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How Can We Break Our Addiction to Contempt? (Update)
00:40:23
Arthur Brooks, an economist and former head of the American Enterprise Institute, believes that there is only one remedy for our political polarization: love. In this 2021 episode, we ask if Brooks is a fool for thinking this — and if perhaps you are his kind of fool?
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- [00:00]
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- [00:31]
Stephen Dubner
Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Mint Mobile. At Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees, no BS. Plans start at $15 a month at Mint Mobile. Ready to say yes to saying no? Make the switch@mintmobile.com freak that's mintmobile.com freak Upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 per month Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. Given the heated nature of our national conversation these days, I have been thinking about an interview I did in 2021. So I went back and listened and I thought you might like to hear it too. Whether again or for the first time, facts and figures have been updated. But do keep in mind, this conversation was recorded in 20. As always, thanks for listening and let us know what you think. Our email is radioreconomics.com I have a question that I'm afraid is going to sound rude no matter how I put it.
- [01:48]
Arthur Brooks
It's okay. It's okay.
- [01:50]
Stephen Dubner
So my reading of your second to last book, the Conservative Heart, was that it was written to help pave the way for the right kind of Republican presidential candidate in 2016. Maybe a Jeb Bush type or whatnot. Is that roughly right?
- [02:04]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, it was my entrant into the ideological sweepstakes of 2016. It's debate night for the Republicans and we're just. And I lost.
- [02:14]
Congressional Representative
This is a tough business.
- [02:16]
Arthur Brooks
You're a tough guy and it's and we need to have a leader that is real tough. You're never going to be president. Salting your way to the let's see, I'm at 42 and you're at 3. So so far I'm doing better.
- [02:26]
Stephen Dubner
Doesn't matter.
- [02:27]
Arthur Brooks
So far I'm doing better.
- [02:29]
Stephen Dubner
Right. So you did lose because Trump was not the kind of Republican or conservative candidate that you wanted. And then in 2019, you published a book called Love youe How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. And this book argues that we have reached a contempt crisis in the US and we need to fight it with kindness, essentially. Now, from the evidence I've seen since 2019, that argument of yours is not working so well either. So let me ask you this. Those were just statements. Now, finally, is the rude question. How do you rate yourself as a public persuader? And if not very well, why not? Because you are a smart, experienced, well meaning person with good communication skills, experience, connections, et cetera. So what does this failure say about. About either the message or the messenger.
- [03:25]
Arthur Brooks
I have a latent demand strategy. And latent demand strategies, they lose a lot. You know, entrepreneurship means rolling out something new. And by the way, I might never succeed. But remember that the average successful entrepreneur has 3.8 bankruptcies. I had a couple of bankruptcies. I mean, it wasn't bankruptcies. They were bestsellers. I mean, that's not nothing. And by the way, I talked to mayors and governors all the time. Many of them are successful using these ideas, both Democrats and Republicans who say, I love this book and I'm using it and it helped me get elected and it's helping me govern, and I'm governing across the aisle. I mean, you're right to say that this ideology that I'm trying to inject, it looks a little quixotic. I'm like tilt, no windles or something. I get it. But I think it's right. I think it's morally right, I think it can be popular, and I think that it just might work. But you gotta keep trying. You can't stop just because, you know, look, because virtue didn't fit at the current moment. Well, I guess I'm gonna turn to vice. I know that's the wrong strategy.
- [04:32]
Stephen Dubner
The person I'm speaking with today is named Arthur Brooks.
- [04:35]
Arthur Brooks
I'm a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School.
- [04:39]
Stephen Dubner
The latent demand strategy that Brooks mentioned, that's the, the kind of thinking employed by entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs.
- [04:46]
Arthur Brooks
These are people who basically said, I have a product. You don't even know what it is. You're going to need it. You're going to need it. And latent demand is more powerful than extant demand. And it can have much bigger markets than extant demand, but it requires visionary entrepreneurship. So what's going on right now is that we have an untapped latent demand for the kind of country that we want, which is an aspirational country, which is not characterized by bitterness and polarization, which is one in which we actually can learn from each other, and one in which the competition between the ideological sides which is good and healthy because iron sharpens iron, as far as I'm concerned, is to see who can empower people the most. Instead, what we have is the actual demand curve. Firing up dopamine in people's brains again and again and again and again. And creating addiction.
- [05:36]
Stephen Dubner
And what addiction are we addicted to? Contempt. That's his argument at least. Now, who is Arthur Brooks and why should we be listening to him? We'll get into his full bio later. But briefly. Before teaching leadership at Harvard, he ran the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most prominent conservative think tanks in the country. Before that he was an economics professor and before that a professional father, French horn player. So he's already had several careers and an unusual trajectory which has led him to an unusual belief. Arthur Brooks believes that the best way to detoxify American politics, maybe the only way is with love.
- [06:22]
Arthur Brooks
I will not let the press, the media, politicians tell me I've got to hate my brother in law. I'm just not going to put up with it anymore. In the end, people want to love, they don't want to hate. And then we can accelerate that with good leadership. And I'm telling you, Stephen, I'm spending all of my time doing what I can to make love cool right now in politics.
- [06:46]
Stephen Dubner
And how is this love offensive working so far?
- [06:49]
Arthur Brooks
Everybody hates me. Yeah, totally. I'm despised by one and all.
- [06:54]
Stephen Dubner
Right, today on Freakonomics Radio, can love really conquer all? Is Arthur Brooks a fool for believing it can? And are you maybe his kind of fool?
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Freakonomics Radio Announcer
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explains explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
- [07:34]
Stephen Dubner
Let's say you are a bright, ambitious, civic minded kid in middle school maybe, and you are considering a career in government, perhaps in Congress. So you tune in one day to see what's happening on the House floor. Thank you. Chair recognizes Ms. Tlaib from Michigan. You find two representatives. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
- [07:55]
Arthur Brooks
I think it's really important.
- [07:56]
Pacific Life Announcer
We need to stand up against this fascist takeover.
- [08:00]
Stephen Dubner
That's not a bad word, it's a fact. And Byron Donald's Florida.
- [08:04]
Congressional Representative
Will the gentlelady yield to a question?
- [08:06]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [08:06]
Stephen Dubner
Having the sort of high minded debate that our founding fathers must have envisioned. I don't yield. I don't even have time.
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Congressional Representative
Chairman, I think it's insane that the gentle lady doesn't have an argument. But she's going to refer to me and some of my colleagues. We were from the Third Third Reich. This is insane.
- [08:21]
Stephen Dubner
Criminals.
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Congressional Representative
It's insane. Do I look like a member of the Third Reich to you, Ms. Talib? Is that what I look like to you?
- [08:27]
Arthur Brooks
Trying to insult somebody into agreement is the stupidest thing you can possibly do?
- [08:32]
Stephen Dubner
Arthur Brooks.
- [08:33]
Arthur Brooks
Again, I mean, it's completely ineffective, but it feels good. It feels satisfying in the very short run.
- [08:39]
Stephen Dubner
But surveys suggest that most of us hate this noise.
- [08:43]
Arthur Brooks
93%, if you believe Tim Dixon's data on this, 93% of us hate how divided we become as a country.
- [08:51]
Stephen Dubner
Brooks is referring to a 2018 survey run by an international group called More in Common, which tries to build stronger communities and fight polarization. Now, we shouldn't pretend that polarization is new in many political systems. It is more of a feature than a bug. You can find incredible nastiness if you go back a century or two in American politics, or if you go back a couple millennia in Roman politics. But the current American polarization has been building for a while now. Here's an example. In the 1960s, only 42 of votes in the US Senate were what are called party unity votes, where the majority of Republicans opposed the majority of Democrats, or vice versa. By 2022, that number had risen to 83%. Here's some more data to consider. In 1935, the Social Security act was passed with 90% Democratic support and 75% Republican support. So not unanimous, but united. The Civil Rights act of 1964 was passed with just 60% Democratic support, but again, 75% Republican. But if you look at the major legislation passed in recent years, it's another story. President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction act made it through Congress with zero Republican votes. President Trump's one big beautiful Bill act made it through with zero Democratic votes. And I think we can all feel this partisanship reflected in our daily lives and in the media we consume. So how did we get here? What's been driving this intense spike in division and partisanship?
- [10:25]
Arthur Brooks
It's a perfect freakonomics question, actually. So there's an interesting paper from the European Economic Review that was published in 2017 by three German economists that looked at 800 elections over 120 years in 20 advanced economies, including the United States. And what they found was that a financial crisis, which is a two times a century deal, not a regular V shaped recession, but a financial crisis like what we endured in the 30s and what we endured in 2008, 2000, 2009, has a very, very strong impact in the following decade on political polarization specifically. On average, it causes a 30% bump in voter share for populist parties and candidates. This is Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump by the numbers. So we don't know how to distribute the returns after economy is coming back without 80% of the returns going to the top 20% of the income distribution. Which opens the door for political populists to say, somebody's got your stuff and I'm going to get it back, whether it's foreign or whether it's trade or whether it's bankers or whether it's wealthy people.
- [11:27]
Stephen Dubner
You're saying that the populist sentiment comes from frustration over how the recovery gains are distributed? Because I was assuming it was about blaming the experts and elites for the underlying crisis.
- [11:39]
Arthur Brooks
Well, there's that too, but that generally comes later. It's the fact that I'm seeing people doing just fine after the crisis, but I'm still not. And my brother in law, Cletus is still on my foldout and watching TV all day because he can't get his job back. And it's like, what the hell? But then the real action happens because in democracy, which is the political version of capitalism, AKA markets, people decide. The leaders are not leaders, they're followers. They're following market signals. And so Donald Trump, all he did was followed market signals. Bernie Sanders follows market signals. These news networks, they follow market signals. And those market signals are coming from a whole lot of frustration. And then of course, the tail starts to wag the dog. So the contempt that actually is serving the markets as an outlet of frustration for the lack of progress that's going to the margins of society then actually fires up more contempt and it self fuels.
- [12:32]
Stephen Dubner
Let me be sure I understand, because you're saying all this frustration comes from us, from the citizenry who feel duly wronged by the big macro events that have ruined our livelihoods. And that feeds into something that politicians then respond to and it creates this even bigger storm. But you also just told us that most of us don't want to be involved in that contemptuous partisan cycle. So you're saying that we are both victim and villain, we being the citizenry. No, for sure.
- [13:05]
Arthur Brooks
And the same thing is true with any addictive cycle where you want some relief and so you drink and then the homeostasis sets in and so you drink some more and you want the relief, but you hate the process. And so what we are in is this weird downward spiral of contempt.
- [13:25]
Stephen Dubner
Tell us what you can about the science of contempt. I'd like to know, first of all, just how empirically it's been identified as a separate thing from let's say anger.
- [13:36]
Arthur Brooks
So anger is a basic negative emotion. The negative emotions are produced vis a vis stimuli of your limbic system. It's kind of your lizard brain. Anger is a hot emotion that says, I care what you think and I want it to change. The problem is when you mix these emotions into complex emotions. So shame and guilt are complex emotions, for example. And contempt is this nasty cocktail of anger plus disgust, which is not a hot emotion anymore. It's a cold emotion. It says you are worthless and what you said is worthless. You are beneath my regard and that's something that should be reserved for something that's not human.
- [14:15]
Stephen Dubner
Reading your book Love youe Enemies, it was so moving to me. Especially the portions where you're describing the difference between contempt and anger. You write people often characterize the current moment as being angry. I wish this were true, because anger tends to be self limiting. But then when you mix it, as you've described, with disgust and it becomes contempt, it's a totally different thing. What I found so moving about it was one very positive thing and one very negative thing. The very negative thing was you realize how easy it is for anyone to tip into contempt. In fact, I don't know if most of us have even noticed that we added that layer of disgust to our anger. The upside, what makes me happy about it is once you can identify the forces that are being destructive, you can address those forces. So do most of us who exhibit contempt or experience contempt even know it? Do we identify the fact that it's something different than anger?
- [15:16]
Arthur Brooks
The answer is no, because it's a habit. Our habits of communication are as ingrained as smoking. I mean, I've seen myself in debates about the free market system and somebody made an ill considered remark about capitalism and I rolled my eyes, Stephen. And I guarantee you that my interlocutor didn't go home that night and say, I was debating the president of the American Enterprise Institute on CNN and he was making some very good points. He's going like, that guy's a jerk. And the reason is because I made somebody feel horrible with just one little action. And I didn't hate the person, it was just a habit.
- [15:49]
Stephen Dubner
What do we know about the characteristics of people who are most likely to exhibit contempt or to be the target of contempt? In other words, break down if you can, whatever you can tell me, gender wise, Republican, Democrat, old, young, anything racially, ethnically and so on.
- [16:07]
Arthur Brooks
So we don't see racial differences and we don't see gender differences and we actually don't see differences between right and left. What we do see is differences in consumption of media. So the more time you consume political information on social media, the more you're going to be both a victim and a perpetrator of contempt. The more that you watch cable television, you're going to be a victim and perpetrator of contempt. For example, answering questions like what do you think is the biggest threat to the United States? The likelihood of you saying it's a person of the other party is directly related to how much political news that you consume. And I don't even have to know what political news you consume. It's funny, but it's not right. Straight great hits, off the bottle for people who just can't handle it.
- [16:46]
Stephen Dubner
Make your best argument that while feeling contempt seems to make us happier, satisfied, in fact makes us psychologically and physiologically worse off.
- [16:59]
Arthur Brooks
There's a really great psychiatry professor at Stanford Medical School named Anna Lemke who has a big new book out about dopamine. She talks about addictions to video games and gambling and substances and pornography. What they all have in common is that they stimulate dopamine. So if you're a media addict and you're watching six hours a day of Fox News or msnbc, the reason is because your brain is lighting up like a Christmas tree. The problem is that you're neutralizing the pleasure you get from that almost immediately, leading you to have to take the drug again and again and again and again. These are the sort of the neurochemical predictors of falling happiness. And then at the more meta level, what you find is that contempt is going to drive love out of your life. There's a very famous study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is an 80 year longitudinal study of people when they get old. What do they all have in common if they're happy and well, and the answer is love. It's just all you need to know. Happiness is love, full stop.
- [17:57]
Stephen Dubner
Okay, so is love a verb or a noun? Discuss and feel free to show your homework.
- [18:06]
Arthur Brooks
What I'm talking about is the love that we manage, that we make metacognitive. So love is a verb. It is to will the good of the other as other. What is love not? It's not a feeling. And this is incredibly important to remember because in our modern culture we tend to, in my view, over valorize feelings, which tends to throw us like bits of jetsam on the surf and we're getting thrown around a lot. And it makes our lives have less quality, quite frankly, and it makes Us bitter and angry, and it makes us suffer a lot more than we need to.
- [18:39]
Stephen Dubner
If you were writing this as some sort of equation in an econ paper, where you are treating contempt and love as these commodities, talk about how the two relate, where the supplies come from, where the demand comes from. In other words, how can this lovely theory of yours actually work?
- [18:59]
Arthur Brooks
Your vice, the opposite of your virtue, is your contempt divided by your love. If you want that force in your life to decline, absolutely you should work on your contempt. But the real way to do that, where you've got a lever, is that you should have a denominator management strategy. And the more that you increase the denominator, the more that vicious impulse will just magically decrease.
- [19:24]
Stephen Dubner
Are you saying that love is proactive, essentially, and contempt tends to be reactive?
- [19:29]
Arthur Brooks
It generally tends to be because it's being processed by the nucleus accumbens of your brain, which is the part of your brain that governs your habit forming behavior. And so you can basically say, I won't be that way, I won't be that way. That's what I used to say when I was trying to quit smoking. And I always wound up like, you know, seven cigarettes burning at once. Because it would be like this binge behavior at the end of the day. And people will say, I won't be contemptuous. And then they wind up watching MSNBC all night.
- [19:57]
Stephen Dubner
We should say the number of people who actually binge on MSNBC or the other cable news networks is relatively small. MSNBC averages well under 1 million viewers during primetime, not so many in a country of around 340 million. CNN is also under a million. FOX News, the biggest cable news network, averages just over 2 million. But the noise from the cable news networks, the nearly constant volley of contempt, that noise reverberates like someone shouting into a canyon. It disrupts any chance of peace you might have hoped for. So coming up after the break, how does Arthur Brooks propose to restore the peace?
- [20:39]
Arthur Brooks
Pretend that you're feeling this love notwithstanding your feelings, because it's an act.
- [20:46]
Stephen Dubner
And what does all this mean, if anything, for the future of politics?
- [20:50]
Arthur Brooks
We need people from both parties that people are going to vote for, as opposed to somebody who will defend me from the person I'm voting against.
- [20:58]
Stephen Dubner
That's coming up right after this.
- [21:04]
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- [21:37]
Stephen Dubner
Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by LinkedIn Ads when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn Ads, the platform that has the highest B2B ROAs of all online ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com Freakonomics Terms and Conditions apply. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Dell Introducing your new Dell PC with the Intel Core Ultra processor. It helps you handle a lot of like your holiday to do list, like organizing your holiday shopping and searching for great holiday deals and customer questions and customers requesting custom things. Luckily you can get a PC with all day battery life to help you get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Get yours@dell.com holiday terms and conditions apply. See dell.com for details. If I told you there was a public intellectual, a conservative, who wanted to fight political polarization and contempt with love, and that this person was trained in economics, you might not believe me. Economists are about supply and demand, costs and benefits, not love. But Arthur Brooks is not a typical economist.
- [23:09]
Arthur Brooks
I thought everybody who is a professional economist actually starts out as a French horn player.
- [23:15]
Stephen Dubner
Brooks grew up just outside Seattle. His mother was an artist, his father a math professor. Arthur started playing violin when he was 4 and piano at 5, and I.
- [23:26]
Arthur Brooks
Played the French horn starting when I was 8 years old, and that one really stuck because I was good at it. And it's fun to be good at something when you're a kid. And then when I went away to college, all I wanted to do was play. So I went to the California Institute of the Arts, where I dropped my required classes and took Indonesian dance and North Indian classical drumming and was invited to pursue my excellence outside of the institution.
- [23:46]
Stephen Dubner
He spent the next 10 years playing French horn professionally, the last several with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra.
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Arthur Brooks
I moved to Spain to get a woman who didn't speak English in a bid to convince her to marry me.
- [23:58]
Stephen Dubner
It worked. That woman, Esther Mundt, now Esther Mundt. Brooks is still his wife, but his musical career didn't last as long.
- [24:07]
Arthur Brooks
There was really something missing. My ambition was to be the world's greatest French horn player, not to make beautiful music. And that's a problem because I was all about extrinsic satisfaction, not intrinsic satisfaction. So I started doing correspondence school. I was playing in the orchestra. I didn't tell anybody because I was embarrassed that they might think that I wasn't all in on music. This is how musicians think. And I wound up secretly getting my bachelor's degree by correspondence. And then I just couldn't stop. And so I got my master's degree secretly at night at a local university. I decided I was just, you know, it's so great, these ideas are just so interesting that I quit music and started my PhD.
- [24:46]
Stephen Dubner
I wonder, for you, someone who's coming to academia relatively late, what would you say were the benefits? What did you bring to that academic pursuit as. As a full grown adult?
- [24:57]
Arthur Brooks
Here's the deal. People don't know what they want. The most obscure thing to most people is the nature of their own desire. People always ask the wrong question. They say, I want to do with my life. No, no, no, you don't know what you want. And they look for exogenous sources of information, and they don't actually go through the process of discernment. Every major philosophical and religious tradition has discernment. I mean, discernment is part of Judaism. Discernment is part of Buddhism. It's certainly part of the Ignatian tradition in Catholicism. Discernment is all about understanding the nature of your own desire so that you can actually be happy. And what people will do is they'll say, everybody goes to college after high school. Okay, I'm going to go to college after high school. And in college I'm going to figure out what I want to do. And then they get out of college like, I don't know what I want to do. So I'm going to go work for a consulting firm or write software, and then I'll figure out what I want to do. And then they don't. They're hoping that some outside experience comes over the transom and shows them what they want to do. And that's not how it works. And so what happened was having to make decisions for my own life and treating my life like an entrepreneurial endeavor. I figured out the nature of my desire. I actually really, really, really want to be an idea guy. I want to. It's not because some college professor said, you're smart enough to be like me. It was because I realized that I'm obsessed with ideas.
- [26:19]
Stephen Dubner
After his PhD, Brooks became a college professor, first at Georgia State and then Syracuse. He would spend 10 years in academia. He focused his research on philanthropy, primarily the Motives that lead people to donate money. Out of this research came his first book in 2006. It was called who really Cares? The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.
- [26:44]
Arthur Brooks
There was one thing in that book that people either liked or didn't like, which was that as a general matter, this wasn't very political. It was more religious in nature that people who have strong religious commitments give more to all causes and charities, including secular causes and charities, than people who don't have strong religious commitments. And people who are more religious tend to be more conservative. And so therefore, this is the reason that we see a pattern in which at that time, in particular, conservatives gave more to charity than liberals. And for me as an academic, it's like, big deal, man. I'm just looking at a bunch of data and I'm noticing these patterns. And also there's one other characteristic of conservatives, which is that they tend to think that the government is not effective.
- [27:22]
Stephen Dubner
How much did you overlay that association onto this argument that conservatives give more to charity because they don't believe so much in redistribution while liberals do and therefore think the government should distribute and therefore might give less to charity?
- [27:38]
Arthur Brooks
That was an interpretation on the basis of the associations that I showed. But I tried to be careful about my language because I'm a guy who does this research, and so I know what the research is saying and not. But of course, the political thing was what was salient. And it hit the news cycle in just the right way. President Bush read my book, and when the President of the United States was walking out to the helicopter holding a book and be like, what's that book? And it's like some obscure college professor. Suddenly my phone started ringing.
- [28:07]
Stephen Dubner
So you write that you were happily working as a professor at Syracuse when you get a call from aei, the American Enterprise Institute, asking if you'd think about becoming their president. Describe that call and how much of a surprise this development was.
- [28:19]
Arthur Brooks
They were going through a presidential search that was going very poorly. And so they threw a dart down the hall and basically hit me. I'd never raised a dollar and I'd never had one employee. It was just insanity.
- [28:33]
Stephen Dubner
Usually when an institution has a hard time finding a leader, it's for good reason that the place is in bad trouble. Were they?
- [28:42]
Arthur Brooks
No. The truth of the matter is, however, that most institutions have a really hard time finding a chief executive. I mean, these jobs are. They're a grind. You're on the road all the time, they're 80 hour a week jobs. And if you're going to go in to be a university president, but even more a think tank president. You got to be a scholar.
- [28:59]
Stephen Dubner
Did it feel like the intellectual, academic, ideas based operation that you envisioned or did you feel like, oh, it's an ideas shop, but it's an ideas shop geared toward producing policy that is meant to promote a certain spectrum of the political industry?
- [29:19]
Arthur Brooks
It was the former. It really was. And part of the reason was because our scholars are notorious for irritating our friends.
- [29:28]
Stephen Dubner
Give me, give me an example, if you could.
- [29:30]
Arthur Brooks
You talk about the carried interest provision, which is basically, it's a loophole where you take income and say it's not income for founders of certain kinds of businesses. And our scholars are like, no, it's income, sure, lower the income tax, but don't say there's something that is income isn't income. And so we were saying things like that all the time. I was getting these outraged phone calls from donors all the time. How can your scholars say something like this? Like, dude, this is what the data's telling them And I'm sorry, what do you want me to tell you?
- [29:58]
Stephen Dubner
So let's say that I am a billionaire plutocrat and I wish to affect U.S. policymaking. Okay, where do I get the best ROI? A, funding a think tank to support research that promotes my agenda and works its way into the bloodstream. B, lobbying members of Congress directly, or perhaps C, some other route like a public relations campaign or a media blitz.
- [30:25]
Arthur Brooks
I'd buy a bunch of TV stations and newspapers and I would probably start a cable network. That's where you're going to be coalescing, a movement of people who are highly ideological. And that's where you don't have to worry about anybody telling you you're wrong. The whole idea that you're actually going to be informed by cable media, that is just insane. If you think that if you're actually going, it's like, oh, I'm going to watch these cable news networks, especially during primetime, and I'm really going to find out what's going on with Biden, what's going on with Trump. No, you're not. You're basically going to have your biases scratched. And if you go to the other side to see what the other side is saying, you're going to recognize the accelerants on these half truths and rumors. And that won't change how you think either. So we have a big problem with the means of communication in this country and the way that we actually do so called news. There are things that can happen that can radically change this environment, or we can have a slow kind of oozing moving forward where the leadership in one or both parties basically says, I've had enough, I've had enough. What I really, really hope is that you have this. Remember good old days, Stephen. Remember 2012? Obama and Romney were just duking it out about who was going to be a better opportunity politician for the American public. And I knew tons of people like, I don't know who to vote for. I don't know which one of them I like more. And instead, you know, you get into 2016 and people are like, yeah, I don't know who I like less. Things can change really fast in American politics. And so we need people from both parties that people are going to vote for, as opposed to somebody who will defend me from the person I'm voting against. That's what we actually want.
- [32:03]
Stephen Dubner
So you've collaborated with the Dalai Lama, and you asked him once what to do when you feel contempt. And his answer was practice warm heartedness. And then you did exactly what I would have done, which is said, can you say a little bit more about that, please? Are there any specifics?
- [32:22]
Arthur Brooks
You got anything else, your holiness?
- [32:25]
Stephen Dubner
And then, as you write, he suggests that you think back to a time when you answered contempt with warm heartedness. Remember how that made you feel, and then do it again. Is it really that simple? Because that sounds like even I could do that.
- [32:40]
Arthur Brooks
It's amazingly good psychology. It's reversing an automatic process. There's a famous exercise that I teach to my Harvard students now. I had to teach a class in happiness. And when you're feeling unhappy, if you want to feel happier, if you put a pencil in your mouth and bite down, so it's sideways in your mouth and you're biting down in your molars, that will actually strain the orbicularis oculi muscles in the corner of your eyes, giving you little crow's feet. And that signals to your brain that you're doing a Duchenne smile, which is the only smile associated with true happiness, and it runs the causality in the other direction. And you will literally feel happier. So that's what I'm suggesting. Pretend that you're feeling this love notwithstanding your feelings, because it's an act, it's a commitment, it's not a feeling. And in so doing, you will run the cognitive process in the opposite direction and you'll get results. And that's what the Dalai Lama was telling me. He was just not telling me in those wonky Nerdy terms.
- [33:38]
Stephen Dubner
So you're making the argument that people, individuals, can and should opt out of the contempt industry and practice more warm heartedness. But I wonder if, if you're being somewhat Pollyannish here, because the leverage and the reach of the industries that promote contempt, especially the political and media industries, they're very powerful. So what makes you think that those Goliaths could ever be taken down by even a very large army of Davids?
- [34:10]
Arthur Brooks
Well, the answer is that every movement actually starts with a few people. What political leaders do, what institutions do, is they get in front of parades that are going down the street saying, this parade needs a leader and the parade's gotta start someplace. And none of the things that I write are at odds with the idea that we need institutional change. That's true too. But only thinking institutionally, only thinking in terms of systems doesn't actually get out the intrinsic truth, which is that everything actually starts with a few individuals. That was Gandhi's big point. That was Martin Luther King's big point. Martin Luther King didn't start by going to the Department of Justice to try to break up racist institutions in the South. Martin Luther King got people together who said, I think that we can start making things better. We can act in a particular way. We can show steely courage with boundless love.
- [35:03]
Stephen Dubner
Coming up after the break, the COVID 19 pandemic might have been a good moment to break our addiction to contempt. But that didn't happen. Arthur Brooks will explain why. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be be right back. Freeconomics Radio is sponsored by Stripe. AI companies have unique business models, each with distinct billing needs. Stripe is the go to choice for AI leaders from early stage startups to scaled enterprises. With Stripe billing, you can support any business model and easily align your monetization strategy with customer value. Join the ranks of 78% of the Forbes AI 50 and millions of businesses worldwide that trust Stripe to help them build more profitable scalable businesses. Discover more@swepe.com. freeconomics Radio is sponsored by Claude. The most interesting questions don't always have the most obvious answers. Why do people behave in seemingly irrational ways? What hidden forces shape our decisions? Claude is built for minds that ask these deeper questions. When you're exploring patterns or connecting dots across disciplines, Claude goes beyond easy answers and matches your curiosity about the world's unexpected connections. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Freakonomics and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Sylvania, with Sylvania. Seeing better while driving at night starts with you because headlight bulbs dim over time and can lose up to 50ft of visibility before burnout. So don't wait. Upgrade your drive with Sylvania lights for better visibility on the road ahead. Sylvania's step by step installation guides make it easier than ever to take control of your nighttime clarity, all without a trip to the mechanic. So before a burnout darkens your day, upgrade to Sylvania and see better tonight. A lot of social scientists argue that when different groups are presented with a common enemy, they tend to unite. I heard a lot of smart people posit that COVID 19 would be that common enemy that would bring everyone together, that it would lessen contempt. I see no evidence that it's done that. Why do you think? Not bad leadership.
- [37:36]
Arthur Brooks
You know, we had an opportunity, and under appropriate leadership, the country could have come together. And it did in other parts of the world. Not perfectly. There's still dissidents and there's still problems, and there's uneven recovery. I get it. The fact of the matter is that the President of the United States used Covid to divide as opposed to using Covid to unite. Every leader's got a choice. And when the President of the United States. I mean, it would have been great if the whole country said, no, we refuse. We will come together. We will. But the President of the United States has a lot of power. It was a classic case of dividing contemptuous leadership in our moment of need.
- [38:10]
Stephen Dubner
Here's a sentence from your book that one doesn't often read. My admiration for politicians has grown enormously. You go on to write, they are some of the most patriotic, hardworking people I've ever met. They love America and hate our culture of contempt as much as you and I. So, Arthur, if that's the case, why are they, the players in that industry, not able to tamp down the contempt?
- [38:36]
Arthur Brooks
You have a problem of scale where it's one of them versus the entire infrastructure of media, the rest of politicians, the most powerful politicians. It's a massive collective action problem. Now, when I say my respect for politicians has risen, it's true. Not all politicians. I mean, some are opportunists, and some of them are really creating the problem wholesale. But the truth of the matter is that most that I've met, they're smart, they're interested in what's going on, they want to make things better, and they don't know how. And just like the rest of Us, they feel a lot of fear and people act in suboptimal ways when they're fearful.
- [39:12]
Stephen Dubner
How much time do you spend talking still with Republican candidates, congresspeople, strategists, and so on?
- [39:19]
Arthur Brooks
A lot. Not everybody. It's not like President Trump is calling me. But I do have the pleasure of talking to a lot of people on Capitol Hill. And what I'm talking about, the playbook that I'm trying to bring to everybody who will possibly listen, not just Republicans, but anybody who will listen, is we need a competition of opportunity. Look, we are still the same nation of ambitious riff raff that we always were. We believe in the radical equality of human dignity. I've got the data. Most people believe in this. Absolutely. And we have different ways to make this agenda true and pure and good. And once we start fighting each other over that. No, I want more opportunity we can get out of this crisis. I've got the ear of a few. And Stephen, I want more. I want more.
- [40:01]
Stephen Dubner
When you talk to Republicans, either elected politicians or their strategists, who are on the fence about whether to continue to support Donald Trump or to accept support from Donald Trump in the upcoming midterms, how do you advise them?
- [40:18]
Arthur Brooks
So it depends on where they are. But fundamentally, you got to ask yourself, what are you willing to fail for? Steven, one of the things that we find about the happiest people is they can answer the question, why are you alive? And for what are you willing to die? Okay, so let's take it to the level of our career. What are we willing to fail for? What are we willing to have the microphone taken away from us for? And so I asked my political friends, you have a concept of what you think is right. It doesn't mean it's what I think is right. What are you willing to lose an election for? And when my friends examine that, you start showing some courage. You start saying the things that you think. And then once you cross that Rubicon, it's unbelievably liberating. You can be free. You can be free.
- [41:05]
Stephen Dubner
What are your very best ideas for fighting contempt? Let's say we're sitting next to each other on an airplane. You catch my attention totally by saying, yeah, we live in this contempt cycle, but I can fix it. Fix me quickly. We're going to land in 10 minutes.
- [41:20]
Arthur Brooks
Number one, stand up to the man. Like they used to say in the 60s, stand up to the man. The man that's manipulating you is the media that are telling you that you have to hate. Number Two is start running toward contempt because this is your opportunity to show love. And you don't get that many opportunities to show love. I mean, this is mission territory, man. Why is it that all these religious missionaries, why do you think that they're so happy all the time? You know what nobody has ever said in human life, oh, good, there's missionaries on the porch, and yet they're happy. They're happy because they're actually bringing light where there's darkness. In their view, be a missionary. And one of the ways to do this, if you're in a habit, this is number three. John Gottman says that if you're fighting with your spouse, start carrying around a five to one list where when you want to say something hateful or sarcastic or critical, you write it down on your list. But then you have to say five loving, nice, caring things first. And guess what? You won't get to the sixth thing. And so if you want to say something sarcastic on Twitter about President Biden or Trump or something, you got to say five positive things. You're going to lose followers on Twitter, by the way, because it's a contempt machine. But you're going to be a different person. And what that's going to do is you're going to start finding yourself confronting the sources of contempt with love, with happiness, with light. And then finally, last but not least, you need to be more grateful. If you're a Republican and you actually think that the biggest threat to America is Democrats, man, you're out of your tree. You're just not looking at the facts. You don't have enough grasp on foreign policy. Among other things, you're drinking this Kool Aid from cable TV and your Facebook friends or something, and it's crazy. And you need to be more grateful for the fact that you live in a country where you can say, the President of the United States is an idiot and there's no knock in the night and no jackbooted thug, and God bless America for that.
- [43:13]
Stephen Dubner
That's Arthur Brooks. What do you think? Does the love and warm heartedness he prescribes stand a chance against the contempt machine that seems to be running our country? I'd love to know what you think. Our email is radio freakonomics.com you will be hearing from us again very soon. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too.
- [43:38]
Freakonomics Radio Announcer
Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Ryan Kelly and updated by Dalvin Abawaji. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger and Greg Rippon. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Jeremy Johnston, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, Teo Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers. Our composer is Louise Guerra. You can get the entire archive of Freakonomics Radio on any podcast app. If you'd like to read a transcript or the show notes, that's@freakonomics.com as always, thank you for listening.
- [44:27]
Arthur Brooks
I haven't played a concert in 25 years.
- [44:29]
Stephen Dubner
Do you keep up your embouchure? Can I hear? Can I just hear you? Try to blow a little?
- [44:36]
Arthur Brooks
I mean, I could play, but it would be bad.
- [44:44]
Freakonomics Radio Announcer
The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden Sign of Everything.
- [44:52]
Edward Jones Announcer
Stitcher.
- [44:57]
Freakonomics Radio Announcer
If.
- [44:57]
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- [46:28]
Stephen Dubner
All right, two more reps. Why am I wiped out? Where have my gains gone? Did my testosterone take a dip?
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