First of all, it's one of the very few books where the author doesn't take a stance. I mean - a few times he expresses his (liberal left) affiliations, but it does NOT impact the judgments made in this book. He proposes a simplified MENTAL MODEL to take a look at today's socio-political posture spectrum & he succeeds in showing that exactly the same mechanisms work in both ways. He nails it when he shows that it's not really left vs right, but this conflict actually spans 2 dimensions (add: low-rung vs high-rung). He does so well in using common sense to show that there is STILL space to use reason in a civilized discussion - he also captures why this is not happening. Oh, I've made soooo many notes, so many highlights - I don't remember noting down so much stuff since ... well, a long time ago. And so downward we spiral, with tribal divides reaching the intensity of religious war. The idea of going against your party is blasphemy. And the internet, despite being somewhat responsible for this mess, still has the capacity to keep the flame of free speech alive. America and other liberal democracies have always suffered rough patches, and the problems we’ve looked at are relatively recent. There’s no reason to think that the tide won’t turn.

On the other hand, when a bunch of Primal minds gather, they form an Echo Chamber, a cult. It’s a place where you have to believe everything the Echo Chamber says, and you should repeat it as well. Differing opinions are not accepted, and anyone criticizing the cult will be canceled. The group’s members only care about being right and will go to great and nasty lengths to get what they want.Go down to the next rung on the ladder and your higher mind is still in control but your primitive mind is having a bit more of a say. Let’s think of this as “thinking like a sports fan” – you know and respect the rules of the game, but you really want your team to win. You're no longer impartial and you’re subject to the confirmation biases that a first-rung thinker would avoid. The next three chapters and two interludes lay out his thinking on Social Justice Fundamentalism (SJF), which is his term for wokeness. Far from being today's version of the Civil Rights Movement, SJF is a radical political ideology inspired by Marxism and postmodernism. It is hostile to liberalism, viewing it as just another tool that white people have used to oppress people of color. Despite its obsession with eliminating racism, in many ways SJF is itself racist. And perhaps worst of all, SJF has infiltrated many of the institutions that society relies on to function (universities, journalism, and some government agencies, to name a few) causing them to act in some truly loony ways, and making much of the non-SJF population lose trust in them.

Altogether, the media and social media perpetuate the narrative of Republicans vs. Democrats, right vs. left, Us vs. Them, and exacerbate the polarization. In contrast, the low mind prefers “echo chambers” and is hypocritical, overconfident, oversimplifies, dislikes skepticism, uses fallacies, has confirmation bias due to motivated reasoning, prioritizes conformity and loyalty, treats ideas like sacred objects, sees those who disagree as bad people, and divides the world into us vs. them. The way Tim makes this argument is by distinguishing two dimensions in human thinking: what we think (e.g. left vs right in politics), and how we think (low-rung vs high-rung). On this second dimension, he defines high-rung thinking as being open to changing your mind, welcoming dissenting views, and in general being more attached to truth than to any idea in particular, and low-rung thinking as being unable to change your mind and forcing your ideas upon others through manipulation and coercion. With lots and lots of examples (seriously, there are so many of them, you have to read it to believe it) he argues that the core conflict that is happening is not left versus right, but low-rung thinking trying to overpower high-rung thinking, and succeeding. If you are anything like me, you will be annoyed or offended many times while reading the book because it seems like Tim is arguing against noble ideas such as equal rights and anti-discrimination, before realizing that no, he is not arguing against any of that but rather against trying to force them upon others while silencing any dissenting voices. Now, both of these fundamentalist movements are examples of lower-rung thinking. This kind of thinking is unscientific – there’s no room to test hypotheses or welcome alternative ideas. It also encourages echo chambers. Members who don’t accept the core beliefs are shunned from the group. Finally, it’s morally inconsistent. Discrimination is given different weight for individuals from different social or racial groups.

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However, there are a few topics I wish he would have examined more. His chapter on the Republican Party, for example, felt a bit shallow. He did an excellent job explaining what he set out to explain, but there are several other types of low-rung thinking and behavior the Republican Party engages in that I would have liked to see him explore (Jonathan Rauch's examination of "troll epistemology" and Rachel Kleinfeld's examination of political violence come to mind). In the next section, we’ll examine some of the real implications this has on today’s social landscape. Republican and Social Justice Fundamentalism The intro starts with an argument about technology becoming more risky as it becomes more powerful, and then doesn't really talk about it again as far as I can see Keep this ladder in mind; we’ll refer to it in the next sections as we look at the causes and implications of this troubling trend. Overall, I felt the argument could have been made more succinctly, with more time spent on what we can do about it.