Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…It is possible. I would say more generally about conversations as… It goes back a little to what I said earlier about the Marxist view of history. One of the problematic things I see today in many academic circles is that people focus too much on power. They think that the whole of history or the whole of politics is just a power structure. It’s just struggle about power. Now, if you think that the whole of history and the whole of politics is only power, then there is no room for conversation. Because if what you have is a struggle between different powerful interests, there is no point talking. The only thing that changes it is fighting. My view is that, no, it’s not all about power structures. It’s not all about power dynamics. Underneath the power structure, there are stories, stories in human minds. And this is great news, if it’s true, this is good news. Because unlike power that can only be changed through fighting, stories can sometimes, it’s not easy, but sometimes stories can be changed through talking, and that’s the hope. I think in everything from couple therapy to nation therapy, if you think it’s power therapy, it’s all about power, there is no place for a conversation. But if to some extent it’s the stories in people minds, if you can enable one person to see the story in the mind of another person, and more importantly, if you can have some kind of critical distance from the story in your own mind, then maybe you can change it a little and then you don’t need to fight. You can actually find a better story that you can both agree to. It sometimes happens in history. Again, French and Germans fought for generations and generations. Now, they live in peace. Not because, I don’t know, they found a new planet they can share between France and Germany so now everybody has enough territory. No, they actually have less territory than previously because they lost all their overseas empires, but they managed to find a story, the European story, that both Germans and French people are happy with. So they live in peace. I very much believe in this vision that you have of the power of stories. And one of the tools is conversations, another is books. There’s some guy that wrote a book about this, power of stories, he happens to be sitting in front of me. And that happened to spread across a lot of people, and now they believe in the power of story and narrative. Even a children’s book too, so the kids. And It’s fascinating how that spreads. Underneath your work, there’s an optimism. And I think underneath conversations is, what I tried to do is an optimism, that it’s not just about power struggles. Yeah.…

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