Podcast
#183: How Your Stories Can Unite Divided People
#183: How Your Stories Can Unite Divided People
Why is happiness elusive? Why can’t it be as easy as knowing what makes you happy and doing exactly that? Think about it. Later, you’ll come to realize your important role in resolving this dilemma. In the pursuit of elusive happiness, we can use stories to connect even the greatest divides.
It is a privilege to have Jonathan Haidt on this week’s Business of Story podcast. Jonathan is an American social psychologist who wrote the book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. In this book, he explored the relationship between modern science and ancient philosophies like Buddhism and Stoicism. Using the metaphor of the elephant and the rider, he rationalized that the subconscious mind is constantly at war with our conscious mind. That’s the reason why our actions are often the exact opposite of what we’re thinking or feeling.
What is it that divides us? Jonathan touches on the subject in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided By Politics and Religion, showcasing how moral judgments arise from gut feelings, and why many of us have such different intuitions about right and wrong.
In his new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Haidt, with his co-author Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, reveal how we can overcome the polarization we’re now seeing in universities as the iGen. Or Gen Z, kids born in 1995 and beyond.
How can we conquer this division through storytelling and link our worlds together? In this episode, find out how
the stories we tell ourselves influence the varying truths we live in our everyday lives. How can you use storytelling to connect our internal and external divides?
In This Episode, You Will Learn
- About the happiness hypothesis and how it affects the left and right brain
- The six major foundations of morality and how they divide us
- How the three major political groups differ in their concepts between right and wrong
- Three components of political narrative
Key Quotes
“Brains evolve to the kind of society we are in.” — Jonathan Haidt
“Our tongues guide us to the kind of fruits we need that are good for us and our moral foundations guide us to the kind of society we need to live in.” — Jonathan Haidt
“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.” — Jonathan Haidt
“Find ways to live together; give benefit of the doubt. Learn from each other. Recognize that we need each other.” — Jonathan Haidt
Mentioned In This Episode
- The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
- The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion
- The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
- Joe Rogan Show Episode 1221 with Jonathan Haidt
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz
- The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics: Matt Bai
- The 3 Levels of Personality by Dan P. McAdams
- Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
- Let Grow
- TheCoddling.com
- Jonathan Haidt LinkedIn
- Jonathan Haidt Twitter
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