Naming the Real

With all the talk of cancel culture, we turn to an issue at the heart of our cultural crisis: the human penchant to blame and scapegoat as a means of feeling righteous. In this episode, we explore René Girard's mimetic theory and "the scapegoating mechanism"—the human tendency to scapegoat others in order to relieve our own anxiety and demonstrate our own virtue. By understanding this mechanism, we can transcend it, and we can focus on becoming truly virtuous rather simply calling out the hypocrisy of others.

Grief done well means moving into wholeness, a process in which we become people who help heal the world around us. But how do we get there? In this third and final episode about grief, we explore the role of anger and protest in moving us beyond sorrow and into meaningful action for the sake of hope and joy.

If grieving well is so important to a flourishing life, how do we engage it? In this episode, we explore five practices (and a bonus practice) for grieving well. The goal is not to avoid grief nor to wallow in it, but to become a person that can not only touch grief but ultimately be strengthened by it. If we do this with courage, we can become a bastion of joy and a source of hope for others.

Grief is more than the loss of a loved one; it wears many faces and has many expressions. Nevertheless, grief can feel elusive, overwhelming, and misunderstood, while remaining life's one inevitability. It is also one of the core practices for living an extraordinary, flourishing life. In this episode, we explore what grief is, how critical it is for living a life of joy, and begin to explore practices for grieving well.

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.