Arthur Brooks
About
Economist, author, former president of the American Enterprise Institute, Harvard leadership professor, former professional French horn player
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Claims by Arthur Brooks (20 of 100)
Aquinas's Definition of Love
Thomas Aquinas, paraphrasing Aristotle, defined love as 'to will the good of the other as other' — a definition that is about action rather than sentimentality or feelings, and which closely parallels Buddhist conceptions of loving kindness and compassion.
Brooks's Eclectic Career Path
Brooks's career was peripatetic: he left college at 19 to be a professional classical french horn player, toured through his 20s and played in the Barcelona Symphony, returned to finish his bachelor's at 30, became an economist and academic for 10 years, then led the American Enterprise Institute for over a decade before becoming a Harvard professor teaching the science of happiness.
The Striver's Curse
Strivers — hard-working, ambitious, success-addicted people — tend to suffer greatly later in life because the abilities they are good at and identify with cannot be sustained forever; there is an inevitable, neuroscientifically grounded decline in those abilities.
Two Types of Genius and Intelligence
Raymond Cattell observed two distinct types of intelligence: fluid intelligence (innovative capacity, working memory, problem-solving speed) which rises through the 20s and 30s and peaks in the late 30s/early 40s before declining, and crystallized intelligence (accumulated knowledge, wisdom, pattern recognition, vocabulary, teaching ability) which increases through the 40s, 50s, and 60s and stays high into the 70s and 80s.
Intelligence Is Highly Fungible in Modern Society
Modern society is increasingly complex and gives outsized returns to intellectual ability, making intelligence highly fungible across nearly all valuable activities, which is why it is rationally preferable to athletic or musical talent and why the intellectually gifted increasingly build moats around their advantages.
Intelligence Taboo From Conflating It With Moral Worth
Intelligence is a taboo topic largely because society has mistakenly equated intelligence and cognitive ability with moral superiority; since intelligence is partly a matter of genetics rather than effort, treating it as morally praiseworthy is a category error, like complimenting someone for having blue eyes.
Love Versus Attachment Are Distinct
Love and attachment are not the same thing; the Dalai Lama exemplifies loving everyone universally while remaining unattached even to those he loves, and the key to lasting well-being is detaching love from attachment, because treating anything as a permanent source of satisfaction guarantees disappointment.
Benevolence Should Be Prized Over Cognitive Ability
When choosing characteristics for one's own children, nearly everyone would choose a child of moderate ability who is benevolent, loving and kind over a psychopathic genius, which reveals that benevolence, love and kindness are in fact more important values than cognitive ability — and society should price and reward these higher values more overtly.
Mother Nature Doesn't Care About Your Happiness
Mother nature does not care whether you are happy; her goal is for you to pass on your genes, so she wires us to strive relentlessly and never be satisfied — the hedonic treadmill and homeostasis ensure no achievement (new car, marriage, success) produces permanent satisfaction.
Favorable Social Comparison Rewards the Brain Like Methamphetamine
Favorable social comparison can oxygenate the ventral striatum and deliver a real neurochemical reward comparable to taking methamphetamine, which is why people become stuck on it, yet this reward will never produce ultimate happiness because happiness is not something we can sort or rank ourselves on.
The 'I' Versus 'Me' Distinction (Atman)
Drawing on the Hindu concept of atman, there is a crucial difference between the 'I' (the pure observer of the world) and the 'me' (one's self-understanding refracted through what others think); most people are all 'me' and no 'I', and only the ultimate 'I' (atman) can be in communion with the godhead (brahman) — communion requires observing rather than self-regarding through others' reflections.
Career Arcs Should Shift From Fluid to Crystallized Roles
Many professions follow a pattern where people excel early in fluid-intelligence-heavy roles and later in crystallized-intelligence-heavy roles: startup entrepreneurs become better venture capitalists, star litigators become better managing partners, and academics write their most innovative papers early but become better teachers and explainers later — so people should consciously migrate to the role that favors their rising crystallized intelligence.
Lightweight Believers Fear Death Most
Atheists and very serious religious believers have equal — and relatively low — fear of death, while the people most afraid of death are those with lightweight religious beliefs they do not actually live according to, demonstrating that it is worth believing something seriously and acting according to it.
Religious Traditions as Curve Fits to Underlying Reality
Different spiritual and transcendental traditions are like competing curve fits to an underlying objective reality, analogous to how Newtonian physics, Einsteinian physics, and successive theories are progressively better curve fits to how the natural world works; we cannot know which tradition is more right, but each is a different language struggling to apprehend the same Platonic shadows.
Symbols and Analogy Are Valid Tools for Grasping Truth
Using symbols, poetry, and analogy is a legitimate and effective way to understand underlying truths — Brooks teaches romantic love through neurochemical analogies (dopamine as the incoming tide, oxytocin on the beach) and through Christian symbolism of divine love refracted in human love — but the danger lies in getting hung up on the poetry itself rather than the underlying concepts it points to.
Cross-Tradition Borrowing Improves One's Own Practice
Drawing techniques and insights from other traditions can make one a better practitioner of one's own faith — Brooks reports that meditating with Tibetan Buddhists in Dharamsala gave him better understanding of breath, heartbeat, and posture, making him a better Catholic at praying the rosary, and the Dalai Lama himself encouraged him to be a 'perfect Catholic.'
Brooks's Late-Career Mission to Lift People Up
Upon leaving his think tank in his mid-50s, Brooks decided to spend the rest of his life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using his intellect, on the conviction that benevolence, love, and kindness are higher values than cognitive ability or academic achievement.
Camino de Santiago as Submission of Self
Walking the Camino de Santiago is a profoundly contemplative experience that beats one into submission of the 'I-ness' by removing devices and leaving nothing to do but walk and attend to trivialities like sore legs and dirt on one's shoes through prayer and contemplation, producing a monastic walking meditation that makes sectarian differences feel irrelevant and yields a purer understanding of one's faith.
Brooks Was a Success-Addicted Self-Objectifier
Brooks's early identity was so welded to being a great french horn player that when he began declining in his early 20s he hid even the fact that he had returned to college, ashamed anyone would know — illustrating how a success-addicted self-objectifier conflates being a person with being a professional, until someone who loved him for who he was helped him separate the two.
Happiness Lives in the First Derivative
Humans are not happy unless they are making progress — all of happiness is in the first derivative, in getting better — which is why it is easy to lose weight while the scale is dropping but hard to keep it off once the goal is reached, and why successful people feel frustration and despair on the downslope of their fluid intelligence curve.
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