#483 — The Knots We Tie Ourselves Into
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You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today. I am here with Alain de Botton. Alain, thanks for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. So I think this conversation probably is, I don't know, two decades coming. I feel like I've known about you for at least 20 years and admired your work from afar. You've done many things. You've written many books and you have The School of Life, which I would love to talk about.
But how do you describe your career at this point? What is it that you focus on and how are you showing up mostly now as a thinker?
Sure. I mean, I'm broadly interested in the slightly paradoxical and elusive sources of human happiness, unhappiness, sorry, that are not really related to material or political shortfalls or events, but broadly lie in the psychological space are amazing human ability. to make a hell out of often pretty benign circumstances. I'm fascinated by, as I say, the knots we tie ourselves into. And I write books. I operate on YouTube. As you say, I run this organization called the School of Life in London. We're interested in emotional education. And I'm also a psychotherapist. So I see clients one day a week.
Nice.
And as well as writing books and things.
And the School of Life has published many books. Are you the author of those books? I am.
I and a colleague are the author of all the books. Yes. Wow.
You are more prolific than you get credit for then. How many books have you written?
There are a lot of them. Well, the School of Life has 70 books under its brand, and I've written 15 under my name. So it's a little too much. And I leave it to experts to diagnose what the problem might be.
This is L. Ron Hubbard territory, though happily with much better content. Wow. Okay. Well, then I'm glad to see you away from your keyboard for at least the hour that we're speaking. Thank you. Well, see, you have focused on these timeless issues of, as you just put it, our capacity to suffer unnecessarily. It's pretty easy to uncouple that from the historical moment. I mean, there are ways in which current technology and changes in culture, I think, are amplifying that capacity. making it more difficult to be happy in some very ordinary ways. Perhaps these changes are making it easier, too. Let's just talk about culture for a moment. What most concerns you about the cultural changes that we're seeing happening, more or less accelerating hour by hour around us now?
Mm-hmm. I wonder if I might start in an unusual, slightly unusual and slightly provocative place, which is with religion and with the decline in much of the modern world with what I would be careful to call a religious mindset as opposed to belief. And I think I still diagnose modern societies as coming out of the very long religious age which preceded it. And taking my cue from a thinker like Nietzsche, who predicted, I think very accurately, that the end of belief would be trouble for human beings. I mean, it's not like there was no trouble before. Don't get me wrong. There was a lot of trouble before as well.
What is the psychology behind human unhappiness?
But there were particular kinds of trouble that were going to beset humanity. non-religious eras, predominantly non-religious eras. And I think it's a good place to look. I mean, let's look at some of the things that religious societies do and secular societies have problems with. One of the things that religious societies do is to socialize in ritual forms certain kinds of psychological transitions. which secular societies have a lot of trouble orchestrating or putting on the agenda. I mean, our diaries are filled with business meetings and technical priorities. In the more religious eras, days were devoted to ideas, to priorities of the soul, if you like.
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