- It's been widely thought that we have something
like a crisis of meaning, especially in the developed
world at this point. There's a sense that
culture has atomized, right? We're all kinda on our own
with our phones and laptops

and our digital media experiences. No one knows what everyone
else has seen on some level, and we spend so much time thinking about and reacting to the digital lives we and others have created, that there has been this
shattering effect of culture.

So I think we need a truly
open-ended conversation with now 8 billion strangers, and what makes that
hard to do increasingly is a level of political fragmentation and extremism and partisanship born of our engagement with
these new technologies, born of the fact that we
just simply can't agree

about who is lying most
of the time, right? And, you know, who is misinformed? Who is in possession
of only half the story? And the greatest question
that we face individually and as a society is what to do next.

I'm Sam Harris, I'm a
writer, a neuroscientist, a podcast host and the
creator of the Waking Up app. (dramatic music) I'm increasingly concerned that something like half of
us can't quite agree that

we have a stake in the maintenance
of a global civilization. We're witnessing a fairly
stark zero-sum contest between those of us who want
to maintain open societies and anything like democracy and capitalism as we've come to understand them, and those who increasingly
want to build closed ones

and belligerent ones
that make it impossible to share space in this
increasingly common world. The thing to recognize is that
we live in a perpetual choice between conversation and violence, those are really the two alternatives, and we have to get people on the same page.

When people have to cooperate, well, then we've got
persuasion or coercion. Either we're going to get
everyone on the same page through the noises we
make with our mouths, or we're going to have to
force people or imprison people

and in the limit, you know, fight a war and kill people
in the service of goals that we find non-negotiable. The importance of conversation
can't possibly be exaggerated because it is the bulwark
against perpetual violence,

it is the bulwark against murder, it's the bulwark against war. It's the only thing keeping those things out of our daily experience, and we're finding it harder and harder to have a conversation that converges on a shared set of facts,

and that makes violence, in my view, of all sorts and at
several different scales, more and more likely. The challenge is always how to get strangers
to cooperate, you know, and solve a wide variety
of coordination problems.

Almost everything that
we can do personally and needless to say, at scale
that is important, you know, for good or for ill is made possible by this capacity to represent
the nature of the world in our thoughts and to trade
those representations in speech.

or, you know, writing or other forms of
communication with other people and to persuade other people
of certain things being true. I don't think the story
of all of our mayhem and unnecessary suffering has much to do with bad
people doing bad things,

I think, for the most
part, it's good people, or at least normal people under
the influence of bad ideas. These ideas were communicated by people and acted upon on the basis of concepts. It's a set of arguments, it's a rehearsal of history

and expectations about the future. And if you're rational, those
reasons can be explained. If your beliefs are not falsifiable, if there's no scenario
that could convince you that your most cherished
opinions are in error, well then, that's proof
that you didn't get them

by being in contact with reality. If most of human misery and inequality and conflict and violence is a matter of the stories that people are telling themselves, then you see that virtually all of human suffering and
chaos is just tissue thin, I mean, it's a bad dream.

It's just thoughts that
people are finding compelling and they could cease to find
those thoughts compelling. So the consequence of all of that is that it really
matters what you believe. It certainly matters what millions and billions of us believe in any given moment,

because it's our beliefs that
will dictate what we do next. One basis for hope is
that there's almost no problem human ingenuity can't solve in the end. This is a point that the physicist David Deutsch made recently, which I find compelling,

Unless there's some law of
physics that rules it out, any change in the
universe that is possible is possible in the presence of
sufficient knowledge, right? And I would add, you need
sufficient cooperation to implement that knowledge.

All the progress we've
made to arrive at anything like a universal conception
of human flourishing and scientific rationality, all of that has been a matter
of getting rid of dogma and having an open-ended and intellectually honest conversation based on facts and arguments.

Really, the sky's the limit in terms of how good
we can make human life on the basis of our
understanding how the world works and to cancel the truly
unconscionable disparities in good and bad luck we see in this world.

(gentle music) But the question is, how
unhappy do you have to be in the present as you
struggle to figure out how to solve the problems in the world? And what is the optimal state to be in once the world has got your attention?

I mean, how useful is
anger 30 seconds later or 30 minutes later? How fearful do I wanna be? How impatient do I wanna be? How angry do I wanna be right now? All of our failures of compassion are failures of mutual
understanding of, you know,

just an inability to be kind and patient and curious about what's happening on the other side of the wall or the other side of a conversation. All of those strong negative
emotional reactions, like anger and fear, they're
necessary as information,

They're salience cues, they tell you that something
has happened in the world or in your body that is
worth paying attention to. I think it's important to recognize that your mind is all you
have really, you know, your mind is the basis of your
experience in each moment.

And therefore it makes sense to train it, it makes sense to understand it, it makes sense to pay
attention to it directly. And until you learn to
recognize thoughts as thoughts and emotions as emotions, until you break this spell of just kinda helpless identification

with each new appearance in consciousness, you are just condemned to
be as angry as you will be for as long as you will be. And the reason why meditation becomes a great tool
of emotional regulation is that it introduces a
degree of freedom here.

Even if you haven't changed the world in any significant sense, your response to the world
can be radically transformed. - Hey, Big Thinkers, before we go, we couldn't have made this video without the help of Storyblocks, the sponsor of this Big Think interview.

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Sam Harris: The great problem of our time

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Sam Harris: The great problem of our time

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