We counter polarization and anxiety with forgiveness and reconciliation. But we live in an emerging moral culture, called a Victimhood Culture, which at its worst can incentivize us to live in offense, comparison, and scapegoating. In this episode, we explore the history of three moral cultures and the implications of the emerging Culture of Victimhood.

Immaturity is marked by either-or, all-or-nothing, zero sum thinking…and our culture it steeped in it, especially in the form of false binaries. In this episode, we explore how false binaries help keep our culture stuck in polarization and anxiety and how, through recognizing them, we can transcend them. We can live in the maturity of both-and thinking, which leads to humility, empathy, and wisdom.

In our over-stimulated world, experiencing anxiety in the form of racing thoughts and a spun-out mind is a pervasive reality. We humans already have a negativity bias: as the metaphor goes, our brains are like Velcro for negative thoughts and Teflon for positive thoughts. But we can transcend our fixation on negativity. In this episode, we explore how to counter the anxiety of our culture (and our own minds) by raising our awareness and quieting our brains. By practicing 5 key practices, you can learn to be fully present in each moment, here and now, which opens up a world of abundance.

Since the 1970s, America's sense of community, measured in "social capital," has steadily declined, resulting in what sociologists sometimes call "the atomized self." We are more disconnected from one other now than we were in the past, which directly impacts how we go about getting our need for recognition and dignity met. And with two very different understandings of what dignity is (recognition of sameness versus recognition of differences), we are often thrown into conflict with one another, which is part of our cultural crisis. This must be named if it is to be transcended.

Defining happiness—let alone what leads to it—is difficult, and yet the quest for happiness is at the heart of our modern cultural ethos. In this episode, we explore Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" and how the notion of "self-actualization" reigns in our culture, when "transcendence" is what really makes us happy. And we explore the difficulties in pursuing transcendence in a culture in which moral frameworks or over-arching narratives are viewed with deep suspicion, if not hostility.

Regret is looking back and wishing something had been different—a different choice made or a different path taken. And it is often linked to shame. In this episode we explore how to navigate regret in a way that ends strengthens us rather than burying us. And we explore principles and practices we can engage to deal not just with regret but pain in all of its manifestations. This, too, is part of what it takes to live a life of courage and hope.

In this episode, we explore how notions of personal freedom have changed over the last 400 years, post-Enlightenment, creating a new notion of the self and a rampant individualism across Western culture. This concept is key to understanding our cultural crisis of anxiety and polarization because our new notion of freedom and our new individualism fuels much of our contemporary anxiety and undermines moral discourse.

Progressives and conservatives mis-understand each other's morality, that much is clear. But what exactly do they misunderstand?

In this episode, we explore Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph's research into the 5 universal moral foundations (harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, in-group loyalty, and purity/sanctity) and the differences between the moral frameworks of progressives and conservatives. Progressives and conservatives relate to each of these 5 moral foundations differently because much of our contemporary cultural conflict traces back to these differences in moral outlook. If we understand that, we can start to live with more curiosity and a willingness to critique our own positions before attacking "the other side."

How do we understand the rise in anxiety, polarization, and division in the US? More to the point, how do we name it so that we can transcend it and live free of its dominance? In this episode, which launches a new series, I explore two of the dominant archetypal impulses in human nature: conservatism (the desire to keep the good that is) and progressivism (the desire to pursue the great that could be). And I explore how we might all edge away from the precipice and start living more balanced, sane lives.

There's an ancient paradigm for how we build our character: our desire for change can be funneled into practices. Practices, consistently engaged, become our habits, our instinctual, reflexive ways of behaving in the world. Our habits, quite simply, become our character, who we become, for ourselves and for others.

It sounds simple, but it takes real work. Sometimes people get so caught up in "what they don't want" that they lose sight of pursuing "what they do want." In this episode we explore how we can make change sustainable in our lives by learning to state our vision in positive terms.