#therighteousmind

The book (The Righteous Mind) is based around three great untruths. My first book The Happiness Hypothesis is actually about ten insights you find in ancient cultures all over the world. Psychological insights. And so one of them is what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That was Nietszche's formulation. You find the exact same idea in mensches in ancient China, you find it all over the world that kids need challenge. Human beings need challenge, obstacles, failures, setbacks in order to grow. So that's a basic truth. That's a psychological truth.

But what we're finding on campus and finding in the lives of American kids is an increasing presence of the idea that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. In fact oh my god just recently there's an article making the rounds. Kids are mobilizing in high school to end the practice of regular public speaking. That some kids have anxiety around public speaking. That's very common. One of the lines in this Atlantic article quoted a high school kid saying nobody should be forced to do something that they're not comfortable doing. Wow! Wow can you imagine raising kids with that dictum? How would they come out?

If this is true that we need challenges, setbacks, even fear, we have to be afraid in order to overcome it and realize “Oh, I can do that.” And if we give in to this idea that no one should be forced to do anything they're uncomfortable doing, we are setting up the next generation for failure. And that's exactly our subtitle. How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. More briefly, the second great untruth is always trust your feelings. And the third is life is a battle between good people and evil people. And our contention in the book is that if we can successfully teach the young generation all three of these great untruths, they're almost guaranteed to fail.

              It’s always been interesting to me that so many people could be confronted with so many hard facts, and yet decided simply to ignore them. The facts must be wrong. We are now living in a time where facts have the amazing ability to have an agenda.               

              Being a mere mortal on this Earth and not having studied history as extensively as would be necessary, I cannot tell you much about political discourse and rhetoric have changed in the past handful of centuries or even decades. Certainly there was always an element of drama to them as some of the most famous and infamous politicians I am aware of (Lincoln and Hitler come to mind) have been known to be great and impressive orators. The orator that most readily comes to mind at time of writing is in this podcaster’s opinion unworthy to be compared with such masters of human speech, but there is no denying that we are all waiting for him to leave office to see if he has brought about an irreperable sea change in political discourse or if he will take it all with him when he goes.

              During the Obama presidency (a presidency I did not personally vote for or endorse), I like many frequently heard the sarcastic refrain “Thanks Obama.” Admittedly I was much less politically aware than I am now as I am succumbing to the stereotype of becoming more attuned to politics the older I get, but I never felt any noticeable harm or difference good or ill to my life throughout those two terms. I recall very recently turning to my dear friend Momo and saying “I believe Obama will largely be remembered as a caretaker president. He didn’t do anything egregiously bad or good, and mostly he was the first black president.”

              That’s not to say he won’t have his own legacy in the short term - a legacy that his successor is hellbent on dismantling in lieu of actual policy or governance. But anything done through executive orders can be undone by a new executive, and the Republicans who today cry “obstructionist Democrats” stonewalled any piece of legislation that Obama looked upon favorably. Such is the politics of today. Tomorrow a Democrat will regain the presidency and the Republicans will shout tyranny and the Democrats will complain obstruction, and not much will get done unless a lobbyist backed by powerful corporations says so.

              This all sounds very bleak, and I mean it to be so. Today I watched children on the news speaking on the need for some kind - any kind - of gun legislation to (and it pains me heartily to phrase it so) decrease the number of mass shootings that take place in what we call the greatest country in the world. Yet rather than empathy, those who viewed any regulation of firearms saw enemies, and their righteous minds seized on any small shroud of evidence that these were paid “crisis actors” after seeing one of these children rehearsing the speech he would give.

              Before this, families torn apart by the Sandy Hook Massacre fled their homes and moved out of state to escape the death threats they received for being “crisis actors” in the pocket of the liberal anti-gun agenda. The claim being that Sandy Hook was a hoax. No children died, and these people’s grief and pain are met with open hostility rather than compassion because they dared to ask that further harm be prevented.

              I can’t pretend to understand such pain. It shames me to say so, but I have never been so close to my family as I have seen others be. And yet, when I imagine receiving a phone call from the police saying that my little nephews or niece were at school when such an event took place... I lack the prosaic skill to describe the dread and disgust I feel.

              Often times I think of the superheroes I grew up idolizing. Batman stands out as having one singular and well defined rule - “Thou shalt not kill.” It’s a good rule in my opinion. No matter how many bones he breaks, or years of therapy the people he terrifies will need, Batman abstains from killing, and that’s something. In Batman Begins he makes the point that this specific rule is important because it makes him different from the criminals he hunts. It sounds so wonderful and heroic on the screen and in print. But putting it into practice proves to be so much more difficult.

              I imagine that like me, most of those who might read this have done pretty well at abstaining from killing, but I would challenge you to go a step further. It sounds so tired and trite I realize for me to say this again, but love thy neighbor. If you are truly “righteous,” if you are truly different from those evil conservatives, those evil liberals, those who would take your guns, those who would let you die rather than enact change, then love them. I am so very far from Jesus, so I won’t ask you to turn the other cheek. Fight. Fight with every fiber of your being for the change that you believe is right with the world. But I implore every American who reads this to remember that the enemy they fight is not an enemy. Simply another “righteous” mind fighting for what they believe in.

 Respectfully and with Love,