“This is our most important problem”

I watched a short video recently where Sam Harris says something that is, on its face, completely right. The short, entitled “This is our most important problem,” states we’re losing our grip on what’s “real.” Conspiracy thinking is “noxious.” (Harris always features the fantastic vocabulary of a bright mind.) Shared reality is fracturing. As a result, technology is driving us a little crazy. All true. If you zoom out and squint, he’s basically nailed the description of the mess we’re in.

Where I think Harris is slightly askew is not on what is happening but on what he thinks is doing the happening.

Human beings have never had a shared reality.  They have never agreed on what is real.  Every culture on earth differs on the particulars of this at some level. This has never been otherwise.  This is why there are so many different cultures, different “true” stories, different religions.  We have been war-like for millennia because we do not share quite the same reality.

What is common between us are emotions and needs.  How they manifest is generally common but always differing in the specific.  This is the way of things.

Like almost everyone with a megaphone, Harris elevates technology as a primary culprit. Algorithms, social media, engagement incentives, the collapse of the information commons. The implied solution space follows naturally from that diagnosis. Better information architecture. Better fact-checking. Better norms. Better epistemic hygiene. Get the right information to people in the right way and rational alignment becomes possible again.

That entire approach assumes something that almost no one ever articulates. Which is frustrating considering Harris is talking about what's "real." To quote Morpheus from The Matrix, "What is real? How do you define real?" There's a psychological developmental context that people just skip right over as if it were nothing at all.

But it's everything. Everything humans express and experience is connected with their psychology and their stage of personal development. According to Spiral Dynamics this works both personally and socially.

I’ve written before about Spiral Dynamics as a way of describing how different meaning-making systems show up over time. Not personality types. Personal (inward) and social (outward) orientations in a color-coded scheme. There are basic ways human beings organize their reality and they evolve through time. The stuff in their psychological tool boxes, regardless of their intelligence or technology. In that language, Harris is assuming the audience is already playing the Orange (rational) game.

In other words, it assumes people fundamentally care about factual truth more than their faithful story telling. Evidence, falsifiability, coherence, correspondence with reality. Once you notice that assumption, the rest of the argument starts to wobble.

Conspiracy stories are older and more fundamental to who we are than human reason.

Prior to Orange in the spiraling scheme of things, the Red and Amber psychologies, which constitute the majority of Americans and people in general, are not malfunctioning. They are not confused. They are not ignorant in the way Harris and others implicitly mean. Plenty of Red and Amber people are smart, resourceful, cunning, creative and highly adaptive. They simply organize reality around different priorities.

A Red orientation processes information through power, threat, loyalty, and emotional resonance. What matters is not whether something is true, but whether it explains danger, mobilizes allies, or justifies action. An Amber orientation filters reality through authority, tradition, and sanctioned narrative. What matters is not evidence, but alignment with what is already deemed legitimate and sacred.

Neither of these systems treats truth as a neutral object waiting to be discovered through reasoned discourse. That expectation doesn’t arrive until Orange (roughly 500 years ago). And you can’t reason someone into Orange any more than you can scold a teenager into mature behavior.

This is the part Harris misses when he says that the combination of falsehoods and technology is driving us crazy.

He treats conspiracy thinking as an epistemic failure. I see it as storied meaning-making success inside a stressed developmental system. Conspiracies feel “real” to Red minds (perhaps 20% of Americans) because they explain threat and assign agency. They feel righteous to Amber minds (maybe 40% of us) because they conserve a moral order that seems to be dissolving. The problem isn’t contrived fictions or bad information. It’s incompatible orientations among the American public.

Now introduce mass consumption, convenience and entertainment into that equation.

Give a Red psychology a smartphone with unlimited access to content optimized for engagement, outrage, and tribal reinforcement and you don’t get enlightenment. You get weaponized narrative. Give an Amber psychology algorithmic feeds and global connectivity and you don’t get careful discernment. You get absolutism at scale.

This isn’t a glitch in the system. This is exactly what happens when pre-rational meaning systems are handed tools designed under Orange and Green assumptions.

Technology didn’t create these psychologies. It enabled a number of people that were previously disassociated and disaffected by the great liberal century. Many decades of liberalism changed the world so much that Red pushed back hard. 

Technology didn’t break something that was previously working. It simply removed the friction that used to contain them. What once took generations to collide is now happening in suddenly distinctly organized communities in real time.

To paraphrase Rodney King from 1992: “Why can’t we just all get along?”

People are why, not technology.  Hell, Windows 3.1 was standard then.  So, were pay phone booths. The Apple II was still being sold. DOS was king.  And we were asking why we couldn’t get along?  What is really real?

Harris is baffled that better arguments don’t work. That fact-checking fails. That rational discourse keeps bouncing off like rain on armor. Given the psychologies involved, it’s hard to imagine how it could be otherwise.

You can’t fix a developmental mismatch with better UX.

Technology is an accelerant, not the fire. The fire is ancient. Thousands of years old. What we’re watching is not a collapse of intelligence or a sudden outbreak of stupidity. It’s the collision of incompatible meaning systems inside an information environment that assumes everyone is supposedly “modern.”

That assumption needs closer inspection.

This is why some of our smartest people keep proposing solutions that fail. They’re looking at information flows, incentives, and platforms while missing the deeper layer where orientation itself is doing the sorting. Platforms built by Orange and Green minds don’t know how to address a problem that existed prior to rationality.

So yes, Harris is right about the danger. He’s just pointing at the wrong lever.

The crisis isn’t that we’ve lost access to truth. It’s that we never shared the same relationship to truth in the first place, and technology stripped away the delays that once kept that fact from becoming explosive.

This is not going away with better moderation policies. And it doesn’t get solved by teaching critical thinking to people who aren’t oriented toward critical thinking as a value.

It gets worse when stress increases. Which brings us some economic considerations.

Right now, a lot of people are materially fine while psychologically disoriented. The system is already venting pressure through culture war theater engulfing us all Red to Green. Conspiratorial narratives abound.

When conditions deteriorate, the orientations don’t change. The volume does.

This is where the piece gets uncomfortable, because the pattern is already visible during good economic times. Political violence has been rising while most people report being personally fine.

When large numbers of people feel secure in their private lives but are otherwise convinced that the society around them is illegitimate, corrupt, or collapsing, tension has nowhere to go except outward. The stress isn’t coming from empty refrigerators or mass unemployment. It’s coming from meaning failure. From the sense that the country no longer makes sense, no longer reflects recognizable rules, no longer honors the right authorities, no longer protects the right people.

Under those conditions, symbolic violence becomes legible. Targeted acts aimed at public figures, cultural symbols, or ideological stand-ins begin to feel like messages rather than crimes. Not to everyone, of course, but to the psychologies already oriented toward power, threat, and sacred order. When the story is that the system itself is an enemy, violence can present itself as communication.

This is why rising political violence during relative prosperity is such a bad sign. Historically, violence is expected when material conditions collapse. What we’re seeing instead is violence emerging while the material floor is still mostly intact. That suggests the system is already operating near psychological saturation.

When the economy eventually stumbles, as it always does, the pressure won’t arrive on a calm surface. It will land on a population already primed by grievance, identity threat, and moral panic. The people who are currently satisfied with their personal lives won’t suddenly become more developmentally flexible under stress. Red and Amber orientations don’t evolve upward when threatened. They harden.

The result is not mass uprising but fragmentation. More lone actors. More symbolic targets. More attempts to shock the system into recognition. Each incident then feeds the narrative on all sides, confirming threat perceptions and accelerating the loop.

In a society where most people feel their own lives are working (about 81% according the Gallup) but believe the country itself is failing (about 75%), political violence doesn’t unify or clarify anything. It corrodes trust, amplifies fear, and further dissolves the shared reality that Orange institutions depend on to function at all.

That’s the real danger. Not collapse overnight, but normalization. A slow adjustment to living inside sporadic ideological violence as background noise, justified by competing stories about who started it and who deserves it.

Threats against members of Congress have increased tenfold since 2016. The Capitol Police reported 9,474 threats in 2024 alone. The University of Maryland tracked 150 politically-motivated attacks in just the first half of 2025, nearly double the rate from 2024. FBI domestic terrorism cases grew 357% between 2013 and 2021. Experts describe this as the worst period for political violence since the civil rights and anti-war era in the 1960's and 1970's.

Right now, though they may complain, a lot of people are contented. Their jobs work. Their families work. Their routines mostly work. And yet they are convinced the country itself is broken, illegitimate, or under attack.

That combination is unstable.

When the economic heat is turned up, nothing new appears. What disappears is slack. An important buffer that currently absorbs frustration thins or vanishes. Economic stress doesn’t create new orientations, it compresses existing ones.

For people oriented toward rational problem-solving (Orange businessmen and scientists), stress produces anxiety, reformist energy, and attempts at recalibration. For Red and Amber orientations, stress sharpens threat perception and collapses restraint. The story morphs from something is wrong into something is being done to us.

That is the psychological inflection point.

Under those conditions, frustration stops circulating symbolically and starts leaking into behavior. Not as mass revolt, but as fragmentation. Lone actors. Symbolic targets. Acts meant to communicate rather than win. Each incident feeds the narrative environment, amplifying fear, grievance, and moral certainty on all sides.

In Chapter 25 of Harmogenics I write: "...the greatest problem of our time is that most people are neurologically hardwired for a narrative-based world that is already in the past and is morphing ever-faster into something completely different. Normal people will become more volatile and unstable if they fail to use their neuroplasticity to rewire themselves..."

I fear the Charlie Kirk and Alex Pretti murders are harbingers of something rather sinister underlying personal American satisfaction mismatched with overwhelming national dissatisfaction.

This is how societies decay under acceleration. Normal life continues. Most people still go to work, raise families, and try to stay sane. Alongside that, ideological violence becomes episodic, just the way things are supposed to be. Trust erodes. Institutions harden. The space for rational coordination shrinks.

We are already seeing early versions of this pattern during “good” economic times.

When conditions deteriorate, the orientations don’t change. The volume does.

At least in the 1970s, people couldn’t tweet.