The issue 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. Most gene strands don’t last very long, and those still on Earth today are the miracle outliers, such incredible survival specialists that they’re hundreds of millions of 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.

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.

While the Scientist’s clear mind sees a foggy world, full of complexity and nuance and messiness, the Zealot’s foggy mind shows them a clear, simple world, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions.

The ant colony is really the “independent life form” of the ant world. If we look at how ant colonies treat other ant colonies, it’s a lot like the way one spider treats another.

In Political Disney World, people who claim to hold liberal values won’t hesitate to go illiberal if it helps their team win. When they’re unhappy with the result of an election, they insist that they’re disenfranchised, that the system must be broken, that the election was manipulated by foreign powers or rigged by the opposition. When their candidate wins, they say things like, “faith in democracy restored!” which translates to “democracy is only working when my candidate wins.”

Perhaps the easiest way to squash a dissenting argument is to just disqualify it right off the bat based on who said it, without ever addressing the argument itself. The infamous ad hominem fallacy. In Political Disney World, ad hominem fallacies happen constantly, because when our minds are on the low rungs, we tend to trust people who agree with us much more than those who don’t.

In other words, 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.

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 phenomenon is explained in a 1971 paper called Dynamic models of segregation, and it’s nicely illustrated in an interactive simulation by online creators Nicky Case and Vi Hart.

When I bumped the percentage up again, this time to 50%—meaning the shapes are still totally fine with variety, they just don’t want to be in the minority in their neighborhood—we end up with complete segregation. All it takes is a little bit of bias for almost everyone to end up surrounded entirely by people like them.

In 1950, people wanted to live near people like them too—but with the political parties so mixed up, a culturally homogeneous neighborhood might still be politically diverse. Today, the parties have become proxies for two vast macro-cultures, so seeking out people like you also often means ending up surrounded by people who share your politics.

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.

The reason I call disgust the scariest of all human emotions is that it’s a trigger for dehumanization, and dehumanization is the doorway 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.

As political tribalism has ramped up, the number of undecided votes has dwindled. It makes less sense than it used to for candidates to try to persuade moderate voters and more sense to run hyperpartisan, negative campaigns that fire up their base and increase turnout.

Throughout human history, clever opportunists have discovered that if you could control what people say, you could write the story people believed.

In Hypothetica, we saw how the power to censor became the gateway to other kinds of power. That’s why free speech is often referred to as not just any right but the fundamental right.

But free speech gives the powerless a voice—the ability to spark a mind-changing movement that gains so much momentum, it moves our beliefs and our cultural norms, which in turn moves the Overton window, which moves policy, and then law.

Many of us are well-acquainted with the story of Jussie Smollett, the actor who in 2019 told police he was attacked in the street by two men wearing ski masks. According to Smollett, the men beat him up while calling him racist and homophobic slurs (Smollett is Black and gay) and saying, “This is MAGA country,” before leaving him there with a noose tied around his neck. Smollett immediately received an outpouring of love and support from across the internet. Except it turned out that it was all a hoax, orchestrated by Smollett, who was then convicted on five counts of making false police reports. This is Social Justice Munchausen syndrome.

None of this is to downplay the prevalence of real hate crimes—just like analyzing Munchausen syndrome isn’t downplaying real cancer cases. It’s just that it’s pretty hard to picture Black Americans in South Carolina in 1925 orchestrating fake attacks. Or Jews in Germany in 1938. Or LGBTQ people in Afghanistan today. We have fake hate crimes in the U.S. because they’re socially rewarded by a culture in which victimhood enhances one’s status.

When concept creep gets out of control, it allows a far wider range of behaviors to qualify as bigotry, abuse, and trauma, which means a far wider range of people viewing themselves as victims of bigotry, abuse, and trauma. It also turns a far wider range of people into bigots, abusers, and traumatizers. Many more victims = many more villains.

Perhaps the most impactful example of concept creep has been the evolution from “words can be hurtful” to “words can be an act of violence.” This directly contradicts the liberal mindset, in which speech is seen not as violence but as the critical alternative to violence. But over the past decade, open disagreement with the SJF narrative has regularly been labeled as “violence.”

The one caveat a liberal society places on their guiding mantra—“live and let live”—is the harm principle. Everyone can do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. When harm is happening, “live and let live” no longer applies. This, of course, makes the definition of harm critically important. When concept creep turns dissent itself into an act of unacceptable harm—an act of racism, of transphobia, of violence—punishing those who dissent becomes not only justified but imperative in order to protect people’s safety. This is how idea supremacy, through the lens of SJF, can appear to be righteous activism.

Like most instances of authoritarianism, all of this bullying is framed as righteousness.

We’ll never hear about the article that sits on the editor’s desk and never gets published, or the movie that never gets bought. The science too risky to research. The book too risky to write. The memo too risky to send. The op-ed too risky to pen. The opinion too risky to voice. George Orwell called this “the sinister fact” about censorship: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”

British author Helen Pluckrose describes the essence of secularism like this:

I don’t believe what you believe, and I don’t have to. I defend your right to hold, express and live by your own belief system, but you have no right to impose any of it on me.

CRT originated in law schools and explores how America’s history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination may be embedded in the nation’s laws in ways that continue to marginalize and oppress people of color.

Either way, what certainly has entered hundreds of schools is Social Justice Fundamentalism, and everything that comes along with it: the idea that disparities always imply injustice and equality of opportunity must lead to equality of outcome; the view that identity characteristics like race, gender, and sexual orientation are the primary axes of advantage and disadvantage, and identity diversity is the only meaningful form of diversity; the equating of basic liberal values and institutions like free speech, science, and meritocracy with “whiteness”; the belief that oppression pervades every institution, every interaction, and every norm; the notion that disagreeing with SJF is violence and punishing such behavior is nothing more than self-defense; the gloomy outlook that sees a world where racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are forever present and barely improving.

Homicide is the leading cause of death among young Black men in America, while growing up in a single-parent home is one of the best predictors of poverty. But violence and one-parent homes aren’t phenomena easily explained by SJF's notion of the Force, so they are left out of much of today’s progressive discussion.

Think about the beliefs of those you disagree with. Do they have any merit? Could you state them to your opponent, in all their complexity, in a way that would make your opponent say, “Yup, that’s what I believe”? Or would you oversimplify or misrepresent those beliefs? If you can’t steel man your opponent’s beliefs, you don’t yet know whether you disagree with them or not.

Golems rely on the delusion of pluralistic ignorance (when no one believes but everyone thinks everyone believes). A few brave people speaking out shatters the delusion and makes others realize they’re not alone. When more people start saying what they think, it becomes less scary for others to follow in their footsteps.