Rick Hanson

And if we let ourselves be hijacked by those righteous grievances, that's an affliction on us.

And it's especially important to pay attention to that affliction because it can feel so rewarding.

This makes me think about exemplars and our strong tendency, because I'm a developmental psychologist, to what's called social learning, where we observe people.

I have a friend, Dr. Daniel Ellenberg, past president of the division of the APA that focused on men and masculinities.

Anyway, he makes the point that the problem, which goes back to what we said earlier, John, we don't have enough models, mainstream models of compassion and action.

We don't have enough macho men being compassionate.

We don't have as much models of that, including in our politics and in business and so forth.

And when we see someone like that,

who is morally beautiful, like your comment about the Dalai Lama considering everything that he and his people had to deal with at the hands of the Chinese government, which I separate from the Chinese people, make a distinction there.

We're very, very moved by that.

And I feel like we need more and more of that.

We need more and more examples of that.

One example that just comes to my mind, which you can find on the internet,

is Frank Rogers, Mr. Rogers, famously a TV person working with kids, was testifying before Congress, which was about to cut off funding, I think, for PBS or that sort of thing.

And a very hostile, I think it was a Republican congressman who was the chair of the committee at the time, was grilling Mr. Rogers, who then just did not get defensive and really spoke from his heart about the children in America

were benefiting from the show and you could see that his embodiment of moral beauty there um was deeply persuasive to that congressman who was started on a righteous path this way and he finished being a complete supporter and things like that so i i look for more examples like that and um

Maybe that's an area of research for you, Josh.

I don't know.

But I am also looking for ways that you and I have talked about, John, to invest some money in social media and in influencers who can foreground more of these models, because I think we really need them.

And it's our culture that's toxic right now in particular.