The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:27:12 · David Brooks
[00:27:12] S2: Yeah. I would say it's... That's a rhythm in American life where money becomes the dominant ethos. And you would say the eighteen eighties, the eighteen nineties, we were incredibly materialistic society. But what you need is a moral system that stands against capitalism. So you live in the in the contest and the tension between capitalism, say, and Catholicism, or capitalism and Judaism, or frankly, capitalism and progressivism. These are all systems or capitalism and environmentalism. These are all systems that push against some of the worst flaws of capitalism and give you a a moral basis to make your decision, a sense of right and wrong, not just richer or poorer. And so I think creative people live in the tension between those two things. And I think what we've seen is the collapse of all rival systems. One of my favorite things from psychology is from a guy named John Bowlby who does attachment research. Says all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. We need that secure base. And that secure base fundamentally is about your relationship with your parents having secure attachments. But it's also about having a secure home, hometown, a safe neighborhood. But it's also about a moral order. The sense that you live within a coherent moral order, and you can make the decisions of your life based on this. There was a historian named George Marsden who wrote once that what gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric such power was his sense that there was a moral order woven into the fabric of universe. That segregation was not just wrong sometimes. Segregation was always wrong. Slavery is always wrong under all circumstances. And so that you... That gives you a sense of security if you have a sense that, yes, that right and wrong are permanent. And we took that away. We privatized morality. We told people it's up to you to come up with your own values. And if your name is Aristotle or Nietzsche, maybe you can do this. Most of us can't come up with our own values, and we're left in sort of a formless world that gives no security. Way back in 1955, a great columnist named Walter Lippmann wrote a book in which he wrote that if what is right and wrong is just what each individual invents based on his or her feelings, We have left the bounds of civilization, and I think we have left those bounds.
00:29:27 · David Brooks, Scott Galloway
So it's a loss of social security, friends, family are weakening, community base is weakening, and moral base is weakening. And that to me explains what I think is the deep root cause of our... A lot of our political problems, which is a spiritual and relational crisis, the rise of disconnection, the rise of loneliness, the rise of suicide. Forty five percent of teenagers say they're persistently hopeless and despondent. The number of Americans who say they have no close friends has gone up fourfold since 2000. And so we've just seen a decay at the foundations of society, and that has perverted our politics. [00:30:03] S0: Let's try and move to solutions. A spiritual and personal disconnection. How do you think we repair this? If you, I imagine, get called a lot by probably not this White House, but you probably have a lot of influencing it, asked a lot. What what are the two or three programs you believe warrant real investment and attention to try and heal this this decay? [00:30:26] S2: Well, first on the political front, you know, I thought Joe Biden had one job, and his job was to redirect resources to the places that have been left behind. And I thought he basically succeeded at that. If you look at the people who received the money from the Build Back Better and the big infrastructure bills and all that stuff, they're mostly Republican rural places. And [00:30:45] S0: if
00:30:45 · David Brooks
[00:30:45] S2: you look at where the big... Rahm Emanuel, who was then our ambassador to Japan, produced a map where he he showed where the big massive investments are in chip plants and other kind of manufacturing facilities. And the good news for me was, like, out of the top 100, only two are in California. But five or six or seven were in Illinois, and five or six or seven were in Iowa, Upstate New York. And as I travel around the country, I find a lot of those places. You go to Eastern Ohio, they're happy because they got an Intel plant coming in there. You go to around Syracuse, they're happy because they got a micron plant coming in. There really is some bit of economic renaissance. It did not bloom enough to reward Joe Biden. And the second mistake Biden made was you can't fundamentally solve a problem of respect with economic resources. That it's not only that these places have been left behind materially, but they've been left behind in terms of status and respect. And the Democrats still have not managed to find a way to show solidarity and respect to a lot of working class voters. And crossing that cultural divide is is a chief challenge, I think, for the party. But then if you're talking about the social and relational crisis, you know, I do two things. I'll just tell you what I do. I started a nonprofit called Weave, the social fabric project, and we celebrate and reward and support people who are working in the neighborhoods where they live, And they're rebuilding trust in those communities. And we give them money, we give them support, we give them platforms to tell their stories. And culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy. So you pick the community leaders in your neighborhood and you hold them up and say, let's be more like them. Let's build connection. And then the final thing I did, had a book come out a year ago called How to Know a Person. And that's based on the idea that a lot of the disconnection is that people just don't have skills. How do you sit with someone who's suffering from depression? How do you sit with someone who's grieving? How do you ask for an offer forgiveness? How do you break up with somebody without crushing their heart? These are basic social skills. And for a couple generations, we simply have not taught them.
00:32:50 · David Brooks, Scott Galloway
And so to me, one of the reasons we have such high levels of distrust and disconnection is we haven't taught people the practical skills of how to be considerate to each other in the concrete circumstances of life. And so these are the... At least the things I've to try to work on to... As my my piece of the of the larger challenge. [00:33:09] S0: Something that struck me in your work is that you advocate for putting moral formation at the center of society. What does that mean, and how tactically does that become operationalized?
00:33:20 · David Brooks
[00:33:20] S2: Yeah. When our founders created this country, they took around... Look around human nature and said, we're... If we're gonna build a democracy out of these people, we have to work hard on moral formation. And moral formation is a pompous word, but my favorite definition comes from the gospel of Ted Lasso. And he says his job at coach of this football team he was coaching is to make these fellas better versions of themselves on and off the field. And schools, unions, civic organizations, they used to think that moral formation was part of their job. It was to perform the character of their kids. And there was a school called The Stowe School, and the headmaster said, our job is to turn out students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. They wanted to turn out students who were reliable when the chips were down. And sometime after the war, the whole ethos changed. And we went from a understanding of human nature is that we're we're beautiful creatures, we're also deeply flawed. We went to a version of human nature is that we're beautiful. People are good inside. There's an angel inside. All you have to do is self actualize yourself. And if you think you're perfect inside, you don't need to do more formation. And so all sorts of institutions got out of the moral formation business and into the self actualization business, including the Girl Scouts, including the schools. And then gradually, the schools became just more careerist. They're not about moral formation. They're about getting you into Harvard. They're about getting you a job. And so to me, that whole side of human nature, the whole side of human activity, which to me is the most important side, how can we become slightly better versions of ourselves? We abandoned it, and we're left with the consequences. And we left, frankly, with a country that can't like Donald Trump because they look at him, and they don't see anything wrong. And and that's that's the consequences.
00:35:11 · Scott Galloway
[00:35:11] S0: The thing I struggle with, I think that makes a lot of sense. Right? I'm think of Boy Scouts, which doesn't exist anymore. They're Scouts for America, and the Girl Scouts get their own gender, but Boy Scouts no longer exist. I think of... I used to go to church, temple. My dad was married four times, so I was exposed to a lot of different different institutions, and I recognize the importance there. Having said that, I worry that universities, like the one I teach at, offer a lot of courses in sustainability, leadership, ethics. And quite frankly, I find for the most part, they're just student debt and an opportunity to bring in what I'd call FIPS, formerly important people, to basically over and over say one thing. Do the right thing even when it's hard, such that we can charge kids more and more money. I I wonder if, again, Democrats have decided it that we have decided in higher education that we're no longer centers of excellence. We're social engineers and evangelists of a certain orthodoxy. That, again, it's the right idea, but it's gotten out of control at universities. Any thoughts?