Them Ben Sasse Quotes

...there is almost nothing more important we can do for our young than convince them that production is more satisfying than consumption.

There is a deep and corrosive tribal impulse to act as if "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." But sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just a jackass.

Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”3

In the midst of extraordinary prosperity, we’re also living through a crisis. Our communities are collapsing, and people are feeling more isolated, adrift, and purposeless than ever before.

I believe our entire nation is in the midst of a collective coming-of-age crisis without parallel in our history. We are living in an America of perpetual adolescence. Our kids simply don't know what an adult is anymore - or how to become one. Many don't even see a reason to try. Perhaps more problematic, the older generations have forgotten that we need to plan to teach them. It's our fault more than it is theirs.

If we really want to be happy, we must plant roots and tend them. that means, in large part, thinking carefully about how to get the best out of the technology that liberates us from inconveniences - without letting our devices cut us off from the richest parts of life.

Lacking meaningful attachments, people are finding a perverse bond in at least sharing a common enemy.

We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.

When one half of the nation demonizes the other half, tendrils of resentment reach out and strangle whatever charitable impulses remain in us.

The fact that college campuses, once the cornerstone of free expression and open debate, are now among the most intellectually intolerant spaces in America should concern us deeply.

As The Atlantic’s Julie Beck has written, we’re building “pillow forts” of comfortable information around us and making it more and more difficult for anything we don’t want to hear to penetrate.5

Work is where we build character. Work is where we create value with our lives and lift up our own souls. Work, properly understood, is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others.

If a free people is going to be reproduced, it will require watering and revivifying and owning anew older traditions and awaking the curiosity in the soul of each citizen. National greatness will not be recovered via a mindless expansion of bureaucratized schooling. Seventy years ago, Dorothy Sayers wrote, 'Sure, we demand another grant of money, we postpone the school leaving age and plan to build bigger and better schools. We demand that teachers further slave conscientiously in and out of school hours. But to what end? I believe,' Sayers lamented, 'all this devoted effort is largely frustrated because we have no definable goal for each child to become a fully formed adult. We have lost the tools of learning, sacrificing them to the piecemeal, subject matter approach of bureaucratized schooling that finally compromises to produce passive rather than active emerging adults. But our kids are not commodities, they are plants. They require a protected environment, and care, and feeding, but most basically, an internal yearning to grow toward the sunlight. What we need is the equipping of each child with those lost tools.

Living only in the present isn’t freedom. Living only in the present isn’t even human if you think about it. Humans, unlike any other animal on the planet, remember the past. We understand our nature. And we try to build on both of them. We are an aspirational species; we look to the future.

Many of our television hosts are modern-day carnival barkers. We get dopamine, adrenalin, and oxytocin all at once. It's an adult video game. But instead of expertly separating us from our wallets, they're separating us from things much more valuable. Our time, our sense of perspective, and our judgment. And they are separating us from each other.

Right now partisan tribalism is statistically higher than at any point since the Civil War. Why? It’s certainly not because our political discussions are more important. It’s because the local, human relationships that anchored political talk have shriveled up. Alienated from each other, and uprooted from places we can call home, we’re reduced to shrieking.3

As Putnam demonstrates, poorer, less-educated parents tend to believe that their primary task is getting their children to obey, as opposed to better-educated parents, who emphasize helping their children understand why they ought to obey a given rule. Reading, reasoning, and problem-solving with their parents help children develop the higher-order skills that make them better equipped to face the challenges of a fluid, complex world.

Yet despite the complexity of contemporary society, there are still some simple formulas we can use to distill the path to social and economic flourishing. One of these, labeled the “Success Sequence,” and credited to Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the left-of-center Brookings Institute, proposes a three-step rule book for modern American life: 1. Finish high school. 2. Get a job. (Any job. Because working leads to more working, which leads to better jobs.) 3. Get married before having children. When people follow this pattern—and crucially, in this order—life generally turns out pretty well.

We have a crisis in this nation, and it has nothing to do with regulatory reform or marginal tax rates. This book is not going to be about politics. (Sorry to disappoint.) It’s about something deeper and more meaningful. Something a little harder to quantify but a lot more personal. Despite the astonishing medical advances and technological leaps of recent years, average life span is in decline in America for the third year in a row. This is the first time our nation has had even a two-year drop in life expectancy since 1962—when the cause was an influenza epidemic. Normally, declines in life expectancy are due to something big like that—a war, or the return of a dormant disease. But what’s the “big thing” going on in America now? What’s killing all these people? The 2016 data point to three culprits: Alzheimer’s, suicides, and unintentional injuries—a category that includes drug and alcohol–related deaths. Two years ago, 63,632 people died of overdoses. That’s 11,000 more than the previous year, and it’s more than the number of Americans killed during the entire twenty-year Vietnam War. It’s almost twice the number killed in automobile accidents annually, which had been the leading American killer for decades. In 2016, there were 45,000 suicides, a thirty-year high—and the sobering climb shows no signs of abating: the percentage of young people hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and actions has doubled over the past decade.1 We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.

Algorithms in our search engines and social media platforms shape what we receive based on our previous preferences and choice, confirming our natural inclinations to read things that confirm our beliefs rather than challenge them.

Reverend King knew that the path to success could not be zero-sum—our side wins and your side loses.

And the media plays into his hand, every single time. By April 1, 2016, with a month still to go in the Republican primaries, Donald Trump had received the equivalent of $2 billion in free television coverage. All sixteen of his GOP opponents, by comparison, had received $1.2 billion combined. By the day of the November general election, Trump had earned just under $5 billion in free media—$1.75 billion more than Hillary Clinton.4

This is reality TV provocation, pure and simple. He loves it when the chyrons scream, Surely, surely, this is the thing that will take Trump down! He’s finally gone too far! He wants the twenty-four-hour coverage obsessing over him and his double-downs, partial pivots, and salacious provocations.

fun fact: there’s more computing power in the average digital washing machine today than was used to put the first man on the moon in 1969.)

The sad reality behind our life expectancy decline is an increase in deaths of despair. Americans, particularly American men, are killing themselves, either directly with suicide or indirectly through the abuse of opioids and other addictive substances. Males between 20 and 55 years old—men in the prime of life—are dying at unprecedented rates, and they’re doing it to themselves. They’re doing it because they lack hope. We lack purpose. In many communities, there are no jobs, stores have shut down, and everybody seems to have given up. This, for many, is the end of rootlessness: homelessness.

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.

Work, after all, isn’t merely about providing for one’s family. It is certainly that, but it is also about having a sense of purpose, a means of serving one’s neighbors, a place to fit in.

There is almost something perverse about wanting to teach everyone to read but not teach them how to think clearly.

We want an America with free speech, religion, press, assembly, and protest - even for those we disagree with.

During the last upheaval of this scale, the Industrial Revolution, the concept of adolescence changed radically. Teenagers’ mission became finding the job they wanted to take when they left school, the paid calling they would stick with for the next several decades until they retired. Now, with an increasingly rootless work culture, it follows that a longer-term identity crisis, a pervading sense of unease, is plaguing the American workforce. All of us yearn to be called to something bigger than ourselves, yet most of us, most of the time, aren’t hearing that call at work.