This book forever changed the way I see politics.

I’ve been following Tim Urban’s blog (Wait But Why) for years, ever since the post about Gen Y went viral. He has some reaaally long posts that he uploads once in a blue moon, but each one of them is so worth it.

He has a really cool way of explaining complicated concepts: he uses these little drawings, like the ones below. He also gave a TED talk explaining why he procrastinates so much.

So when I heard that he had launched a book, I knew I had to read it.

In What’s Our Problem he expands the concept of our individual primitive emotions to the level of a country and discusses the mass instincts that led to the ultra-polarized scenario that we have in the U.S. today. In short, he uses human biology to explain politics, a concept that truly stayed with me.

Tim stacks concepts on top of concepts, and towards the end of the book you have a whole new vocabulary and way of thinking.

Here’s some of it:

Inside all of us is a war going on, a conflict between the animal instincts that keep us alive and our ethics, morals and sense of fairness. Tim calls them the Primitive Mind and the Higher Mind.

As a result, the way you behave, debate and even think is determined by the amount of edge one has over the other.

The higher up you go on that scale, the more you can think objectively, analyze facts in an unbiased way and see reality for what it is. You think like a true scientist. The lower you go, the more you let your emotions cloud your judgement, refuse to see logic and treat people as your enemy. You think like a zealot.

Tim then goes on to expand this concept from the individual level to groups of people and eventually the whole society, in what he calls the emergence tower.

He then focuses on the two sides of the political spectrum and explains how this concept affects politics. Ideally, he says, if everybody’s higher self was always in control, we would have two parties that naturally balance each other and engage in a healthy debate with the goal of moving the country forward.

Is not that both parties would agree on everything, but they would be willing to see each others’ point of view and put their best arguments forward, generating a constructive debate that would eventually lead to the best outcome.

But what happens today is that the primitive mind is dominating the political debate.

This truly opened my eyes to the fact that, more than paying attention to what people’s arguments are, we need to pay attention to how they’re expressing them and how tolerant they are of contrary opinions.

He goes on to explain how much polarization has taken hold of society and how the media, social media and even our geography are pushing people into their isolated consensus bubbles. One of the consequences is that we start to see the world in black-and-white, in terms of heroes and villains, because one of the things that our animal minds can’t understand is complexity and nuance.

Suddenly, instead of having a political spectrum full of nuanced opinions, we now only have two extremes that have adhere to a strict checklist:

What’s left is very little space for contrary opinions and nuanced discussions, since defending any of the points in the opposite list can label you as being “on the other side”. Tim goes on to dedicate whole chapters to explaining the red and the blue golens that have dominated both the Republican and Democrat parties.

But I’m not going to go into detail about it, you’ll have to read the book for yourself. There’s so much more than I could fit in this post and it’s definitely worth the reading.

This is an incredible and eye-opening reading, done in a fun way the way only Tim Urban can do. I read it in the middle of last year, and its message still resonates with me. This book is one of the reasons why I keep posting about difficult topics online and why I created a YouTube channel to try to shed some light on some very polarizing debates.