How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached.

The world is reflected back to you.

The crucial question is not “What happened to this person?” or “What are the items on their résumé?” Instead, we should ask: “How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct their reality?” This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.

Understanding someone's experience of something is the purpose of true, heartfelt communication. This fosters trust and understanding.

Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person “constructionism.” Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it. “The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

Constructionism is the idea that while objective reality exists, we can only access it through subjective experiences.

The effects of this are ruinous and self-reinforcing. Social disconnection warps the mind. When people feel unseen, they tend to shut down socially. People who are lonely and unseen become suspicious. They start to take offense where none is intended. They become afraid of the very thing they need most, which is intimate contact with other humans. They are buffeted by waves of self-loathing and self-doubt. After all, it feels shameful to realize that you are apparently unworthy of other people’s attention. Many people harden into their solitude. They create self-delusional worlds. “Loneliness obfuscates,”

The pathway to social solitude

As the columnist Peggy Noonan put it, “People are proud of their bitterness now.”

According to research by Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute, lonely people are seven times more likely than non-lonely people to say they are active in politics. For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy.

Politics and loneliness

The essence of evil is the tendency to obliterate the humanity of another.

Evil is anti-human

as the years have gone by, I have increasingly fixated on what I see as a deeper cause of our social and relational crisis. Our problem, I believe, is fundamentally moral. As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect.

The issues we are facing today may have their epicenter in the moral breakdown of society

I realize the phrase “moral formation” may sound stuffy and archaic, but moral formation is really about three simple, practical things. First, it is about helping people learn how to restrain their selfishness and incline their heart to care more about others. Second, it’s about helping people find a purpose, so their life has stability, direction, and meaning. Third, it’s about teaching the basic social and emotional skills so you can be kind and considerate to the people around you.

Basic moral formation.

for members of dominant or majority groups, there’s usually little or no gap between how others see you and how you see yourself. For people from marginalized or historically oppressed groups, there’s usually a chasm between who you are and how you are perceived.

This is important because it illustrates the settings in which our biases may be wholly inaccurate.

every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation. The official conversation is represented by the words we say about whatever topic we are nominally discussing: politics, economics, workplace issues—whatever. The actual conversation occurs in the ebb and flow of underlying emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened.

There are two conversations within every conversation.

But very often in hard conversations, there is no shared pool of knowledge. One person describes their set of wrongs. The other person describes their own different set of wrongs. As the conversation goes on, they each go into deeper detail about their particular wrongs, but there’s no shared pool. Pretty soon nobody is listening. It doesn’t take much to create an us/them dynamic. This is a surefire way to do it.

In hard conversations one of the goals is to foster cooperation and avoid dfferentiation. Also, learn to let go of your desire to win the argument

Labeling is when you try to discredit another person by tossing them into some disreputable category: You’re a reactionary. You’re the old establishment. You’re woke. Slapping a label on someone is a great way to render them invisible and destroy a hard conversation.

You lump them in with a group and no longer accept that they are capable of independent thought

“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve to never ask them why,” the actor Stephen Fry once wrote. “Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”

Walking alongside someone experiencing severe depression is scary, uncomfortable, and draining but it is a selflessness that may be unmatched