We humans are more like lab rats than David Brooks realizes or the rest of us care to admit. Subject us to certain stimuli and we behave one way, change the stimuli and our behavior changes. We have free will and a bountiful yet oft-untapped capacity for rational thought. We also are social creatures susceptible to primal impulses.
For many years Brooks was a ruminative but fairly doctrinaire conservative, fond of free enterprise and limited government. Then Trump came along. Brooks and many other thinking conservatives were horrified by how their life philosophy had mutated, how their sermons were being put into practice by the congregants. He’s been reinventing himself ever since.
Brooks started writing about the need to rebuild community and embrace a life of interdependence, exploring what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-indulgent world. He’s obsessed with two questions about American society: Why have we become so sad? And how did we get so mean?
As Brooks ponders these…
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