How love can help repair social inequality Chlo Valdary
my name
is chloe valderry and i’m going to be
talking to you today
about a concept i created called the
theory of enchantment
i’m going to tell you what it is how i
came to develop it
and why i think it’s necessary to help
us in this moment
as a country and to help heal our nation
so the theory of enchantment is really a
social emotional learning program
that teaches individuals how to develop
character
develop tools for resiliency to meet the
hardship of life
head on but more importantly to learn
how to love
oneself so that one can be able to love
others
in the process and the unique aspect of
the theory of enchantment is that it
uses
pop culture to teach a lot of these
ideas
so i use disney hip-hop pop music
broadly speaking and other
really fun and cool aspects found in pop
culture to teach it
but more on that later first i’m going
to tell you
how i developed this concept called the
theory of enchantment
so about five years ago i moved to new
york
from new orleans and i got a job at the
wall street journal
now my background is in international
studies
and diplomacy and i was really always
interested
in this concept of you know teaching
people how to combat conflict this is
what we study
within international relations but
once i got to the wall street journal i
decided to work on a thesis
that tackled the topic that was slightly
different not teaching people how to
combat conflict
but rather instead teaching people how
to love
now these two things are actually two
totally different things they are
interrelated but they are not the same
thing
so i wanted to teach people or figure
out how to teach people
how to love and in order to do this i
asked myself
well if i want to teach people how to
love maybe i have to ask
what are people already in love with and
how can i use that as a conduit to work
backwards
to get people to learn how to love and
the biggest source of content for me
that shows us what we love as a species
as a society
is pop culture so all of a sudden in the
middle of this
thesis paper that i was working on i
started studying pop culture
this means that i started studying
companies like nike
companies like disney singer-songwriters
like beyonce
i wanted to see if there was a common
denominator across
all these influencers and across all
these companies
that really demonstrated why we
gravitate toward them in the first place
and it turns out there is a common
denominator and it’s
very very simple these companies and
these influencers
create content where we as the audience
see ourselves and our potential
reflected in the content
and that’s why we gravitate toward it so
for example nike
nike puts out sports apparel and
attaches to it the brand
just do it and the idea that we have in
our minds is that once we put on this
apparel
we will be able to accomplish and
overcome any obstacle
that we have to meet very similarly
disney every almost every single disney
movie is a motif
is a metaphor for the human condition it
entails
a human being a flawed hero who is
imperfect
who’s met with some obstacle who has to
meet that obstacle head-on
and in doing so becomes transformed by
that obstacle
and emerges heroic and finally of course
there’s beyonce so i don’t know about
you but for me
and many other women around the world we
see ourselves and our potential
reflected in beyonce’s content so for
example when she says things like
who run the world girls we see our
potential reflected in that
so this is really the common denominator
of a lot of pop culture that we
gravitate towards
and i decided to call this phenomenon
enchantment
and i called it enchantment because guy
kawasaki the former marketing director
of apple
describes enchantment as the process by
which you
delight someone with a concept an idea
a personality or a thing and it dawned
on me that that’s really what we’re
trying to get at we’re really trying to
become
enchanted by one another to be full of
wonder when we encounter one another
and this is really the step the key to
learning how to love ourselves
and to love one another in the process
so after i wrote this thesis
at the wall street journal i worked for
a non-profit for two years
lectured on it refined it in colleges
across the united states
and around the world and came up with a
whole system
for teaching this now there are three
principles
that are really the guideposts for the
theory of enchantment
and it’s important to understand them
because i think that they will be useful
in helping us heal our nation in this
moment that we’re dealing with racism
and police brutality and really needing
to advance towards social justice and
social change
so the three principles are very simple
and they are as follows
number one treat people like human
beings
not like political abstractions number
two
if you want to criticize criticize to
uplift and empower
never to tear down never to destroy and
number three
try to root everything you do in love
and compassion
now you can imagine even if we as a
nation were to implement the first
principle to try to live
out that practice in our everyday lives
we would
come so far but we’re not doing that at
the moment at the moment we are
prejudging people and treating people
not like human beings
but instead like abstractions we’re
caricaturing one another
we’re stereotyping and reducing one
another and in the process we’re
stereotyping
and reducing ourselves so i think that
if we were
able to internalize and implement all
three principles
of the theory of enchantment we could
foster better conversations
that can help heal our nation and help
us move forward
thanks so much
thank you so much for that chloe um
let’s dig in
and uh talk about an example so
as you said you use pop culture as a way
to connect to your audience with your
principles but it’s there’s a larger
message as you said
within those references um can you sort
of
share a thread with us from a movie like
moana or a kendrick lamar lyric
and link that to you know how we resolve
conflict
sure absolutely so i teach both kendrick
lamar
and moana in the theory of enchantment
uh course
i teach kendrick lamar in the context of
really
teaching people the first principle
treat people like human beings not like
political abstractions
and the first question that comes to the
to the front of that
of that principle is well what does it
actually mean to be a human being
and one of the things that i teach is
that well to be a human being is to be
imperfect and complex and multifaceted
and multi-dimensional
and in kendrick lamar’s song dna he says
i got power poison pain and joy inside
my dna
and when he says that he’s really
articulating a capacity to be self-aware
to understand that he’s capable of
producing good
and of produce and of producing harm he
understands that he’s capable of both of
these things as a human being
so i use that song and that lyric
specifically to introduce students
to this concept of the complexity of the
human condition
when it comes to moana i think that
moana is the best
uh contemporary disney movie ever made
and what’s brilliant about moana is that
it’s actually incredibly restorative
moana is all about a young warrior
princess
who lives on this island who’s dying and
the reason why the island is dying is
because it used to be ruled over by a
good goddess named te fiti
and then her heart was taken from her
and then it was replaced by an evil
rageful goddess named taka
and i’m going to give it away but i
think we’re we’re at that point uh
right now but um the aha moment that
moana has
in the end is that te fiti and taka are
actually the same being
and once the heart was removed from te
fiti she descended into rage
and became taka which again as i said
earlier every disney movie is a motif
for the human condition
i mean this is reflective of how we are
as a species
if you remove love if you remove nurture
from us we tend to descend
into rage so really that film um i think
teaches
both the first principle remember that
we are human beings and capable of
love and rage but also the third
principle the importance of rooting
everything we do in love and compassion
so that we can restore
each other and ourselves to our higher
selves
it makes so much sense to to use these
examples to recognize value in ourselves
and
others but how do you see it fitting in
with dismantling
structural and systemic issues
so i don’t think that one can really
tackle systemic issues
without centering the individual without
understanding that the individual has to
first
be able to love themselves right and it
takes a lot to teach a person to love
themselves it’s not something that’s
necessarily
uh true for a lot of people we deal with
emotional baggage we deal with
insecurities
this is true of every human being and we
don’t have the skill set
to love ourselves we’re not going to be
able to love each other
if we don’t have the skill set to
develop a sense of inner contentment
and a sense of self-worth then what
we’re going to end up doing is we’re
going to project
that insecurity onto other people and
then the
systemic inequality that we’re seeing
today
will continue to exist so in order to
change that in a long-term
fashion and in a sustainable way we have
to first renew ourselves and make sure
that we’re healthy
and we come into the place in society in
a healthy way
it seems hard to value another person
who has tried to suppress you
um at a larger level how do you think
about that
so that’s a great question and i teach a
lot of uh
influential and inspiring work from
individuals who
have been hosted in the ted community
folks like daryl davis for example who
has
successfully i mean talk about treating
people who treat you badly with grace
um daryl davis is someone whose claim to
fame in addition to being a famous
musician
he actually has gotten hundreds of
former kkk members to leave the kkk to
give up their roads in the process
and he did this simply by showing um
grace and empathy to these individuals
and showing them where they were wrong
of course but not treating them like
they were less than
and not treating them like they were
abstractions but still treating them
as human beings and we saw that he was
able to change
the lives of these individuals in the
process and i asked him once you know
did you not get insulted or offended
when these guys were saying really
insulting things
to you when you were speaking to them
and he said to me something i’ll never
forget he said
well actually what i thought to myself
was what does that have to do with me
i know who i am i know that my
self-worth
i understand what they’re saying is
absolutely absurd
so i was able to de-personalize it and
not take it personally and as a result
it didn’t bother me and i thought to
myself yeah well that takes a very
strong composition and a strong sense of
character to be able to do that
and that’s really what i’m trying to
help teach like how can we develop that
strong sense of character
so that when someone comes at us in an
insulting way
we can de-personalize it and still meet
them with grace and with love
um one of the things you’ve critiqued in
the current anti-racism discussions is
the idea
of white fragility you feel it can be
harmful to our progress
why do you think that why do you feel
that way sure so i think that the
concept of white fragility
basically breaks the first rule of the
principle of the theory of enchantment
it treats
white people as though they were a
monolithic being or entity
um it treats white people sort of like a
conglomerate instead of treating white
people as people as complex
individuals who are multifaceted um and
if we treat any human being or any group
of people
as though they were a conglomerate we
run the risk of stereotyping them
reducing them
in our words and in our actions and
turning them into an abstraction
and that’s not going to be very helpful
or sustainable
for the long run we have to treat each
other like family we have to treat each
other like brothers and sisters
and only by doing that will we be able
to create what dr king called the
beloved community
um and have compassion for ourselves and
for each other even as we’re trying to
you know advance reconciliation
and correct some of the things that
we’re seeing that have been unjust in
our society
well speaking of community let’s take a
couple of questions from our community
sure thing um
so you believe that privilege exists for
individuals in different ways but
isn’t society waiting privilege for some
more than others in in kind of an
overwhelming way
i would say yes in general but the way i
think of privilege is actually
i think far more multifaceted in the way
we sort of discuss it in our
in our common lingo i think that at all
times there are an existing number of
infinite privileges that people carry
with them so
for example a white person may not be
followed in a store
right where as i may be followed in a
store prejudged because of my skin color
that’s an example of what we call white
privilege
but at the same time another white
person might come
from a single parent family who may have
experienced
uh abuse in the family and maybe
treated a certain way in society as a
result of that whereas i come from a
two-parent family a healthy family
and i may be treated differently as a
result of that so there are always at
all times a different number of
privileges that we bring to the
forefront of the
social spaces that we enter and so the
question
is very simply how do we treat each
other equally at all times
and actually i think more importantly
how do we treat
all of us with compassion and with love
despite
the privileges or lack thereof that we
bring into society
okay we’re gonna take one more question
from the community
from jediah i really love these
principles
but i’m hoping to hear about bad actors
aka villains if i understand this
framework properly
what happens if and when people reject
these principles
yeah that’s a great question um and i do
think that when people
reject these principles they do sort of
become bad actors and they do sort of
become
villains one of the things that i teach
in the course which i
alluded to earlier is disney um and one
of the things we study when
studying the disney pantheon is some of
the villains so we study ursula for
example
from the little mermaid and we study a
couple others
a lot so bear from the toy story 3 for
example and there’s a common denominator
amongst many of these villains
especially for ursula in the little
mermaid
through the song poor unfortunate souls
so if you study that song
poor unfortunate souls you’ll discover
is actually a textbook example
of how people villains tend to exploit
the insecurities
of folks in order to sort of get them to
do their bidding that’s what the song
poor unfortunate souls
is all about and i think that if you
don’t practice these principles and if
you don’t understand
the importance of loving yourself and
loving others you’re
more prone to descend into rage and to
ma
into madness and become that bad actor
and to treat people
unfairly unkindly and as a result that
will of course contribute
to a lot of the systemic injustice that
we’re seeing today
thank you i’m gonna ask one more
question and then we’re gonna hand it
off to whitney and sandy
um what makes you oh we have sorry okay
uh um i’m not sure if we wanna
anyways okay uh back to us uh what makes
you feel hopeful right now
well i think that’s i think we’re seeing
the
one of the most diverse coalitions right
now
outside in the streets protesting for
racial justice
um you know we’re seeing people of all
colors and from all socioeconomic
backgrounds and even across the
political spectrum
um i certainly can say that for here in
brooklyn where i am
um and that’s something i’ve never seen
before that’s not something i’ve never
really read of in american history and i
think it is a testament to
the just you know notion of this moment
that just idea that is really
moving this moment and pushing this
moment forward
um and i hope that it’s sustained and i
hope that it keeps going
and again i’m also really excited that
it’s uh a lot of millennials i’m a
millennial
um at the forefront of this movement i’m
encouraged by seeing my generation step
up and really try to advance social
justice