David Brooks: The Modesty Manifesto

here this week I recommend Dan Gilbert Marty Seligman Jonathan hates speaking right after but I guarantee you nobody knows more about human nature and reads people better than Linda does now I will try to be moderately brief I've been to many Aspen ideas festival as I know you didn't come to hear me you came here yourselves I'll try not to get in the way of that and it's a little odd talking about modesty and Aspen I'm not really going to talk too much about my book but in the book I do talk a little about people who live in Aspen who don't have a lot to be modest about what I admire if you go down and see them walking down the street at night downtown is how incredibly beautiful and elegantly slender they are they don't actually have thighs they just have one elegant calf on top of the other they they've achieved sort of a genetic miracle so all their grandmother's work looked like Gertrude Stein but by married marrying beautiful people all their granddaughters look like uma Thurman I don't know how they've done that they you the nice thing about the moms is they all weigh less than their own children during pregnancy they've taken so many soy based nutritional formulas the babies come out these 13 pound defensive lineman popping out they're the moms are flashing little mandarin flash cards and little things get them ready for the Harvard admissions process introduce them to their dogs and Aspen it's fashionable to have a dog as third as tall as your ceiling heights so they got these gigantic hounds named after Jane Austen characters and then the thing I've wrote about in the book was the guys who are in their 80s here and they've succeeded in business and they've decided they're just not going to die and so they get these personal trainers they're popping cialis like breath mints you take a hike up the American trail or one of the great trails around here you see these guys they've shrunk down to little five-foot 90-pound things covered in spandex they just zoom by you trailing little bits of contempt it's like being passed by a little iron raisinet going up the hill and so these people don't have much to be modest about but nonetheless that's what I'm gonna talk about and I'm gonna start by talking about something that happened to me several months ago which was I was driving home in DC at NPO and I was listing NPR as one must and we have a great program on NPR called the big broadcast on Sunday nights and I happen to hear an episode of a show called command performance and command performance was a variety show that went out to the troops in World War two and the one I happened to hear was broadcast on VJ Day 1945 in fact it was broadcast live just hours after the Japanese announced their surrender and all the big stars were on the show Bob Hope Marlena Dietrich Frank Sinatra the host was Bing Crosby and he gets out there and he says in the first moment of the show we've just learned the Japanese have announced the surrender but I guess we don't feel proud of this moment we just feel humble we're just glad we got through it and this note of humility struck me very forcefully and in the period of the show they kept repeating it over and over again in the middle of the show burgess Meredith factor came out and read a passage from Ernie Pyle the great war correspondent and Pyle had written we won this war because we have brave soldiers we've great allies we happen of material abundance we didn't win it because we're God's chosen people or were better than anybody else we should just try to be worthy of the peace and it was this notice of modesty that really struck me and so I get home and I turn on the TV and I turn on a football game and there's a quarterback throws a pass wide receiver catches it to yard gain cornerback Oh defensive player comes up and tackles him and does what all professional athletes do after a moments of great personal achievement he did a victory dance in honor of himself and it occurred to me that this I'd seen a bigger victory dance after a two-yard gain then I just heard after the u.s. won world war two and this seemed to me symptomatic of something that there's been a shift from a culture of self-effacement that says I'm no better than anybody else but nobody's better than me to a culture of self expansion and I really wanted to talk about that shift today and I really want to try to say that this shift has undergirds a lot of the problems in a lot of the situations we have and to describe this shift let me go back to that time of around command performance and tell you a little historical story about people and the atmosphere in which they lived and so if you go back to the president who was president then Harry Truman at the moment of that performance if you go back to the man who was Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower think about how they were raised they were raised in Independence Missouri Abilene Texas and there was a certain prevailing atmosphere in the way they were raised most of us actually wouldn't probably want to go back to those towns they're pretty insular they're probably racist but they did have some qualities they had an um problematic embrace of virtues like hard work being neat being responsible they did have tight communities very interlocked in each other's not lives but they did have also have an ethos of maxim's that were they were raised with in Maxim's like don't get too big for your britches don't get above yourself Truman remembered his neighbors as quote the salt of the earth Truman was once described as a regular guy his first boss in fact described him as a regular guy from the outwards and so being a regular guy salt to the earth not too big for your britches a sort of social egalitarianism Eisenhower was a very religious family grew up in a religious family they got down on their knees every night and one night when he was very young or one day when he's very young on Halloween he wanted to go out trick-or-treating and his mom wouldn't let him because he was too young and so he flew into it just a tempestuous rage at say age three or four and he beat his hands against a tree until they were literally bloody his father ran out and shook him violently and said get a grip on yourself and sent him up to his room where he cried in a rage for an hour and finally his mother came up to him and she put lotion on his hands and she put bandages around them and she said to him he that conquer earth his own soul is greater than he you taketh the city and when he was night when he was 76 years old Eisenhower looked back and wrote that that was quote one of the most valuable moments of my life he that concur with his own soul now Truman's family was a little less religious than Eisenhower but pretty religious and as a boy he memorized a prayer which he later said was the one of the central prayers of his life which he would repeat again and again in whatever circumstance he found it in and here's a passage from the prayer that Truman memorised make me truthful honest and honorable in all things make me intellectually honest give me the ability to be charitable forgiving and patient with my fellow men help me understand their motives and their shortcomings even as thou understands mine now underlying these two stories is a common worldview which in highbrow form you'd call the Augustinian worldview which is that we have sin within ourselves and we have to master the weaknesses that are inside and in this view pride is the worst of all the sins because what pride does it is strangers you from God it makes you think desire to be your own God it weakens the resistance to your own weakness inside and it makes it hard to tap the larger blessings of life which probably come from outside yourself from your family your friends your neighbors and your Creator and in this view of pride pride it's not only egotism thinking a lot of yourself pride is self preoccupation thinking a lot about yourself for good or ill and that was an important part of how they grew up thinking pride was the worst of their sins Reinhold Niebuhr also grew up in the Midwest at roughly the same time who was a prominent thinker was in command performance aired he wrote evil in its most developed form is always a good which imagines itself or pretends to be better than it is great suspicion of pride and thinking you're better than you are that I mean Eber argued that pride is the foundation of all the other sins it leads to self-righteousness greed and vanity and so this was the Augustinian climate it was the idea that you should never promote yourself or think too much about yourself it was why when they were born Truman and Eisenhower presidential candidates still didn't campaign about themselves because they didn't want to be seen talking about themselves it was why in that era got self-effacing movie stars like Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck Jimmy Stewart Henry Fonda over the case of a couple decades I remember covering George HW Bush's campaign in the first time he ran for president and he called that his mom was still alive and asked how am i doing and she said you're talking about yourself and in a moderate presidential campaign that's all you do but it offended her Sensibility and so that is that was an ethos and it was not about doing nothing about we have a if you go to the dictionary definition of humility it's about having low self-esteem this was not thinking about yourself but about balancing aspiration with a sense of your own weakness there's a Jewish story which captures this balance it's about a rabbi who keeps slips of paper one in each pocket the first slip reads the world was created for me the second slip reads I am just dust and ashes and it's balancing those two things and I think the mid 20th century they did a reasonably good job of balancing at least in the prevailing winds of the culture but there was a shift around that time the first big shift which I'm not really going to talk about was arise in individualism thinking a lot about the individual and this happened both in the 60s and 80s we used to think the 60s in the 80s the 60s about social liberation of the individual the 80s about economical liberation the individual were opposite trends they were really the same trend but two different sides of it liberation of the individual from the group but the second shift which I'll dwell on a little more was really founded from psychologists like Carl Rogers and Erich Fromm they looked at their patients and they said the problem is not too much pride the problem is the opposite the problem is self-loathing my patients have low self-esteem well they don't need to be reminded how modest they are they need to be puffed up a little my patients think they're pond-scum and so as one psychologist of the time wrote all neurotic manifestations are incarnations of self hate there's a totally opposite worldview and the central human problem is not pride its lack of self-love the central problem is the undervalued self and so they believe we should orient all arms tutions to boost self love and self esteem they believe that people are basically good inside they just need to let that goodness come out by loving themselves as Rogers wrote the goal of therapy is to be the self which one truly is and that is an entirely different worldview and starting in the 1950s and building straight through the 1970s this different view of human nature prevailed and reshaped all of our institutions it changed psychological counseling it changed the schools it changed parenting it changed religion as it became much more promoting self-love it changed the whole culture and so it wasn't only Rogers there was the individualism I think in the years since there's been as the influence of technology has probably expanded self love and self preoccupation whole group of things but there has been this shift and I believed it's a measureable shift and so just some data to suggest there has been a shift in the way we think about ourselves in 1950 the Gallup Organization asked high school seniors are you a very important person and in 1950 12% of high school seniors said yes I'm a very important person twelve percent they asked the same question again in 2006 this time it wasn't twelve percent it was 80 percent and so that's a shift if you look at math scores we used to score very well in math now we're down people at this conference will tell you it's either 17 or 36 but if you ask Americans are you really good at math we have gone from the middle of the pack to number one we were number one of the world and thinking we're really good at math in 1962 in the academic literature there were zero articles on self-esteem and the educational journals by 1992 there were 2,500 in 1950 parents were asked what's the most important trait you want in your kids then is now the number one answer is I want them to think for myself themselves the number to answer in 1950 was obedience I want them to respect me obedience is now the bottom answer and so that's a shift and the year since these trends have not abated in fact in the past 10 or 15 years there has been an expansion in if you call it narcissism or self regard in these studies so for example psychologists give tests to measure self regard and they ask people do these statements apply to you I'd like to be the center of attention I'm a special person I show off if I get a chance I find it easy to manipulate people and so we have we don't have these measures going all the way back to 1950 but we haven't going back for about 20 years in the last 20 years if you took 93 percent of teenagers right now score above the median score in 1980 so for another way of saying that is there's been a meet at an increase of 30 percent in the narcissism score over those decades people who identify with those things the children of the boomers are in fact according to these scores more self-regarding than the boomers themselves which are saying something one-third of Americans say they are completely satisfied with themselves we have a flurry of data to suggest how happy we were are with ourselves ninety-six percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills fifth 50% of high school students believe they will attend law school med school or graduate school Time magazine recently asked people are you in the top 1% of earners 19 percent of Americans are in the top 1% of earners and 36 percent expect to be someday in this true is room that's actually true Paul Schumacher and Edward Russo gave tests to executives asking them to how much they knew about their own industries in the advertising industry people and then they said here's a test how confident were you you got the answers to the test correctly in the advertising industry people gave answers they thought were 90 percent correct in fact they got 60% of the answers wrong the most egotistical industry is the computer industry people in the computer industry thought they got 95 percent of the answers correct in fact they got 80 percent wrong this is by the way a strongly gender linked trait men drown at the rate is women because men have tremendous confidence in their ability to swim after they've been drinking the other thing that's increased in addition to the self regard is the obsession with Fame in 2006 51 percent of 25 year olds said that being famous was the most important life goal they could have that's twice as many said being spiritual was the most important life goal 43 percent of middle eight mill school girls said their goal was to become a celebrity's personal assistant that's twice as many said they want to become president of Harvard a study recently of college students said would you rather be famous and receive praise or have sex large majorities would rather receive praise than have sex I've been a little famous I remember sex sex is better we are by the way among the most egotistical countries on earth the top 5 egotistical countries according to these studies are Serbia Chile Israel in the US the least egotistical or South Korea Switzerland Japan Taiwan and Morocco now this is not all Carl Rogers and psychologists it's not all intellectuals as I say it's probably technologies probably the rise of individualism is probably musical trends a recent study of music lyrics pop music lyrics suggests that in the 1980s most of music emphasized togetherness today most of the music emphasizes how great I am and if you listen to any rap song any pink song and he catch the song any Katy Perry song you're familiar with lyrics we now had to pay a scandal recently which was a self parody of narcissism the the Anthony Weiner scandal he didn't he won't have a relationship with somebody he just took pictures of himself and broadcast it out to his audience and so there I think there has been this shift and I think this shift is responsible not only for how people think of themselves but for some broader social problems the first of these is attitudes toward spending if you think very highly of yourself if you have a large sense of self you're gonna spend money as to fit your station and so if you look at personal consumption over the course of the 20th century it's basically flat as sixty percent of GDP until the 70s when this kicks in and it shoots up to 70% personal debt as a percent of GDP is basically 45 percent decade after decade until the 70s and it shoots up to a hundred and forty five percent total debt including mortgage debt and other financial debt shoots up from about 160 percent to three hundred and fifty percent and so that's how we got the financial bubble second passing debt on to future generations if you have a small view of yourself if you see yourself as part of a long chain of generations being connected over the decades you feel a visceral horror of imposing burdens on the people who are next in the chain and if you go back to the New Deal and look at FDR he looked at the future generations and they had a good reason to spend a lot of money but they said we can't impose debt on them if you see yourself more as enlarged and lose a sense of how you fit into a chain of generations you feel less moral horror about opposing burdens imposing burdens on future generations I think that's happened third attitudes toward risk if you have tremendous confidence your own intellectual abilities then you're gonna believe risk assessment models on Wall Street that tell you you can basically handle the risk of what you're investing in fourth polarization if you have a small a large sense of your own intellectual weakness you know you need the people who disagree with you to balance out your own ignorance if you think you have a hundred percent of the truth then those people are just in the way and it's no accident that Rush Limbaugh are people like that or a very polarizing figures are also their whole ego their old humor style is based on large ego and so that's another effect and so I think the self magnification is an underlying contributing cause not the only cause but a contributing cause to a lot of our social problems and contributing to cause to a lot of personal problems I had decided to talk about modesty several weeks ago I saw the current issue of the Atlantic which is about the problems with self-esteem and that talks about the sense one gets from a lot of people who are very successful even that their sense of their self is built on shaky foundations their sense of their self has not built up gradually through accomplishment but is built up through grades or by other people's reactions to them and so it's more fragile and I think that's what that's what that article gets at so I've tried to describe so far a shift in the intellectual climate which led to a shift in how we think about ourselves this shift from the culture of self-effacement to the culture of self expansion and so it's a pervasive problem a pervasive cultural shift and the question becomes how do you get out of it well the first step I think is developing an accurate a better sense of who we actually are what skills we actually have what we actually deserve we're in the middle of a cognitive revolution led by a lot of people are here in this I is Festival this year which I think does give us a more accurate and frankly a more limited sense of our own abilities the cognitive revolution if you signed up a lot of the things that have been discovered the last 30 years about who we are by these neuroscientist cognitive scientists psychologists they congregate around a group of things which should make us a little less impressed by ourselves the first is that we're really not aware of most of what we do I talk about this in my book the human mind can take in 12 million pieces of information of which it can be consciously aware of 40 and so a lot of the stuff that we're doing we're not in charge of it's happening and some of the oddities of this I mentioned the famous study that people named Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists people named Lawrence are disproportionately likely to become lawyers because unconsciously we biased toward things that are familiar which is why my daughter is named presidents of the United States Brooks the other one I should mention in this context is that if you eat alone you eat this much if you eat with two other people who eat on average 35 percent more if you eat with seven or more other people who eat 86 percent more so we're all screwed here and so we have impressive abilities but a lot of them were not really responsible for they're happening unconsciously and often were very ill informed about our true selves go to any of the nine million Dan Gilbert panels this week and he'll tell you about that the second thing we've learned is that we have free will but our free will is bounded we inherit a river of knowledge some of it forms by genes millions of years ago some of it formed by our civilization some of it formed by family some of it formed by culture and it shapes the way we see the world it gives us ways of seeing the world but we didn't create them we just inherited them and so every man in this room probably likes women with a 0.7 waist-hip ratio and we didn't create that ratio it's just genetically sort of in us for evolutionary reasons we meant unfortunately like men who are taller than themselves though I did read a great study I mentioned in that book that a guy who's five foot six can get as many online date offers as a guy who's six foot so long as he makes hundred and seventy two thousand dollars a year more and so these are preferences and ways of seeing the world we didn't create but they're in us we have cultural things that are in us that we didn't create we are just the lucky recipients of one of my favorite cultural studies somebody had the bright idea of looking at people as they had coffee around the world and seeing how often they reached across the table and touched their companion at the coffee table and I'm gonna get the numbers slightly wrong but in Rio I think they touched 180 times an hour in Paris 120 times an hour in London and zero times an hour and so we have free will we have the ability to choose certain things and certain other things but it's bounded because so much of what we're inheriting channels are decisions unconsciously Joshua green of Harvard says it's like a camera you have manual settings on most your cameras but you usually don't turn them on all the time you rely on the automatic settings and so we really shouldn't be pleased with most of our decisions because most of it is happening in ways we didn't control and the third thing that I think the psychologists are Co hearing around is the idea that we do not have one self each of us has multiple selves inside the brain there are dozens of different systems competing for primacy at any given time there's the fat loving self and the dieting self the angry self the happy self the short term himself for the long term self we have many different personalities Maurice Sendak got it exactly right in this his story the wild things we have wild things inside the thing he got wrong was in the book the where the wild things are max looks into the eyes of the wild things and tames the wild things the movie gets it more accurately in the movie max cannot tame the wild things that's more accurate so these three findings that most of our thing is most of our thinking is conscious unconscious most of our influences come long before we're really aware and that we have many different selves in ways were rarely aware suggest that Ayn Rand was wrong we are not master of our own ship captains masterfully steering the boat through life we have control but it's bounded we have abilities but we're really not respond before them we're deeply interconnected and we shouldn't be so pleased with our ability to control things and so I think this is giving us a different more accurate and I think more humble sense of who we are and what we're capable of and most importantly how much we rely on other people and so I think to finally to rediscover a sense of humility it's important to go back and find the models and the exemplars who did preach and practice a lifestyle that was more accurate about who they are and in my life I always keep a list of people who I think exemplify these traits and a list of five impressive people in Washington just so I can say hey Washington may stink but there are these people here and those people include people like Anthony Weiner no I'm just kidding those people include people like George Shultz Robert Rubin Bob gates Jim Lehrer and for them it's not about self it's about doing the job that they were given Jeff Goldberg's here had a great line in a column it's about the execution of responsibilities and that's what humility looks like in real life and over the course of the 20th century and over the course of all the centuries they have been exemplars who have exemplified this style of being and it doesn't come from just one layer comes from many different layers the first and I think most traditional wire layer of emphasizing humility is the religious layer think of all the different religious experiences that encourage modesty and humility there's the sense of quieting the self through meditation and prayer there's the sense of reminding how small you are in the presence of the Almighty Rick Warren's book The Purpose Driven Life begins with the sentence it's not about you there's a sense of all one feels standing at a Cathedral there's a sense of gratitude one feels when you say a blessing before a meal and there's a sense of an attitude of life that has already answered around surrender CS Lewis who was the most profound and acute observer of religious experience wrote that the most profound religious experiences obliterate the self they involve self forgetting and Saran Lewis writes in one of his books in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self a commerce with which by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses or anything where of we have biological or social needs or anything imagined or any state of our own minds proclaims itself purely objective the presence of God is so far outside ourselves that you surrender yourself to it and so Lewis says it's only in self forgetfulness that you experience religious experiences he also added one very canny point Lewis at one point wrote do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call humble nowadays he will not be a sort of greasy smarmy person who's always telling you he is nobody probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him he will not be thinking of humility he will not be thinking of himself at all and so there is a sort of religious tradition that emphasizes humility there's also a political tradition when our founders created this country they had a profound distrust of themselves and they had a profound distrust of the American people in the American character and because they had this just trust of themselves they erected Republican institutions to stand between the popular will and what actually turned into law they also had a sense of public spiritedness and what they meant by public spiritedness is the opposite of what we mean by public spiritedness when we think of public spiritedness someone whose public spirited we think of someone who is signing petitions getting passionate about causes getting involved when they thought about public spiritedness it was a person who curbed your passions who moderated your own opinions in order to create agreement and social cohesion so their exemplar of social of public spiritedness was George Washington who was always self controlled and he went out of the room when people would talk about himself and so they created these republican institutions to stand between the way of ourselves and our laws over the past thirty years I'd say we've eroded those Republican institutions and he we regard anything that stands between ourselves and the law as illegitimate now I've gone on too long but I just want to talk about one final a sense of humility source of humility and this is a sense of how one plans one life we have I wrote a column recently about after reading a bunch of commencement speeches and the speeches were what you would expect from an era of self expansion the message of most of the speeches was follow your passion find your joy chart your own course march to the beat of your own drummer it was all about you it was the litany of expressive individualism and I don't mean to totally disregard this way of looking at the world one of the people I admire most gave one a great commencement speech two years ago about which was really in this vein I was a guy named clay Christensen who gave a great great speech at Harvard two years ago and he told the story of himself he graduated from Harvard and he decided at age 24 or 22 he went off to Oxford probably on Rhodes and he said I'm gonna spend the next year finding my purpose in life and so every day while he was a Rhodes Scholar he took an hour off to it to think and to read and to think about his purpose and he argued unless you find your purpose at an early age 22 or 24 you'll waste a lot of time deviating from your purpose you won't know how to serve it you won't have a guiding star something to navigate your life by and Christensen is a very admirable and successful man and for him that method has worked it's about who's Who am I what is my purpose and it's about executing a plan now I admire him immensely I doubt there are too many 20 year olds or 22 year olds or 24 year olds who can sit down and define their purpose I doubt they know themselves or the world enough to know how their life will be lived I doubt any 22 or 24 year old actually exists as themselves I think that self is only formed through the processes of the life and you only find that process later on and so as much as I respect Christensen's route which was thinking about yourself what is your purpose I'd like to describe a different route of fulfillment which is more in keeping with the humility ethos of the mid 20th century which I started off talking about and in that this other way of thinking about it you don't ask what is my purpose in life you ask what is life asking of me what is life summoning me to do now this is not a question I invented this is a question found in a very famous book by Viktor Frankl called man's search for meaning and Frankel grew up in Europe he was a young student he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and being in a Nazi concentration camp was obviously not the life he would have chosen for himself but life presented him with this set of problems and so he realized life had called upon him to study human psychology and moments of extreme suffering as he wrote suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs and so the question is not what do you want from life but what is life asking of you what problems in front of you is life asking you to solve and the question becomes not what do I want but what is the world want the assumption is that you didn't enter the world and create the world the assumption is the world has been here long before you got here the world is a story in the middle or toward the end a lot of has been going on before you got there and you're entering a story that's well underway in a landscape that is completely filled and your job is to find your position in that story in that landscape not to imagine it's being created for yourself and so Franco had this way of conceptualizing life which I think would have been more familiar with the humility ethos that I described early on and I think it's that sense of the smaller self and seeing yourself in the larger that is really the core to getting back to that ethos and as I say none of us would like to go back to 1950 none of us would like to go back to that era when women were at very limited means when the races were segregated but that ethos of humility is part of a long Augustinian tradition that really is something we've lost to our detriment and the message is that most of us are egotistical most of the time concerned are about ourselves most of the time but it's nonetheless true the life only comes to a point when the self dissolves into some larger task and the purpose of life is not to find yourself it's to lose yourself thank you very much we have a few minutes for narcissus to get up and talk no unlike the narcissus the last 40 minutes I see one question back thank you for another wonderful presentation I read your op-ed to three weeks ago when you say and I'm starting to cover the 2012 campaign with great reluctance because what I think the issues aren't going to be discussed and some of the narcissism you talked about today I was curious did you get any feedback from any of the candidates any of the political advisors whatever group you want claiming that they actually were going to do some of the things that we know they're not I've never had candidates call me and say you know I was campaigning a certain way or in governing a certain way but I read your comment and you're right I should do it another way so I I didn't get that reaction I can tell you from private conversations that most candidates know what the country needs they know we probably need to raise taxes on a certain number of people we probably need that we certainly need to trim entitlements including Medicare but they are they are within institutions within parties and they don't have free rein and so there are only certain things they can say and what what is troubling to me is the parties that become more rigidly impinging upon their free movement and so a Republican really is locked into a no new taxes pledge Democrats are really pretty locked into a Medicare protection pledge and it's very hard to give themselves the free movement that most economists have you got them together liberal or conservative could find and so they're really they're really stuck in these narrow alleyways that's one of the reasons by the way I'm quite pessimistic about what's going to happen in the country over the next three weeks I really think there's a chance that we'll have some we won't cut a deal there's a significant chance we won't cut a deal on the debt ceiling that we will have some sort of either small term or long term crack up and it's a good time to get your money out of the markets and I don't I don't give financially but but so I think there is this tradition and Tom Friedman's here also has written about this that we have this Conservative Party that believes in limited government to enhance freedom we have a Liberal Party that believes in expanding government to enhance security inequality there's this Hamiltonian party which believes in limited by an energetic government to enhance social mobility which would cut things that go to healthcare and the elderly and spend more on the young and innovation and that party can't exist and doesn't exist and a lot of people wish it did so I know that you work in Washington a lot you know a lot of the politicians that you work with and you talked a little bit earlier about George HW Bush being told that he shouldn't talk about himself so much on the campaign trail by his mom but do you think it's possible that any of the folks who are in politics and national politics in the United States right now could actually be humble in the way that you're talking about or is it a process that basically invites narcissists and you need to be narcissistic to be able to succeed in that process and if there are humble people who are they I mentioned some but you're right the political process is a process that encourages it and demands it because you what are you doing if you're in politics you're talking about yourself all day every meeting is about yourself and how you're gonna market yourself every strategy session every ad it's all about yourself and now I think most politicians are in it for the right reasons it's not that glamorous of life they wouldn't do it unless they really cared and yet to get into that world the one thing you they have they're incredibly adept social creatures in general they they have what I call logorrhea dementia that which is they talk so much they drive themselves insane but they they also they get very close to you they invade your personal space they you know they rub your cheeks they want to they need that personal love two quick stories I tell one story you're gonna call them name-dropping but I call it reporting a Bill Clinton story I'm in a hotel room in hotel lobby in Boston Clinton comes out of an elevator sees me and starts praising me for a column I'd written praising him which he thought was particularly brilliant and comes up and but as people see Bill Clinton lobby he starts backing up because he wants to welcome them into our conversation so he's just talking to me but he's 80 feet away from me and he just wants the audience and the social skill the other story I tell is about Mitt Romney I was following him while he was campaigning up in New Hampshire the last election cycle and he was campaigning with his five perfect sons bit chip rips get flipped and dip Andrew and he goes into a diner in New Hampshire he introduced himself to each family at each table of the diner asked what village in New Hampshire you're from and then he tells them about the home he owns in their village and then he goes around but he meets like 40 people and on the way out he first names almost everybody who's just met and that's the social connection but it's the need for that worship and then the final thing I'll say about this are the corrosive influence they in general lot of them are really admirable and I respect them for doing this but their lives are so oriented about going up and down their relationships are up and down to the people they need the people working for them a lot of them have no lateral relationships with equals who could tell them they're full of it and so they hit middle age and then they discover that they've reached certain stature in their lives but they're really lonely and so they decide in middle age to reach out and cure their loneliness and because their relationships have been all up and down in the course of their lives they have very few social skills laterally to have real friendships and so suddenly it's like you know being kissed by a st. Bernard they overdo it they just don't know how to do anything and though I wrote a column and I mentioned the sentence that a young woman will find her at a dinner party in Washington and suddenly some senators tunngle the inner ear and a number of people said yes that's the way it is and so if you look at the Weiner scandal the governor Sanford scandal a lot of the scandals Spitzer it's from people who are in mid-career just desperately in the clumsily and stupidly lunging out for some sort of connection and that's another effect of the where it's all about you not having those lateral relationships anyway I think we're out of time thank you very much you

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 9,148

Rating: 4.609756 out of 5

Keywords: aspen institute, ideas festival, aspen ideas festival, david brooks, Modesty Manifesto, Modesty (Quotation Subject), Aspen (City/Town/Village)

Id: fzKP4-fb104

Length: 42min 24sec (2544 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2011