Sam Harris’s “Great Problem” and Conversational Leadership The vital connection

In this talk, Sam Harris describes a crisis of meaning in the modern world, where digital technology has atomized culture, making it difficult to have genuine conversations across divides. He argues that we face a stark choice between conversation and violence, with meaningful dialogue being our only defense against destructive conflict.

Harris suggests that most human suffering stems not from inherently bad people, but from normal people under the influence of harmful ideas and rigid beliefs that aren’t open to revision. He maintains that what we collectively believe matters tremendously because our beliefs dictate our actions.

While expressing optimism about humanity’s ability to solve problems through knowledge and cooperation, Harris also emphasizes the importance of our inner mental states. He argues that regardless of external circumstances, we can achieve a degree of freedom by training our minds to recognize thoughts and emotions without being controlled by them. Meditation, he suggests, offers a path to emotional regulation that can transform how we respond to the world even when we cannot change it.

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. 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 perpetual choice between conversation and violence, those are really the two alternatives, and we have to get people in line when people have to cooperate, well, then we’ve got persuasion or coercion. Either we’re gonna 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 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.
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.