Chapter 103: Jonathan Haidt on mirrory misconceptions and morality in the matrix

LISTEN NOW ON APPLE, GOOGLE, SPOTIFY or YOUTUBE

Jonathan Haidt is the Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the author of bestsellers The Righteous Mind, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Coddling of the American Mind. He has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, selected as one of the Top 50 Thinkers in the world, and delivered four TED Talks.

I was lucky to be introduced to Jon by our mutual friend Roger Martin, our guest in Chapter 68.

We sit at his kitchen table to discuss his then-in-process 8000-word Atlantic cover story slammer After Babel: How Social Media Dissolved the Social Mortar of Society and Made America Stupid, which doubles as a sneak peek on the book he’s working on now.

I hope your mind is stretched like taffy as mine was when you listen to Jon. There’s a reason Roger Martin warned me “You’ll have to keep up with him. He thinks pretty quickly.” And yet he is incredibly kind, patient, and humble. A consummate teacher.

We discuss: hive culture, the binary divide, the need for constraints, life after Babel, how we make decisions, communication through stories, LSD, the power of explore mode, and, of course, Jon’s 3 most formative books.

Let’s flip the page into Chapter 103 now…

Chapter 103: jonathan haidt on mirrory misconceptions and morality in the matrix

What You'll Learn:

  • What is a hive culture?

  • What is group level selection?

  • What is the difference between social psychology and sociology?

  • What does it mean to be tightly bound vs loosely bound?

  • Why is too much freedom bad?

  • What are the ills of social media?

  • What is the story of Babel?

  • Why was the Arab Spring such a pivotal moment in history?

  • How has Facebook changed the world for the worse?

  • What separates the right from the left?

  • Why is constraint essential to freedom?

  • How do we make decisions?

  • Why should we appeal to the elephant?

  • Why should we parent using stories?

  • How do we better communicate in relationships?

  • How should people think about doing LSD and should it be legal?

  • What is the mind?

  • What are Jon’s favorite podcasts?

  • What is the fundamental question in life?

Notable quotes from jonathan:

“We make judgements of each other in part because we co-create a vast imagined world that we then live in and within that world, it's constant judgments of each other.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“We're now in the world after Babel, which is a frightening, lonely place where we are not bound into healthy or stable groups.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“Society is changing so fast, it's changing at a speed beyond our capacity. And this I think is leading to a sense that everything is coming apart. Shredded. The center cannot hold.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“The internet is connecting everyone to everyone in ways that don't encourage information sharing and true communication, but they encourage social posturing and display.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“We do have a dysfunctional society in which everything is becoming the red team versus the blue team” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“Now we have a shredded moral fabric. We live in thousands or millions of little temporary bubbles” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“The matrix is a consensual hallucination.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“The right is correct about a lot of things. And the left has no clue. And the left is correct about a lot of things and the right, while you can't be conservative and not have heard what the left thinks, but they don't buy it.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“Each side is right in what they affirm but wrong in what they deny.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“FOX News made the right crazy beginning of the nineties and there's a lot written  about that shift, but I think social media has done a bigger number or at least as big a number on the left.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“Pleasure comes not from reaching your goal, it comes from making progress on the journey.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“If you just have endless bottomless feed and endless passage of stuff, that is just enervating.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“We need structure constraint and restraint within which we can have freedom.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“The problem in America has not been too much authoritarianism it has been too much anomie or normlessness.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“The mind is divided like a small rider on a large elephant. And the small rider is our conscious reasoning and the large elephant is everything else. It's all the intuition.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“We're so bad at logic problems, but we're incredible at perceptual problems.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“Telling a good story is an essential part of persuasion.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“Great persuaders open with a story, whereas a lot of rationalists open with data or evidence and it doesn't work.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“Our morals come not from reasoning but from intuition.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“Evolution gave us a lot of intuitions and each culture builds on a subset of them.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“First identify what it is that the person is right about and acknowledge it and then give your point of view.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“There clearly are some neural circuits that are rarely activated, but once activated through LSD, they have positive transformative effects." Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“When you lose track of yourself in space and time, this is how you can begin to understand mystical experiences from around the world; your ego boundaries are destroyed and you become one with the universe.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“The secret to success in this amazing world that we live in, which has many problems, is to spend almost all of your life in explore mode.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

“If you're subject to anger, then you're hackable.” Jonathan Haidt #3bookspodcast

connect with jonathan:

word of the chapter:

wordcloud of the chapter:

Resources Mentioned:

Enjoy the show? Use the Links Below to Subscribe:

 
 
 
 
 
 

GIVE US A Call AT 1-833-READ-A-LOT

(YES, THIS IS A REAL PHONE NUMBER)