A Sick Giant — Wait but Why⁠↗

Psychology is just a microcosm of sociology. And sociology is higher-emergence psychology—it’s the psychology of giants.

nothing unites a group of humans like a common enemy—and the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by giant world wars that helped Americans to feel united.

According to a comprehensive study, people are at their most politically and ideologically impressionable between their mid-teens and mid-20s, and all of those Baby Boomers born in the 1940s and 50s—none of whom were sentient the last time the U.S. felt like a single, united front against a common enemy, and most of whom were deeply influenced by the events of the late 60s—are, by the 80s and 90s, running the country. The Greatest Generation (who fought in World War II) are by this point mostly retired, and it’s the Baby Boomers who are the politicians, the university administrators, the CEOs, the home buyers, and the media moguls.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism…It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions…it is a spirit not to be encouraged.

And here’s the thing about mobility. If lots of people have the means to choose where they settle down, and those people tend to have even a slight preference to live near other people like them, everyone ends up totally segregated.

This exposes a stark fact: if easily mobile people like diversity but prefer not to be the minority where they live, it leads to complete segregated homogeneity.

Or as Case and Hart put it, “small individual bias can lead to large collective bias.” The only way areas stay diverse—racially, ethnically, politically—is if people like diversity more than they dislike being in the minority.

Politically, Americans have formed geographical Echo Chambers. Living in a geographical Echo Chamber means people will find themselves surrounded by agreement at dinner parties, at local churches and parks and businesses, and at school, which is where children make their lifelong friends.

I use The Onion as a reminder that what harms society is not a brand’s Media Matrix location as much as its dishonesty about that location. News brands are rarely like The Onion—they typically claim to be squarely on the North Star. So if and when they ultimately present with bias and inaccuracy, it misleads their audience, filling them with real conviction without filling them with real knowledge.

Internet algorithms are profit-maximizing mechanisms that want to spoon feed me whatever I’m most likely to click on. This is a win-win, symbiotic relationship—until it’s not. When an algorithm is catering to your Higher Mind, it’s your friend. When it’s luring in your Primitive Mind against your Higher Mind’s will, the relationship is parasitic.

If you’re thinking about politics without regularly asking yourself, “What does this look/feel like to the people I don’t know?”, you’re going to get a lot of things wrong. Which ultimately makes you less politically effective.

A scam is like a virus that converts trust into cynicism, but it’s the news, in the name of keeping things entertaining and addictive, that distributes the virus across the whole country. We can call this phenomenon—where the news cherry-picks stories that weaken society and spreads them—“destructive cherry-picking.”

The reason I called disgust one of the scariest words in the English language is that it’s a trigger for dehumanization, and dehumanization is the gateway drug to the worst things humans do. It’s not a coincidence that two of the most horrifying events in recent human history—the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide—were made possible by disgust. Nazi propaganda constantly compared Jews to disgust-inducing animals like rats, swine, and insects. The Rwandan radio broadcasts that incited the 1994 genocide referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches” repeatedly. These are just two examples of a well-worn tradition. During World War I, the Germans depicted the British as spiders, while the U.S. did the same thing with the Kaiser. During World War II, Americans painted the Japanese as rats, while the Japanese went with spiders for the English.

Writer Gene Knudsen Hoffman says, “An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.” It’s hard to feel dehumanizing disgust for people you know personally. Less hard when you rarely see your enemies in person. And even less hard when destructive cherry-picking teaches you only the worst of the worst about them.

If you heard about a country populated by two major races or ethnicities or religions, and they talked about each other the way today’s Americans talk about the opposing political tribe, you’d be very, very concerned about that country.