Social animal David Brooks

and I got my current job I was given a

good piece of advice which was to

interview three politicians every day

and from that much contact with

politicians I can tell you they’re all

emotional freaks of one sort or another

they have what I call logorrhea dementia

which is they talk so much they drive

themselves insane

but what they do have is incredible

social skills when you meet them they

lock into you they look you in the eye

they invade your personal space they

massage the back of your head I had

dinner with a Republican senator several

months ago who kept his hand on my inner

thigh throughout the whole meal

squeezing it I once this was years ago I

saw a Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle meet in

the well of the Senate and they were

friends and they hugged each other and

they were laughing and their faces were

like this far apart and they were moving

and grinding and moving their arms up

and down each other and I was like get a

room I don’t want to see this but they

have those social skills at another case

last election cycle I was following Mitt

Romney around New Hampshire and he was

campaigning with his five perfect sons

bit chip rip zip lip and dip and and

he’s going into a diner and he goes to

the diner introduce himself to a family

and says what village are you from in

New Hampshire and then he described the

home he owned in their village and then

he so he goes around the room and then

as he’s leaving the diner he first names

almost everybody he’s just met I was

like okay that’s social skill but the

paradox is when a lot of these people

slip into the policy-making mode that

social awareness vanishes and they tart

talking about like accountants so in the

course of my career I’ve covered a

series of failures we sent economists in

the Soviet Union with privatization

plans when it broke up and what they

really lacked was social trust we

invaded Iraq with the military oblivious

to the cultural and psychological

realities we had a financial regulatory

regime based on the assumptions that

traders were rational creatures who

wouldn’t do anything stupid for 30 years

I’ve been covering school reform and

we’ve basically reorganized the bureau

edek boxes charters private schools

vouchers but we’ve had disappointing

results year after year and the fact is

people learn from people they love and

if you’re not talking about the

individual relationship between a

teacher and a student you’re not talking

about that reality but that reality is

expunged from our policymaking process

and so that’s led to a question for me

why are the most socially attuned people

on earth completely dehumanized when

they think about policy and I came to

the conclusion this is a symptom of a

larger problem that for centuries we’ve

inherited a view of human nature based

on the notion that were divided selves

that reason is separated from the

emotions and that society progresses to

the extent that reason can suppress the

passions and it’s led to a view of human

nature that were rational individuals

who respond and straightforward ways to

incentives and it’s led to ways of

seeing the world where people try to use

the assumptions of physics to measure

how human behavior is and it’s produced

a great amputation a shallow view of

human nature we’re really good at

talking about material things but we’re

really bad at talking about emotions

we’re really good at talking about

skills and safety and health were really

bad at talking about character Allister

McIntyre the famous philosopher said

that we have the concepts of the ancient

morality of virtue on or goodness but we

no longer have a system by which to

connect them and so this has led to a

shallow path and politics but also in a

whole range of human endeavors you can

see it in the way we raise our young

kids you go to an elementary school at

3:00 in the afternoon and you watch the

kids come out and they’re wearing these

eighty pound backpacks that if the wind

blows them over they’re like beetles

stuck there on the ground you see these

cars that drive up usually it’s sobs and

Audi’s in Volvo’s because in certain

neighborhoods it’s socially acceptable

to have a luxury car so long as it comes

from a country hostile to US foreign

policy that’s fine

they get picked up by these creatures

I’ve called uber moms who are highly

successful career women who’ve taken

time off to make sure all their kids get

into Harvard and you can usually tell

the uber moms because they actually

weigh less than their own children so at

the moment of conception they’re doing

little butt exercises the babies plop

out they’re flashing Mandarin flashcards

with the things driving them home and

they wanted to be enlightened so they

take them to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream

company with its own foreign policy and

one of my books I joke that Ben and

Jerry’s should make a passive his

toothpaste doesn’t kill germs just ask

them to leave be a big seller and then

they go to Whole Foods to get their baby

formula and you know Whole Foods is one

of those progressive grocery stores

where all the cashiers look like they’re

on loan from Amnesty International they

buy we buy these seaweed based snacks

they’re called veggie booty with kale

which is their kids at home home and say

mom mom I want to snack that a whole

prevent colon rectal cancer and so the

kids are raised in a certain way jumping

through achievement hopes are the things

we can measure SAT prep OBO soccer

practice they get into competitive

colleges they get good jobs and

sometimes they make a success of

themselves in a superficial manner and

they make a ton of money and sometimes

you can see them at vacation places like

Jackson Hole or Aspen and they’re

they’ve become

elegant and slender they don’t really

have thighs they just have one elegant

calf on top of another they have kids of

their own and they’ve sort of achieved a

genetic miracle by marrying beautiful

people so their grand moms look like

Gertrude Stein their daughters look like

Halle Berry

I don’t know how they’ve done that they

get there and they realize that they

it’s fashionable now to have dogs 1/3 as

tall as your ceiling heights so they’ve

got these furries 160 pound dogs look

like velociraptors all named after Jane

Austen characters and then when they get

old they haven’t really developed a

philosophy of life but they’ve decided

that I’ve been successful at everything

I’m just not going to die and so they

hire personal trainers they’re popping

cialis like breath mints you see them on

the mountains up there they’re

cross-country ski

up the mountain with these grim

expressions that make Dick Cheney look

like Jerry Lewis and sort of as they

whizzed by you it’s like being passed by

a little iron raisinet going up the hill

and so this is part of what life is but

it’s not all of what life is and over

the past few years I think we’ve been

given a deeper view of human nature and

a deeper view of who we are and it’s not

based on theology or philosophy it’s in

the study of the mind across all these

spheres of research from neuroscience

the cognitive science behavioral

economists psychologists sociology we’re

developing a revolution in consciousness

and when you synthesize it all it’s

giving us a new view of human nature and

far from being a coldly materialistic

view of nature it’s a new humanism it’s

a new enchantment and I think when you

synthesize this research you start with

three key insights the first insight is

that while the conscious mind writes the

autobiography of our species the

unconscious mind does most of the work

and so one way to formulate that assists

the human mind can take in millions of

pieces of information a minute of which

can be consciously aware of about 40 and

this leads to oddities one of my

favorite is that people named Dennis are

disproportionately likely to become

dentists people named Lawrence become

lawyers because unconsciously we

gravitate toward things that sound

familiar

which is why I’ve named my daughter

President of the United States Brooks

another finding is that the unconscious

far from being dumb and sexualized it’s

actually quite smart so one of the most

cognitively demanding things we do is

buy furniture it’s really hard to

imagine a sofa how it’s gonna look in

your house and the way you should do

that is sort of study the furniture let

it marinate in your mind distract

yourself and then a few days later go

with your gut because unconsciously

you’ve figured it out the second insight

is that emotions are at the center of

our thinking people with strokes and

lesions in the emotion processing parts

of the brain are not super smart they’re

actually quite sometimes quite helpless

and the giant in the field is in the

room tonight and is speaking tomorrow

morning Antonio Damasio

and one of the things he’s really shown

us is that emotions are not separate

from reason but they are the foundation

of reason because they tell us what to

value and so reading and educating your

emotions is one of the central

activities of wisdom now I’m a

middle-aged guy I’m not exactly

comfortable with emotions one of my

favorite brain stories described these

middle-aged guys they put him into a

brain scan machine this is apocryphal by

the way but I don’t care

and it and they have them watch a horror

movie and then they had some them

describe their feelings toward their

wives and the the brain scans were

identical in both activities it was just

sheer terror so me talking about emotion

is like Gandhi talking about gluttony

but it is the central organizing process

of the way we think it tells us what to

imprint a brain is the record of the

feelings of a life and the third insight

is that we’re not primarily

self-contained individuals we’re social

animals not rational animals we emerge

out of relationships and we are deeply

interpenetrated one with another and so

when we see another person we reenact on

our own minds what we see in their minds

when we watch a car chase in a movie we

it’s almost as if we are subtly having a

car chase when we watch pornography it’s

a little like having sex though probably

not as good and you see this in when

lovers walk down the street when a crowd

in Egypt or Tunisia gets caught up in an

emotional contagion the deep

interpenetrate

and this revolution and who we are

gives us a different way of seeing I

think politics a different way most

importantly of seeing human capital we

are now children of the French

enlightenment

we believe that reason is the highest of

the faculties but I think this research

shows that the British enlightenment of

the Scottish enlightenment with David

Hume Adam Smith actually had a better

handle on who we are that reason is

often weak our sentiments are strong and

our sentiments are often trustworthy and

this works corrects that bias in our

culture that dehumanizing bias it gives

us a deeper sense of what it actually

takes for us to thrive in this life when

we think about human capital we think

about the things we can measure easily

things like grades SATs degrees the

number of year and for schooling what it

really takes to do well to leave a

meaningful life are things that are

deeper things we don’t really even have

words for and so let me list just a

couple of things I think this research

points us toward trying to understand

the first gift our talent is mind-sight

the ability to enter into other people’s

minds and learn what they have to offer

babies come with this ability meltzoff

who’s at the University of Washington

leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes

old he wagged his tongue at the baby the

baby wagged her tongue back babies are

born two interpenetrating two moms minds

and to download what they find they’re

models of how to understand reality in

the United States fifty-five percent of

babies have a deep two-way conversation

with mom and they learn models to how to

relate to other people and those people

have models of how to relate have a huge

head start in life scientists at the

University of Minnesota did a study in

which they could predict was 77 percent

accuracy at age 18 months who was gonna

graduate from high school based on who

had good attachment with mom 20 percent

of kids do not have those relationships

they are what we call avoidant lis

attached they have trouble relating to

other people they go through life like

sailboats tacking into the wind wanting

to get close to people but not really

having

models of how to do that and so this is

one skill of how to Hoover up knowledge

one from another a second skill is

equipoise the ability to have the

serenity to read the biases and failures

in your own mind so for example we are

overconfidence machines 95% of our

professors report that they are above

average teachers 96% of college students

say they have above-average social

skills

Time magazine asked Americans are you in

the top 1% of earners 19% of Americans

are in the top 1% this is a gender

linked trait by the way men drown at

twice the rate as women because men

think they can swim across that lake but

some people have the ability and

awareness of their own biases their own

overconfidence they have a pistola

logical modesty

they are open-minded in the face of

ambiguity they are able to adjust

strength of the conclusions to the

strength of their evidence they are

curious and these traits are often

unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ the

third trade is Metis what we might call

street smarts it’s a Greek word it’s a

sensitivity to the physical environment

the ability to pick out patterns in an

environment derive a gist one of my

colleagues at The Times did a great

story about soldiers in Iraq who could

look down the street and detect somehow

whether there was an ie D Al and mind in

the street they couldn’t tell you how

they did it but they could feel cold

they felt a coldness and they were more

often right than wrong the third is what

might call sympathy the ability to work

within groups and that comes in

tremendously handy because groups are

smarter than individuals and

face-to-face groups are much smarter

than groups that communicate

electronically because 90% of our

communication is nonverbal and the

effectiveness of a group is not

determined by the IQ of the group it’s

determined by how well they communicate

how often they take terms and

conversations then you could talk about

it Oh trait like blending any child can

say I’m a tiger pretend to be a tiger it

seems so Elementary but in fact it’s

phenomenally complicated to take a

concept I and a concept tiger and

them together but this is the source of

innovation what Picasso did for example

was take the concept western art and the

concept African masks and blend them

together not only the geometry but the

moral systems entailed in them and these

are skills again we can’t count and

measure and then the final thing I’ll

mention is something you might call

limerence and this is not an ability

it’s a drive and a motivation the

conscious mind hungers for success and

prestige the unconscious mind hungers

for those moments of transcendence when

the skull line disappears and we are

lost in a challenge or a task when a

craftsman feels lost in his craft when a

naturalist feels at one with nature when

a believer feels at one with God’s love

that is what the unconscious mind

hungers for and many of us feel it in

love when lovers feel fused and one of

the most beautiful description I’ve come

across in this research of how Minds

interpenetrate was written by a great

theorist and scientist named Douglas

Hofstadter’s at the University of

Indiana he was married to a woman named

Carol and made a wonderful relationship

when their kids were five and two Carol

had a stroke and a brain tumor and died

suddenly and Hofstadter wrote a book

called I am a strange loop in the course

of that book he describes a moment just

months after Carol has died he comes

across her picture on the mantle or on a

bureau in his bedroom and here’s what he

wrote I looked at her face and I looked

so deeply that I felt I was behind her

eyes and all at once I found myself

saying as tears flowed that’s me that’s

me and those simple words brought back

many thoughts that I had had before

about the fusion of our souls into one

higher-level entity about the fact that

the core of both our souls they are

identical hopes and dreams for our

children about the notion that those

hopes were not separate and distinct

hopes but were just one hope one clear

thing that defined us both that welded

us into a unit the kind of unit I had

but dimly imagined before being married

and having

children I realized that though Carol

had died that core piece of her had not

died at all but had it lived on very

determinately in my brain the Greeks say

we suffer our way to wisdom through his

suffering Hofstetter understood how

deeply interpenetrated we are through

the policy failures of last 30 years we

have come to acknowledge I think how

shallow our view of human nature has

been and now as we confront that

challenge us and the failures that

derive from our inability to get the

depths of who we are comes this

revolution in consciousness these people

in so many fields exploring the depth of

our nature and coming away with this

enchanted this new humanism and when

Freud discovered his sense of the

unconscious it had a vast effect on the

climate of the times now we are

discovering a more accurate vision of

the unconscious of who we are deep

inside and it’s going to have a

wonderful and profound and humanizing

effect on our culture thank you