Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

by Ben Sasse

they also intentionally built an anti-majoritarian government because the worst form of democracy—mob rule—is always a danger against which we must be on guard.

The Founders urge us to do the hard work of protecting ourselves and our vulnerable neighbors against the majority that says might makes right.

Rather, the goal of an election is to determine who will best steward this experiment in self-government for the next short while—before returning to the farm or suburb or small business or Rotary Club. The winners aren’t the Good Guys, and the electoral losers aren’t the Villains who need to be crushed.

If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on. It outlives me when I’m gone. Like the scripture says: “Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree And no one shall make them afraid.”

“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right,”

Limited government is not the same concept as small government.

You do not have rights because the government decided to be generous to you; you have your rights because you are created with dignity.

We need to have the courage to admit that sometimes both options stink.

Deep, enduring change does not come through legislation or elections. Meaningful change comes as lots and lots of individual minds are persuaded and hearts changed.

Progressives see the world as a battle between victims and oppressors; Conservatives see the world as a battle between civilization and barbarism; Libertarians see the world as a battle between freedom and coercion.

As Americans are increasingly tempted to buy into the idea that more tech saturation is a cost-free escape from the boredom and inconveniences of life, the creators of these new technologies are themselves increasingly guarding against letting technological devices cut them off from those essential parts of life.

humans shouldn’t aim to be “free from” real people and real places, but aim rather to be “free to” grow roots into those people and places.

We’re increasingly bonding with our machines, and these virtual relationships aren’t satisfying.

“The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind.” They are merely “the ties that preoccupy.”

Writing led to a decline in memorization, because remembering on your own—that is, without the aid of a book—was no longer the only way to preserve a fact or story.

Social media accounts are exercises in selection bias—no one posts photos of themselves cleaning up the cat’s puke—but we don’t pause to remember that.

But in real life, much of what you end up appreciating about the hard-to-attain moments is the work required to get there.

SCIFs. It’s a special room used for classified intelligence briefings—built to be spy-proof. When I go into one of these rooms, I’m not allowed to bring in anything with a battery.

Recently, after hearing me voice some of the worries I’ve outlined here, one of my friends suggested that maybe the SCIF concept could be transplanted into homes.

“To master the art of deep work, you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.”

“If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours,” he writes, “you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.”

Cal Newport’s book Deep Work—at

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,

When we prioritize “news” from afar, we’re saying that our distant-but-shallow communities are more important than our small-but-deep flesh-and-blood ones.

Socrates never had an iPhone, but he was right about this regardless: “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”

What’s crucial here, at least for our purposes, is that God cares not only about immaterial souls but also about the material world. We’re not spirits, zipping about. We’re bodies, too. And that whole complex—body plus soul—is always in a particular place, at a particular time. We’re right here, right now. Place matters.

Mobility breeds rootlessness, and our rootlessness results not in improved communities but in more isolation.

“Mobility, like frequent repotting of plants, tends to disrupt root systems, and it takes time for an uprooted individual to put down new roots.” After having done this multiple times, though, many people decide—in the interests of preserving energy, both physical and emotional—to stop even making an attempt to put down roots. Building community takes time and energy and emotional risk, and so it’s often easier to guard our heart than to invest. After all, we aren’t sure how long we’ll be around.

“What’s crazy about California is there are a lot of people here, but no one thinks of themselves as from here,” he continued. “Eight times more bodies left LAX than entered LAX last month.” He shook his head. “This state is beautiful, and it’s a magnet for many. But many people don’t really think of this as ‘home.’”

While more money and more freedom can provide you with more pleasure, they cannot provide you with more contentment. The world is crowded with people whose lives abound in pleasure, but are miserable and dissatisfied nonetheless.

technological innovation has focused primarily on reducing production costs, and therefore making prices cheaper, and therefore making ownership cheaper and easier. But today, with so much innovation focused on software that can drive the cost of real-time, geographically aware transactions toward zero, one of the major breakthroughs of our moment is the reduction of what we might think of as rental facilitation costs.

You’ll never start building community until you start building community.

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. —Winston Churchill

You find out that life is just a game of inches.

A good rivalry requires a good deal of similarity.

But debating policy and demonizing your debate partner are fundamentally different things.

We should stop holding the candidates on “our side” to lower standards than we expect from our opponents. This shouldn’t be hard. Lying matters, and truth matters. We should stop lazily absolving bad actors on our side by just shrugging and saying, “Well, they all lie.” Be skeptical of any politician whose statements frame our primary struggle in terms of one group of Americans versus another. Accountability starts at home, and “what-about-ism” is an intellectually vacuous way to live a life—not

Real journalism isn’t a “game”; it’s not about the quippiest hot takes. Journalists do not exist to entertain you, confirm your opinions, or support your candidate. In a democracy, we count on journalists to ask hard questions.

One of the core problems with our public life together is that we’re constantly failing to distinguish between politics and civics.

Civics is about who we are as a people. A nation requires a framework of shared values, a set of core commitments.

America’s military is superior to any force that could challenge it on the battlefield. But, Lincoln added, that does not mean America is invulnerable: “If destruction be our lot,” he remarked, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

D.C. is not supposed to merely tolerate but to actively encourage a wide diversity of local communities. We don’t need to agree on everything; we simply need to allow the space for communities of different belief and custom to flourish.

The American response to speech we don’t agree with is not less speech but more speech. We

We don’t have problems because we belong to too many different groups but rather because we prioritize them wrongly. When we get the order wrong, we cause connections to fray.

And we should always worry that calls for civility can be reduced to a demand to accept the status quo, which tends simply to favor those with status.

As Americans, we need to agree first on the universal dignity of all people, before we descend to the more divisive but less important debates about the prudential use of the levers of government power.