The Story of Us

Kristen Solindas

Included here is a very small excerpt from a website I enjoy thoroughly, Wait But Why. His writing is peppered with goofy stick-figure illustrations, charts, graphs, and interesting tidbits that make all his subject matter enjoyable.

 This excerpt, from the author Tim Urban's VERY large series he has called "The Story of Us", is a very small snippet from a very long chapter in a 12 part series. Seriously, they are long. Get comfy.

The Story of Us delves into politics, and the ever widening divide between left and right, and he explores the reasoning behind why things are the way they are, and where they're going. (Thus the title, 'Wait But Why')

His other posts are insightful, humorous, or just plain fun. Usually all three. I highly recommend his writing.

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Recently, I noticed this headline on CNN.com:

I wanted to not click on that, but the computer and I both knew that I had no choice. So here’s what happened: a homeless man came across a woman after she had run out of gas on the side of the interstate, with no money. The homeless man told her to wait safely in her car while he walked over to a nearby gas station and, spending his last $20, bought gas and brought it back to her. The woman then went home and started a GoFundMe campaign to “pay it forward” and raise money for the homeless man.

When we read a feel-good story like this, it poofs away the fog in our heads for a moment because it reminds us how many good people there are out there and how much generosity and kind-heartedness there is in the world. It makes our Primitive Minds feel safe, which calms them down, and it empowers our Higher Mind. High-mindedness is contagious,10 and the high-mindedness of the homeless man in the story traveled through the internet and infected 14,000 people, who donated a combined $400,000 to the homeless man. It was a beautiful moment.

Until the woman, the woman’s boyfriend, and the homeless man got caught. The homeless man (Bobbitt) really was homeless, but the whole story had been made up by the three of them as a get-rich-quick scheme. The article explains: “Bobbitt received $75,000, and within months McClure and D’Amico had ‘squandered’ their share to buy a car, high-end handbags and trips…they also used it at casinos.”

Quite the crew.

At the very end of the article, there was a quote from GoFundMe’s spokesman:

It’s important to understand that misuse is very rare on our platform. Campaigns with misuse make up less than one tenth of one percent of all campaigns.

In other words, this is reality:

And if we knew more about the thousands of genuinely heartwarming GoFundMe stories that happen every year, it would strengthen our trust and love networks and boost kind-heartedness and generosity. Those kinds of stories are like positive viruses that, when spread, strengthen society.

But in the reality show editing room at CNN.com, they see this:

Of all the people that saw the article’s headline, only a tiny fraction will end up reading the quote from GoFundMe at the bottom of the article. Everyone else just sees the headline, and lots of other similar headlines over the years, and they develop the intuition that things like GoFundMe are pretty “scammy”:

Trust is a society’s most precious resource, and a strong trust network does amazing things, like donating $400,000 to a homeless man. But trust takes decades to build up and is easily shattered. In the case of a scam like this, 14,000 people reached out lovingly to another member of society, and their hands were zapped by an electroshocker. Their trust was shaken and replaced by cynicism.

On its own, this scam wouldn’t do much harm to society. Unless, of course, the news plasters the scam all over their front pages. When that happens, 14,000 people have their outreached hands painfully shocked—and 10,000,000 more people watch it happen.

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.”

Destructive cherry-picking breeds fear, anger, and cynicism. It’s why we always think crime is getting worse even though it’s almost always getting better.22

But to me, the most damaging form of destructive cherry-picking is the kind that spreads hate.

Nicky Case made a killer simulation about this phenomenon too. It’s fun and quick—give it a try.

Portraying a society where everyone is a GoFundMe scammer damages trust. Portraying a society where crime is rampant spreads fear.

But portraying a society where everyone hates each other is the most dangerous virus of all, because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Geographic bubbles mean many people barely know anyone on the other political side personally, so the only information they have on what those people are like comes from information bubbles. And those bubbles have increasingly become hate-mongering machines. The right-wing information bubble floods viewers with anecdotes that make it seem like everyone on the Left positively despises them and everything they stand for. What a Republican from a small town hears from the Left is: “you’re stupid, you’re ignorant, you’re a bigot, you’re privileged, your values are wrong, your religion is bad, you’re toxic, you’re backward, you’re selfish, you’re a Nazi.” Through the left-wing information bubble, all a Mexican-American living in Los Angeles hears from the Right is: “you’re a criminal, you’re a rapist, you’re not a real American, you’re stealing our jobs, you’re inferior, you don’t belong here, and we’re coming for you.” Outrage about these messages then spreads like wildfire on social media, because as CGP Grey explains in a fun/upsetting video, nothing spreads faster than anger—especially anger in the specific format, “Just look at how awful the people we hate are.”11

Vocal Primitive Minds activate other Primitive Minds. Filtering a steady stream of “they hate you” to people jolts awake the recipients’ Primitive Minds, filling them with reciprocal hatred, clouding their humanity, and flipping on that ancient tribal switch that makes people want to band together into giants for safety. The resulting anger is, in turn, filtered back over to the other side.