## The Great Dumbening - By Jeff Maurer - I Might Be Wrong ### The Great Dumbening - By Jeff Maurer - I Might Be Wrong  #### Metadata * Author: [[Jeff Maurer]] * Full Title: The Great Dumbening - By Jeff Maurer - I Might Be Wrong * Category: #articles * URL: <https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/the-great-dumbening?s=r&cmdid=C64I0H7RQ39C75> #### Highlights * Conservative media took a different approach: What if you decided what the world was like before you gathered the news, and then just reported the bits that fit that narrative? It was a game-changing approach, similar to Jack Donaghy's suggestion that comedy writers start with the catch phrases and work backwards. And it worked, in terms of gaining viewers. Unfortunately, it's probably more responsible than any other factor for the near-total brain death of the Republican Party * The writer Tim Urban thinks that viewing politics along a simple, left-right continuum is incomplete. He thinks that we need to consider not just what we believe, but why we believe it. He takes the traditional left/right political spectrum and uses it as the x-axis of a graph that also has a y-axis. The y-axis charts the push-and-pull between the so-called "primitive mind" and "higher mind". The primitive mind is the impulse we all have to look out for our immediate needs and safety; it's short-sighted and selfish, and it specializes in identifying "bad guys" and slaying them. The higher mind represents our more reasoned and broad-minded tendencies. Politics tends to speak to the primitive mind, and of course it does; we spent millions of years evolving those habits, and the idea that you shouldn't immediately kill your enemies with a rock is a relatively new and edgy concept. Urban ends up with a graph that looks like this: # The Great Dumbening - By Jeff Maurer - I Might Be Wrong  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jeff Maurer]] - Full Title: The Great Dumbening - By Jeff Maurer - I Might Be Wrong - Category: #articles - URL: https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/the-great-dumbening?s=r&cmdid=C64I0H7RQ39C75 ## Highlights - Conservative media took a different approach: What if you decided what the world was like before you gathered the news, and then just reported the bits that fit that narrative? It was a game-changing approach, similar to Jack Donaghy’s suggestion that comedy writers start with the catch phrases and work backwards. And it worked, in terms of gaining viewers. Unfortunately, it’s probably more responsible than any other factor for the near-total brain death of the Republican Party - The writer Tim Urban thinks that viewing politics along a simple, left-right continuum is incomplete. He thinks that we need to consider not just what we believe, but why we believe it. He takes the traditional left/right political spectrum and uses it as the x-axis of a graph that also has a y-axis. The y-axis charts the push-and-pull between the so-called “primitive mind” and “higher mind”. The primitive mind is the impulse we all have to look out for our immediate needs and safety; it’s short-sighted and selfish, and it specializes in identifying “bad guys” and slaying them. The higher mind represents our more reasoned and broad-minded tendencies. Politics tends to speak to the primitive mind, and of course it does; we spent millions of years evolving those habits, and the idea that you shouldn’t immediately kill your enemies with a rock is a relatively new and edgy concept. Urban ends up with a graph that looks like this: