David Brooks || The Quest for a Moral Life

today we have David Brooks on the podcast. Brooks is an op ed columnist for The New York Times and appears regularly on PBS News Hour, MPR's All Been Considered and NBCs Meet the Press. He teaches at Yale University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts

and Sciences. He's the best selling author of a number of books, including The Social Animal, The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, The New Upper Class and How They Got There, The Road to Character, and most recently, The Second Mountain, The Quest for a Moral Life. David, great

chat with you today, Great to be with you. Yeah, it's really interesting book, and it's interesting kind of watch The evolution of David Brooks by reading David Brooks's books and succession, I feel like everyone they tried, I tried to get I realized, Look, you only realize these things looking backwards. But I've written about the same territory, but sort of one level down each time. So my first book was Bobo's in Paradise, about consumption, really, and then

was about settlement patterns. My second book then about emotion, and then about character, and now sort of more spiritual stuff. So I don't know what what's the next level down, maybe sports or something, the mental level of human existence. Yeah, you might need like a break from such high level spiritual stuff. Your next book might be like Before the Mountain exactly wrote to hedonism. Well, so I was going to ask you how this book differs from The Road

to Character. I mean, I know it differs, but I wanted you to maybe explain to the audience a little bit. There are two ways that differs. One, it's much more personal. This is a book about the things that happened to me in the last six years of my life which were transformative in how I look at the world, and

so it's that and it's much more about relationships. And Second, the Road to Character was really built and imprisoned by the culture of individualism, which is I think the culture of our time and the culture I was living in. And so the theory of character building in the Road to character is that it's all about internal drama. You identify your own weaknesses and then you slowly learn to master those weaknesses. So it's like going to the gym, and you build muscles to be more honest, to be

more courageous. In Dwight Eisenhower, who was in that book, it's about he had a terrible temper, so every day he did inner work to build his temper. And so the theory was very individualistic, and I've since come to believe that character is not really built that way because none of us have enough motivation to do it. And then the desire to be good is or the knowledge of what is good is plentiful, but the desire to actually do it is scarce, and you've got to focus

on the desire. And so the theory now is that you fall in love with things, let's say a child, a cause, or a profession, and you make promises to the things you love, and then your character is forged as you sort of live up to your promises. So character swarms by our commitment to others, not so much

by our drama within ourselves. Yeah. So the subtext there is that choose your commitments very wisely, because couldn't you commit to certain things that are going to build that are going to like not build good character, Like I can be community eating steaks every night, right, I mean fifteen or sixteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine says, be careful what you love, because you become what you love.

And more recently, David Foster Wallace in that famous Kenyan commencement said if you love money, you'll always feel poor. If you love power, you'll always feel powerless. He said, there are no atheis life. We're all worshiping something, So

careful what you worship. And I do think that is true in the theory of this book, and it really comes out of the teaching I was doing, which is that most of us make four big commendments in life to a estous and family, to vocation, to a philosophy or faith, into a community, and the fulfillment of our lives depends on how well we make and then execute

on those kinds of commitments. Be right, and we'll go through those later in the podcast, but before we get to those specific commitments, you talk about some crises that we're going through. You actually say they're interrelated. And when talking about these crises, can you talk about how things have changed in our society since you wrote your last book, or even since you wrote your first book. There's been some dramatic shifts like you wouldn't necessarily have identified these

four interrelated crises when you wrote your first book. Is that right? Right? Well, we've gotten to know a lot of America a lot better, and America is in some ways economically richer, it's socially worse, and so over the last since nineteen ninety nine, the suicide rate has gone up by thirty percent. The teenage suicide rate, by some measures, has gone up by as much as seventy percent. Depression

rates are up, mental health problems are up. Every campus I go to, the mental health facilities are swamped, and so there's been some crisis of disconnection. I think that was not evidence in the nineteen ninety decline in social capital, and of course that's a gradual process, but general narrative I would tell was in the fifties and forties because we had to fight the war and combat the depression.

We had a very communal culture, We're all in this together, and around about nineteen sixty two we decided that was too stifling. We worried about conformity, and it was too racist and too sexist. So we got rid of that communal culture and we developed a culture that says, I'm free to be myself. This is sort of the Carl Rogers world. I want to self actualize, I want to

unleash my inner spirit. And that was good and necessary for a time, but we've taken as the extreme and as a result, we've gone disconnected from each other, and the effects are visible in our depression rates are also very visible in our politics, in the levels of distrust, alienation, and hostility. So can you talk about these four crises that you identify. One you touched on with a suicide. It seems to be linked to loneliness, But can you

mention the other the others? Yeah, Well, for example, others are levels of distrust. If you ask people a generation go, do you trust the institutions of your society? Seventy or eighty percent said yes, I do, And now it's down to twenty two percent. If you ask the generation to go, do you trust your neighbors a majority? Fifty or sixty percent? So theeah the people around here are basically trustworthy. Now

that's thirty three percent and nineteen percent of millennials. And it's interesting the younger you go, trust and institutions declined basically seventies eighties, and then around two thousand and eight, you know, financial crisis of rock War in two spurts. But the distrust of each other, that's purely generational. If you're a boomer, you have pretty high trust in people around you. If you're a millennial, much lower, and gen Z much lower. Still, the younger yougo, the more distrusting

you are, and so you get that crisis. And then to me, one I see in my day job political is the crisis of tribalism. And I've heard the psychologists have this phrase. The hardest thing to cure is the patient's attempt to self cure. And when you're left naked and alone, you do what your evolutionary roots tell you to do, which is you revert to tribe. And tribe seems like community, it seems like a way to attach

to people, but it's really the opposite of community. Communities based on a mutual affection for a cause or a place or something, but tribalism is based on a mutual hatred of another. You both hate the same things, and so it's always friend enemy us them, zero sum scarcity mentality, erect walls, build barriers, and tribalism is basically the world I live in when I cover politics. Oh yeah, you

certainly do. List You're deep in the swamp, you know, of just so fast inted with this article you wrote a couple of months. I believe on you know, You're like, I'm open to reparations. Yeah, I'm like, wait, David Books just said that, you know, like this kind of hardened conservative stance, I mean, is that's not you? You know, it seems like you're really trying to listen to as many perspective as possible. At least that's my perception. You

would you agree with that? Yeah? I hope. So. You know, I've always been more of a Burkiy and Alley, Yeah, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton conservative. Yeah, and that's not the kind that would put me in the moderate conservative camp these days, But or maybe twenty years ago, I would have been the moderate conservative camp. Now it's like the Republican Party is unrecognizable to me. So I'm just politically homeless.

And then that reparations column. I've just been traveling around the country for really two or three years, trying to find people who I call weavers, who are building community on local levels, for people who are just really sensational relationship And in the course of that, you just spend a lot of time just on the racial divide in this country, and it really began to feel like a make or break moment where we either show a gesture

of historic recognition and respect or we don't. And so I have still qualms about the practical aspects of doing reparations, like how ex that thing you do it? But I think it's necessary to think in unexpected ways, given where we are, to think in unexpected ways and maybe listen to as wide perspectives as possible in the issue. Yeah, so kudos to you. I gave you kudos when you

wrote that for being open. Now I haven't made my own mind up on these complex issues, but I think the important thing these days is to at least have these discussions in a complex, respectful manner. Yeah, are you a member of the Headerdox Academy. By the way. Now I'm going to speak at their conference in Okay a few weeks, but I am consider myself as an admirer okay, potentially a member. So okay, this is something I try

to reconcile in reading your book. So, well, there are a couple of things, and so I thought we could dive into some nuances here. You describe your life as a quote border stalker, and I thought that was neat. I identify as a border stalker too, in the sense, let's be clear what a border of stalker is. It sounds a little shady, to be honest. So for our audience, he has nothing to do with being a stalker, you know, but could you please describe a little bit that it is.

Because I resonated with that description, Yeah, and really thought about that, Like the guy who hears in the windows say o loud. I was like, wait a minute, let's be clear to the audience what we're talking about. Yeah. The phrase I got from a friend of mine named Mako Fujimori, who's a painter. But he he is Japanese, but he's also American, so he grew up a bit

in Japan, but a lot in America. But he goes back to Japan and he does a He uses Japanese artistic techniques to create incredibly beautiful beatings, and so he sort of lives between the Japanese culture and the American culture. And I weirdly, when I was writing the book, found realized how much I I'm never quite in one camp. I'm sort of a journalist, but I'm a little more. I'm pretty academic y for a journalist. I'm sort of a conservative, but I'm pretty left ring for a conservative.

I'm sort of a Jew, but I have polls to Christian thought. And so a phrase, another phrase that appeals to me is from a gun named Richard Rohrer, and he says, you want to be on the edge of inside. And so in any group, there are people who are right at the core of the group and they serve a useful function. But there are also people who are inside the group but sort of on the outer edge

of it. And he says that's where creativity happens because you can see more clearly outside the group, you have more exchange across borders, and it's just a creative place to be on the edge of inside. So I love that, and I agree as a creativity researcher, I would say the empirical evidence confirms that or suggests that's true. So what I'm trying to reconcile is how can you live a fiercely committed to life and be a boristalker at the same time. That is a very good question, which

nobody has ever asked me before. You know, I think partly it's you don't decide to become a border stalker. You just find yourself in this spot. I didn't decide to become sort of on the edge of conservatism. It's just where the social group happened to fit around me. And so I do think I'm for example, you know, I decided I want to become a writer at seven, at age seven, and it's been fifty years since, and I've written pretty much every day, maybe two hundred and

fifty days in all those years. So I think I've proven I'm reasonably committed to being a writer. It was never quite there what kind of writer I would be, whether journalists, fiction plays, whatever. I have different ambitions at times, and I just happen to find myself really admiring the non fiction of the nineteen fifties, and there was people like Jane Jacobs and did people all Sell and other people like that William White. They wrote sort of high.

It would be a little high journalism, but it wouldn't be quite rigorous enough to be academic. And I just like that style, and I really write in their style in twenty nineteen. So that makes me a little bit of a border stalker, but doesn't mean that I'm less committed to writing than I've always been. Yeah, And I can see how that applies to like the general demeanor of writing. But you talk about the second mound in life, of the committed life of either a vacation spouse and family, philosopher,

faith or committee. By the way, are these ores or these ends? Is the second mound life? Okay? Either? Yeah, Like a lot of people, what I'm really trying to use commitment is a way to really combat individualism. And so in marriage, for example, there's a guy, a great sociologist you I think, all at Northwestern who says that the model of marriage that's prevalent today is sort of the expressive marriage, where two partners are sort of helping

each other on their life plan. But it's they're not really totally They're not a one flush union as the old religions would say. It's sort of two individual projects that are done side by side with intertwines. And I think that's not a very great model for marriage. And this is obvious scenario where I've had my own problems

and through divorce. But I do think marriage survives when you each partner throws themselves wholeheartedly into it and sort of loses ego, loses individualism and sacrifice for the institution. And so to me, commitment is living for the institution rather than living for self. So I disagree with that, and I thought we could talk about that, okay. So I actually wrote a response to your column The Life

in wal Calm. I wrote a response to that for Scientific American called there is no one way to live a good life. And I kind of argue that was like a false dichotomy because you say a sentence like there's always a tension between self and society, and I thought that was a false dichotomy as well. It seems to me, and you can tell me what you think, but it seems in all the research I've seen that a good integration of having a healthy self respect, having

a healthy self actualization. So basically, the way I view it is that transcendence a healthy transcendence. You can have healthy transcendence, and you can have very like unhealthy transcendence. You can have like masochism. You can have like like the idea of surrendering yourself and leaving yourself behind is like sets you up for like a lot of psychological disorders,

you know. In my opinion, it seems like the best way is to have a kind of relationship where you stand on a you know, we're transcendent, stands on a healthy bedrock of self actualization, like you know yourself, you know what you're bringing to the table, and you are helping each other learn and grow, each in their own direction. So I guess I didn't see it as either you know, because you opened up your article either you have this model, a good waye for you have this model. I didn't

see it as an either or situation. So I'm excited to be able to talk to you about that today. Yeah, I guess I'd say two things. One is, you know, obviously a lot of these things are tensions, and there are tensions between competing goods, and I would say, in our culture, the main problem we have to worry about these days is narcissism and self obsession and the detached self. And so if we were living in the society probably you know, medieval, you know Britain, where no one was detached,

then I'd probably be leaning the other way. So a lot of what I'm writing is in the context of the times we're in. The second thing I think i'd say, and I have this conversation with friends of mine and we differ. There's the phrase you have to love yourself before you can love others. Yes, And I think I disagree with that phrase. And I think you love first because someone loved you and gave you a model for

how to love, probably your parents. And then the second you find yourself being worthy of love when you see yourself loving others. And so I think my worldview puts the relationship first. It's not that individuals form relationships, it's the relationships exist in the relationships form the individuals. I think that's how I put it. Cool, Well, thanks for offering that perspective. I guess I don't view it as

a chicken or egg sort of thing like either. Again, I also Vieid as a Baltic ivy that like, either you know you and need to love yourself first, you love others. So I really take kind of like the Eric From, I'm a big fan of the humanistic approach. I'm a bit so like when you kind of talked to about Carders and Maslow and kind of a negative light, I was like, oh, game on, you know, just let me explain my position and then I'd love to hear

what you think. So, because the way I view it as like a very like The Art of Loving by Eric From is one of my favorite books, and that's my philosophy that I'm committed to, you know, in the language, in your language of your book, and in that philosophy doesn't view it as a chicken our egg sort of thing. It's a simultaneous thing. So love is love is love. So if you shine, if you have a readiness to love,

you can have a readiness to hate. And there's a lot of people with a readiness to hate in this world today. Those people with a general readiness to hate tend to hate themselves as well as others. Those who tend to just have a general radiness to love, they just shine. The beam of love. They radiate love regardless of the stimulus. Maybe it's internal stimulus and they show themselves self compassion and acceptance, or it's others and they

show others acceptance. And like our data set on the I've been doing some research on the light triad to kind of balance out the dark triad. In the psychological literature, we see that the light triad is strong, very very strong correlations between worldview of I offer others dignity a respect, and I, you know, don't use people as and means to an end, and I love myself not in a narcissistic way self love. See, I would argue that narcissistic love is not self love, Like that's not love, that's

something else. So yeah, I just wanted to offer that perspective on the table. And it's interesting, well that, I mean the part about the sort of the triads that does resonate with me. But do you find I mean a couple of things more questions. Really, do you find people are consistent across contexts in how they manifest loving

demeanor or hateful demeanor? Probably my is just my instinct, and the research is probably they are just the idea that people who hate hate themselves doesn't always ring true to me. And of course hate is sometimes a very useful emotion to have. It's it's a larger justice. So I just throw those out questions for you. No, and those are great questions because like you know, there is no obsolute here. Like I think the healthy integration of

like anything can be valuable. So if you have aggression, let's not use the word. Hey, that's such a strong word, but like, yeah, like hostility, it's perfectly a lot of people that score high on the way Try it may rightly so have hostility towards people who are damna doing like great injustices in this world, you know, or causing great injustices. It's okay to show that emotion, but you know,

there's a healthy integration of that emotion. What we're what I think we're seeing so much in society today is this disintegration of like you know, people have runaway aggression, as Karl Rodgers put it, you know, they don't have the sort of like principled sort of aggression that's towards a common humanity sort of view. And we found people who score on the lay Try it have very transcendent values so even whilst why I don't know why I just said, whils not British. But even while I don't

know why did that. But even while they may have rightly so you know, feel anger and for so many injustice in the world old, they still are always looking for that. They still have a fundamental faith in humanity. That was the third part of this. So I just told with the three things of the White Triad were one, and I can give you the test to take if you want to. I have it online if you want to take it and see your own White Triad score.

But one is Kantinism, which is the opposite of Macavelianism, which was in the Dark Triad. So I you know, constant categorical imperative. I don't treat people as a means to an end. I treat peoples and in themselves. Another is humanism, you know, I treat individual I meet with dignity and worth and respect. And then faith in humanity is the third one, and we use like Helen Keller

as an example. I mean, even as the Nazis were coming up to killer, she wrote in her diary, I still believe in despite this all that humans are fundamentally good and so yeah, I mean these three things, they still have this overall worldview despite this contextual sort of

discontent with things. Yeah, I guess, well, the first thing that the curse means the Rogers and from we're writing at that moment when we were rebelling against the conformity of mid century twentieth century America, and so sometimes when I read them, I think they were part of that rebellion,

which was probably a necessary one. But second, I think from the self esteem movement and the rising narcissism scores and rising faith in just that the oracle of all life will be inside oneself, I do think has left people morally inarticulate because they're always waiting for the golden

oracle inside themselves to answer all their spiritual questions. And I would side more on the Victor Franco side that asking the question what's my passion or what do I want from life is generally the wrong way to approach life, and the better is to seek sources of wisdom outside oneself. What is life asking of me? And it is? Well, I guess I would side more on the people who think the Rogers methodology has led more to you know, a Christopher Lash called the culture of narcissism and all that.

Again not necessarily because of what he said, but things get taken too far in the culture. That's just the way things go. Yeah, and I love that aspect of your book. And you know, this is the thing that's kind of interesting for me, like sitting back, because I am so on board with this call. And you know, I've been doing some research on you know, with colleague David Yaden. It depend on self transcendence and it's such a valuable you know, there's you're saying so many good things.

I guess where I start to lose is when you start to pitot you say aside, like I thought you were a border stocker, you know, like don't be hypocritical. Now if you actually look at the writings of Carl Rogers, we need to make a distinction between self esteem and narcissism, and I guess you don't make that distinction, which like there's a very clear in the psychological literature they have very different correlates. Actually, self esteem is a great thing.

Like if we just view it as as having self worth and a healthy sense of competence, that's it. That's all self esteem means narcissism is really what you're talking about, and I think conflicting that with self esteem is actually detrimental because you know, if anything, I think, you say, what's wrong with the world today, what's the crisis? It's funny I would say one of the big crisis is

that people are losing their connection with themselves. And you know, it's a different way of framing it, like that's what real Carl Rodgers, you know, and Maslow and the humanistic psychologists. I'm a big fan of Roll May as well, or if you've read any of his writings, right like the way he would have framed it is real healthy, like surrendering yourself and giving to others just has to rest on a sense of basic self worth and competency for

your own skills or else. That actually does lead to hostility and a lot of the aggression we see in the world today. You see a lot of people surrendering themselves in violent extremists, in colts and in the extreme far left and far right movements. You know, you have I think that's actually the problem is there's too much, as Mazwell would put it, I guess transcendence built on a shaky foundation. Right again, I would make ditinction on whether it's born out of love or born out of hate.

But one final question, I think they really would have seen themselves intention May or Rogers. I think intension with a pray. There's yan old nibber, and it's really an assumption about what's what's essential to human nature, what kind of creatures are we? And Neighbor's argument was that were

blendidly in that and deeply broken. And he thought one of the problems with the American foreign policy in the American life in general was what do you call the easy conscience of modern man, the unwillingness to face the essential sinful nature, which is not all sin. He was not like one of these Calvinists, so there's a lot of love there, but he's he said, the unwillingness to face sin and to build structures around sin was a key problem with American life. And I take him to

be gesturing towards some of the many Rogers, et cetera. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think you know so role May had this central concept, the dynamonic, which I loved. It's interesting you talk about that a little bit in your own book, but not in the did but you didn't mention. I was like, oh, I give my brother roll so credit because I'm a such a big fan of that concept in the way that he

articulated it. As you know, humans have all these potentialities, it does not make sense to ask the question like what is deep down? What are we? The deep down thing? Doesn't really make sense considering it's all there. You know, over the course of human evolution, we can use our diamonic for the highest heights of creative expression or the greatest destructive aspects. So that's I guess where a free will.

To what extent we have free will comes into play a consciousness, you know, we kind of try to direct it in one way or another. But the demonic is not the demon and he was very clear about that. He said none of these things by themselves, even aggression, hostility, like we put these things as categories. As is also a christ of the field of positi ecology. But I think that I don't like to absolutely classify certain psychological traits and things as like these are the positive ones

and useing the negative ones. To me, it's all about the healthy integration as opposed to like I pick the team of transcendence or I picked the team of this. It's like I picked team wholeness. And you do use the frame I think, use the phrase whole person in there, and that was the central concept of the humanistic psychologist, was becoming a whole person. So I was excited when I believe you did use that phrase. Right, No, I

agree with that. I just hear that phrase everywhere. Now, now what you said rings frankly with Jewish thought, which hmm, says there. You know that the quote evil impulses often drive us to do good, Like we might be greedy, but that causes us to buildings and great companies and you know, great foundations. And we may be lustful, but that causes us to have children. And so Jewish thought is much more. It's all mixed in. Yeah, that's true.

You know, there's also so much Christian thought in this book. I mean, like I want to actually quote Can I quote scripture on the psychology podcast? It would be thrown out of the profession, but you can try. Okay, give me more Why I find it because just one second, I'm actually working a paper, just while you're while you're looking for it, and one of the things that I find if you're reading about how to do relationships right or what's the purpose of life? Religious thinking? For most

of Western history that was religious thinking. So there's just a lot of wisdom in theology, whether you believe in God or not. And sometimes I go to it simply as a wisdom literature, and I find a very valuable religions I don't actually believe in. There's just so much stored wisdom over the centuries. There's so much storied wisdom that you can pick from various religions even without the commitment.

So again I keep going back, like, how do we reconcile the commitment idea with the export of I guess my way is not picking a team but saying that's the integration of the two. But hey, I'm going to read the conclusion of a paper by Roddy Bassett and Jennifer Albey. I think I'll really reckon I really resonate with you is publishing the Journal of Psychology and Theology

Considering adaptive and maladaptive versions of what's called unmitigated communion. Now, this is very relevant to your work because the concept of unmitigated communion is the idea of self sacrifice, but losing yourself with self neglect, right, and some researchers have shown just how damaging that can be. But they I love this paper. And many people don't know about this paper because it was published such an obscure like Theology Journal.

But when I discovered, I was like, I contact the authors, like, I need to do a study using your scale and expand this because this is brilliant. So I'm just going to read the conclusion of their paper. I think it's going to resonate with you and help like further this

conversation we're having. So Previous research identified a number of negative effects on personal and relational wellbeing when individuals expressed a tendency to focus on the needs of others at the expense of their own needs, a style labeled you

see or unmitigated communion. However, other work found that a willingness to forego immediate personal gain in order to promote the well being of a partner a relationship had positive relational effects, and Christian teachings generally affirm the value of sacrificial love. How can this discrepancy be resolved? Scripture suggests an answer, quote, if I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship. That I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

So that's from Corinthians thirteen three. Furthermore, the definition of love includes quote it is not self seeking means thirteen to five. So scripture teaches that our sacrificial behavior has value if it is driven by correct motivation. Our attempt to distinguish between self sacrifice that is motivated by concern for others versus self sacrifice as motivated by concern for

self fits with this distinction. For the research could examine the personal, relational, and spiritual outcomes associated with with the unmitiated comedian self versusunmitigate mean other. So that the important

thing here is that motivation matters. And I guess some nuance I'd like to add to your book and take it or leave it because I really like your message, And is that I think that it's important not You know, there are a lot of children that grow up where are constantly told sacrifice yourself, sacrifice of and they grow up and end up on the psychotherapists couch, especially women.

You know, there's a gender difference here where a lot of women just start to lose their sense of self or lose their sense of like, you know, who am I really And because I'm constantly been pressured to give to others, even to the sense that my own needs, I feel like are not valuable or worthy of expression. So I think that you're kind of like going against this important like pendulum swing that you're seeing in one direction.

But I guess all I would say is, let's make sure we don't like move the pendulum too far in the other direction either, where we start to make people feel guilty for having what I call like healthy selfishness, which is just you know, like taking care of yourself and actualizing you know, it's okay to have talents and things and interests and motivations that differ from others. So anyway, I just throw all this out there, I think the very valid. In the course of writing this book, I wondered,

is this a man's book. We certainly have known examples of women who've short of so totally given themselves over to family and other things, which is sacrificial, but have never and then they feel what about me? Whereas one of my time and we all feel like that, like I'm involved in a lot of different projects in my life, and in moments of self pity, always say, well when do I get to do what I want to do? And we all have that, and that's legitimate one question.

One point the paper says something about self sacrificial activity for the basis of self. I understand, Yeah, let me unpack that. I would like to unpack that. So it turns out that there are a lot of people. So there's a thing called vulnerable narcissism, which has been distinguished from like grandiose narcissism. So grandiose narsism what we see, you know, which is the stereotypical, like the boastful, grandiose form, but there's a more vulnerable form where you feel shame,

intense shame and self uncertainty about yourself. You feel like you're kind of rotten in the core. But you also kind of feel like, well, but I do of these grandiose visions, but I'm ashamed of having these grandiose visions.

It's a kind of an introverted form of narcissism. Interestingly enough, you find that one of the major facets of vulnerable, not grandiose narsism, but vulnerable narcisism is what's called self enhancing self sacrifice that seems to be actually an indicator of vulnerable narcissism in the clinical literature, and that is like the kind of items on that are like I help others in order for me to feel good about myself. I help others in order to show what I'm a

great person I am. And that's what they mean by the self motivations for unmitigated communion seem to be unhealthy, but the important thing is to enjoy it, to have the genuine sort of like the kind of items on the other scale, or like I help others because I want my own personal growth, or I genuinely like to see people flourish, or like I get some sort of not a compulsive aspect of it, but are really like I get great sort of enjoyment out of just helping people,

and that seems to be healthy. So they distinguish between these two motivations, and I think that what's really interesting is that a lot of the developmental precursors. There's also genetic factors, but developmental precursors of vulnerable narcisism are we found in our own studies. The item as a child, I was told to constantly substitute my own needs for others. That was like one of the biggest markers of the development of vulner of narcisism. Now, I don't think you

want to develop vulnerable narcissism in people, right right, right? Yeah? And then that rings you. I know people who I would put in that category, and it is Yeah, it's funny. And as first as we're speaking, my first reaction is there's a lot of literature there. I got to learn. You have access to a lot of the journals that I'm not reading. I can hold you up. Second, I am, I am struck a little by It depends on what

we're pushing against. And I guess I do you know, my last book, The Word Character, had had a lot of the research on narcissism and the rise of narcisism and just the rise of ego. And I do think there's a fair bit of data which I tend to be pushing against them. Maybe I'm just pushing against my own ego. No, no, no, I want to be clear that I'm so on bored with you about transcending ego. Do you see this as a valuable distinction, because I

guess I do. Like there's one thing which is like transcending the ego, but the other thing is like I don't think we should need to transcend ourselves. So like self is not ego. I actually so the ego to me is that part of the self that is the defensive that holds the fortress up, Like I have to constantly be seen in myself, has to be seen in a positive light at all times. But the self is just simply, you know what, knowing yourself, knowing what's my personality?

What is my order? Am I intro you know? Do am I dispositionally an introvert? Okay? Am I to really have great self insight about you know, what are my stress? Realistic understanding and my ability is you know, like understanding myself. To me, I would say that what you're arguing really against is the ego. And I'm so important with you David Brooks, like, don't get me wrong, don't get a twisted as they say, you know, yeah, I think that puts what I should have said. I think that's that's right.

We've had so much I've spent so much of my time over the last fifteen years reading like Dan Economon and people like that so much thinking on cognition, and I think we've made great strides in understanding that, and I feel like we've had a long way to go, or maybe the literature out there, I just don't know it on understanding desire and where our desires come from. Like why is it that I either like scallops or

I don't, but I can't control their like scallops? And that's a shallow but you know, in this book, I try to say there, and it's a metaphor. Obviously there are different types of this are in different seats of desire, And the ego is one, which is the desire to be better than others or appear better, you know that sort of thing. And then the heart, which is the desire for relation and connection with one another. And then I do have a concept which is probably not accepted

in the psychology, but it's useful from me. I think about a soul, which is the desire to lead a life of purpose and meeting. And I do think we live in a culture that encourages the ego desire, and frankly, we teach at universities that are about how to satisfy those desires. But the desires of the heart and soul that thinks we sort of have to figure out on our own. I totally agree with that. Yeah, that's such

a good point. You talk about the nunciation moment and maybe think of how Gardner's notion of the crystallizing experience. I don't know. Have you come across that literature. No, I know I've read a bunch of Gardener, but I don't know that one. I know his work on the creativity, which i'd be interested here your thoughts on, but I don't know that I don't know that concept. Yeah, it's exactly. It's the nunciation moment. It's the same thing that you

call the nunciation moment. He says, people have this crystallizing experience usually when they're young, where they make contact with the demean and they say, well, that's it, that's me, you know, that's what I want to do with my life going forward. And so I was really excited to see you kind of talk about that and quitar listeners a little bit, maybe unpack a little more, maybe how you see that and the importance of it for a committed life. Yeah, I mean, it's a very lucky thing

to have happened. You know, I said earlier. I read a book when I was seven called Pattings in the Bear and decided while reading that book, I wanted to become a writer. So it was very fortunate to know pretty much early on just what I wanted to do. My daughter, when she was five, she walked into an ice hockey rink and she just felt instantly at home. And now she's twenty five and she teaches ice hockey

out in California, part of the Anaheim Duck's organization. And I quote in the book, I think Anny Dillard interviewed a painter and asked her why she became a painter, and she said, well, I just love the smell of paint. And so what happens is we have these aesthetic moments where something just seems beautiful and captivating. And sometimes it happens early in life. I wonder if it can happen later. I couldn't find any samples of this where you just

feel suddenly at home. And the big example I used in the book is the scientist EO. Wilson, whose folks were getting a divorce when he was seven, so they sent him away from his home and he stayed with a family he didn't know in Florida, and he'd never seen a large body of water before, and he was there on the Gulf and he saw a jellyfish and he saw a sting ray. And he was losing one world at back home, which was his family, but he

found another world that just captivated him. And he estimated that children see animals at twice the size of adults, which seems very true to me. And he said, at that moment, a naturalist was born. I became a naturalist. I just was captivated by this world. And now he's in his eighties and he's still a naturalist. I'm so

interested with that. Like you look at prodigies, you know, I've studied prodigies and ran about that, and I mean some of them at each two like discover, Like Gilliam Moss was a prodigy, and he as soon as he saw like you know, the cello, he's like, oh, that's me. Or like Jacqueline de Prey, like she just heard it on like a BBC Christmas recording or something and on the radio and she's like, Mommy, I want to play that. Isn't that interesting? Like there's got to be a genetic

component to that. Right. Yeah, well that's why I said, like our desires, where do they come from? Yeah? Like why did this? Why did it happen that way? And I do think they're often I do think sometimes there are moments of loss or you've lost something and you find something new. I have a friend who's a minister to comment that. She said we were all missing something as children and as adults, were willing to give up

a lot in order to get it. And somehow I think it's the moments of loss and moments of finding are often conjoined. I think that's that was quite quite a profound statement. So, yeah, just in our final minutes here, what can we do about this putical landscape? It just seems so relevant to the book. Like your book, you don't talk about politics much, but doesn't it seem like the answer to sole many of our problems is this form of transcendence, like this reframing of what we're on

this earth for. Yeah, I mean I wrote it with political intent, and I do think that the diseases in our politics. We had this notion that frankly was spread a bit by the founders and ts Eliot put it, We imagine that we could create a society so well structured that people in it didn't have to be good, and capitalism is a bit based on that that if

we're all selfish together, everything will worked out. And frankly, our theory of factions in our democracy, if we all pursue our self interest, then things will work out because we've balanced the machine. And I sort of think that's wrong, as frankly as a lot of the founders that if you don't have a bed of trusting relationships at the foundation of society, the market and the state will go haywire.

And so I think there's plenty of evidence from social capital indicators that we don't have a bed rock of trusting relationships within communities and sometimes even within families, So then people react in harmful ways out of that sense of alienation and distrust. So I don't think you can solve our political problems from the top down. I do think you'd have to solve them from the relationship up. Yeah,

it's a really good point. I saw a study that came out recently showing that if you have this control condition where you've experts and you have people listening and say, rate your trust of what they're saying and then another condition where you tell them if they're a publican or Democrat and then ask them to do their rating if they were a political party that was opposite of yours.

Like you just didn't trust them like anything that they had to say, and even on like a non political matter, correct, no, correct, on their area of expertise they have spent their whole life studying. Isn't that deeply problematic? Yeah? And I you know, I was more conservative earlier in my life, and I was around conservative students, and I would always tell them, you may think your professors have political views that are wrong,

but trust them on what they know. But this tendency was thinking, oh, they're all full of it, not on everything, but they actually really know some things. But it's hard to get that messages growth. It's weird how distrust bleeds bleeds. Yeah, it really does. I think that you really hit the nail on the head there with that as a real core core problem in our sidey. I mean, how can we I mean you do talk about how we can you know some things we can do? What do you

call it? The relationist No, what's the word used? And the relationalism the relationalist manifesto Yeah, that's my attempt to summarize what is the ideological spine of the book, which is a sort of an attack on what I call hyperindividualism, which is sort of individualism taken to the extreme right. And you know, and I have this sort of this manifesto version. But the part that I'm proud of is

where I have the human version. I've spent the last few years hanging around these people I call weavers, and they're just people who are sensational relationship and some of them, you know, have done you know. For example, one woman name Lisa Fitzpatrick was living in New Orleans and she was dripped. She was a healthcare executive. She was sitting in the passenger seat of a car. She saw two ten or eleven year old boys who looked terrified holding something.

What they were holding was a gun, and they raised it and they shot her in the face. And she recovered, and what she remembered about the moment was not the gun, but the look of sheer terror on their faces. And this was a gang initiation ritual. They had to shoot somebody to be members of a gang. You know, there were only ten eleven and so she said, well, I'm not really the victim. I'm just collateral damage. Those boys are the victims of something here, and what can I

do about it? And so she got out of healthcare industry and got into gang talking with gang members and she just builds relationship with young gang members to try to woo them to a better life. And I've been around so many of these people who just skills at relationships. They're just deeply relational, and they have an ethos which I really have come to admire, which is they have more motivation. They believe in deep mutuality. We're all equal,

They're not better than anybody else, radical hospitality. They live in a way which is very inspiring. And most of us are not going to be as heroic as they are, but if we were a little like them, things would go better. I think. So, Yeah, it's very queer to me now. And then the parlance of psychology, you know I talked about unmitigated communion. Your book is really an

argument against unmitigated agency. You can have unmitigated agency where you have more self expense of caring about others, and you can also have and you can also have a mitigated communion too much caring about others not self. So maybe our kind of end on this agreement here that like unmitigated anything maybe is not good for society. Do we both agree with that? I do agree with that. I do think a lot of truth can become wrong

when you take them to the extreme. There was one thing that I realized that I wanted to talk to you about. So I wanted to just bring up the idea of marriage, because I've had some other guests on my podcast, like Wednesday Martin talking about this emerging Polyanori movement where you can have like commitments to multiple partners. And then you've also people like Bella de Paul who talks about, like you know, being single can have a

lot of benefits and things. So I was just wondering how you if you came across those literatures and what you think of, like how you reconcile that with the benefits of marriage that you talk about. Yeah, I guess you know. I don't want to prescribe there's one way for everybody. I certainly don't want to say you have to be married to lead a good and fulfilled life. That's obviously not true because we know, I don't know, lots of people are single or it's right for them

and they're leaving much happier lives. I guess my instinct, and this may just be unlettered prejudices that the historical record warns against it. And then just on the larger sense of marriage, this is actually refers back to a lot of what we've been saying. I try to apply three different lenses to making a marriage decision. And one

is the straight up psychological lens. And as I tried to read as much literature as I could on this subject, and the shorthand answer I came away with, you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that go with kindness and avoid neuroticism. But then I thought there are two other lenses which are slightly different. The second is the moral lens. Do you really admire the person? And because love will come and go, but admiration is much more stable. And then the third was what kind of love do

you have for the person? And there I went back to the old Greek trilogy. There's a gape. There's philia, which is friendship, and then there's arrows, which is passion. And if you only have arrows, that's not a marriage partner, that's a fling. And if you only have philia, that's a friendship, but it's not a marriage, and you should try to all three. So it was about trying to apply different lenses to that decision. But again, I don't want to be seen imposing one one view on the world.

But I do think the general literature that I've read is that, in general, a happy marriage. And I would say this is in literature, but in my observation of life, the people of lifelong, happy marriages have won the lottery, They've won the golden ticket. Yeah, in a lot of ways, for sure. There's some interesting nuances though about attachment styles.

Is that you know, you actually find there are some pairings so secure attached people tend to be attracted as securely attached to people like no rare, but there's some interesting nuances in that avoidant males and anxious females. I know it may be a stereotype, but actually the research shows they make a good pairing. Like, yeah, so there's did you see that? Have you seen that? Meta analysis?

Is it? Because they basically solve each other's Yes, that's exactly what the psychologists say in the discussion section, you know, like maybe we should just be open to you know, people have you know, even with polyamory, people are into all sorts of things these days. You know, I guess that you know, it can get a little political because I guess if you are more on the conservative side politically, you might be judgmental against some of these other alternative arrangements.

But I personally, like, you know, even not saying what my political follition is because I don't think it's relevant. I just like to be non judgmental about things that work for people, if it works for them. Even like saying like we should avoid neurotic people, I mean that seems perhaps even maybe discriminatory against neurotic people, you know what I mean? Yeah, you know I hid that to a friend of mine. Yeah, what do I do? I'm the neurotic one, Yeah, exactly, Like what do you do?

You know, like like forty percent of our listeners of this podcast maybe are you know, I don't want to say that people should avoid them, you know, as a dating partner. I guess you are right about if you average over all individual differences, and that's a big thing to do though, But if you do, you know, securely attached individuals do tend to report much less discord in their relationships, They're much happier, they have higher levels of life.

That is true for sure, but that does you know that averaging over everyone thing also can be problematic and not recognizing that there are individual differences that can work for people. Yeah. I would say one of the main conclusions I've run from my life as a reporters that we over lump. And I've been very guilty of that, and especially early in my career and probably still so.

Like you go to a rally, say a Trump rally, and you think, oh, I have a certain stereotype of who a Trump voter is, and then you start interviewing people at the rally and it turns out to be a lesbian, viker, vegan woman who works in finance. People are crossing all your category and that's sort of the Norman. You meet people who just cross all your stereotype. Having said that, I think if one of my kids decided to enter a polyamorous relationship, I would say, well, I

would put up. I wouldn't say that's a terrible thing to do. I would say, be careful. There's a lot of psychological trickiness to that. Yeah, there's enough psychological trickiness with one partner, but it doesn't mean I can't work for people for sure. Yeah, there have obviously been a lot of polygamous society centers in history. Do you mean polyamorous? There's a difference in polyamoral. Yeah, you know, is having a specifically male having multiple female parts. But is just

anyone having committed multiple partners? Yeah, right, Yeah, a lot of there's I mean, the polyamory movement is growing, you know, and I'm sure they're making the case, you know, like I said, I had Wednesday morn on my podcast making the case that there could be a lot of great benefits from that arrangement. There's all sorts of alternative arrangements popping up these days, David. Yeah, I've am working on a piece long term called what's the Nuclear Family Mistake?

We've asked too much of it? Oh, that's so funny. Like I love how you you really do go back and you know you have these fluid boundaries of whether or not you are absolutely right about something or not. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me, Tony David. Okay, I've learned a time I really appreciated. Thank you. And

also I want to thank you for your humility. You know in this during the course of this conversation you did live live by your principles there so I'm respectful of the literature that I don't know about won't want to learn. Thanks David, Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast

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