genes value reproduction above all else, so whenever mating is a possibility, it’ll crank up the
horniness high enough to override everything else.
Girl lizard enters the frame
Lizard with neck bent backward to look at girl lizard leaving the frame
Life on Earth is a long succession of temporary animal containers passing genes along to newer
containers like a baton in an endless relay. It’s an odd survival system, but so far, it’s worked pretty well
—at least for those genes still around.
And that’s great for genes. But it’s stressful for animals.
The problem is that genes themselves aren’t alive, they’re just a force of nature—and forces of nature
don’t give a shit about anything. Gravity wants to smoosh matter together, so that’s what it does. It has
no concern for the well-being of the atoms it smooshes. If the hydrogen atoms in the center of the sun
can’t handle the smooshing, they’ll fuse into helium atoms. Gravity doesn’t care. But the important
thing is, atoms don’t care either. In the center of the sun, no one cares about anything, so everything’s
fine.
Atoms in a cluster; not caring; vaping..
Genes are like gravity—they don’t care. They want to stay immortal, and they’ll pursue that goal as
relentlessly as gravity fuses atoms inside stars. Just as there’s finite space in the center of a star, there
are finite resources in the animal world—finite land, finite shelter, finite food, finite mates—which
makes gene endeavors a zero-sum game. One species doing better almost always happens at the
expense of other species doing worse. And just like gravity relentlessly smooshes, genes are relentlessly
greedy—a successful species will grow and expand as far as it can until it exhausts its advantages.
When you have a relentless force consuming finite resources, something’s gotta give. In a star, atoms
give, fusing into bigger atoms. In the animal world, animal species give, morphing into new, mutated
species—or, more often, going extinct.
So genes are like gravity—but animals aren’t like atoms.
Mindless evolutionary innovation brought survival tricks like feelings and subjective experience and
higher sentience into animals, which means animals are like atoms in the center of a star…if the atoms
hated being smooshed.
To genes, animal su!ering is simply a useful tool—so the animal world is full of su!ering. Genes have
no higher principles, so neither does the animal world—no such thing as rights, no concept of right or
wrong, no concern with fairness. Animals woke up in the heat of a universe pressure cooker, playing an
unwinnable game they never signed up for, and that’s all there is to it.
At least that’s all there
was to it.
A few million years ago, the genes that inhabit a particular population of great ape started innovating in
an unusual way, trying out an animal container upgrade that had never quite worked before: super-
high intelligence. All previous genes had passed up extra high intelligence in their housing because it
requires a ridiculous amount of energy to maintain. It’s like running a small business and considering
whether to hire an employee with a rare skill set who will only work for $1,000,000 a year. Doesn’t
matter how good the employee is—no one is worth a million a year to a cash-strapped small business.
But these ape genes tried it anyway.
They evolved into a variety of hominid species, all of whom have since been discontinued, except one—
a saucy one called homo sapiens. For them, the advancements in intelligence proved to be a major
survival asset, so their cognitive capacity rapidly increased, developing into an array of shiny new tools
that no animal had ever possessed before. Through an accident of evolution, humans had gained
superpowers.
They had gained the superpower of reason, which gave humans the ability to solve complex problems,
invent fancy new technologies, design sophisticated strategies, and make real-time adjustments to their
thinking based on changes in their environment.
Reason sharpened human thinking, introducing nuance and logic into the process. It also a!ected
human motivation—by illuminating the distinction between true and false, reason made truth a core
human drive.
Humans had also gained the superpower of imagination, making them the world’s first animal that
could fantasize and tell stories and dream of places they had never been.
this is you shouldn't
be in animalwor
being anerd is better
than being abody
builder
Girl laying in grass, staring up at the sky imagining herself flying
But the real power of imagination came when it was combined with communication. Humans now had
the power to communicate with each other using a complex language full of sounds that represent
things or ideas—human language is humans imagining
together. Communication plus imagination is
why humans can think in the big picture and make long-term plans in a way no other animal can.
Reason and imagination, combined together, lead to something even more incredible. Without
imagination, animals have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that animals other than
themselves are full, living creatures who experience life just like they do. They can’t put themselves in
another animal’s shoes. Without reason, animals can’t follow the logic that concludes that the lives of
others are just as valuable as their own, and their pain and pleasure just as real.
These two superpowers produced a third superpower—one that, above all, makes humans human:
empathy.
With the power of empathy came powers like compassion, guilt, pity. Even clueyness. Most significantly,
with the groundbreaking epiphany that all animals have worth came the concept of right vs. wrong.
These superpowers took their place in the human mind as powerful new enhancements.
g
reason t imagination
empathy
But none of that is the really weird part.
The craziest thing about the new human superpowers was their unexpected side e!ect. Each of the
advanced capabilities was like a new stream of mental potential, and when combined together, it was as
if they formed a glowing orb of light in the center of the human mind.
This light was so bright and so clear and so powerful that it was as if it had its own
awareness—an
awareness of itself, of the human it lived in, of the ancient software running beside it. The human brain
had grown a mind of its own that could think for itself.
Up until this development, the early human mind was like all animal minds—powered by genetic will
and run by ancient software, with one purpose only: genetic immortality. But this new mind was
something di!erent entirely—something running
independently of the human’s survival software.
Not only could this mind within a mind think its own thoughts, it could actually
overrule the will of the
genes, override the software’s commands, and drive human behavior.
For the first time in early life history, an animal was more than just an animal—it was an animal plus…
something
else.
Let’s call our ancient animal software, which is still very much in our heads—our Primitive Mind. And
let’s call this highly advanced, independent new consciousness our Higher Mind.
As any human you’ll talk to can attest, two minds in one animal is an odd situation. Especially since the
two minds often don’t get along.
The Higher Mind is rational, reasonable, and thoughtful. On his sta! sits the light of higher
consciousness, and when the Higher Mind is in the driver’s seat of your being, the light fills your mind
with clarity and self-awareness. Wisdom flows through the Higher Mind’s head, and love and empathy
radiate out from his heart. When the Higher Mind is doing the thinking in your head, these rays pass
directly into
your mind and heart and light them up with the warm glow of high-mindedness.
The Higher Mind spends most of his time on the right side of the control panel with the superpowers,
absorbing their energy and feeding them with his consciousness.
When he thinks about it—and he does think about it, sometimes—he wonders whether this is all a
mistake and he ended up in the wrong head. Because he can’t help but notice that next to him at all
times is a hectic ball of orange fuzz that was living here when he moved in.
Over the years, the Higher Mind has come to see the Primitive Mind as a not-very-smart pet. But he also
understands that it’s important to the whole system to let the Primitive Mind get what it needs from its
little pet life—to an extent. The Primitive Mind is endlessly greedy, completely untrainable, and the
Higher Mind has learned the hard way that the Primitive Mind
must be kept in check. As the only
grown-up in the room, the Higher Mind does what he can, trying to keep an eye on the Primitive Mind
and make sure that whatever it’s doing over there makes sense and fits with the overall plan.
Meanwhile, the Primitive Mind doesn’t know the Higher Mind exists. The Primitive Mind doesn’t even
know the Primitive Mind exists. The Primitive Mind is software—programmed by evolution to serve the
will of your genes. In its hand, the Primitive Mind carries your primal flame—the raw will of your animal
genes to survive.
The Primitive Mind doesn’t care about you any more than gravity cares about atoms. It’s just a truck
driver delivering precious cargo from one place to another—and you’re just the truck. The only concern
it has with the truck is to keep it well fueled and out of accidents during this segment of the eternal
voyage. The more prominent the Primitive Mind is in your head at any given time, the less you’re like an
independent entity and the more you’re like a truck being driven by automated software.
The di"culty with two minds is that there’s only one brain—leaving the two minds in an ongoing power
struggle. When the Higher Mind is empowered, his sta! lights up the room with self-awareness,
o!ering a clear view of the Primitive Mind in all its silliness, which makes it hard for the Primitive Mind
to do anything sneaky.
But when the tides turn, the Primitive Mind’s torch grows along with his influence, and the room gets
increasingly smoky. The more smoke there is, the more it blocks the Higher Mind’s light, cutting o! his
access to his human and making it hard for him to do his job.
PrimitiveMind Highermind
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The human, with smoke obscuring its self-awareness, doesn’t realize its mind has been switched over to
software automation, leaving the Higher Mind pretty helpless to take back the controls. This is when
humans start trouble, for themselves and for others.
The never-ending struggle between these two minds is the human condition. It’s the backdrop of
everything that has ever happened in the human world, and everything that happens today. It’s the
story of our times because it’s the story of all human times. We’re gonna go to all kinds of places in this
post series—and wherever we go, remember to remember the great battle of fire and light.
Chapter 2:Chapter 2: A Game of GiantsA Game of Giants
___________
To keep up with this series, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts
right when they come out.
A huge thanks to our ridiculously generous (and patient) supporters on Patreon for making this series
free for everyone. To support Wait But Why, visit our Patreon page.
___________
Three Wait But Why posts about fire and light:
Religion for the Nonreligious
Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
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The Big and the Small A Sick Giant Neuralink and the Brain’s
! August 29, 2019 By Tim Urban
A Game of Giants
__________
Chapter 2: A Game of GiantsChapter 2: A Game of Giants
Billions of years ago, some single-celled creatures realized that being just one cell left your options
pretty limited.
So they figured out a cool trick. By joining together with other single cells, they could form a giant
creature that had all kinds of new advantages.
The downside was a major loss of individuality—
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