Smash Notes
The lies our culture tells us about what matters -- and a better way to live | David Brooks
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…
People
Notes
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For David Brooks, loneliness unexpectedly came to him in the form of fear, of a burning in his stomach. It felt like drunkenness and a lack of solidity. The emptiness in his apartment reflected the emptiness in himself.
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David Brooks admits that he has fallen for these cultural lies. The first lie is that career success is fulfilling. The second lie is self-sufficiency, that he can make himself happy. The third lie is meritocracy.
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The deep relationships of life and the losing of self-sufficiency.
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You can't climb out. Someone has to reach in and pull you out. From the dark period, David states you have to have a few realizations. For him, his first realization is that social freedom sucks. The second realization is your soul. The final realization is that you have to expand to a different level of consciousness.
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On TED Talks Daily, David Brooks quotes an old man in Louis de Bernières's novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, speaking to his daughter about a late wife. Love itself, the line says, is whatever is left when being in love has burned away, and that remaining love is both an art and a fortunate accident. The couple's roots grew toward each other underground, and when the blossoms were gone they found they were one tree, not two. Brooks says that is what the heart yearns for. He sets the quote after Paul Tillich on suffering, which he says cuts through the floor of the soul and shows a depth that only spiritual and relational life can fill.
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They reach down and grab people out of the valley. They live a relationalist life, not an individualistic life. They have a different set of values, which include moral motivations, vocational servitude, radical virtuality, and are geniuses at relationships.
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Joy is a better thing to aim for than happiness. Joy is not the expansion of the self, it’s the dissolving of the self. It’s a moment where you’re so lost in your work or a cause that you have totally self-forgotten.
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We need a lot of environmental and economic change. It’s because we don’t have the mindset to balance it. We no longer feel good about ourselves as people, we’ve lost our defining faith in our future, and we don’t see each other deeply or treat each other well.
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According to David, his theory of social change is that society changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy them. He believes that the weavers have found a better way to live.
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