Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words Arthur Brooks Love Your

Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words Arthur Brooks Love Your Enemies 20240712

Taught nonfiction authors about their latest works. Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us. Arthur, thank you for being here and cspan, thank you for letting me interview you about this book. Last time we did this show was when we were talking a about the best seller. Guest you asked a lot of hard questions and i plan to wreak if the favor. Host you are on the internet 50s and the people have already heard your introduction so i wont redo all of it, but you are a freakisly productive. If you have accomplisheyou havee globally renowned musician who then laid down and became an academic and behavioral social scientist and lots of people cite your work and happiness studies over time. National bestsellers and anyone onto his third career with a think tank of the American Enterprise institute thats important in washington, d. C. And beyond if you take it to new heights and raised a lot more resources and hired interesting people and now you are about to transition to a four curvier output level career and as you are making the transition, you write this new book love your enemies how decent people can save america from the culture of contempt so thank you for sharing with us today. I want to start by having you unpack for us what is contempt and how is it different from anger . Guest people often see this in american Politics Today or ideological differences in general whether it is any dimension, religious or social that traditionally politics, that americans are too angry with each other and that isnt right. Anger is a hot emotion. The problem that we have today is that we have too much of the 19th century philosopher he called it contempt, the conviction of other worthlessness of a human being. It is a cold emotion that says i dont care about you. It takes anger and it kind of mixes discussed into it making it a compound toxic and theres a lot of social Science Research that shows when you treat somebody with contempt, that person will never forgive you if. Theres a guy that teaches at the University Seattle who is the worlds leading expert in reconciliation and he can counsel for one hour, just interview that made no with 94 accuracy. He is uncanny and he fought and what he is looking for signs of contempt, eye rolling, sarcasm, i. E. Rolling, dismissal, so that is the way also for americans to hate each other and for ordinary citizens to not listen to each other and one in six americans have stopped talking to a Family Member or close friend of the president ial election and that isnt because of anger, that is because of contempt. Host but to stay with the analog. If you are successful diagnosing this and able to save some of these marriages, but is the magic for him an and the analoge tanalog towhat you think your qr the project. Guest he has thousands and of the way hthe way he does thay inducing people to stop contempt because it is and wha isnt whay really feel. Most couples they do love each other, but theyve go gotten ino an unproductive form of communication where they roll their eyes or say what theyve heard, they criticize constantly, but that isnt what is on their heart, the problem is to get into a cycle you criticize me and i criticize you. So what he does as he makes them stop. One of the things he will say is they need to just say five living things for every care system and its weird because when couples are ready to divorce they cant think of anything. But with love to cant think of anything to criticize so he makes them go back to when they were first in love. Some carry around notebooks and write on things they are going to save before they can get to the criticism. This radically changes the whole form of criticism. We need to break the habit of talking to each other with income debate co contempt. You and i are on social media. The rate i may talk to be a good joke with each other that we have an audience of hundreds of thousands of people watching us at joking around. The problem is that we dont know each other and those are trashing each other and talking with contempt. You are an idiot, that is the stupidest thing ive ever heard. That is the discourse weve gotten into. Somebody said something i disagree with and i rolled my eyes. Im guilty then. I dont want to be that way and that is what breaks them on a citizenship is the ability to listen to each other. We dont need to agree. Agreement is bad in a kind of monopoly. We dont need to disagree less, we need to disagree better and that means breaking the habit of contempt like couples do when they figure out how to get back together again. Host i want to come back to that later but first you use the word addiction a little bit ago, you talked about how we have become a big did to them. I dont want to talk about that as a way to get social media yet, but the addiction habit to complete addiction habit i want to ask you a bit to distinguish them as well. What is it to be addicted to contempt . Guest it is a manner of communicating and speaking in a manner of expressing your thoughts. It is a way to sort of say what you think and if that habit can be an addiction insofar as it passes by. The part of your brain that processes the emotions. On the contrary there is a deep part of the brain called the nucleus about the size of a walnut that involves more than a million years ago and its part of the sport of lizard apricot is, processing rewards and stay staying alive. Part of what happens is it feels kind of gradient user to build a habit. Whether it is a chemical or whether it is communicative, i do something and get the reaction i like it, the nucleus is going to start programming that into your brain. That is how it works. When you find yourself communicating in a particular way to find results saying some them over and over again. That isnt being processed by your conscious brain is by your unconscious brain. Thats the secret to break habits. You need to get a lot of time, when yotimes,when you are stimuo something you can respond. If your mom says count to ten if you are angry, extend the time between stimulus and response so that you can retrain your nucleus and get past this lizard brain by basically saying i feel this, this is how im going to react, but i am going to react this way instead. And when you do that, you get a different kind of reward. That is what they are telling these couples to do. Hes making them wait before they criticize by saying loving things. Things. That is reprogramming the nucleus incumbent and we can do the same thing by not responding when we get an email that we dont like or a message on facebook or we hear somebody Say Something that we disagree with strongly to wait before we react and sent we consciously put something in a positive instead of negative and get the reaction to that and that is a large part of what im talking about in this book. Host before we get to the cultural and Public Square implications date of the marriage piece, is it possible to retrain yourself to do that no matter how long that happens . How optimistic are you about that as a successful strategy to counter ten . Its one thing to do that if you have that sort of romantic infatuated phase early on as a different thing than that of early sort of overwhelming. You can retrain those habits if you get into bad habits of six months and, six years still. 60 years. I do believe it because i have actually seen examples of it, but no one is going to claim that its easy. If youve done something for six days or 60 days, weve talked about that, how the habits are virtues and you are more sophisticated on this stuff than i am. So, we know that the longer that you ingrain something the harder it is to break. But if you want to be a better leader or a more unifying leader, by the way, why, because they want to be a more persuasive leader. In the Politics Today we are not getting any place because they are locked down in standoff. Obviously if someone walks away they have to be more persuasive. Treating people with contempt wont do it because nobody in history has ever entered into this. If you want to go with them, they are practical but youve got to do something differently. You can be the master of your results and greek these habits. Weve got the evidence in this book that not doing that, behaving in a different way will make you persuasive then ultimately more persuasive. If its within 60 years its going to be harder but you can do it. Host you mentioned some of the things you pray about and use it one of the things you do is pray for oxytocin, the state of the brain for a minute. Why do you do that and what does that mean . Guest it is a hormone, it is a neurotransmitter and its often called the love molecule. Its interesting coming though, in 69 Richard Nixon commissioned a study for the corporation because there was a huge problem going on in the 20 of the soldiers in vietnam were a bit good to hear when. No detox, zero. We get the answer when we are talked to beat fo dave for talko anyone they will call you it feels like you are being enveloped in love. That is how harrowing appeals. When you come home you do get enveloped. We found out decades later what was happening its stimulated and its called oxytocin and those receptors are fueled and filled by harrowing so that is what gives you the simulation and its preparing something broke in. They are selfmedicating in a way so that the key thing about oxytocin when you see your kids and wife, remember the first time you helped deliver your children and they make you feel like youre hoping that you are really not. The first time you looked and it feels like something popped in your brain when you see your parents after a long time and your wife. Thats gods way of helping us to bond to each other in this miraculous way and this is something we talk about and about because when we bond more, we get our pleasure if it stimulates us to a work for unity, that is why i think god for oxytocin. Host this is earlier than i want to get swallowed by social media but lets stay there for a second. That requires it to be used as a supplement to the human relationships if it is going to complement what you said to the substitute for the relationships. If it is positive or negative, how could this possibly work for the theory of a pop of bonding that the more you ignore me bs in technology. Guest it is a problem and what we need there is the key thing for my money as the senator writing books we do work in history in the social sciencl science and how it is such that it can be met life enhancing thats what i got for your book. In the neuroscience of this stuff is understanding what we cannot substitute for human relationships, for practica docl in person relationships and social media cannot be done because the human relationships that we get involved the oxytocin and looking into each otherothers eyes and that is ht was developed. We dont have that evolution or about 100 of 500,000 years of twitter for us to develop the neurological link of one to another. I think that is great happy to see this because as a flesh and blood person the problem is among strangers they cannot get that done and as a result of it doesnt give you the biochemical to meet your needs and its a contempt of machine because it reduces the handle and reduces you to something the delay less than human and it is anonymous. Host you have been putting out practical things mostly from this book but ways to tackle the content using the media that is largely at least in the political space its main ingredient seems to be contempt. How can we solve this problem unless everybody on plugs because i dont think that you are recommending that. Guest even if i did it wouldnt be practical. It isnt going to have been in the meantime, but one thing i do recommend this people think about the social media behavior and essayist is complementing my facfaith or substituting the rel relationships and you can see both. They are pretty good on social media and use it to set up where are they going to meet for example my oldest son uses facebook and they will have a meeting for something but they do not use it as a substitute for personal relationships. To get an oxytocin deficit Legislature Im going to be more contemptuous and less successful and thats bad. Weve got to make sure it is a complement for the relationships and i recommend talking with your friends you see regularly and not others. The other thing is to try to use it and this is my experiment so we follow each other do notice that i am not going to say mean things on twitter. For every one thing that i say that is as a joke or critical d what i find is i am committing myself to using it as a positive media to get 50 million followers because it is a lot more interesting than trying to get the dopamine ahead which is a transmitter that gets the reward when you get stimulated in a way that is positive or negative but you see when somebody is part of that. But i have to say twitter doesnt bum me out because im participating in the way that i feel like i am lifting other people up. Host you mentioned the leaders that succeed with the two different tactics in this book. You unpack coercive leadership and authoritative leadership, which i think could also be called aspirational. He also said your pessimistic. And dont we see more of that now . Guest this is language that is taken from harvard. He has done work on thousands of ceos and at the appointed leaders and what he says as he is categorized them using the Factor Analysis but that is an important. He breaks them up into different kinds of leaders and on the one end it there is the coercive and that is kind of selfexplanatory. They are the bullies, the offers, become come tempters. What we see in the media or the other authoritative leaders but basically it dont they come with me now but if you see a Better Future they are when some and make people want to follow them. Theyve have a lot of followers but they dont last for long and when they go down the good on ugly. But this isnt the case in these countries. France is a populist place and as a result of coercive and they tend to hang on for a lot longer but not in the United States so we see the coercive leadership tends to be successful in the 2015 years after the crisis because the financial crisis with th the gut that doesnt cre the Economic Program for creeds and Even Economic growth at and about 20 of the economic distribution. It makes perfect sense theres a lot of research that shows that support for these parties. Exactly what we are seeing now but then it ends badly and they have authoritative leaders with an opportunity. I believe we have a Market Opportunity and here is the statistic i want to share. Weve talked about this before and i am excited and happy about this. There is a group called more in common in the United States and britain. They find 93 of americans hate how its becoming as a country. They are profiting from it and getting famous and powerful and rich indicating and track clicks or maybe sociopathic personalities but the 93 of that which is most people watching us right now and demand it be i know for sure we want Something Better and that is a Market Opportunity for the authoritative leadership. It takes longer and more skill but i like that more than the 7 . Host one of the reasons we see so much contemplate out even when we know it is about how that for us continuing again and again, shortly it seems to be because the market is the opposite we send back to the media as these are the kind of stories they want. So, like the 93 may be putting on rosecolored glasses when asking them to question what is borne out in their behavior is that they all kind of like that put down. Guest that is possible. But it makes us unhappy and the Research Shows when people are dissipating in the climate of content either being treated with contempt or others with contempt and the stress hormone that makes people feel lonely or into these are all things you see. They feel lonely and depressed and this isnt related to that of the deal an political and ideological debate so we are in kind of a sub optimal equilibrium because we have the leaders in the media and on campuses and in politics and in entertainment who are making a big profit by being the 7 and if that is all youve got you are going to take one side or the other. But that youre looking for Something Better and this is the reason ive been so bullish on the political life is because you are not that one guy in the whole state of nebraska. This is what is so good when i hear you talk because you are the one for the 93 and we need more people like this. This is a moment waiting to happen. Its time to stand up to 7 and say i will take it and by the way i am addicted. I am an addict but there are a lot of product said this is another point of there are a lot of products we consume regularly and patronize to great effect that we hate. One of the reasons the Cigarette Companies are trying to make them less dangerous and less addictive is because people started to figure out tobacco is something people are attuned to spend a lot of money on but they didnt like it because it was hurting them. That is the product that we have in the contemptuous Politics Today. And the vehicle like social media we do it all the time. We are stuck on it but they dont like our lives and want Something Better and they are waiting for Something Better. Host the book is filled with fascinating social Science Research. It leads to a lot of envy and contempt is the product of these habits. Do a little more history for us. 30 years ago there wasnt as much contempt as there is today. What arwhatever the historical s that led us to get here. Why did we get into this vicious cycle. Guest it isnt to say we are at an alltime high. There is a lot that the text could use and pretty easy to manipulate. We are pulverized as we were at any time since the American Civil War however youve seen the waxing and waning of the highly contemptuous politics and what you see is a general following year to ten or 15 year cycle of the populism and a populist political rhetoric is almost always contemptuous. Its almost always impossible to be very positive. Now i am encouraging people in this book and in this interview in ou

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