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The lies our culture tells us about what matters -- and a better way to live

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    So, we all have bad seasons in life.
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    And I had one in 2013.
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    My marriage had just ended,
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    and I was humiliated
    by that failed commitment.
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    My kids had left home for college
    or were leaving.
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    I grew up mostly
    in the conservative movement,
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    but conservatism had changed,
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    so I lost a lot of those friends, too.
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    And so what I did is,
    I lived alone in an apartment,
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    and I just worked.
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    If you opened the kitchen drawers
    where there should have been utensils,
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    there were Post-it notes.
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    If you opened the other drawers
    where there should have been plates,
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    I had envelopes.
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    I had work friends, weekday friends,
    but I didn't have weekend friends.
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    And so my weekends
    were these long, howling silences.
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    And I was lonely.
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    And loneliness, unexpectedly,
    came to me in the form of --
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    it felt like fear,
    a burning in my stomach.
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    And it felt a little like drunkenness,
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    just making bad decisions,
    just fluidity, lack of solidity.
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    And the painful part of that moment
    was the awareness
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    that the emptiness in my apartment
    was just reflective of the emptiness
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    in myself,
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    and that I had fallen for some of the lies
    that our culture tells us.
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    The first lie is that
    career success is fulfilling.
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    I've had a fair bit of career success,
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    and I've found that it helps me avoid
    the shame I would feel
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    if I felt myself a failure,
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    but it hasn't given me any positive good.
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    The second lie is I can make myself happy,
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    that if I just win one more victory,
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    lose 15 pounds, do a little more yoga,
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    I'll get happy.
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    And that's the lie of self-sufficiency.
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    But as anybody
    on their deathbed will tell you,
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    the things that make people happy
    is the deep relationships of life,
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    the losing of self-sufficiency.
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    The third lie is the lie
    of the meritocracy.
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    The message of the meritocracy
    is you are what you accomplish.
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    The myth of the meritocracy
    is you can earn dignity
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    by attaching yourself
    to prestigious brands.
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    The emotion of the meritocracy
    is conditional love,
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    you can "earn" your way to love.
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    The anthropology of the meritocracy
    is you're not a soul to be purified,
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    you're a set of skills to be maximized.
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    And the evil of the meritocracy
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    is that people who've achieved
    a little more than others
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    are actually worth
    a little more than others.
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    And so the wages of sin are sin.
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    And my sins were the sins of omission--
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    not reaching out,
    failing to show up for my friends,
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    evasion, avoiding conflict.
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    And the weird thing was
    that as I was falling into the valley --
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    it was a valley of disconnection --
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    a lot of other people
    were doing that, too.
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    And that's sort of
    the secret to my career;
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    a lot of the things that happen to me
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    are always happening
    to a lot of other people.
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    I'm a very average person
    with above average communication skills.
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    (Laughter)
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    And so I was detached.
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    And at the same time,
    a lot of other people were detached
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    and isolated and fragmented
    from each other.
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    Thirty-five percent of Americans
    over 45 are chronically lonely.
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    Only eight percent of Americans
    report having meaningful conversation
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    with their neighbors.
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    Only 32 percent of Americans
    say they trust their neighbors,
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    and only 18 percent of millennials.
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    The fastest-growing
    political party is unaffiliated.
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    The fastest-growing religious
    movement is unaffiliated.
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    Depression rates are rising,
    mental health problems are rising.
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    The suicide rate has risen
    30 percent since 1999.
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    For teen suicides
    over the last several years,
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    the suicide rate has risen by 70 percent.
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    Forty-five thousand Americans
    kill themselves every year;
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    72,000 die from opioid addictions;
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    life expectancy is falling, not rising.
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    So what I mean to tell you,
    I flew out here to say
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    that we have an economic crisis,
    we have environmental crisis,
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    we have a political crisis.
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    We also have a social
    and relational crisis;
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    we're in the valley.
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    We're fragmented from each other,
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    we've got cascades of lies
    coming out of Washington ...
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    We're in the valley.
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    And so I've spent the last five years --
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    how do you get out of a valley?
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    The Greeks used to say,
    "You suffer your way to wisdom."
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    And from that dark period where I started,
    I've had a few realizations.
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    The first is, freedom sucks.
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    Economic freedom is OK,
    political freedom is great,
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    social freedom sucks.
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    The unrooted man is the adrift man.
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    The unrooted man is the unremembered man,
    because he's uncommitted to things.
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    Freedom is not an ocean
    you want to swim in,
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    it's a river you want to get across,
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    so you can commit and plant yourself
    on the other side.
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    The second thing I learned
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    is that when you have
    one of those bad moments in life,
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    you can either be broken,
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    or you can be broken open.
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    And we all know people who are broken.
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    They've endured some pain
    or grief, they get smaller,
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    they get angrier, resentful,
    they lash out.
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    As the saying is,
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    "Pain that is not transformed
    gets transmitted."
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    But other people are broken open.
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    Suffering's great power
    is that it's an interruption of life.
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    It reminds you you're not the person
    you thought you were.
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    The theologian Paul Tillich said
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    what suffering does is it carves through
    what you thought was the floor
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    of the basement of your soul,
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    and it carves through that,
    revealing a cavity below,
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    and it carves through that,
    revealing a cavity below.
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    You realize there are depths of yourself
    you never anticipated,
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    and only spiritual and relational food
    will fill those depths.
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    And when you get down there,
    you get out of the head of the ego
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    and you get into the heart,
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    the desiring heart.
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    The idea that what we really yearn for
    is longing and love for another,
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    the kind of thing that Louis de Bernières
    described in his book,
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    "Captain Corelli's Mandolin."
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    He had an old guy talking to his daughter
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    about his relationship with his late wife,
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    and the old guy says,
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    "Love itself is whatever is leftover
    when being in love is burned away.
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    And this is both an art
    and a fortunate accident.
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    Your mother and I had it.
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    We had roots that grew
    towards each other underground,
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    and when all the pretty blossoms
    had fallen from our branches,
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    we discovered that we are
    one tree and not two."
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    That's what the heart yearns for.
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    The second thing
    you discover is your soul.
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    Now, I don't ask you to believe in God
    or not believe in God,
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    but I do ask you to believe
    that there's a piece of you
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    that has no shape, size, color or weight,
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    but that gives you
    infinite dignity and value.
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    Rich and successful people
    don't have more of this
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    than less successful people.
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    Slavery is wrong because
    it's an obliteration of another soul.
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    Rape is not just an attack
    on a bunch of physical molecules,
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    it's an attempt to insult
    another person's soul.
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    And what the soul does
    is it yearns for righteousness.
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    The heart yearns for fusion with another,
    the soul yearns for righteousness.
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    And that led to my third realization,
    which I borrowed from Einstein:
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    "The problem you have
    is not going to be solved
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    at the level of consciousness
    on which you created it.
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    You have to expand
    to a different level of consciousness."
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    So what do you do?
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    Well, the first thing you do
    is you throw yourself on your friends
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    and you have deeper conversations
    that you ever had before.
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    But the second thing you do,
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    you have to go out alone
    into the wilderness.
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    You go out into that place
    where there's nobody there to perform,
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    and the ego has nothing to do,
    and it crumbles,
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    and only then are you capable
    of being loved.
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    I have a friend who said
    that when her daughter was born,
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    she realized that she loved her
    more than evolution required.
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    (Laughter)
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    And I've always loved that.
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    (Applause)
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    Because it talks about the peace
    that's at the deep of ourself,
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    our inexplicable care for one another.
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    And when you touch that spot,
    you're ready to be rescued.
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    The hard thing about
    when you're in the valley
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    is that you can't climb out;
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    somebody has to reach in and pull you out.
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    It happened to me.
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    I got, luckily, invited over to a house
    by a couple named Kathy and David,
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    and they were --
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    They had a kid in the DC
    public school, his name's Santi.
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    Santi had a friend
    who needed a place to stay
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    because his mom had some health issues.
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    And then that kid had a friend
    and that kid had a friend.
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    When I went to their house six years ago,
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    I walk in the door, there's like
    25 around the kitchen table,
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    a whole bunch sleeping
    downstairs in the basement.
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    I reach out to introduce myself to a kid,
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    and he says, "We don't really
    shake hands here.
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    We just hug here."
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    And I'm not the huggiest guy
    on the face of the earth,
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    but I've been going back to that home
    every Thursday night when I'm in town,
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    and just hugging all those kids.
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    They demand intimacy.
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    They demand that you behave in a way
    where you're showing all the way up.
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    And they teach you a new way to live,
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    which is the cure
    for all the ills of our culture
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    which is a way of direct --
    really putting relationship first,
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    not just as a word, but as a reality.
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    And the beautiful thing is,
    these communities are everywhere.
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    I started something at the Aspen Institute
    called "Weave: The Social Fabric."
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    This is our logo here.
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    And we plop into a place and we find
    weavers anywhere, everywhere.
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    We find people like Asiaha Butler,
    who grew up in --
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    who lived in Chicago, in Englewood,
    in a tough neighborhood.
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    And she was about to move
    because it was so dangerous,
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    and she looked across the street
    and she saw two little girls
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    playing in an empty lot
    with broken bottles,
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    and she turned to her husband
    and she said, "We're not leaving.
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    We're not going to be just another family
    that abandon that."
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    And she Googled "volunteer in Englewood,"
    and now she runs R.A.G.E.,
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    the big community organization there.
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    Some of these people
    have had tough valleys.
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    I met a woman named Sarah in Ohio
    who came home from an antiquing trip
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    and found that her husband
    had killed himself and their two kids.
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    She now runs a free pharmacy,
    she volunteers in the community,
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    she helps women cope
    with violence, she teaches.
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    She told me, "I grew from this
    experience because I was angry.
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    I was going to fight back against
    what he tried to do to me
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    by making a difference in the world.
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    See, he didn't kill me.
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    My response to him is,
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    'Whatever you meant to do to me,
    screw you, you're not going to do it.'"
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    These weavers are not living
    an individualistic life,
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    they're living a relationist life,
    they have a different set of values.
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    They have moral motivations.
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    They have vocational certitude,
    they have planted themselves down.
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    I met a guy in Youngstown, Ohio,
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    who just held up a sign
    in the town square,
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    "Defend Youngstown."
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    They have radical mutuality,
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    and they are geniuses at relationship.
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    There's a woman named Mary Gordon
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    who runs something
    called Roots of Empathy.
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    And what they do is they take
    a bunch of kids, an eighth grade class,
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    they put a mom and an infant,
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    and then the students have to guess
    what the infant is thinking,
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    to teach empathy.
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    There was one kid in a class
    who was bigger than the rest
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    because he'd been held back,
    been through the foster care system,
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    seen his mom get killed.
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    And he wanted to hold the baby.
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    And the mom was nervous
    because he looked big and scary.
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    But she let this kid,
    Darren, hold the baby.
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    He held it, and he was great with it.
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    He gave the baby back and started
    asking questions about parenthood.
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    And his final question was,
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    "If nobody has ever loved you,
    do you think you can be a good father?"
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    And so what Roots of Empathy does
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    is they reach down and they grab
    people out of the valley.
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    And that's what weavers are doing.
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    Some of them switch jobs.
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    Some of them stay in their same jobs.
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    But one thing is,
    they have an intensity to them.
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    I read this --
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    E.O. Wilson wrote a great book
    called "Naturalist," about his childhood.
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    When he was seven,
    his parents were divorcing.
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    And they sent him
    to Paradise Beach in North Florida.
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    And he'd never seen the ocean before.
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    And he'd never seen a jellyfish before.
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    He wrote, "The creature was astonishing.
    It existed beyond my imagination."
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    He was sitting on the dock one day
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    and he saw a stingray
    float beneath his feet.
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    And at that moment, a naturalist was born
    in the awe and wonder.
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    And he makes this observation:
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    that when you're a child,
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    you see animals at twice the size
    as you do as an adult.
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    And that has always impressed me,
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    because what we want as kids
    is that moral intensity,
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    to be totally given ourselves
    over to something
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    and to find that level of vocation.
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    And when you are around these weavers,
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    they see other people
    at twice the size as normal people.
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    They see deeper into them.
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    And what they see is joy.
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    On the first mountain of our life,
    when we're shooting for our career,
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    we shoot for happiness.
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    And happiness is good,
    it's the expansion of self.
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    You win a victory,
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    you get a promotion,
    your team wins the Super Bowl,
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    you're happy.
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    Joy is not the expansion of self,
    it's the dissolving of self.
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    It's the moment when the skin barrier
    disappears between a mother and her child,
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    it's the moment when a naturalist
    feels just free in nature.
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    It's the moment where you're so lost
    in your work or a cause,
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    you have totally self-forgotten.
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    And joy is a better thing
    to aim for than happiness.
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    I collect passages of joy,
    of people when they lose it.
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    One of my favorite is from Zadie Smith.
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    In 1999, she was in a London nightclub,
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    looking for her friends,
    wondering where her handbag was.
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    And suddenly, as she writes,
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    "... a rail-thin man with enormous eyes
    reached across a sea of bodies
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    for my hand.
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    He kept asking me the same thing
    over and over, 'Are you feeling it?'
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    My ridiculous heels were killing me,
    I was terrified that I might die,
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    yet I felt simultaneously
    overwhelmed with delight
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    that 'Can I Kick It?'
    should happen to be playing
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    on this precise moment
    in the history of the world
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    on the sound system,
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    and it was now morphing
    into 'Teen Spirit.'
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    I took the man's hand,
    the top of my head blew away,
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    we danced, we danced,
    we gave ourselves up to joy."
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    And so what I'm trying to describe
    is two different life mindsets.
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    The first mountain mindset, which is about
    individual happiness and career success.
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    And it's a good mindset,
    I have nothing against it.
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    But we're in a national valley,
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    because we don't have
    the other mindset to balance it.
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    We no longer feel good
    about ourselves as a people,
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    we've lost our defining
    faith in our future,
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    we don't see each other deeply,
    we don't treat each other as well.
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    And we need a lot of changes.
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    We need an economic change
    and environmental change.
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    But we also need a cultural
    and relational revolution.
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    We need to name the language
    of a recovered society.
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    And to me, the weavers
    have found that language.
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    My theory of social change
    is that society changes
  • 14:09 - 14:11
    when a small group of people
    find a better way to live,
  • 14:11 - 14:13
    and the rest of us copy them.
  • 14:14 - 14:16
    And these weavers have found
    a better way to live.
  • 14:16 - 14:18
    And you don't have to theorize about it.
  • 14:18 - 14:22
    They are out there as community builders
    all around the country.
  • 14:22 - 14:25
    We just have to shift our lives a little,
  • 14:25 - 14:27
    so we can say, "I'm a weaver,
    we're a weaver."
  • 14:28 - 14:29
    And if we do that,
  • 14:30 - 14:32
    the hole inside ourselves gets filled,
  • 14:32 - 14:35
    but more important,
    the social unity gets repaired.
  • 14:35 - 14:36
    Thank you very much.
  • 14:36 - 14:41
    (Applause)
Title:
The lies our culture tells us about what matters -- and a better way to live
Speaker:
David Brooks
Description:

Our society is in the midst of a social crisis, says op-ed columnist and author David Brooks: we're trapped in a valley of isolation and fragmentation. How do we find our way out? Based on his travels across the United States -- and his meetings with a range of exceptional people known as "weavers" -- Brooks lays out his vision for a cultural revolution that empowers us all to lead lives of greater meaning, purpose and joy.

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
14:54

English subtitles

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