Sam Harris On Whether Religion Really Does Make Everything Worse | The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk

Sam Harris welcome to the podcast hey Asha it's good to see you it's great to speak to you um so you've worked on on so many important things over the years but I actually want to start by revisiting one of the topics that really made you uh prominent you were one of the free Horsemen of atheism uh or Horsemen four so I've removed a Horseman yes uh you were one of the four horsemen of uh of atheism um I I want to do two things one is that I wanna just hear the intellectual case for atheism I mean afterwards I have some political questions for you but just what is the intellectual case for atheism and and why should we care about that well the the the epistemological case for it is pretty simple it's the same as the case for not believing in Zeus or Poseidon or Isis or any of the other of the thousands of dead gods that um uh are interred in the in the graveyard we call mythology right so it's just the The Atheist and this is a kind of a famous Trope of atheism The Atheist just goes one God further and consigns the god of Abraham to the same fate right I mean these are clearly inventions of people and they don't purport to be right the god of Abraham is explicit in the Bible in the Quran that uh you know this is the document you're now reading is is the the word of God this is not of human of human manufacture um and it's just obvious that that can't be so I mean there's it's really a claim when you're dealing explicitly with Judaism Christianity and Islam it's really a claim explicitly about books because these these Traditions are based on claims about books right there's they're based on Revelation or what purports to be Revelation and yet you look at the books and there's just no way they're the product of omniscience I mean they they betray their merely human Origins on every page and what they don't show which would have been trivially easy for a God to put in there is a single sentence that announces its its uh Supernatural provenance right I mean just think of how easy it would be for an omniscient being to write a book or even a single page of text that proved that it could not be of human origin I mean that's just it would be the first thing you would do if you're trying to convince anyone about anything or even just be useful over over the centuries but rather than give us a um you know insights into mathematics and science and you know computation and you know everything else that we care about at the moment medicine um it tells us how to sacrifice goats right and when precisely and you know and how to keep slaves and I mean it's just I'm not saying there's no wisdom in those books of course there are but there was wisdom you know in in many other books uh in that period um so there's no Monopoly on wisdom in the Bible you know at any of the stage if it's of uh of any any of the stages of its completion and um so let's just be honest about the nature of the books and and so and the moment you are honest you witnessed your horror that we're living in a world that is shattered over competing claims about literature right I mean the the situation we're in is every bit is absurd as a world in which people would be seeking to pass laws infringing on the rights of their neighbors or to start wars or to commit terrorist atrocities based on Rival interpretations of the plays of Shakespeare right now we don't live in that world but it just imagine how absurd it would seem to live in that world right you got these plays and you got you got the Hamlet cult that's going against the Leer cult and they're literally willing to die and let their children die over differences of opinion about those you know various texts it would be insane but the world we live in is every bit as insane as all that right and yet we've acclimated to it uh we cease to notice it right it's no longer selling it to most people except most atheists so that atheism is uh you know intellectually and and politically relevant in the end because it it um is the only lens you can throw up over the present that reveals how insane and obscene really the the wastage of human life and opportunity and attention is over these ridiculous claims about texts right and that that's now I'm sure you'll get there but what I'm not denying in all of that is that their extraordinary experiences that are testified to in some of these books right and that the transformation of the human mind is possible and that you know Unconditional Love Is Possible and self-transcendence is possible and certain people have extraordinary Charisma and all like all of that is is real as as phenomenology uh and we should be interested in all that but we should be investigating that and experiencing that and talking about it most of all in 21st century terms so that's an excellent summary of the case for atheism I wonder how far it goes for right so that feels like a strong set of arguments to be skeptical about uh the Old Testament the New Testament the Quran you know various particular religious texts it doesn't strike me as an argument for the absence of some Divine Force so uh does the core of your atheism just say um you know the main monotheistic religions uh are wrong we have no reason to believe in those or do you think that by extension the same argument can be made about any particular set of claims and we should therefore not believe in any purpose of higher Force uh no it really is limited to the the claim the obviously false claims about books you know especially the divine origin of certain books and the and the Virgin birth of certain people uh Etc but no I mean I think I think there's every reason to believe that the universe is Stranger than we realize and May in fact be Stranger than we can realize and you know so so if you're going to tell me we live in a universe where there are trillions upon trillions of nearly identical copy copies of ourselves having precisely this conversation or or something close to this conversation um you know that's that picture of a Multiverse and that's as strange as anything you find in religion and yet probably one-third of physicists at the moment believe something like that um yeah but they have reasons for believing something like that you know as as unintuitive as it is um so yeah you know and if we're living in a simulation on some alien supercomputer I mean like the the the world could be profoundly counter-intuitive um and so yeah I'm not closing my accounts with with every strange version of of ontology there it's just uh every specific claim has to be taken on its own merits right and if you're if you're saying well here's a book that is perfect in every syllable and you know it could not possibly have been written by mere mortals well then let's that's a very easy claim to analyze uh and there's no book that that survives you know contact with that with that claim a bit and so but you know you know if you again you could just take take each of these claims as they come you know take the claims of L Ron Hubbard which you know Mark the foundation of Scientology right well like you know we have this guy's driver's license right and we have his you know we know a lot about L Ron Hubbard and so that the reason why Scientology looks more like a cult and less like a religion it's not merely the number of subscribers it's that you know it's all to human Origins are well documented right and Mormonism is right on the cusp of that you know in videos uh analysis and but as you go as you push back further into history um it becomes the scope for alleging Miracles where we just don't have facts uh it because it becomes a little bit wider and that's what people have done but it's just um again and I'm not even closing the the door to any possibility of of what we might call a miracle right man a miracle on one level would just be some aspect of of natural law or or you know natural phenomenon that we don't understand I mean the universe is whatever it is and there's no no one thinks we are anywhere near fully understanding it right so yeah things could be very strange in fact but what about a strange in that way so you know I'm trying to play Devil's Advocate to some extent perhaps God's Advocate because I grew up as a non-religious person my parents my grandparents were not religious and so um I find it easy to agree with you on much of that but um when we're talking about miracles you know what about the possibility of a miracle that goes beyond what you're saying right so one understanding of Miracle is simply there's clearly a lot of laws of nature but we haven't understood so there could be certain events uh that just be fatalized and one way of expressing that to say well it's a kind of Miracle right um you know what about the possibility that there's some purposive Divine Force but intervenes in the Affairs of the universe at certain points and that actually does have a capability in some meaningful sense of that term to suspend laws of nature right to intervene in the ordinary course of things as a supernatural agent now I have no particular reason to believe that but it strikes me but it's also really hard to come up with a reason to disbelieve that um and so I guess I'm I'm wondering whether you're agnostic about those kinds of claims or whether you think we can reject them in a more Universal in a more Universal sense not just as as regards particular claims made in particular human texts um but even as regards possible such claims well I would say there's no evidence for such claims right and and um if there were such a force right if there were some kind of divine mind that could intervene in our Affairs whenever it likes or he or she liked well then one thing you can know about this mind is that it's not moral in the sense that we would would want to claim right it's certainly not compassionate if if you're if the focus if the appropriate focus of compassion is human and animal suffering right it's not it's it wasn't of much help when 500 million people were killed by smallpox in the 20th century right it was it wasn't much help during the Holocaust right so you have all these religious people thanking God for these invisible interventions right you know you get you you find a parking space that just a second ago wasn't there and you thank God for for you know easing your your you know the various transitions in your day you know or more seriously you you know you get a diagnosis of cancer but you know you get this miraculous remission right your doctors thought you were doomed and you got better right well but think of all the people who didn't get better right and think of all the good work this God of yours has not done in the lives of others who are just as deserving or even more deserving of compassion than you were we just think of all the children who cannot be accused of having done anything wrong or annihilated casually moments after birth or you know in the first years of their lives right you know um so you need only one Horror Story like that and of course there are millions um to disprove this notion that an All-Seeing omnibenevolent God Is Watching Over Us right um so then if you're going to say okay well what if there's a Divine mind that is intervening far more casually and capriciously and without Rhyme or Reason and yet as well but okay but what good is that to anyone you know it's practically a you know that's a a an autistic god with a roulette wheel I mean what are we what are we alleging here right like what are we praying to in that case um ironically then went back to sort of a conception of Zeus or something like that right bees right very human Gods with uh uh you know very humanists and desires and jealousies and so on right um let me go to what I'm in some way more interested in which is the political implications of religion um and I want to ask you two related questions one of which uh is sort of grand and more historical and the second what I'll come to later is sort of applying that to the American context so um you know I have become quite convinced that there are certain basic aspects of human psychology which Drive our behavior that we as Jonathan Hyde would say groupish that we uh you know tend to form groups very easily often treat members of those groups with great compassion and great altruism but we're also capable of treating anybody who's not a member of those groups with Incredible cruelty and nastiness um and if that's a basic mechanism of humanity then the way in which that has become activated so often for history obviously is religion right there's other mechanisms as well but this is one of a really important one right I'm a question you're not I don't owe any duties to you I'm a Catholic you're Protestant I don't any oh any dude I don't I need YouTube and so on and so forth right um but if we think that what's going on here is actually a set of human capacities that are baked into how we operate then it's not as clear to me as it might seem at First Sight but an absence of religion would lessen human conflict or would lessen human suffering because with our infinite ability to invent lines to distinguish my group from your group we would simply be driven to give more importance to ethnic differences more important to ideological political differences more importance to all kinds of other differences we might be able to emphasize or concoct so I guess my question is do you think that if people for the last 2000 years hadn't believed in these different religions um would we have had fewer conflicts or would we just have had different conflicts well a simple way to answer that question is to just imagine what it would take to improve our religions we forget about getting rid of religion just imagine modifying the ten commandments so as to produce a wiser less divisive ideology right that would be trivially easy to do you know you just swap out the the uh the no graven image clause for something truly useful like [Music] um you know don't keep slaves right don't don't own people and treat them like farm equipment right that's just that would be that would have closed the door theologically to slavery whereas the door as you know is wide open for centuries because the Bible on balance supports slavery certainly doesn't condemn it and you know even Jesus doesn't condemn it so it's easy to see how we could improve the Bible or the Quran you know the the Quran could have been a document that just assiduously spelled out the political equality of men and women but it doesn't do that of course it assiduously spells out the political inequality of men and women right and when women the world over are paying the price for that you know in this very day women in Iran are protesting uh you know fighting and in many cases dying to carve out some space of equality for themselves politically um so it's easy to see how we can improve we can improve these documents and and the resulting in faiths and so there's no argument against doing that right if we could and we we have effectively done that just because we have over the course of many centuries of Smashing religion against secular ethics and scientific rationality we have taught generations of people that being a true fundamentalist just isn't worth it right it's just not it doesn't get you the life you you actually want and are right to want and so most people even fundamentalists frankly in the west have relaxed their hold on religious literalism uh and when and where people don't do that you have something fairly extraordinary in this day and age which is you have something like the Taliban or you know the Islamic State where people are really uh you know really have the courage of their convictions and say you know no no we're going to live by the letter of this thing we're going to keep sex slaves we're going to cut people's heads off and etc etc um and that's what you get so uh it's a um I don't think we're condemned not to make progress um in overcoming our native tribalism and xenophobia because we we've already made immense progress even under the shadow of these divisive and tribal identities right and so the identities could have been much much better the beliefs could have been much better um we could have had something like Enlightenment based secular rationality you know centuries before we did right and and we only got it but in in direct zero-sum contest with a very intolerant and overweening church Authority right I mean scientists were literally dying trying to uh interrogate the the nature of the world um you know it's just you got you got the the house arrest of Galileo as a kind of one of the final one of the final moments here where you know you got a bunch of clerics who are um you know glassy-eyed religious Maniacs who won't look through his telescope and you've got a terrified scientist pretending to believe uh as they do and you know kind of basically disavowing his his thesis um and that's where we left that and we've made progress since then so it's it's um yeah I don't I I don't think we're I may take your point that religion is a is a a very powerful piece of software for us to enshrine our groupishness and it is you know that there's certainly an argument that it allows strangers in in you know in groups you know larger than than you know dunbar's number of 150 uh to cohere rather readily in you know larger in larger social organizations and then you know go to war against other groups right and so that like that's uh it's easy to see how there could could have been a cultural Evolution within which religion proved a very durable feature um because I you know yes if if I really do know something important about you whenever you pay lip service to the same God right if that is a if that can be a you know literally a shibboleth this is where we get the concept um where you you know you prove your your in-group status by making you know costly sacrifices uh to in the same direction um well then that basis for trust is useful but I mean that but that's not the only conceivable version of that kind of trust and you know now we obviously have secular Democratic uh non-otherworldly versions of that yeah so I suddenly don't mean to be fatalistic in the sense of saying human beings a groupish and therefore there's always going to be the same amount of conflict in every age we've clearly seen that there are decades and Centuries with much more conflict and much bloodier confrontations and decades and centers of much less and so I think one of the big tasks of a present and I talk about a lot of that in in my last book Midway experiment is uh to to figure out that social and cultural and political institutions we need in order to keep that groupishness Under Wraps particularly at the moment when our societies are sort of us um but but to push you a little bit further on this point I do think that in uh you know some of the work of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse including you is uh a sort of blaming religion for all of a conflicts in which religion was invoked and in a sense that seems fair natural I think that in many ways was just conflicts where the proximate cause of the 30 Years War of all of those kinds of things but if I think about this as a really large question that social scientists don't have a good way to answer to be ready to ask them but if I think about it with the basic tools of social science which is counter factual causation right I want to ask okay well what would have happened realistically if those religions weren't around it if Christianity hadn't Arisen um you know around the time of be a zero because that's how we count um if if uh the Quran hadn't uh been written a number of centuries later and so on and I actually find it really hard to answer that question because on the one hand uh one really powerful source of conflict would not have been in the world on the other hand um as you're saying one with these powerful source of lat group solidarity would not have been there which might have increased the chance of much more small scale endemic uh Warfare of much more conflict at the level of one Village against the next in ways that might have made it even harder to sustain human civilization um and they may have come into being some alternative set of uh ideologies or set of political or social cultural linguistic racial divisions which would have taken the place of those religious conflicts and it's really hard to know what those would have been like and how much conflict there would have caused so I guess when I think about the last two thousand years of human history I think it's fair to say that religion was a proximate cause of an awful lot of suffering and that's a very good reason to be skeptical of it but I find it hard to have any real handle on whether the world really would have been better if those religions Christianity and Islam and this context in particular had not arisen yeah well I think it's it's okay to remain agnostic about that I mean counterfactuals are hard obviously uh but I mean I I think one could easily argue that that uh you know had had Christianity not won out and and paganism had endured you know that might have been a better Road toward religious tolerance for the next millennium right so um but whatever is the case there even if we knew that you know during the childhood of our species religion was absolutely essential for our survival right even if let's say let's take it right up into the you know to the 20th century let's say we just knew that nothing good was going to happen nothing better could have happened through you know World War II but for our you know our you know full Embrace of our religious Heritage the question is what to do now right I mean what what what's the role of the religion is playing now you know how how um certain do we want a U.S president to be that death is an illusion and that if you're a good Christian you get everything you want after you die right you know when we have a U.S president who says he you know in the in the in the darkness of his closed eyes he consulted his creator and formed an intuition about whether to go to war right is that is that good news uh and how is it how is it how does that confession change if he says he was talking to God through his hair dryer right anything he's talking to God through his hair dryer he's obviously a dangerous lunatic and we have to get him out of the White House right but if he's just doing it on the match well then he's just a Christian right so you know that you know well we can we can grant that there's some distance between what people profess to believe and what they really believe but when people really really believe these things how consoled should we be I mean how much do you want your airline pilot to really believe in the power of Prayer right I mean because if you really believe in the power of Prayer right then that has consequences uh the actual or potential consequences you know what like you know if you imagine a pilot who really believes in the power of prayer right who will fly into a thunderstorm knowing that it's you know it's it's certainly elevating the risk of catastrophe for himself and all his passengers but no no he knows God's you know riding shotgun with him right because he's just a True Believer what that's you know in my view that's a disaster right that's precisely the kind of pilot you don't want so um you can you can multiply those examples uh obviously and I think everywhere what you want are people whose convictions scale with good reasons and good evidence and good arguments and and intuitions that are tutored by intellectual honesty and and you know and honest collisions with the opinions and and evidence of other people so that there there's a certain kind of humility and circumspection and and discomfort with illogic and desire for consistency and I mean the whole toolkit we have that's been so hard one that is eroding in various places not just religious places and we've got this post-modern effort to you know that's happening over in wilkastan that is making everything seem upside down um and to the degree that it's insane and and divisive and intolerable it is those things because it so much resembles a new religion right I mean that's what that's what's so awful about wokeness it's it's intellectual dishonesty and his willingness to sacrifice obviously innocent people as as you know scapegoats um Etc so uh I just think that if we're going to be honest about what we value and how we can Safeguard what we value reason and curiosity and and honesty are are our primary tools there and in addition to love obviously and love but you don't need uh to believe anything irrational in order to recognize that you love other people and that your world and your your life gets better the more you you love other people and the more you have you know good reason to love them the the there are a lot of Scholars who claim that uh the foundations of liberalism and democracy are ultimately religious that a lot of the beliefs with ground the American Republic a lot of the beliefs which ground uh human rights uh actually our religious a little bit kind of uh you know secular version of Christianity which is always trying to hide its true nature its true Origins what what you make of that line of of arguments can we ground a deep belief in this important political values uh without recourse explicit or implicit to religion yeah well I think we obviously can it's just um I mean I think people draw the wrong lesson from the observation that the roots of of much of what we value are religious right so if you go back far enough I mean it's true even today but it gets more and more true as you push back into history and you look at every good thing that human beings have done is true to say that virtually all of those good things most of the time were accomplished by people who believed in God right and and so what lesson should you draw from that um I would say there's no lesson to draw from that because there was simply no one else to do the job right so like you could say that every bridge that was ever built was you know for the most part built by people of Faith you know every hospital every you know for the longest time every scientific experiment run was done by somebody who at least professed some belief in God um but the question is are those beliefs uh actually intrinsic to the Enterprise and essential to it and or are they just adding friction to all the good things to you could do if you if you let those if you let a belief in Zeus you know if you got it off your hard drive right what opportunity costs uh would we be paying if we added more gods to the picture right you know it's like like there's no um no one's tempted to say well what we really need is to is is um we've got to bring back the gods of Mount Olympus because they were playing doing some crucial work for us and you you read Homer and you read Ovid and you read all these good old books and clearly those could not have been written without some nominal nominal at least belief in those Gods um and we got we got the very idea of democracy out of you know Athens and there's a lot of Zeus talk there right so um let's let's bring back it's just a waste of time right and it's it and it it's just it's indecent that we think we anyone would think we would have that kind of time to waste on that project right um given all of our challenges so yeah I would just say that just as you don't actually need a belief that the Bible was divinely inspired to do any good thing in science or engineering or anything else now in the 21st century you don't need it politically and you don't need it you know you don't need it philosophically or in any other way even if you can trace back you can trace the the origin of certain ideas to religious books or religious communities because that's that's going to be true in almost every case ironically this feels like an inverse of the argument I was pushing on you a little bit right it was just to say but I actually find it very convincing as a response to say well look of course a lot of the great artists of the last 2000 years were Christian because if you wanted to have the money to you know do good artworks you had to be a Christian and um you know all the most talented art artists were drawn to you know making churches and so on because that's a way you could really let your town shine um it doesn't mean that we wouldn't have had great art of Christianity hadn't been there and we'd had some different sets of beliefs but in a way that's similar to the argument I was making about conflict right but but if we hadn't had these particular lines of conflicts we may have had different lines which people identified we might have gotten different kinds of conflicts um but I want to move on to um the more contemporary version of the political uh sort of concern I have so a lot of the pushback against atheism had a political context um in which with a very strong Evangelical movement and George W bush we had a moment in which Christianity fell very very politically powerful in the United States and there was very good reason to be concerned for example about efforts to stop teaching evolution in schools or to teach the controversy between the supposed controversy between evolution and um Talent design and so on right um and so I certainly uh believed at the time that uh the influence of Christianity in American politics was really negative but it was dividing the country that it was pushing it towards policies that we didn't like but it was pushing towards a kind of anti-intellectualism like the one which um you know pretends that Evolution intelligent designer to equivalently uh well-founded theories right but we're now uh you know two decades on no 15 years on from from those debates um and the political moment feels very different and I've seen people make the argument and I don't think there's any really conclusive work on whether this is true in political science yet but there seems to be some real plausibility to it but actually the relatively rapid secularization of American society over the last 15 or 20 years has a lot to do with some of our problems today that uh you see uh the people who have depths of Despair who are addicted to painkillers uh be less likely to be religious um because actually people who continue to have some real religious Links at least have some kind of community somewhere to go on a Sunday some people to connect with and that's a really stabilizing social Force uh but actually a lot of the sort of most raw energy behind Donald Trump and the mother movement often is not people who well maybe people who claim to be religious which claim to have some kind of question or Evangelical belief but we're not the people who are actually embedded in a real Church community by and large they are people who are more isolated and therefore more Angry um and of course as you alluded to uh there are people like John mcwhirter and others who argue uh that uh even uh wokeness is a kind of quasi-religion which is filling a space which may be there uh because of the decline of traditional religion on the left side of a political Spectrum as well so um I guess applying but like much larger much more difficult to Fathom set of questions about the actual causal influence of religion over the last 2000 years to just the time period in the United States of the last 15 or 20 years um you know my is secularizing in a certain kind of way Evangelical Christianity plays less important the role in our parties today I mean that 15 or 20 years ago before I realized the best some obvious count examples to that like but recent Supreme Court ruling on on on a wolf and um do you think that are you still a sanguine that a further Retreat of religion would actually help to make our politics more harmonious and sane and so on or has it turned out that these beliefs irrational as they might be uh have actually helped to provide an important social skill and important stabilization to our politics and that its absence is precisely what's Driven the sort of deep cultural division of a country today well we we clearly have a lot of problems I mean I would not deny that and some of those problems could be compounded certainly in in specific people or even in any given Generation by the loss of things to which people were attached right so people are attached to a belief in Santa Claus when you tell them there is no Santa Claus they suffer right I mean this is actually this is true of kids you know the kids don't don't tend to like to hear that Santa Claus is a is a lie their parents told them right um so something is lost but then the question is is there really a Santa Claus shaped hole in someone's life you know that's indelible that needs to be filled with a Santa Claus shaped object at some point in the future or can we grow up right can we can we make progress that gives us greater capacities and greater understanding and a greater basis for love and compassion and self-transcendence and and solidarity and community and everything else we where we want and and a right to one right so so Community is is a very good thing and the p and people who don't have it right or people who have lost it are suffering you know certainly most of them are uh in various ways and that's understandable and that's that is a problem that requires a remedy right but so so yes it could be that we're in this kind of you know um Valley between two high spots where we've kind of get to kind of descended a a a relatively um mediocre Peak on this landscape in search of a higher one but we've had to we've had to go downhill a bit in order to to then you know climb higher on some other part of the landscape and that so it's not that progress is is just monotonically Pleasant where things just get better and better and better and better with every increment of change I don't I don't imagine that and um so yes I we you know we could be paying some kind of price for secularizing and secularizing rapidly and that that's true um and certainly any individual again could feel like he or she has paid a price for losing their faith in God and and faith in God really does do a lot of work for people who really have it I mean especially around the the phenomenon of death and and bereavement right I mean when when you're contemplating your own death or the death of someone you love and you sincerely believe that death is an illusion and that you not only do you not lose anything of importance when you die or when someone Close to You dies that person gets everything they want and they get it for eternity right and you will be reunited with your child or your mother or whoever it is in a few short years and you'll be on the right hand of Jesus and there's just there's no problem right this this universe is just set up to reward and console you in the end right that is if you espouse the right uh opinions while alive in those crucial moments while alive you know even even on death row even if you've you know murdered and and raped your way through life um and you know ordered a chicken dinner as your final meal um as long as you come to Jesus in those in those last moments if that's if that's your faith uh I suppose this works for Islam as well you're good and um whereas someone who doesn't say those things doesn't actually mouth that incantation at the end but has lived a an impeccably moral life uh that person will not be so lucky right so that's I mean we can talk about how perverse that moral worldview is in the end um but the I mean I think I would add here that my big picture concern and then really the I think the proper lens through it should view all of this is that all we have in any moment in time is human conversation with which to orient ourselves collectively right I mean we're faced with this circumstance of being of of having a a truly open-ended a hopefully open-ended challenge of cooperating in the face of uncertainty with now 8 billion strangers for the most part and the question is how good could human life be given that that's our situation and what are the tools by which we can navigate that situation and given that all we have I mean you know all we have is persuasion you know that's a word I know you like um or a force right and so so on the cooperation side and the conversation side it is really a you know a theater of persuasion and so what allows people to persuade each other and what is there to appeal to it's you know patently obvious to me that you can't appeal to non-negotiable ancient dogmas for which there is no evidence uh and which are not universally subscribed right um so really at bottom there is nothing that a Christian and Muslim can agree about when it when it really comes when push comes to shove you know when it comes to the you know the question of the Divinity of Jesus say um which the Christians really do care about and the Muslims really do repudiate right um and that's a problem right that's not the best situation that's not the best parameter aren't the best parameters for a conversation that is going to engineer real open-ended uh solutions to an a an absolute blizzard of coordination problems that we have to solve in real time so as not to ruin everything you know so the nature is going to be throwing up pandemics and we may throw up some ourselves through you know malfeasance in various Labs or deliberately through terrorism uh and we're going to have a host of other problems and then the question is how can we rationally and compassionately interact with each other so as to solve those problems and the cast of mind that is certain about religion I would argue and requires you know no proof uh and as and has bent upon misconstruing you know every scintilla of pseudo-proof as proof positive of its dogmas that is the cast of mine that brings us other irrational eruptions of of [Music] um of hatred and and division like you know something like Q Anon right we've got some the tens of millions of people in American society right now who claim to believe that the world is being run by child raping cannibals now again we can wonder whether or not they really do believe these things and what I mean because the claims are as Preposterous as can be but they're not really much more Preposterous than the claims of religion they're just you know modern tweaks on those claims and that's and it's it's those those kinds of people again the tens of millions of them in our society have been trained to think that way right I mean that's that's the level the level of intellectual honesty that gets you queuing on to my eye is exactly the level that gets you Evangelical Christianity and all of its Bible conviction but in what sense have people been trained to uh adhere to Q Anon right so so you know religion they've been trained to believe for two thousand years through very sophisticated institutions right through parochial schools and Sunday schools and uh youth groups and you know a broader culture all of which um you know imbues the idea that uh you know Christianity is uh uh irrational and true set of beliefs right so I buy the claim there that there's this huge Machinery that keeps it going right but what seems to have happened and obviously some people believe both questions to have happened is that actually as the belief of these uh organized religions with somewhat stable theologies has declined you know you and I hoped that people would Embrace science and rationality and and evidence-based reasoning and the basic values of the Enlightenment and all of those things that you and I equally care about right but what seems to be happening is that suddenly it becomes a lot easier to get a whole bunch of people to believe in cure non-conspiracy theories and so I would I would think that there's massive overlap between Q Anon and Evangelical Christianity I mean you correct me if I'm wrong I don't know if any polling exists on this topic but I would bet these are not for the most part atheists right I would you know sight unseen I would bet a fair amount of money that that atheism does not correlate with Q Anon and so my sense and again he does yeah I I contacted a particular Poll for I've looked at a bunch of polls and those of the impression I got from them is that probably somebody's in qnon is likely to be a Christian for us also a fast share of non-christians but I think the less likely to be a member of uh an organized church so we're much less likely to actually go to church on Sunday right we're less likely to have real meaningful ties to a Christian Community yeah yeah well so I mean we I mean q Anon is not it's it's a it's it's more complicated perhaps than I've suggested in in by making that comparison because it it's a social and political phenomenon and it's not it's obviously not otherworldly and and uh eschatological like a like a religion like Christianity so it's it's it's it's a Venn diagram and these are kind of overlapping sets of concerns but it's not the same same set um I would I would just say that you just it's hard to be reasonable and rational right and it doesn't come naturally to us and as you mentioned Jonathan height right one of the things he emphasizes in his work is just how irrational we tend to be even when we profess to be rational right so much of our reasoning on his account is a lawyer a lawyerly post-hoc self-active self-persuasion that you know our gut intuitions are Justified but we got there based on our intuitions you know let's say the moral intuition that certain things are are disgusting or you know worth condemning um and then we don't really reason like moral philosophers we reason like lawyers and and publicists you know now I don't know Jonathan and I don't totally agree about that but um and and more important I mean the place where we I think we diverge more is I think any one of us or any large you know or or individuals by the Millions can make a fair amount of progress I mean this is what education is I mean what does it mean to actually be educated and what does it mean to live a an examined life beyond you know four years of college you know does education does moral education and intellectual growth stop at you know your senior year in college or does it you know push into graduate school and stop there or does it you know or do we you know if we're lucky do we each get like a you know a 60-year or 70-year post-doc in becoming a mensch right and I I think we do and there are ways to do that um and you know intellectual honesty and uh you know you know a few other you know crucial pieces of software um are are hard one you know and it takes it takes a lot of um it takes culture it takes a why a wise culture to intrude into your life and into your you know your rampant wishful thinking um and it takes a certain tolerance for the discomfort of the you know those collisions um to actually make progress and to grow but there's a difference between two different questions right one of which is is it part of the most meaningful Life to Live and examined life and does that require you to interrogate these beliefs that are passed down from Grandma and I think both you and I and probably a lot of listeners to this podcast are committed to an Enterprise right that's why we're the sorts of people you and I who make our living through thinking and talking and writing about the world that's why the people who listen to us right now are taking you know a long amount of time out of a day to to to think about these big questions right um but not everybody has bad preference right some people that's just not what they see is the meaning of a life and this is not what we care about but that's that's one kind of question another question is well if everybody lived an examined life like that or they really try to or simply if those ideas will no longer effectually passed down from grammar to to grandchild would the world become a better place and to go back a couple of beads what you are saying is hey look you know perhaps it's true that when you look at this political moment in the United States and many other countries around the world there's there seems to be a kind of argument that there's some pain from the loss of uh uh religion secularization seems to be leading uh perhaps to a greater availability of people who uh can believe in Q Anon who can believe in in in in you know the uh great uh uh positive uh impact of people like Donald Trump who who can sort of substitute all religious beliefs with a faith and some kind of woke ideology right um but eventually that'll go away right we're in a kind of bad part of a U-shaped curve right but once sort of everybody is gonna uh rid themselves of these beliefs that actually will be better but what if that's not the case right what are the people who are actually capable and interested in re-examined life as as we talked about it are rarely small in number and when you untether people from those uh traditional beliefs we have many downsides but also some upsides in filling empty space and and and and then coming with certain moral precepts actually we're gonna get more and more and more people being willing to believe Q Anon and all kinds of other ideologies and they might shift incredibly rapidly from one ideology to another um they might be able we might end up believing some ideologies but are much more hateful than than traditional religions and and so it doesn't turn out that we're at the bottom of a U-shaped curve it it might turn out nowhere in the middle of a line but just you know points down so so I guess why should we have this faith that um this phenomena we're seeing at the moment are this temporary phenomenon that's going to get better uh rather than that they are a harbinger of what will happen in a pretty atomized Society like the United States when it seems likely given reasons and Trends religion comes to play an even smaller role here than it does at the moment well the question seems to presuppose that we have a choice right that we can decide to pull the brakes on secularization or atheism and preserve these ancient beliefs in good standing among all the people who are apparently losing them right well not necessarily you can just I'm just interested to sort of as somebody who's not business myself and who's based empathetic to Enterprise I'm just trying to understand you know how much we blame religion for the bad things in the past and how much how profier should we have for that decline that's an important question whether or not you think that there's some meaningful way to affect it I certainly am not about to say we should somehow try and you know make everybody believe in an ideology or instead of you know theological views that I myself don't believe in that I think it's unlikely that I'm going to come you know end up in that position um but I do want to know should I be hopeful for for more secularization in the United States or should I actually feel quite uneasy about it because it might have this really bad political consequences well I think you should be um I think we should all be increasingly allergic to dogmatism especially when when the dogmas are um you know obviously leading to needless human suffering and division right so uh so like again it's useful to look at specific religious ideas or you know any ideas political ideas and then ask the question well do we keep this you know if we had a choice would we want to would we want to reinvent this crazy idea uh because it's so useful right so and just you just take your pick you know homosexuality is immoral right like that that comes to us courtesy of religion you know maybe it has older Roots still but it's certainly been enshrined in various religions uh how useful is it you know how how good is our world um how improved is it socially and ethically that millions and millions of people insist that this Dogma is true without any I mean it is the very essence of a dog when they don't have a real justification for it it's just it's what they think is God has insisted is true and if God had insisted otherwise presumably they would believe that you know you could imagine you know it had uh the you know the ancient Greeks gotten their hands on the Bible at The crucial moment they might have relaxed some of that you know homophobia and we would have you know certainly you know gay people through the generations would have lived in a different world had that been the case right he wouldn't have had Oscar a while thrown in in a in prison for being gay um and you know that so that that would have been that good I don't see anything you know I don't see if we could do this piecemeal and just strip out specific dogmas I I think we could do that wisely and and we're right to want to do that now and we've been doing that obviously politically over time if the problem is we're we're doing it with with you know one hand tied behind our back because the people you know even the people who are doing it quite heroically for the most part are still attached to these religious myths and these religious books and these religious identities I mean either as uh you know our mutual friend Andrew Sullivan right who's done as much as anyone uh and perhaps more than anyone in American society to to get us into the end zone where we now have gay marriage being the law of the land right I mean he you know he almost did that single-handedly to my eye but he's a believing Catholic and you know he and I have debated these issues and he can't you know this he any I mean Andrew is fantastic he's brilliant but but anyone who is forced to be on the other side of this debate from me on this topic loses 30 IQ points just based on their religious attachment right I mean the ballast they're carrying just can't get up the hill right it's just um and uh so yeah it would be better had God not said that homosexuality was a sin in the various ways he said it uh in both the Old and New Testament and um there are a hundred a hundred very important examples like that that where we could make our world a better place and leave and you know an edit that you know edit these books if we could edit them uh which again which most you know certainly modern Cosmopolitan well-educated religious people do by their disregard of those passages right people effectively edit the books by just deciding not to pay attention to the parts they don't like and but I'm just saying we could be more intellectually honest than that and recognize that all we've got is human conversation and the the question is do we want a 21st century conversation where we Avail ourselves of all the useful Concepts and ideas insofar as they are useful and we can take you know we can take what we like from Shakespeare and what we like from Pericles and what we like from Saint Paul and what we like from Jesus and what we like from the Quran and and consider it a bequest from prior generations of merely human but still you know fairly incandescent wisdom um which we can improve upon hopefully as we you know push into the into the unknown future uh thank you so much I'm gonna move on from religion um and uh try and understand how you think about this cultural moment um you know I'm struck thinking about the about 15 years that I've now spent in the United States how much the basic intellectual layer of a land has transformed and it seems to me that the two fundamental changes have been uh the transformation of the American right um from uh the Republican party of George W bush which as we've been invoking was uh not to be celebrated in every respect which had many flaws within it um but two Republican party of some elect Donald Trump which I do think is just a fundamentally bigger threat to to American democracy and to decency um and then on the other hand the sort of strange transformation of the left uh in which uh this sort of single-minded focus on uh identity and the marginalization of uh ethnic religious racial sexual gender groups has taken Center place in a way that wasn't the case 15 years ago and has sometimes not always but sometimes gone hand in hand with a real Embrace and tolerance for uh pretty liberal ideas um sort of how worried are you about each of these forces the Confluence of his forces and is this an intellectual moment that's going to pass or is this setting up the battle lines for the politics of the next 25 50 years well I you know I'm not really in the game of making predictions across any time Horizon of that sort I mean I I think the one prediction I feel like I could make is that if Trump or any any anyone sufficiently trumpist runs in 2024 for the presidency the woke problem doesn't go away anytime soon I I think it I think really you know if we had a normal Republican candidate for 2024 I feel that the wokeness you know the the the moral derangement of the left has reached some kind of Tipping Point and the vapors will dissipate you know on their own but the the craziness of trumpistan is so provocative and so seemingly justifying of the craziness in waukestan that they're really they just they mutually create one another at this point so if Trump runs in 2024 and you know if he wins um or somebody who is just appealing to the trumpist cult with the same same politics wins uh I just yeah I think we I have no I then I have no intuitions as to how long the thing lasts but I'd really I really do feel I agree with you with Dusty to seem seem to go both ways right so certainly I think one of the reasons why ideas became so hegemonic not just the American left but in some mainstream institutions um in the second half of it 2010s was that when Trump was in office it both seemed to justify uh the most extreme claims um and it made it very toxic to argue against any leveling position because you would be seen as running interference for Trump and conversely I think one of the reasons why it's so hard to beat Donald Trump why somebody who's not in fact very popular in the breadth of the American population can nevertheless come close to winning re-election 2020 and might come close or might in fact succeed in winning in 2024 is that so many Americans look at what's happened on the left and what looks at what the kind of abuses that happen in some mainstream institutions and say well I don't trust these guys I may as well hold my nose and vote for Trump so so you know it doesn't seems to be a convenient and yang effect here yeah yeah no I I agree and it it worries me and it's really um I mean I don't know I don't know what the variables are that will determine whether Trump runs and whether he wins at this point I think if I the truth is I and this is something that you know I would love your opinion on I don't know who the Democrats will or should run against him right I mean like I obvious it just seems obvious to me that it can't be Biden and it can't be Harris so you know the the president and the vice president in in my mind are unelectable so who runs I I don't know um but if the Democratic Party can't recognize that you know and just has to run Biden or has to run Harris I think we've got a real problem and if they run somebody else and that person doubles down on on identity politics I think we have a real problem so yeah I I do if we could get normal you know politically normal they're totally uninspiring left and right uh I think many things improve for us uh whatever other challenges await us I mean we're you know we could be on the cusp of of World War III and still I think you know things get things get better if we could just find a way of of turning those two knobs on the left and the right why is that so hard you know when I look at opinion polls and particular issues uh most Americans are pretty reasonable even on really contested questions like abortion you know most Americans broadly favor a set of laws which uh most European countries have on the books Germany France Italy uh Spain Sweden Denmark and various forms have on the books but which no American political party at this point actually institutionally stands for um and you know I just picked that because that's one of the most controversial and one of the most seemingly polarized issues and actually it turns out that there is a majority in the United States that uh famous laws which broadly say that you should have free access to abortion in the first trimester and some significant restrictions after that so obviously with exceptions in cases of serious threat to the life of a mother and so on um why is it that uh on issue after issue after issue what average Americans believe is actually pretty reasonable um and yet political parties don't seem to cater for that um they don't seem to be able to set themselves up in such a way as to you know win a crushing majority and then perhaps Force the other political party to follow suit and moderate as well um well again this is a topic I think you know much more about than I do but I would have um I would guess that it has something to do with our you know our two-party system and our primary system and our our uh just the actual mechanics by which we elect people um I would also say that it probably has something to do with the religiosity of America you know the fact that the the left has you know for as long as we've been alive you know for as long as there's been a country uh has been in opposition to uh some version of theocracy right and that has morphed that morphed under Trump and we have you know the really grotesque spectacle of you know Evangelical Christians uh join in a person a a obviously unchristian personality cult so as to Ram through their their Theocratic agenda right and um and there is a I think it's even it's even it's not quite as cynical and instrumental as all that I really do think there's a love for Trump that is sincere right it's not just they're not just using him as a battering ram I think a lot of these these um believing Christians really do really are part of the personality cult I mean they really do admire him deeply and um and that's pretty inscrutable given that he you know in his every poor represents the Nullification of Christian values or at least standard Christian values right um so there's more it's you know it's it's complex um but it is cultic right and it has you know and what to call it cultic is to say that it's unreasoning and not amenable to reason and that you know persuasion fails and you got people who are just not open to argument and evidence and there's just nothing that could prove as a as a um a reductio ad absurdum of their beliefs you know even when it is in fact a reductio and and they're they're in conflict with themselves and they just refuse to acknowledge it right and so they've kicked themselves loose of the Earth and there's no talking to them right so then so then the question is what to do when you get a sufficient number of people like that uh you know shrieking on the sidewalks of your society and that's the political problem we've got it sounded as full you were saying a little while ago that you know if only Trump and and sort of one of his followers doesn't win again in 2024 of only the sort of threat from the anti-democratic right would subside a little bit it feels like we're at a turning point where people are willing to reject some of the sort of more out their ideas that have somehow been able to capture mainstream institutions in the last five or seven years um that feels like you're being more optimistic one moment than the other so how optimistic or pessimistic should we be well yeah well the truth is I don't know how hopeful that uh that prediction is I mean it does feel somehow contaminated by hope and I don't know how influenced it is by my just having paid so much attention to this issue and gotten so tired of it that it's just I I just feel like oh this is just there's no way this is gonna this Mania is going to continue for that much longer but I just I do feel like more and more people behind behind closed doors have have uh broken the spell right I mean it's just like you just okay there is I mean the problem is on the left I mean so there's there really there's some crucial asymmetries here to notice and they're and they're they make it difficult to talk about this you know our politics certainly in in short form and in anything like sound bites in a rational way but I mean what's wrong with the far right is so obvious uh that it it almost requires no discussion I mean like what's wrong with being a Neo-Nazi what's wrong with being a a true xenophobe what's wrong they say it's like that's just it's not ethically interesting or intellectually interesting to try to to parse that there's really nothing to parse and that's why I spend very little time thinking about it although you know I am worried about the far right and I'm worried about this the possibility of far-right violence and I'm worried about the the weird variants in trumpistan that are you know not quite necessarily far right in in all the in all the usual ways but they're profoundly undemocratic and they're and they're profoundly disordered by bad ideas um but the far left and its influence on the rest of culture and this influence on our on our are really our core institutions you know is is far harder to understand it's far more confusing to well-educated and well-intentioned people like what's wrong with black lives matter I said something you know in passing that seemed to disparage black lives matter what are you insane I mean how can you how can it be anything wrong with black lives matter don't black lives matter Sam what you you racist bastard right like that that is a it requires a conversation to get many ordinary liberals for who you know who have day jobs and don't spend you know all their time in the weeds of Twitter you know reading Thomas Chatterton Williams and and and others who have been so eloquent on this topic um what could be wrong with black lives matter it's it's just it is you're going to default to thinking that is a perfect articulation of the political needs of the moment and it was obvious when you watched the murder of George Floyd that we had witnessed a racist lynching right I mean that that you know I saw it with my own eyes right um what more is there to say about that and and the inclination to say any more about that betrays um some unwholesome motive if not Frank racism on your part right or a racist disregard of the problem of racism and the suffering of born of inequality in our society right so it's it's it's harder to talk about and yet it is no less dishonest ibram X Kennedy is no less dishonest than uh you know some analogous lunatic on the right I mean I just think he is poisonously dishonest right and he won't he won't debate anyone who could mop the floor with him and reveal his dishonesty right he won't talk to Glenn Lowry or John McWhorter or Coleman Hughes or Thomas Chatterton Williams or any of these guys who have his number right um and and he he's built a temple of white guilt for himself and and there are other priests in this Temple and it's a good game it's a good gig and it works at the Aspen ideas Festival right and um but what is really happening is we have our core institutions from The New York Times to Harvard to our scientific journals to Hollywood to you know media generally that's not right wing all of it be in vitiated by public displays of dishonesty and masochism and Frank's stupidity that should be intolerable to all of us and I think is it is growing intolerable and um if we could just get Trump out of the picture I think people could on the left could begin to be publicly honest about it right because privately they're being honest about it you know I'm not encountering the same kind of confusion from people who are not who are still terrified to say anything in public but in private they they see the world as I do they know it may hear just to take one claim that sort of cuts through the the morasser okay I mean not only I mean you said that there's not a lot of of active racism keeping uh you know qualified black people out of good jobs and and educational opportunities and all the rest I mean says something like that I mean to you can go further than that you can say that you know at the same level of qualification it is a positive advantage to be black at this point in almost any part of society that you know it would be truly desirable to a qualified candidate whether it's you're looking for an educational opportunity or you want to work in Media or do you want to work in in you know in Tech or in you know if a Fortune 500 company um being a black applicant or being a you know a person of color more generally um at the same level of qualification your America is your oyster at this moment I mean you you this is just a fact right you talk to you talk to anyone at any of these companies you talk to anyone in an Ivy League institution in admissions you talk to I mean it's just you talk to any non-profit they are desperate to hire qualified people of color and if you're white or you're Asian you are at a positive disadvantage right generally speaking right in medical schools and it's just it is a fact and basically everyone knows it right and so what's happening on the left is you have a generation of activists determined to lie about all of that determined to say that not only is that not true the opposite is true and racism is the cause right the reason why they're not more black cardiologists in your local hospital is because of racism right the reason why there's not 13 of everyone everywhere in good in good places in our society is racism today and it's just not true the is the opposite is true you know the the it's it's just you just look at at um I mean it admissions criteria for colleges are um you know this problem in microcosm it's like the it is just a fact that Harvard has to have a racist policy against Asians now in order to meet its affirmative action goals right and this is something that's good you know I think is going to reach the Supreme Court it's a in short order um it's um so it's it's a line about all of that that is so divisive and and the gaslighting about all of that and again again I don't want to be read as somebody who's not concerned and simple concerned about and sympathetic too the the very real disparities in our society I mean I just I I want these disparities to uh uh be remediated in some way and it's the question is how to do that but calling finding racists where no racists exist you know rolling into the the board of a company that is desperate to hire a qualified people of color uh and feels exactly as you and I do about the divisions in our society rolling in there as Robin D'Angelo and calling everyone racist and taking them to tasks for their white privilege um that is just um again that it it is a it is a symptom of a moral Panic it is leading to cultic behavior that is mirroring the cultic behavior of the the right and and of the personality Cult of trump um and it's driving everyone crazy I I have many follow-up questions I I would love to ask you but but um I've taken a lot of your time and I want to uh make sure to end on a topic that I'm perhaps the least comfortable with in this entire conversation and that's meditation um you are a great evangelist of of meditation um uh you talk powerfully about it's it's it's it's its effects um for some of the same reasons but make me skeptical of religion I'm also skeptical of meditation which is to say I didn't grow up with it I'm not the sort of person to whom Holiness speaks you know I don't like the atmosphere of church where you're supposed to sit still and be quiet and have a facial expression which indicates um you know that that you're in the spirit in the presence of some kind of important thing so it's just it's not my vibe um and all of those things make me reluctant about giving meditation a try I've never probably tried to meditate why am I wrong about this why should I go and and download your app or download some other kind of app or go to some kind of meeting or Retreat and actually uh try to engage in this practice um yeah so they're you know generally speaking they're they're two routes into taking meditation seriously or becoming sufficiently interested in it that you would um you'd pay you know you'd pay attention to it and look into it and and begin practicing it um one is just curiosity I mean just it's just you wanting to know more about what it's like to be you wanting to know what more about your mind um wanted to discover what there may be to discover if you could only pay closer attention to your experience right and meditation is the method by which you would pay more attention to your experience um but the more the I think the more common path and it's not antithetical to that I mean you can have both motives but the more common motive is just to have become sensitized to your psychological suffering and to find certain types of suffering you know less and less um tolerable and to become interested in the mechanics of all that like which is why is it that you can't be your best self in every moment you know why why is it that you you have you got what you wanted you worked so hard to get this thing and now you have it and the half-life of your gratification is about 15 minutes and now you're unhappy again right or you're wanting something else or you're you know you're you're otherwise conflicted right you're just not you know each of us goes through our day knowing what it's like to be really happy I mean most I mean not you not everyone has had this experience I mean there are people who are unlucky you know genetically and just circumstantially and they they don't have the free attention to even think about happiness really I mean they've got they've got too many problems they're caught in a civil war or they're too poor they're they're too unhealthy or whatever it is but but most of us you know in the course of Our Lives you know at some point in childhood and and at some points thereafter have have seen the clouds break and if we've had we've been in we know what it's like to have a ray of sunshine right we know what we know what Joy is like we know what what real ease of being is like and the question is why is that not instantaneously available to us and again is there some way of being is there some way of being with the present moment you know whatever is arising uh in it that allows you to feel more and more of that right I mean do you actually need good reasons to be happy or is it possible to be happy before anything happens before anything changes just in the very midst of of uh even a struggle right and you know meditation isn't the only tool by which to to address this you know so you know problems of this sort right I mean it's like you know uh conceptual reframing of experience is is also very powerful I mean you can learn to think about your experience differently um you can tell yourself a different story about you know what you know various experiences mean and and those stories have different you know stories have a lot of power but at a layer but beneath that it's possible to notice that you're spending virtually every waking moment lost in thought you know you're having a conversation with yourself that sounds like white noise and it just feels like yourself you know you just you're you wake up from you're very likely a dream which you dimly remember uh in the morning and then you're kind of chased out of bed by your thoughts and you think think think think throughout the day uh and the structure of this thinking is somewhat paradoxical I mean you're at you're literally in many cases you're literally talking to someone who isn't there I mean you're telling yourself things you already know you're replaying conversations that happened or almost happened or may yet happen and you're you're only kind of dimly aware of your present moment experience through this cacophony of of discursive thought and you're tending not to notice any of that and all of that feels like me as the subject and center of my experience and viewed from that side meditation is actually not a tool or a practice or anything you're adding to your life once you discover how to do it meditation is is nothing more than than ceasing to do something you're doing helplessly now and it's ceasing to be distracted by thought it ceasing to be identified with each passing thought and it's it's the ability to notice thought itself as an appearance in Consciousness so you've got sights and sounds and Sensations and emotions and you have thoughts and um they're all appearing spontaneously in this kind of wide open space of of conscious awareness um and when you can step back and just notice thoughts as thoughts and notice what the mind is like prior to their arising and in the very midst of their arising but not when it's you know trimmed down to being identified with each next one the Mind becomes a very different place it becomes it's much more expansive and it becomes and you begin to notice that there's a freedom even in the midst of struggle right there's a freedom even in the midst of stress that is that that can become more and more palpable and you can sort of solve your basic problem of you know how can I be in the world in a way that is is truly fulfilling without actually changing the world it's I'm not saying that you know there aren't projects worth pursuing I mean we spent this whole conversation talking about immense social projects that are you know that we both desperately want to pursue um and there's no question that life can get better in all kinds of material and and social ways but there's a psychological layer to this which is uh productive of so much else that that ails us right that is really solved uh by recognizing that virtually all of you are suffering is the product of thought and identification with thought and it's certainly any suffering Beyond immediate you know sensory pain in the present moment any suffering born of past and future you know your your regrets about the past and your fears about the future that the mechanism by which by which that is you know doled out to you in the present is thinking without knowing that you're thinking right and meditation is nothing other than being able to wake up from that dream and then then you have another degree of Freedom then you can decide okay well is it is it worth being angry about this thing that I was just helplessly angry about a moment ago Sam Harris thank you so much for this mom of conversation yeah thank you Asha yeah good luck good luck with what you're doing I admire the platform you've built and I'm a subscriber to to your newsletter and so keep going I love your podcast it's uh it's uh it's great to see thank you that's that's a great honor coming from you until next time

Channel: Persuasion

Views: 162,871

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Id: Ct_q-eXF8ko

Length: 89min 3sec (5343 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2022