Urban Radical , One More Time

By Matt Perez

An (imaginary) conversation with Tim Urban on the impact his book had on me.

Below is the continuation of an (imaginary) conversation with Tim Urban on the impact his book, What’s Ours Problem: A Self–Help Book for Society ∇ , had on me.

Continuing…

Out of love. That is making me uncomfortable and energized at the same time. Weirder still, I feel like drawing.
And speaking of your drawings, I’d like to tell what I found most Impactful about the book using your drawings. OK?
Seems like you are going to do it anyway…
Our history illustrated as a 1,000-page book made me sit up and pay attention.
When I got to the ladder, I recognized the analysis and labeling that was coming and I got pretty excited. Then you came up with higher and primitive minds, genies and golems and… and… it was music to my ears. The high-rung and low-run quadrants were pure joy.
I was aware of the distinction between what’s inside your head and what is expressed and I knew that spoken language was key to our humanity. But it was a forehead-slapping moment when I saw this illustration and how communication makes possible the emergence of, for example, social animals.
And, of course, your use of ‘silence’. Maybe it was this diagram,
I am not sure why, but I jumped up from my bed and moved to the laptop where I am writing this stuff. More than anything else it was, I think, the ‘TIMID’ column. The VOCAL column and PROFITEERS squeeze the TIMIDs by limiting speech to dictatorship-convenient-speech or else. That is what has been happening in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. This is also what happens in businesses, with the bosses as essential to their immune system.
Finally, towards the end of the book, this other image jumped at me because it illustrates the biggest problem we face in moving forward,
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