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How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Book by David Brooks · 5 quotes · Understanding, Empathy, Relationships

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How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen Quotes

“For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. Politics seems to offer a comprehensible moral landscape. We, the children of light, are facing off against them, the children of darkness. Politics seems to offer a sense of belonging. I am on the barricades with the other members of my tribe. Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action. To be moral in this world, you don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow. You just have to be liberal or conservative, you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible. Over the past decade, everything has become politicized. Churches, universities, sports, food selection, movie awards shows, late-night comedy— they have all turned into political arenas. Except this was not politics as it is normally understood. Healthy societies produce the politics of distribution. How should the resources of the society be allocated? Unhappy societies produce the politics of recognition. Political movements these days are fueled largely by resentment, by a person or a group’s feelings that society does not respect or recognize them. The goal of political and media personalities is to produce episodes in which their side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to formulate domestic policies or to address this or that social ill; he is trying to affirm his identity, to gain status and visibility, to find a way to admire himself. But, of course, the politics of recognition doesn’t actually give you community and connection. People join partisan tribes, but they are not in fact meeting together, serving one another, befriending one another. Politics doesn’t make you a better person; it’s about outer agitation, not inner formation. Politics doesn’t humanize. If you attempt to assuage your sadness, loneliness, or anomie through politics, it will do nothing more than land you in a world marked by a sadistic striving for domination. You may try to escape a world of isolation and moral meaninglessness, only to find yourself in the pulverizing destructiveness of the culture wars.”

PoliticsEmotionMoralityTherapyBelongingResentmentPartisanshipPartisan PoliticsUs Vs Them
Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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“For [Iris] Murdoch, the essential immoral act is the inability to see other people correctly. Human beings, she finds, are self-centered beings, anxiety-ridden and resentful. We are constantly representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, in ways that gratify our egos and serve our ends. We stereotype and condescend, ignore and dehumanize. And because we don’t see people accurately, we treat them wrongly. Evil happens when people are unseeing, when they don’t recognize the personhood in other human beings.”

HumanityEvilSeeingMoralityPerceptionImmoralityPersonhoodSeeing People
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“Why, over the past two decades, have we seen this epidemic of loneliness and meanness, this breakdown in the social fabric? We can all point to some contributing factors: social media, widening inequality, declining participation in community life, declining church attendance, rising populism and bigotry, vicious demagoguery from our media and political elites. I agree that these factors have all contributed to produce what we are enduring. But as the years have gone by, I have increasingly fixated on what I see as a deeper cause of our social and relational crisis. Our problem, I believe, is fundamentally moral. As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect. I realize the phrase “moral formation” may sound stuffy and archaic, but moral formation is really about three simple, practical things. First, it is about helping people learn how to restrain their selfishness and incline their heart to care more about others. Second, it’s about helping people find a purpose, so their life has stability, direction, and meaning. Third, it’s about teaching the basic social and emotional skills so you can be kind and considerate to the people around you.”

PurposeLonelinessMoralityCaringSelfishnessMeannessSocial SkillsEmotional SkillsSocial BreakdownMoral Formation
Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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