Sam Harris: Breaking the thought trap of anger

The better part of compassion, ultimately, is to recognize that you want other people to thrive

You want to cancel these disparities and bad luck insofar as you can

And more to the point, you want to help build a fair and just society

that the wealthier it becomes, the more it makes life, even for its poorest members

better and better, such that the human world becomes unrecognizably good. And there's no question that's possible

How can we become better versions of ourselves? Well, one basis for hope is when you look at how much of our suffering is self-caused

you immediately see that we could just stop doing that. Right. I mean, if most of human misery and inequality and conflict and violence is a matter of the stories that people are telling themselves and finding credible, and the fact that those stories are discordant, 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. Not much has to change. Again, it's not a story of there being a sufficient number of bad people in the world to make

life unlivable, right? That's almost never the case. The numbers of truly bad people, you know, true psychopaths, true sadists, it's always tiny, right

It's the tiniest rounding error on what is actually the case, which is you have psychologically normal, compassionate, otherwise good people ruled by bad ideas

And ideas that put them in explicit conflict with other human beings who have different ideas

All of this, the status quo, when you look at it, can be very depressing

But the basis for hope in radical change is right there on the surface

Because, again, 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

I mean, 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, right

But 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 on the basis of a disposition to spread the wealth

around, right? And to cancel the truly unconscionable disparities in good and bad luck we see in this

world. I mean, just that, you know, there are many of us who are born with every opportunity

and virtually no impediments to our wellbeing. And there are those who are in the opposite

circumstance, and none of us are responsible for where we have entered this game. No one watching

this can claim to have decided not to be born in some war-torn country to, you know, totally

irresponsible or absent or, you know, soon-to-be-dead parents, right? No one who wasn't

orphaned in Syria in a civil war is responsible for that. And no one who was born neurologically

healthy is responsible for that. You can't account for the fact that you don't have brain damage

I mean, just list your advantages for as long as you like. Really, none of them

were brought into being by you, right? You're a beneficiary of all of these gifts

insofar as you have them. And if you're intelligent and you're capable of great effort

those things too are mere inheritances. You know, they're genetic, they're environmental

there's some combination of the two. But the fact that you weren't murdered in a ditch

as a child, right, is something you can't control. So, you know, the better part of compassion ultimately is to recognize that you want other people to thrive

You want to cancel these disparities and bad luck insofar as you can

And more to the point, you want to help build a society and a civilization that becomes a machine for doing this, right

You want a fair and just society that the wealthier it becomes the more it makes life even for its poorest members better and better such that the human world becomes unrecognizable ultimately and unrecognizably good

And there's no question that's possible. It's already happened for some of us

If you look at the difference between the best life on offer now and the worst

it's as stark as you can imagine. I mean, you just can't possibly exaggerate how much better it is to live in a peaceful, orderly society and to be wealthy and healthy and surrounded by people who you love and who love you and to be surrounded by increasingly happy strangers who just want to cooperate with you

And their hopes and dreams are being realized on a daily basis

And crime is low and social trust is high. And all of that's possible

And many of us have lived this, if not all the time, certainly in our most secure moments

And increasingly, it's the norm. Certainly in affluent societies, it's the norm

And so far as it's unraveling in places, that is worth worrying about

and addressing. But there are places on earth where nothing like that is remotely possible

at the moment. There are places that have known civil war or something like civil war for as long

as I've been alive. And on top of that, they're ravaged by infectious illness at a level that

hasn't been true in any place I've lived for more than a century. So yeah, I think we have a global

responsibility to make life better and better. And insofar as we lose sight of that responsibility

or disavow it because we think it's no longer possible, because we think that there isn't

enough wealth in principle, there are not enough good things to share, we're not going to build

enough knowledge to engineer a tide that lifts all boats, right? And we have to hunker down and

defend ourselves because the barbarians are at the gates, right? I mean, if that's the future

well, it's going to be increasingly dystopian and terrifying. So we do have a choice to make

And at the most basic level, we have to safeguard the tools by which we would

make such a choice and continually correct course. And for that, there really is no

tool better and no substitute for human conversation wherein we converge on a

fact-based understanding of what's happening in the world. When you look at what it takes to

improve your life personally in your face-to-face relationships and really in the privacy of your

own mind. I mean, just what is it like to be you alone in a room with nothing to distract you

That really is a matter of understanding your habitual entanglement with thought

and learning to break that spell, right? I mean, this is, you know, meditation by another name

The reality is, for most of us, we wake up each morning and we are chased out of bed by our thoughts

And we think, think, think, think, think until we struggle to fall asleep later that night

And our lives are largely determined by the quality of those thoughts, the quality of the stories we're telling ourselves

We live moment to moment in a kind of waking dream. and our entanglement with thought is very much like the dreams we experience while asleep

right? And not like the lucid ones. I mean, there's this phenomenon of lucid dreaming

which is interesting, but obviously not the normal case. No, our thoughts are more like the

truly psychotic dreams we have every night where we have no idea what has happened to us, right

We're not even doing enough reality testing to be surprised by the fact that we find ourselves

in another circumstance, right? You go to sleep at night, and then the next thing you know, you're on a beach somewhere

or you're flying on an airplane, or you're talking to somebody who's famous who you never

met, or to someone who's dead, or whatever it is, you're in a new circumstance, and you

don't even know enough about yourself to be surprised, right? You don't, all the laws of physics have been violated and you don't even blink, right

The most surprising thing about dreams is our fundamental lack of surprise when they arise

And so it is with thoughts, right? You're sitting and you're ostensibly doing something productive

You're, you know, you're working or you're reading a book or you're having a conversation

but your moment to moment use of your own attention is competing with this continuous

product this inner voice that is saying things right Or broadcasting images I mean your attention is being buffeted each moment by the intrusion of memories or images about the future sources of anxiety or regret So you buffeted back and

forth by past and future as represented by thought. And you're not noticing thoughts themselves as

appearances in consciousness. They seem to come up from behind and become what you are

Even now, as I'm speaking and you're struggling to follow the thread of this increasingly long and perhaps ungrammatical sentence

my voice is competing with the voice in your head that feels like you

And it's not you in the sense that you normally presume. It's this appearance in consciousness

There's space around it. There's a context in which it's appearing that you are not tending to recognize

and recognizing it, you would see that thought is just this gossamer object in awareness

that really it comes out of nowhere, it disappears back into nowhere

And yet unrecognized, it seems to be what you are in each moment, right

It feels like a self. It feels like I. And that identification, that lack of distance between consciousness and its object, right

That is a thing that leaves us hostage in each moment to the emotional and behavioral implications of each thought, right

So if you're thinking about that thing that profoundly embarrasses you or that concern

about which you are deeply frightened, right? Your child is ill, right

And your moment ago, you weren't thinking about it, but now you are, right

And it's all consuming. It is just this linguistic, imagistic representation of a state of the world that unrecognized

completely changes your emotional state and trims down your mind to some seeming imperative

You need to react just like this right now at the volume that you're currently experiencing

And the reason why meditation becomes a great tool and art of emotional regulation is that

it introduces a degree of freedom here. It introduces a distance between the sense of being the subject of your experience and the various objects, the various states of the nervous system, the physiological changes that you recognize to be this emotion that's being kindled by the next thought and the thoughts themselves

And you can begin to witness all of that in a way that allows for some space and ultimately for quite a lot of space

And then you're free to choose, right? Just how angry do I want to be right now

How fearful do I want to be? How impatient do I want to be? How motivated do I want to be to respond to an emergency

And I'm not saying there aren't emergencies. I'm not saying there aren't circumstances that benefit from a full adrenaline dump that

gets you running or fighting. In truth, those moments are few and far between

and all of those strong negative emotional reactions like anger and fear

they're necessary as information. They're salience cues, right? They tell you that something has happened in the world

or in your body that is worth paying attention to, right? But the question is

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

I mean, the half-life of the utility of anger is very, very short

And so it is with almost any other negative state. And until you learn to meditate, until you learn to recognize thoughts as thoughts and emotions as emotions

until you break this spell of just kind of helpless identification with each new appearance in consciousness

is you are just condemned to be as angry as you will be for as long as you will be

And it will be, you know, could be an hour, it could be a day, it could be a week

depending on just what you do with your mind. But there's no degree of freedom

You're busy trying to arrange the world so as to no longer justify this negative mental state

You have to change the things in the world that are making you angry. That's the only way to get off that ride

But the truth is, anger or any other negative emotion has a very short half-life physiologically

I mean, the moment you recognize it, the moment you cease to be entranced by the thoughts

that are telling you why you have every right to be angry, the moment you break the spell

it diminishes over the course of seconds, tens of seconds at the longest

And then you, again, it'll come back again the moment you get caught by the next thought

But then you keep punctuating these reactions to life with this clear seeing of what the mind is like prior to identification with thought

And those punctuations give you real freedom. It is a kind of superpower to just decide, OK, I'm not going to be angry now

I'm just going to let it go. That's possible once you develop the skill

And then the neurology of that is reasonably well understood at this point

It's important to be able to do it because so much of the chaos we see in the world and

so much of the chaos that gets introduced into our own lives is a matter of kind of

pathological emotional dysregulation, right? It's normal in the sense that it's all too common

It has a lot of subscribers out there in the world. but it's not normal in the sense that it's normative and that it's good or necessary for us

You know, it's ogous to road rage, right? I mean, road rage is so comical and insane because

you know, we've all, you know, most of us have experienced it and it's delimited, you know

it's exaggerated by the context, right? We all get in these metal boxes of privacy and, you know

start moving around at high speed. And it brings something out in us that, you know

the moment you step outside of the car, we would recognize is just totally unsustainable

An experience that is so easy to reframe, right? Someone cuts you off in traffic

nothing's happened. You know, they just did something that caused you to hit the brakes

and you got angry. And it's so easy to tell yourself a story that defuses that reaction

I mean, you could just recognize that you have no idea what's going on in that person's life

You know, I mean, who knows what phone call they just got? Who knows what hospital they're

racing to get to? Who knows what personal chaos they're failing to overcome? You don't know what's

happening there, and yet you are taking everything personally, and you could just feel compassion

there, but no, you feel rage, and now you're shrieking at them and gesticulating, and now

they notice, and now you're in the middle of a conflict. You know, that's a very, it's a cartoonish version of chaos that most of us have lived

to some degree or another. But it's the same automaticity of capture by thought and emotional contraction that is at the bottom of basically everything we're seeing in the world that is deranging us

All of our overreactions, all of our failures of compassion, our failures of mutual understanding

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

It always starts with this moment of contraction into self and self-preoccupation and fear and anger

and everything gets layered on top of that. And it's the inability to unclench the fist

that has formed in your mind that is at the root of everything

And we can try to create a world that never pisses us off

I'm not saying there are no problems in the world worth solving. There are certainly many

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 the answer in almost every case is that you don't have to be

unhappy at all. It's possible to be happy even while working under fairly stressful conditions

It's possible to be happy even when you don't yet have what you want. This is a capacity of

the human mind. This is starkly illustrated by the fact that there are people who go into

into solitude for years at a time and do nothing but meditate. I mean, I've studied with meditation

masters who've spent years in solitude, even years in caves in the Himalayas. And that's exactly what

they wanted to do. And they came out radiantly happy. Right now, of course, there's another name

for that condition. It's called solitary confinement. And it's considered a torture

even inside a maximum security prison, right? I mean, most people, given the way their minds are

would rather be out there experiencing the community of rapists and murderers

than left alone in a room with their thoughts, right? And that tells you a lot about what is considered normal

for most of us most of the time with regards to our thoughts

And there's another possibility. It really is possible to break that spell and recognize just how much intrinsic freedom there is in consciousness itself prior to identification with thought