The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

fragmentation of the social fabric,

The suicide epidemic is one manifestation of this isolation. The shortened life expectancy is another—the so-called deaths of despair. The contagion of mass shootings are a manifestation as well. These mass killings are about many things—guns, demagoguery, and the rest—but they are also about social isolation and the spreading derangement of the American mind.

Whenever there’s a shooting, there’s always a lonely man who fell through the cracks of society, who lived a life of solitary disappointment and who one day decided to try to make a blood-drenched leap from insignificance to infamy. Guys like that are drawn to extremist ideologies that explain their disappointments and give them a sense that they are connected to something. They convince themselves that by massacring the innocents they are serving as a warrior in some righteous cause.

People used to say that depression and other mental health challenges were primarily about chemical imbalances in the brain. But as Johann Hari argues in his book Lost Connections, these mental health issues are at least as much about problems in life—protracted loneliness, loss of meaningful work, feeling pressured and stressed in the absence of community—as they are about one’s neurochemistry.

“Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact,” Hari writes. “You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most.”

vast showdown between the social rippers and social weavers.

And here’s the hard part of the war: It’s not between one group of good people and another group of bad people. The war runs down the middle of every heart. Most of us are part of the problem we complain about.

Most of us have bought into a radical individualism that, as Tocqueville predicted, causes us to see ourselves as self-sufficient monads and cuts each secluded self off from other secluded selves. Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community. Those of us in the media know that the way to generate page views is to offer Pravda-like affirmations of your tribe’s moral superiority. Most of us hew to a code of privacy that leads us to not know our neighb...

Community is also under assault because we’ve outsourced care. As Peter Block and John McKnight argue in their book, The Abundant Community, a lot of the roles that used to be done in community have migrated to the marketplace or the state. Mental well-being is now the job of the therapist. Physical health is now the job of the hospital. Education is the job of the school system. The problem with systems, Block and McKnight argue, is that they depersonalize. These organizations have to operate at scale, so everything has to be standardized. Everything has to follow rules. “The purpose of management is to create a world that is repeatable,” they write. But people are never the same.

Care has been replaced by distance and distrust.

Obviously, it’s possible to do some good on an individual basis. But with this approach you’re not really changing the moral ecologies, or the structures and systems that shape lives.

Maybe the pool story is a better metaphor than the starfish story. As a friend of mine puts it, you can’t clean only the part of the pool you are swimming in. You can’t just polish one molecule of water and throw it back in the dirty pool.

behavior is highly contagious.

“Don’t let your neighbor drift along in lanes of loneliness,” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik writes. “Don’t permit him to become remote and alienated from you.”

“Unconditional love is so rare in life that it is identity changing when somebody keeps showing up even when you reject them,” Sarah says. “It is also identity changing to be the one rejected.”

In my young mind, my crime seemed to be that I existed, took up space and cost money.”

When you are unveiling yourself, it can feel like you are going backward. You realize there is so much trauma around; there is so much blame, and so much forgiveness is required. You realize there are so many people torn between the temptation to deny traumatic events and the desire to proclaim them. Often the struggle comes out as anger, blame, and fury, which can make repair seem impossible. But, in fact, the honest, brutal story is the kind of story that produces combustion. We spend much of our time projecting accomplishments, talents, and capacity. The confrontation with weakness can have this detonating effect.

They ask you to bury your own identity in the collective identity.

“The secret of life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once said, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

In this book I’ve talked a lot about two mountains. As I mentioned, this device was an attempt to render in narrative form the contrast between two different moral worldviews. The first mountain is the individualist worldview, which puts the desires of the ego at the center. The second mountain is what you might call the relationalist worldview, which puts relation, commitment, and the desires of the heart and soul at the center.

The hyper-individualist finds himself enmeshed in a network of conditional love. I am worthy of being loved only when I have achieved the status or success the world expects of me. I am worthy of love only when I can offer the other person something in return. I am what the world says about me. In the end, hyper-individualism doesn’t make people self-sufficient and secure. It obliterates emotional and spiritual security by making everything conditional.

Hyper-individualism directs people toward false and unsatisfying lives. Some people lead an aesthetic life. They get to taste a series of experiences which may be pleasant, but which don’t accumulate into anything because they are not serving a large cause. Some people become insecure overachievers. They seek to win by accomplishing the love, admiration, and attachment they can’t get any other way, but of course no amount of achievement ever gives them the love they crave.

The uncommitted person is the unremembered person. A person who does not commit to some loyalty outside the self leaves no deep mark on the world.

Whenever I treat another person as if he were an object, I’ve ripped the social fabric. When I treat another person as an infinite soul, I have woven the social fabric. Whenever I lie, abuse, stereotype, or traumatize a person, I have ripped the fabric. Whenever I see someone truly, and make them feel known, I have woven the fabric. Whenever I accuse someone of corruption without evidence, I have ripped the social fabric. Whenever I disagree without maligning motives, I have woven it. The social fabric is created through an infinity of small moral acts, and it can be destroyed by a series of immoral ones.

Personal transformation and social transformation happen simultaneously. When you reach out and build community, you nourish yourself.

Who I am? but, Whose am I?

Most of us get better at living as we go.

Joy is found on the far side of sacrificial service.

It is found in giving yourself away.

When you see that, you realize joy is not just a feeling, it is a moral outlook. It is a permanent state of thanksgiving and f...

This is not an end to troubles and cares. Life doesn’t offer us utopia. But the self has shrunk back to its proper size. When relationships are tender, when commitments are strong, when communication is pure, when the wounds of life have been absorbed and the wrongs forgiven, people bend toward each other, intertwine with one another, and some...