How America Recovers

Every week on Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso I invite an actor, author, or filmmaker to come to the table and speak from the heart in ways you probably haven't heard them on the record before. Some of my favorites are with Tom Hanks, Margaret Atwood, and Pedro Pascal. In recent weeks, I sat with Joaquin Phoenix, Mikey Madison, and Jesse Eisenberg, and only two of them gave me a panic attack. New episodes come out every Sunday morning wherever you get your podcasts.

It's Aspen Ideas to Go from the Aspen Institute. I'm Trisha Johnson. To figure out how to recover from a major upheaval, it can help to know how and why things ruptured in the first place. we've become a much more individualistic country which in some ways has been wonderful to us at least all sorts of wonderful energies but we take torn away some of those covenantal secure bases families are weaker

Communities are weaker and the more order has been frayed. Writer and columnist David Brooks sees the same conflict and horror in the news that we all see. And then he turns to philosophers, historians, psychologists, and all kinds of other thinkers and puts together a picture of what happened and what we do next.

Aspen Ideas To Go brings you compelling conversations presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival. For the 20th year in a row, Brooks gives a talk on stage at the festival and takes questions from the audience. This year, he's not rosy about our future. But he's not defeatist either. As the co-founder and chair of Weave, the social fabric project at the Aspen Institute, Brooks underlines the important role that we all have to play in healing society. This talk was recorded at the end of June.

Here's Brooks. It's a pleasure to be in my 20th annual talk at the Ideas Festival. This one will be less funny except for when we get to questions.

So Charles de Gaulle wrote a book, a war memoir, and the first sentence was, all my life I've had a certain idea about France. Well, all my life I've had a certain idea about America. And that idea is that America is about human dignity. That it's all men are created equal and down by their creator with inalienable rights. That's about human dignity. And the second idea about America, it's about mobility.

we have energy, we move. We move physically, we try to move up economically, and we try to move spiritually to get to a better place, to improve. I was talking to some kids today and this week, and for some reason, three times, the Hamilton musical came up. And some of you may know a little about Alexander Hamilton. He was a Puerto Rican hip-hop star from the northern.

But you listen to the lyrics of that musical. Coming up from the bottom, just you wait. Want to be in the room where it happens, not throwing away my shot. And my favorite, I'm like my country, young, scrappy and hungry. And that's, to me, what America is. Lincoln, when he was a poor boy, had a rowboat. And two guys needed to cross a river, and he rowed them across. And they threw a silver dollar into the boat to pay him.

And he said later, decades later, you may think it was a very little thing, but it was the most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day. The world seemed wider and fairer before me. Opened up opportunities, opened up his vision, his possibility for his life. And so we tell these stories of exodus, of movement.

MLK talked more about Exodus than the New Testament. FDR told a version. JFK told a version. Reagan told a version. Obama told a version. Movement and mobility. I hope I don't embarrass my dear friends Stuart and Linda Resnick. If you walk around Aspen or anywhere you see, you know the generosity they produce. But they didn't start out with the means they have today. They built great companies.

And now they've created communities in the Central Valley and they've created a museum here and all sorts of stuff. That's America. But there's been a different story of America which has prevailed more recently.

and which Donald Trump tells. It's not about mobility. It's about protection and security. We live in a dangerous world full of threats. We live in a world of American carnage. America, we know, is being taken from us. We need to build walls. We need to erect tariffs. There's a consistent strategy. It's not about mobility and risk. It's about power. It's about amassing power.

And if there's a constant strategy, it is to create a world where power is uninhibited and where ruthless people can thrive. And one of the... ideas that were behind Hamilton and FDR and Reagan was that America's an idea as well as a homeland. But one of the things J.D. Vance emphasizes is that America's not an idea. It's a homeland.

which is traditionally how other countries have seen themselves. But we've always seen ourselves as an idea. And there's a reason they have to deny the idea that America is an idea. If America is an idea, then we have a moral responsibility to try to reduce poverty around the world and enhance human dignity. You can't go around cutting PEPFAR. You can't go around cutting malarial research.

There's a guy at Boston University, a mathematician, who's counted up the costs already of Trump's decision to gut USAID. It's already, we're five months in, 400,000 dead. Tens of thousands of dead children. And that one decision fills me with a kind of rage that I don't usually experience. If America's an idea, we have a responsibility to try to spread democracy where we can. You don't...

support Vladimir Putin against Zelensky. But if America is not an idea, then we can do that. If America is an idea, then anybody from around the world can come here and become American citizens. and celebrate that. They don't have to be white. They don't have to have been here for seven generations. But if America's not an idea, it's a homeland, then we can just be like ourselves. And so...

Until January 20th, 24, and even in Trump's first term, I didn't realize how much of my identity was based on this conception of America. How much of my daily life and my... The way I think about my life and all the lives I see around me was based on this idea. And in the past four or five months, I've experienced it as a moral injury, as sometimes a sense of shame.

that I've never felt before about the country, sometimes a sense that we're on the wrong side. So how did we get here? I'd like to talk about how we get here and then how we recover. Well...

There have been very few historical shifts in the last 150 years. Movements that shifted history and shift the whole climate of opinion. The first one was the totalitarian movement in 1917 that produced the Russian Revolution and authoritarianism and totalitarianism, both of fascist kind in Nazi Germany and the communist kind in Russia and China. That was a movement.

Then there was the welfare state movement that produced welfare states in Europe and in our country, the New Deal with Franklin Roosevelt. Then in the 60s, there was a liberation movement about helping people who are marginalized realize their rights. And that was anti-colonialism around the world, but in this country it was the civil rights movement, it was the feminist movement, and eventually the LGBTQ movement. Then there was the market liberalism movement of the 1980s.

which gave us Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and Deng Xiaoping. And recently we've lived in a new historical era since I think about 2013, which is the global populist movement. If you look at the climate of opinion, not just in America, but all around the world, people are disgusted with established power. Ipsos Research did a poll, and America fits right in with the world. Our opinions are average for the world.

59% of Americans say they believe their country has declined. The global average is 58. 61% of Americans say the system is broken. The global average is 60. Our hostility to elites is average. 69% of Americans agree that political and economically don't care about working class people. That's average. 67% say experts in this country don't understand the lives of people like me. Average.

Our authoritarian tendencies are average. 66% of Americans say the country needs a strong leader to take back from the powerful. 45% of Americans say we need a leader who's willing to break rules. And so that's populism. Where did populism come from? Well, there's some obvious explanations. It's a reaction against public policy events. Financial crisis, Afghanistan, Iraq, inequality.

And of course, on a superficial level, that's true. But there's also deeper, more psychological and social reasons. We've just gotten a lot sadder as a society, and this has been an obsession of mine for the past decade. Mental health problems are rising. Suicide rates are up by 30%, 60% for teenagers. The number of Americans who say they have no close friends has risen by fourfold since 2000.

The number of Americans not in a romantic relationship is up by a third since 2000. The number of Americans who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category is up by 50% since 2000. We've just become sadder. And when you become sadder, you become meaner. Because you feel isolated, you feel under threat. And you lash out. My sister-in-law is a nurse in New Jersey. And she says her biggest problem is keeping...

because the patients have become so abusive, the nurses burn out. I can give you all sorts of stats on meanness. The one that bugs me is that a generation of three-quarters of Americans gave to charity every year. And now fewer than 50% of Americans get to charity. Just pulling in. And so what creates the spiritual crisis?

And I go back to psychology. There was an attachment theorist who was writing about 70 or 80 years ago named John Bowlby. One of the things I've learned from him is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. And what is that secure base?

Well, for most of us, it's family. It's loyalty to a sacred place, our home. It's loyalty to a country. And it's also... a secure base a moral base that we live in a moral order that we're held together in a community by a shared set of values there's a historian named george marsden who wrote of martin luther king What gave such widely compelling force to King's leadership and oratory was his bedrock conviction that the moral law was built into the universe.

That segregation is not just wrong in some times and some places. Slavery is not just wrong in some times and some places. It's always wrong. There is a moral order. It's wrong. It reduces the dignity of a human being. And in my view... Over the last 60 or 70 years, we've become a much more individualistic country, which in some ways has been wonderful to us, unleashed all sorts of wonderful energies. But we've torn away some of those covenantal secure bases. Families are weaker.

Communities are weaker, and the moral order has been frayed. This was seen all the way back in 1955 by a great columnist named Walter Libman. He wrote, if what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual chooses to invent based on his feelings, we have left the grounds of civilization. And you can't have trust unless you have a moral order.

Trust is the faith that you will do what you ought to do. And for us to trust each other, we have to have a shared sense of what you ought to do. We have to have shared norms. Like if two lanes are merging in the highway. then the right lane goes and left lane goes. And if you button line, I'm going to honk because I'm going to enforce the norms. But when you take away that shared order, trust dissolves.

A generation ago, 60% of Americans say people around me are trustworthy. Now it's down to about 30%. And 19% of millennials and Gen Z. If you ask Gen Z, do you agree with the following statement? Most people are selfish and out to get you. 72% say yes. And so that's just psychological hard. Imagine living that way. And so to me, that's the anxiety.

And existential anxiety always leads to fanaticism. We've taken away the secure base. I'm going to read this passage about that. All fixed, fast, frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. I've just quoted from the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, which I don't usually quote from.

But I think they're right. And this anxiety is not equally distributed in society. It overlaps with the crucial divide in our society, which does not really income its education. People with high school degrees die 15 years sooner than people with college degrees. People with high school degrees are five times more likely to die of opiate addiction.

People with high school degrees are vastly less likely to marry and much more likely to divorce. People with high school degrees are 2.4 times more likely to say they have no friends. And so we've created this caste structure in society. The pain is felt up and down in society, but particularly in those among less educated who don't have the opportunities and security that some of us have. And so what can we do about it?

Well, how do countries come back from this? It's not just a policy problem. It's a spiritual and psychological and emotional and social problem. Well, in my view, we already are. Think about times in your own life when you've gone through hardship. When I ask people what made them who they are, nobody ever says, you know, I had this fantastic vacation in Hawaii. That really made me the person I am. Nobody ever says that.

People talk about some challenging time they got through with others. And I went through a hard time in 2013. My kids were leaving to go to college. My marriage fell apart. I was living alone. crappy little apartment. And I was doing what any middle-aged male idiot would do in response to an emotional crisis, which I became a workaholic. I tried to work my way through it. And if you'd gone to my little apartment, I wasn't having anybody over.

And if you pulled out one of the drawers where there should have been silverware, there were post-it notes. And where there should have been plates, there were stationery. I was just working all the time to cover over an emotional crisis. And Paul Tillich, a 1950s theologian, said that moments of suffering interrupt your life and remind you you're not the person you thought you were.

He wrote, they carve into the floor of the basement of your soul and reveal a cavity below, and they carve into the next layer and reveal a cavity below. In these painful moments, you see deeper into yourself than in normal times. I listened to a lot of Sinead O'Connor, a lot of Sayad Irish music. And then Henry Nouwen's a Catholic theologian.

And I remember in 2013 I read him and he said, you have to stay in the pain to see what it has to teach you. And I was like, screw that, I want to get out of the pain. But he's not wrong. And then finally I read a novelist, Frederick Buechner.

said that when you're in your moments of suffering, you can either be broken or broken open. And people who are broken make themselves invulnerable. They cover themselves over with a callous thick armor. But people who are broken open make themselves, even in the pain, more vulnerable. And that's the only way change can happen. And so I've just described personal process. And the process, personally, is rupture and repair. You go through a hard time.

You learn more about yourself. You change. And I was, I think, radically changed. I'm going to drop a name. I was interviewed by Oprah. I've been lucky enough to be interviewed by her twice in my life. Once before 2013 and once in 2019. And after the second interview, She pulled me aside and said, David, I've not seen someone change so much in middle age. You were so blocked before. And then a couple years after that, I was in Nantucket.

And I was at a conference just like this, and there was about this number of people in the room, and the speaker gave us all pieces of paper, and on the pieces of paper was lyrics to a love song. And he said, okay, I want you all to find somebody you don't know. gaze into their eyes, and sing the love song to them. And if you had asked old me to do that, I would have spontaneously combusted. But I found some old guy.

I gazed into his eyes. And I sang a love song. And there were no sparks, unfortunately, no chemistry. But I'm different. And I'm... Blissfully happily married. My wife's working in the hotel room. And she takes a look at videos of me from 2000. And she always has the reaction, well, I wouldn't have married that guy. And so you can change.

And if it's true of a person, it's true of nation. Jared Diamond wrote a book called Upheaval where he talked about all the nations that went through this process of rupture and repair. And they're not unusual. Britain in the 1820s and 1830s. Britain again in the 1980s. Australia in the 1970s. Germany and Japan after World War II. South Korea in the 1980s. Rwanda after 1994. Chile in the 1990s. And this country too.

has been through its periods of rupture and repair. In 2000, I read a book called The Promise of Disharmony, taking a look at the clock, good, by a great political scientist named Samuel Huntington. And he writes in that book that I've noticed this weird pattern in American history. About 60 years or so, every 60 years or so, we go through what he calls a moral convulsion. People get disgusted with established power. They want to tear everything down.

marginalized groups demand inclusion. A passionate young generation comes on the scene. There's a new form of communications technology. He said this happened in the 1770s with the revolutionary period. It happened in the 1890s when we really struggled to... create a society around an industrial economy. Massive corruption, massive inequality. It happened in the 1960s. People forget how brutal the 1960s were.

riots, assassinations. In 1969 alone, there were 4,000 bombings on college campuses. We forget how ruthless that period seemed. And then he said, I don't know if I believe in 60-year cycles. But if the pattern holds, sometimes around 2020, America will go through another moral convulsion. So I'm reading this in 2020. I'm like, well done, Professor Huntington. And the good news is we come out of them.

We come out different, rupture and repair. And so how does the process happen? Well, let's take two examples. I mentioned Britain in the 1820s. In Britain in the 1810s, It was a brutal economy. The first wave of industrialization wiped out all sorts of jobs. The work in the factories and the coal mines was brutal. And morality was totally acceptable to get drunk at work and go home and beat your wife. That was a norm. And so it happened in three phases. First, there was a religious revival.

something called the Clapham sect, which not only was about God, but it was the beginnings of Victorian morality. The beginnings of like, don't get drunk and beat your wife. And also abolitionism. Second, there was a civic revival. Civic organizations burst into life. A guy named William Wilberforce led the abolitionist movement. And third, there was a group called the Chartists who were like an early union. And then third, there was a political movement.

which led in the 1840s to the Reform Acts, which broadened the franchise. More people could vote. America in the 1890s. First, there was a spiritual shift, a cultural shift. Social Darwinism. which was popular in the 1870s, was the belief that survival of the fittest, that poor people are poor because they're lazy. That was replaced by something called the social gospel movement, which was about community.

Poor people are poor because of systemic injustice. So that was a cultural shift. Then there was a civic renaissance. So within the 1890s, within just a few years, you had the creation of the Boys and Girls Clubs. the NAACP, the environmental movement like the Sierra Club was founded then, the settlement house movement, which was Jane Addams in Chicago and other places to help immigrants. And so you had this whole growth of civic life.

And then third, you had political reform, the progressive movement, that created the Food and Drug Administration, eventually the Federal Reserve System, the Civil Service Act to clean up government. And so in both the cases I've described... It went cultural, people shift in values, civic, and then political. And so I think that's a reasonable formula to look at our current moment.

You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo. Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at The New Yorker. So join us every week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Well, where are we today? We're certainly in the middle of a moral convulsion. It's on the right, frankly, also on the left, this guy, Mangani, who just won the mayoral primary in New York. What's he all about? The establishment is letting you down. He's a Democrat who's figured out how to marshal this populist moment. I don't particularly like his politics. I'm not a socialist, though I do quote Karl Marx. And so we're in this convulsion. But one of the things that happens in the convulsion...

is that people try radical change like Donald Trump offers. And one of the problems with populists is they don't respect institutions. They're not really good at running things. They're good at destroying, but not great at running things. Andrew Jackson was the most successful populist in American history. One of the things he hated was this thing called the Second Bank of the United States, which was an early version of our Federal Reserve System. He got rid of it.

He gave monetary power to crony banks. And guess what? They created the second longest depression in American history. So they screwed up. And that really ended populism. A screw-up. And in my view... Trump is beginning to decay. The first two months of the administration were like blitzkrieg. I'm sort of weirdly impressed by how much they could do. But now, Doge was a complete destructive failure.

He wanted to end the Ukraine war on day one. Failure. Even tariffs. He's trying to impose tariffs, but he's flip-flopping all over the place, and it will create, over the next several months, somebody just told me, take the example of a car seat, and now apparently...

It costs 300 bucks to buy a car seat, a child's car seat. It's gone up since my kids were little. And with the original China tariffs, it was going to go up to $700 per car seat. Now with the current tariffs, it'll go up to $500. That's still a big increase in a child's car seat. And that's across a range of products. I believe that will change. And so you're beginning to see the decay. And you're beginning to see the forces of resistance in May.

Federal district judges overruled the Trump administration 96% of the time. To take the full course of the administration so far, Democratic-appointed judges overruled the Trump administration 80% of the time. And Republican-appointed judges overruled the Trump administration 72% of the time. Not that big a difference. And that's going to be complicated by yesterday's Supreme Court decision. But resistance is building.

I thought the No Kings movement was a very successful movement because it was not too partisan. It was something all Americans agree on. We don't like kings. And it was happy and it was patriotic. And so that resistance is building. And I watch in sector after sector the resistance organizing. I'm closest to university presidents. In the beginning, Columbia and other universities were like, how do we lay low? How do we make a deal?

But then Harvard said, no, we're going to fight back. They really had to. And other universities, I watched them like, we may not be as loud as Harvard. We don't have $52 billion in the bank. But we're going to fight back. We're going to organize. Lawyers are organizing.

And so sector after sector, you're seeing the organization, the nonprofits are beginning to organize. And what happens that has to happen next is all these different sectors have to organize together. There really is strength in numbers. And so you're beginning to see resistance.

But I think what we can do is first, we still need that spiritual and cultural revival. We need to tap into that Hamiltonian energy. that idea of America, that we're a nation of mobility. We need to change culture. How do you change culture? One of the great cultural entrepreneurs of our lifetime, I met him here at the Ideas a couple years ago.

was a guy named Stuart Brand. And Stuart Brand grew up, I think, in Minnesota in the 50s. And he thought Minnesota was boring, no offense to Minnesotans. And he thought, you know who's cool? Native Americans are cool. We should live like they do, close to the land. So he created a thing called the Whole Earth Catalog. And it was about how to form a commune. And it sold like three and a half million books.

and it won the National Book Award, and a lot of people started communes. And then it turns out farming is hard. And so the commune movement sort of fizzled. And so Stuart Brand, who had really created hippie culture, he created hippie culture. He said, oh no, communes are not cool. You know what's cool? Computers are cool. He was living in Menlo Park.

And he ran across these guys and he wrote a big story for Rolling Stone magazine called The Rise of the Hacker Culture. And one of the people who loved the Whole Earth Catalog, it's his favorite book in the world. was a guy named Steve Jobs. That outfit, that Steve Jobs outfit, that's Stuart Brand. He created the countercultural hippie movement, and then he created the countercultural, if you remember those Apple ads,

the misfits, the creative ones. That's Stuart Brand. So he really changed culture twice. Impressive. Culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy them. If we have any Christians in the room, the early church, 12 guys. Now they had the advantage, their boss was the son of God, that helped. But people took a look at them and said,

That's a cool way to live. I like the Sermon on the Mount. I want to be like that. And now there are a billion Christians or whatever. And so we need a new social ideal to renew somehow that Hamiltonian sense of a grower. And I think it's, they're ripe. I've met with the Bezos scholars this year, as I do every year, the high school kids. And when they talk about their lives, they have the thing, they talk about, they don't know what they're going to do with their life.

but they know they're going to have a big life. They know they're going to make a difference. And what I see in their eyes is a certain gleam. And I love to see that gleam. I used to have that glean before life crushed me. No, I'm kidding. I think we can all have that glean. I think we can have that glean all the way through life. Marcel Proust is a hero of mine. He was dying on his deathbed.

And he realized that he wrote a book called Remembrance of Things Past. And there was a deathbed scene in it. And he said, oh, I got it wrong. So he asked his wife to bring the manuscript. He rewrote the scene on his deathbed hours away. He wanted to self-improve forever through his life. I was visiting my dad at a senior center. He lives in a community, a senior community in Haverford, Pennsylvania. And I was sitting next to a 100-year-old guy at dinner one night.

And that guy was in the middle of reading six books. He was going to lectures. A lot of drives die out. The desire for popularity, probably the desire for sex, so I didn't ask him. But the desire to learn. That doesn't die. And so that's the gleam. That's the drive. And somehow we have to tap into that drive. And then we have to help create a secure emotional base.

And the way we do that is one by one, all of us creating a healthier social fabric. I was at an event. about a year ago with a psychologist at Chicago named Nick Epley. And he was interviewing me on stage. And then about 45 minutes in, he said, OK, we're going to stop. And we want you to find a stranger.

And I want you for the next 10 minutes to tell them the high point of your life, the low point of your life, and the turning point of your life. Big groan goes up from the audience. He says, how many of you don't want to do this? 80% of the hands went up. And he says, go.

And they start talking to each other. After 10 minutes, we can't get them to shut up. After 20 minutes, they're still talking to each other. And finally, we get them to shut up. And Nick Epley said, how many of you enjoyed that? 80% of the hands go up.

The basis of his research is we underestimate how much we're going to enjoy talking to strangers. And if we did a little more of that, we'd live in a healthier society. And now when I'm on a plane, I wait until there's like an hour left in the flight. I don't want the whole floor out. I'll start talking to my neighbor on the plane. And so that's just the way of showing respect. I was at a diner in Waco, Texas, eating with a lady named LaRue Dorsey.

And she presented herself to me as a stern disciplinarian. And she had been a teacher. She was 93, and she said, I love my students enough to be disciplined with them. And into the diner walked a mutual friend of ours, a pastor named Jimmy Durrell.

He comes up to our table. He knows us both. And he grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders and he shakes her way harder than you should ever shake a 93-year-old. And he says to her, Mrs. Dorsey, Mrs. Dorsey, you're the best. You're the best. I love you. I love you. And that tough drill sergeant lady I'd been talking to turns in an instant into an eye-shining nine-year-old girl. He brought forth a different version of her just by the respectful gaze he gave her.

Finally, the way to build respect in society and trust is to ask people questions. Questions are the ultimate form of respect. And everybody in this room was once a really good question asker because you're all former three-year-olds. Three-year-olds ask, on average, a woman named Susan Engel does this research, 145 questions an hour. And those of us who have been parents, we've been there.

I have a friend named Naomi who teaches eighth grade boys in New York how to become journalists, how to be an interviewer. And so she asked them, the first day she did this, she said, okay, I'm going to stand in front of the class. You ask me any question, I will answer it honestly. And the first boy says, are you married? And she says no. And the second boy says, are you divorced? And she says yes. And the third boy says, do you still love him? And she's like, whoa, whoa.

And she started crying and said yes. And the next boy said, does he know you still love him? And the next boy said, do your kids know you still love him? Questions are a form of respect. And a lot of people in this country feel disrespected. That's something we can all do. Then the civic renaissance. Organizations that start at the local level and build up. This is what WEVE is.

Weave celebrates people who work in the neighborhood where they live, and they are trusted members of the neighborhood. Some of them don't have any organization. I ran into a lady who said, I practice aggressive friendship. I'm the one on the block who hosts the July 4th party. I host things. Some of them are other-centered and they're beautiful human beings.

We ran into a lady in Florida who was helping elementary school kids cross the street after school, and we asked her, do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood? And she said, no, I have no time. We said, are you getting paid to do this? She said, no, it's safer to help the kids cross the street.

And then we said, what do you do on the rest of the day? And she said, well, on Thursdays I bake food and I bring it to the hospital so the patients will have some better food to eat. We said, do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood? She said, no, I have no time at all.

And she didn't see that as volunteering. That's just neighboring. And if you can shift how people define what a neighbor is, you can have a huge effect on society. And so that's what Weave tries to do. And then finally...

We need political reform. We need ways to fix Congress so presidents don't try to rule by executive order, so we can actually pass legislation. We need ways to fix the school to end the caste system in society. so that some boys and girls at age nine are told by the system they're dumb, and they emotionally check out. We need to fix non-profits. We need to fix a lot of things.

In this room, we're probably more of the establishment and the elite than other people. If we're going to be part of the establishment, you have to be reformist in the age of populism. I was with some faculty with some professors three days ago in Utah. And I said, you know, universities are under assault. And I asked myself the question, how much are you to blame? And I said, I think you're at least 20% to blame.

There are things you've done at universities to not allow conservatives in, to create this class system through your admissions policies. And universities... My daughter did decently on the SAT scores, and she started getting these thick magazines from Harvard, asking her to apply. There is no smart young kid in Bethesda, Maryland, who doesn't know about Harvard.

Why do they send her these thick magazines? Because they want to get the number of applicants up so they can reject them. If they can reject 96%, what they call a 4% admit rate, then their rankings go up. That's part of the system that needs reform. And so social change, we unite that Hamilton energy that's at the core of who we are. Take away the fear.

Create a society where opportunity is real through civic renaissance. Create a society where opportunity is real through political, economic, educational reform. That's how it's going to happen. And it may take us a while to get to that political reform phase, but we can create the social and spiritual health that is a precondition for rupture and repair. Thanks very much.

Okay, we have ten minutes left for questions. All that I ask is you make your questions long and rambling with no question at the end. And I think there are microphones somewhere. We'll start with this lady down here. First of all, the 100-year-old guy is also having sex. They do that in the world. It's the best. My agronation.

You discussed a lot of terms that define us. There's one term I want to ask you about that you didn't mention. I grew up in Wisconsin where I was always exposed to American Indians and it became a passion of mine and interest. So when the term American exceptionalism came, I never bought it and I was called unpatriotic. Do you think that's been...

That we deserve it, or is it more dangerous and arrogant and brought us where we are now? I would say two things. There was a great sociologist named Seymour Martin Lipset who wrote a book called American Exceptionalism. And what he meant by that was not that we're better than other countries. We're just different. And so I read all the statistics about who thinks their country declines, who thinks elites don't get us.

Those statistics are shocking to me because suddenly we're a part of the world average. That never used to happen. Our poll numbers, they might be good or bad, but they're different. We were more individualistic. We were more energetic. We moved. We married more. We murdered each other more. We stood out in all sorts of ways, good and bad. And that seems to have changed. There's been a loss of faith.

What I would say about American exceptionalism is, one, it covers over a lot of crime, including what Andrew Jackson did to Native Americans and what a lot of several generations did. It covered over slavery. It covers over a lot of crime. But it's also true, it's sort of unique. American history is, when European settlers came to the shores in... the 1600s, two things happened. They saw natural abundance. And they saw flocks of geese that were so big it took them 45 minutes to take off.

They would actually shoot cannonballs into the flocks to see if they could divert their path. They saw oysters bigger than they never saw. They saw forests stretching on for thousands of miles. And they had two thoughts. One of them is... that God's plans for humanity could be completed here. And the other was, we can get really rich in the process. And so in my view, America has been fed by a moral materialism. And it's made us...

giving us this ideology that the future is always going to be better than the present. And it's fired a lot of the energy. And we mix the sacred and the profane. And that's why we have big moral fights about things like abortion that others don't. And so I do think that traditionally there has been something a little different about this country. And let's not say other countries don't have their own way of being unique.

But this has been our distinct way of being unique, of just being a driving country, just finally. There was a book called The Giants of the Earth written by, I'm not going to get his name, a Swedish writer set in North Dakota. And a farmer is leading a visitor.

around his farm. He said, that's where the barn is, that's where the home is, that's where the crops are. And the visitor says, I don't see anything. There's nothing here. And he says, well, I haven't built them yet. And I think that we're a future-oriented people.

And that's our own way of being distinct. So I wouldn't say we're better than anybody else. I love a lot of countries. But I think we're a little distinct, and I'd hate to see that go away. Right here in the front. I'm making you guys run. in the red. Thank you.

character or adversity builds character that there's beauty in the struggle that you were talking about is time-honored that we are holer when we go through grief and melancholy instead of circumventing it but the culture that I've installed at least as someone who grew up in 2001 is completely anathema to that.

It's this optimization culture, this convenience culture, that we should make society completely frictionless, that we shouldn't navigate the ambiguities of interpersonal relationships. We should just have AI chatbots. And I don't think that my generation truly craves fast fashion.

or processed foods or all these symptoms of that convenience culture. But I think part of the reason we're so spiritually adrift right now is because that will continue to be sold to us as long as there's an economic kind of... mandate along with it. And so what are the people in this room who have spaces and voices in rooms of power, what can they do to enforce more corporate accountability in cultivating the spirit of our culture as well?

That's a very good question. So I taught for 20 years at Yale, a small commuter school in New Haven, Connecticut. And now I teach at my alma mater, the University of Chicago. And why did I get on the train every week to go from Washington, D.C., where I live, to New Haven? It's because I love your generation.

And one of the things I've learned from my students is they really love it when somebody my age makes generalizations about their generation. They really love that. But I find it inspiring. But let me tell you about my worst day at Yale. I was teaching seniors, and it was the end of spring term. This was their final term, their final time in a college classroom. So I said to them, what's the...

The book you were assigned here that changed your life. And there was a long, awkward silence. And finally one of the students said, you have to understand how we read here. We just read enough to get through class.

So no books are going to change this. And one of the other students said, yeah, but I was assigned some books that I think could change me. And I set them aside. And after college, I'm going to read them. If you didn't read them in college, I doubt you're going to read them after. And that's because of the intense time pressure.

The optimization. They're so busy. Some of my students, and again, Yale is not average America, I understand. They're going to three student activity events an evening. And they're just... Press for time and the system. And then I was up at Williams a couple months ago and a senior there said to me, you know, we're the most rejected generation. And we are, I have to apply to 20 schools to get into one.

I have to apply to 200 internships to get one. Try getting a job if you're in the bottom layer, if you've just gotten out of school these days. You send out 400 Indeed forms. You have no idea if anybody sees them. And so I talked to a young woman. She said, you know, I wish I was young in the 90s. It would have been easier. And I said, I was kind of young in the 90s. It was a lot easier. And so I think the challenges are high and the talents are high.

But the thing that gets me is one of the things that's good and bad about my classrooms is that mental health is in the room every time, every day. People are really open and comfortable, which is great. But the suffering is also there. One study, Gallup, 45% of high school seniors said they're persistently hopeless and despondent. That's not their fault. That's our fault. And that's not having community. And that's, as Jonathan Haidt has shown us, that's social media.

And so my belief is that, like all things, a new technology comes and we don't know how to use it. And then eventually we adapt. And I think we're adapting, and Jonathan Haidt is a big example of that. Now I go to high school after high school, and... they have the no phones policy and they love it the students love it i've talked to hundreds of them i have a friend who when he wakes up in the morning he makes sure he goes outside and he looks at the sky before he looks at any screen

This is a personal thing he does. I'm going to put it in its place. And so I think we're going to figure that out. And if we could create a civic renaissance, if we could create a shift in culture. And then the final thing I'll say is I mentioned those low trust statistics, especially among the young. So I asked my students, why do you think the statistics are there? And one woman said to me, have you seen our social lives?

She said, I've had four boyfriends in my life. All four of them ghosted me at the end. They didn't have the decency. And I think maybe even nobody told them. You've got to have a breakup conversation. And here's how you do it so you don't crush your heart.

And I never had a breakup conversation. I was usually on the other end. But you've got to have these social skills. And somehow we've gone through a couple generations, including my own, where we've not taught succeeding generations to be considerate to each other in the concrete circumstances of life.

How do you ask for an offer of forgiveness? How do you offer criticism with care? I was never taught how to end a conversation gracefully. Nobody ever taught me that. And so I was at my fifth high school reunion and I... Remember, my only move in a cocktail setting to get out of a conversation was to say, I've got to go to the bar. And so after 20 minutes, I was so drunk, I had to leave the reunion.

Because I'd gotten like six drinks. I had to get out of that conversation. And so these are all basic social skills. And to me, the... improving the situation for the younger generations is about those social skills and policing the technology and a lot of other things. But we can adjust. Maybe time for one more. We'll stay down here.

Are you wearing a Fitbit? I hope so. Well, first of all, thank you for a very poignant and thoughtful overall discussion. You made one point that really stands out, which is apparently very true. The divide is fundamentally an educational divide, not an income-based divide. How much of that is, how much of the education dynamic causing that divide, is it causation versus correlation? How much of it is people...

How much of it is a deeper factor that is driving certain people to either go to college or not versus how much of it is what is being learned through that college experience? Yeah. First, one big factor is in the information age economy, people who are good with abstract ideas and synthesizing ideas make money.

And alternate forms of intelligence, like being really good with your hands, having spatial intelligence, knowing how to be an engineer or be a mechanic, those abilities are not as rewarded as much. And so that's one of the causes. But to me one of the core causes is that we've created an educational system that rich people have rigged. And so by age five...

affluent kids are five times more likely to go to preschool. By eighth grade, affluent kids are four grade levels above less affluent kids. By college, kids from the top 1% according to Raj Chetty, are 77 times more likely to get into Ivy League schools than kids from the bottom 60%. And there are a lot of schools, schools are really getting better on this, but at least as of like four years ago, a lot of schools, including my alma mater,

have more students from the top 1% of earners than the bottom 60. And so I think the system has been set up around standardized tests. And to me, that is a screwed up definition of ability. I can tell you, if you're in college or high school right now, don't listen to what I'm about to say. There is zero correlation between high school and college grades and life outcomes. Zero.

There is very little correlation between whether you went to some fancy school or whether you went to any normal school. The things that matter, we've created this society, and it really started in the 1930s and 1950s, which worships intelligence. But what's the correlation between intelligence and good judgment? Zero. What's the correlation between intelligence and creativity? Not great. What's the correlation, and this is what I think is the most important ability,

is motivation. Are you willing to walk through walls to solve problems? And you can't tell somebody's motivation very well by how they do on the SATs. And so why are people fired in companies? In 11% of the cases, it's because they lack technical abilities for the job. But in 89% of the cases, it's because they're uncoachable. They're bad teammates.

It's social. And we don't sort by that. And if we changed our definition of human ability to include motivation, to include social skills, to include kindness and compassion... Those things are more democratically distributed. Rich people wouldn't be able to rig the game. And we wouldn't have this inherited class structure in society. And so to me, it's really funny when you control the levers.

of opportunity, you control the culture. And if you define intelligence as the primary definition of ability, you get a really screwed up culture. And to me, that's a foundational problem that we started in the 1930s, 1950s, and live today. But when I mention this to educators, and I mention this to college admissions officers, they all agree. They all know it's screwed up. And so to me, the problem is not changing people's minds. It's we've inherited these legacy structures.

that are hard to change. But we can do that too. So even these grave problems will be better in 50 years. Will be better in 20 years. 1968 looked brutal. By 1974, people were into disco. And ests and crystals. So go out, find a disco. Thank you. Thank you. David Brooks is a columnist at the New York Times, a contributor to The Atlantic, and a commentator on PBS NewsHour. He also teaches at the University of Chicago, having previously taught at Yale and Duke Universities.

Brooke's most recent book is How to Know a Person, The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. He co-founded and chairs Weave, the social fabric project at the Aspen Institute, where he was previously executive director. Today's show was programmed by the Aspen Ideas Festival team and produced by Natalie Jones and me. Our theme music is by Wonderly.

The Aspen Ideas Festival brings together brilliant leaders and thinkers each June on the Aspen Institute's 40-acre campus nestled in the Rocky Mountains. To learn more, visit our website at aspenideas.org and sign up for our newsletter. Passes for 2026 are now available. If you like what you've heard today, help us spread Aspen Ideas by rating the show in your podcast app and sharing this episode with a friend. I'm Trisha Johnson. Thanks for listening.