“The Story of Us” — A Review

I wish people would spend less time talking about politics and maybe spend more time thinking about why we suck at talking about politics. Tim Urban’s blog post series, The Story of Us, provides a valuable framework for self reflection in this regard. I want to explain why I think it’s worth investing the time to read it, and I also want to explain what I think it’s missing.

I think that a lot of the trouble with political discourse boils down to this: It is human nature to apply a higher level of scrutiny to things that are challenging or novel than we apply to information that affirms what we already believe. This makes us vulnerable to being manipulated by false political narratives, as long as those narratives reinforce our beliefs.

The authors of these narratives can successfully manipulate us (and, often, themselves) because they can construct support for incorrect conclusions through a process of cherry picking from real facts. It’s hard to refute what someone is saying when all the specific points they are making check out. Only by adding additional facts does a different perspective on the correct overall conclusion sometimes emerge. And if people don’t like that different perspective and don’t want to hear it, they are likely to underestimate or dismiss the facts that lead to it.

Can people learn to think differently about political narratives? Can they learn to accept all the facts, no matter where it leads them?

This is, in essence, what Tim Urban asks of each of us. He does a fantastic job presenting a simple, accessible framework for thinking about the way we approach our own political beliefs, with lots of helpful illustrations and humor along the way. It’s a lot of text, but it’s broken up into digestible chapters. It’s worth your time.

One of the best sections of the series asks us to consider whether we are thinking like scientists (objectively without regard to the conclusions), sports fans (fairly, but with prejudice to the outcome), or lawyers (willing to engage in tortured rationalizations in order to cling to our desired conclusions) and he shows how these different kinds of thinking effect not only individuals but groups of people at scale. I really appreciated his illustration of the social forces that create high and low friction environments for different kinds of ideas to spread between people (something everyone who designs social media systems should contemplate).

However, while Urban’s writing conveys some very sophisticated insights about the way that human nature clouds our ability to grapple with complex disagreements, I felt that the understanding of US civics conveyed in Chapter 3 comes off at the level of a typical American high school student, who misattributes every important idea about government to the American founding fathers. I tried to reserve judgement as I read about whether this problem would negatively impact Urban’s conclusions.

It turns out, Urban never finished the blog post series. It’s been over a year since his final entry, which promises further updates that haven’t arrived. We’re left to speculate about where all of this was leading.

Something the American founding fathers understood well is the problem of faction. Urban talks about factions at length but he never uses that word. In Urban’s framework, factionalism or tribalism comes from the same sort of primitive wiring within us that makes us crave junk food even though it’s not healthy. Urban sees this behavior as irrational and suggests that if we elevate our thinking and approach things more rationally, we will do so less tribally.

I think the reality is that it is often in the genuine, rational interest of factions to be uncooperative jerks. Consider, for example, calls to ban something that is seen to create negative externalities for other people, like guns, or marijuana.

Guns and Marijuana have cultures around them. Some people are a part of those cultures and other people are not. Some people are far removed from those cultures — they don’t have anything to do with them and they don’t know anyone who does. These people experience only the negative consequences associated with having these things around in our society, and do not receive any direct benefit. They may lack empathy for people associated with these things because they see themselves as being part of a different tribe. Consequently, they have no reason to compromise in the slightest bit in cracking down on them. Let’s have proactive police searches and mandatory minimum prison sentences! The impact of aggressive policies produces negative consequences for the people in those cultures, but for everyone who is removed from those cultures, the direct consequences are all positive.

It only makes rational sense for factions to compromise with each other when the benefit of doing so exceeds the cost, such as when we face a shared enemy and need to cooperate in order to survive. While primitive facets of our nature do cause us to underestimate the benefits of compromise all the time, compromise is not always the optimal choice in a policy fight. Sometimes we really do face zero sum questions.

Urban also argues that our primitive minds overestimate the consequences of losing these political fights. He writes that “in a country like the U.S., the stakes in [political] games are far lower than they were in ancient times.” He’s not wrong, but I think he is underestimating just how fucked people in America are today when they lose political fights. Upper middle class Americans have a tendency to go through life in a bubble in which some of the realities of the country they live in are invisible to them.

But to the degree that he is right, it’s worth talking about WHY. As he has observed, it’s not that Americans have avoided sorting into tribes or factions. The reason that the consequences of losing political fights are more limited today than they were in the distant past is that high minded people have created structures within our political system that are intended limit the “violence of faction.”

Some of these structures, like the right to be secure against unreasonable searches, were created whole cloth by America’s founding fathers. Others, like the separation of powers or the right to trial by jury, have older origins. Some, like the right of poor people to be appointed an attorney if they cannot afford one, are relatively recent inventions. Together, they create a set of rails for our political fights to run on that protect us against the unrestrained pursuit of self interest by particular tribes.

The political fights that we have can become existential when these rails are threatened. For example, we have several sitting Supreme Court justices who would do away with the right to be appointed an attorney. If more judges with similar views are also appointed to that court, this rail may be stripped away. As these rails fall, the consequences of losing political fights will become more and more dire. The possibility of regressing into authoritarianism is real. It has happened to many democracies similar to our own.

Whats happening with our political discourse today is that thought leaders in our society have learned that misleading their own side with respect to the truth is both an effective means of advancing their agendas and carries no risk. Loyalty to the cause has become a higher value in our culture than integrity. When people highlight facts that run counter to popular narratives they are often accused of operating in bad faith — they must be aligned with the bad people we are fighting. When we catch someone on our side overplaying their hand by misrepresenting the facts, we excuse it. Their heart was in the right place. They are fighting an important fight.

In my opinion, their hearts are not in the right place. Manipulating people in order to advance a factional interest is extremely selfish. It doesn’t matter if the underlying interest you are fighting for is legitimate. Our system of government incorporates structures that limit the “violence of faction” because it is an evil that can tear societies apart.

The onus is on those of us who understand this to help our culture appreciate the true costs of the choices that it is making. To that end, Tim Urban has made a valuable contribution. Higher minds are ones that aren’t willing to sacrifice the truth on the alter of the cause. Thats the right approach.

I also agree with Marshall Mcluhan’s observation that “the medium is the message.” Urban is right to point at the end of the Fairness Doctrine as a turning point for the quality of political information. I think there is worthwhile work to do in building structures in the Internet that help us call out political disinformation and phony narratives. A computer is supposed to be a device that helps me think. If it’s not doing that, we need better computers.