Let’s Ascend to Our Higher Minds to Heal Our Civic Souls in a Year When Democracy Itself Is on the World’s Ballots
In a journey to my quarter-century class reunion at the Wharton School, my thoughts turned to the ways leaders must help us climb down from a performative global arms race of primitive mind symbolism and theater.
I’ll call it a tale of two approaches: Two ways to consider this moment in history, two ways to respond, and a goal of synthesis to repel the mind viruses burrowing into our civic psyches and souls. It starts with two states of mind. I realize that sounds a little abstract, so let me share a small but concrete anecdote of insight into what is perhaps our biggest civic, if not civilizational, challenge.
It was the run-up to the 25th anniversary reunion of a very accomplished group — my Wharton School MBA 1999 class. I was reflecting on higher-minded, if sober, thoughts. Wharton was and remains transformational for me, serving as the launch pad of my entrepreneurial journey, along with those of so many graduates who are now leaders changing the world. I have both my classmates and Wharton professors to thank for that, many of whom I remain very close to today. Yet, my contrasting thoughts were on how primitive-minded our planetary politics and discourse have become, infused with anger, abuse, revenge, and even violence in this year when I believe democracy itself is on the ballot across the world.
Dark thoughts are not where I spend a great deal of time. The prism through which I look out at the world is generally one of optimism. There is so much progress happening outside the purview of our 24–7, hyperventilation-based news cycle. I recommended in my annual New Year’s letter three different progress-amplifying newsletters, including that of my good friend and data.world Advisory Board member Zachary Karabell, The Progress Network. But I’m also a realistic optimist, and the wisdom of author and TED speaker Tim Urban often echoes: “Trust, the critical currency of a healthy society, is disintegrating. And these trends seem to be happening in lots of societies, not just my own,” Urban wrote in his great book last year, What’s Our Problem. In my own reflection on that book, shortly after its publication, I wrote:
His essential argument is that we’re trapped between our biological brains, what he calls our “Primitive Mind”, evolutionarily hardwired for the tribal world of 10,000 years ago, and our evolved and intentional consciousness, our tolerant and creative “Higher Mind”, that we’ve willed into being despite ourselves in the last few hundred years. When we’re operating in our Higher Mind, we’re civil and productive; when stressed, as rapid change and the fear-generating algorithms of social media take over, we’re pulled down into the paleolithic, suspicious mind of old.
A post, a reprimand, and a conversation with myself before others
So it was ironic that amid these thoughts, I fell prey myself to the anger-seeking algorithms. Not a full paleolithic fall but a slip in the wrong direction. On WhatsApp to my class, I reposted this clip from X/Twitter of Jewish activist Lizzy Savetzky, querying protesters at an encampment on the University of Pennsylvania, home to its business school of Wharton. I’ve certainly no quarrel with Lizzy, whose sentiments I fully share, and whose bearing of witness to the mind virus at work is initiative I applaud. And I won’t dwell on the antisemitic comments and symbols she recorded, more of the numbing icons of anti-Jewish hatred and intimidation on display for months across college campuses. No, my quarrel is really with myself, and more broadly with the fact that we’ve allowed ourselves to be trapped by the ever-smaller frames through which we conduct our civic discourse. We are trapped in a performative arms race — and it’s global.
As I shared Lizzy’s post into the Wharton ’99 forum on WhatsApp, the private group chat to keep in touch, connect with old friends, and make plans to connect at the pending reunion, I asked: “Are we going to see this when we are there?”
I was quickly reprimanded by a few of my classmates, who reminded me that polemics are outside the guidelines. While I was sincere in worrying about an ugly display on campus, particularly since I was attending with my 14-year-old son, I realized they were right. Was my intent to be provocative? Yes, in a narrow way — though I argued to myself that the hatred on display, on a campus central to my being, was the real provocation. But fair enough, I answered, again speaking to myself. A two-minute video, posted in a community forum of well-educated, successful, world-traveling, news-savvy fellow alumni was unlikely to change hearts and minds. Returning to Urban’s higher mind on this, I responded in the forum at greater length:
Of course the two-day reunion was great, full of old memories and new insights. The public forums were dominated by discussion of artificial intelligence, which I appreciated very much, as AI is the core mission of my current company, data.world, and we are doing exciting things. Leading was Ethan Mollick, my favorite university professor on AI anywhere. I feel lucky that he teaches at Wharton, alongside another favorite of mine, Adam Grant (Adam also serves on our Advisory Board at data.world.) Ethan’s shares on LinkedIn are my favorite on the subject, and I’ll keep saying that until someone points me to another professor that shares better content on AI (and then I’ll follow them too). Also, I was very happy to see Wharton Dean Erika James share a preview at our Reunion of a new initiative Wharton just launched yesterday in partnership with OpenAI, part of the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative, that will supercharge AI in business education in multiple ways. Just for starters, every full-time MBA student as well as all executive MBA students will be provided enterprise licenses to ChatGPT beginning next fall. Much will follow on that front, I’m sure — and I have no doubt that Wharton will guide the next generation of leaders to success in this must-win arena. As part of a series I wrote last year, I’ve explored the way AI will transform education. So, it is incredibly gratifying (and not surprising) to see Wharton take such a pioneering role.
I’ll have more to say on how AI is very much part of our higher mind/primitive mind dichotomy. But first, a few of the concerns I heard and shared at the Wharton reunion, and a few examples of those leading the world’s discourse in new directions — the direction of the higher minds of Wharton ‘99.
In those more private conversations, at meals, during breaks, on a couple of walks, discussion did turn to many things, including the ongoing war on Hamas in Israel, ignited on 10/7 by the most devastating pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust itself — the subject that prompted both my “provocative” post to the group chat, and this article of reflection and context I am penning today.
False equivalence is just one of many spike proteins on the mind virus
As a Jew and a proud supporter of Israel — and a believer in its promise amid many faults — my views on the war are unambiguous. I weep at the horror, death, destruction, and displacement in Gaza. I believe that a two-state solution, while seemingly more remote than ever, is urgent (but without terrorists at the helm of a new state). The settlers and their actions are despicable and their leadership an affront to that ethos of Judaism, which is Tikkun Olam (in English, To Heal the World). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is similarly a disgrace to Israel and Judaism. But the bestial horror of 10/7, the rapes, the mutilations, the sheer joy taken in the killing captured on the Go Pro cameras and cell phones of Hamas, are crimes that must be answered. You’ll seldom hear words or condemnation of this evil; far too often, this terror is airbrushed from the dominant narrative. Those with doubts should watch the wrenching documentary Screams Before Silence, produced by technology executive Sheryl Sandberg. And the moral equivalence arguments, now being waged not just on college campuses, but by the International Criminal Court in the Hague as well, are beyond the pale. In what is now a sad foreshadowing of our current moment, I wrote on the one month anniversary of 10/7 (my most shared article of 2023):
“…It’s time to tame the perverse tyranny of this word “but” in our discourse on Israel and the now month-old war raging in Gaza after the gruesome slaughter, rape, and torture of more than 1,400 innocent people…Did you condition your reaction to the murder of George Floyd with a but? Did you use a but during Trump’s Muslim ban? Did you say but in discussion of the Stop Asian Hate movement? Did you use a but after the slaughter of so many Muslims (over 230,000) at the hands of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad? Did you react with a but in the Rwandan genocide (over 800,000 slaughtered)? Did you use a but in your thoughts about the Russian slaughter of so many Ukrainians (around 70,000), still happening right now..?”
I continued:
“… If you only used a but in the slaughter of 10/7, almost reflexively and immediately, you really need to get your human cognition checked out… You have a mind virus. It may seem obscure, but this virus is part and parcel of what has been discussed so widely in recent years in the media, in academia, in political discourse — “false equivalence…”
False equivalence, of course, is just one of the spike proteins on the mind virus. Blaming “the other”, manipulating fear, exploiting the decline of community, stoking ancient hatred and nationalist symbols, sanctifying a sense of victimhood, and lying with impunity, bots, and computational propaganda are all elements of Urban’s ubiquitous primitive mind. It is all part of what the author and podcaster Kara Swisher has termed, “the grievance industrial complex”. It’s what Columbia University Professor Jonathan Haidt called the “oppressor vs. oppressed mindset” in his profound essay last December, Why Antisemism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus. It’s a term Haidt popularized with co-author Greg Lukianoff in his 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind. It’s a read I highly recommend for many reasons to evolve our societal cognition.
A planetary challenge to democracy
This particular pandemic is hardly over. In Russia a tyrant just wrapped up a landslide in a country where reality is so warped by propaganda. India is voting in phases as I write, with 50 million calls made by fake AI clones before angry voting even began. South Africa headed to the polls yesterday, with 70 parties competing for the attention of an electorate more deeply disillusioned than at any time since the end of apartheid three decades ago. Full results are expected by the weekend. But as I write, the long-ruling African National Congress appears to be suffering its first-ever defeat. On Sunday, Mexico will vote in an election marred by violence and broadly seen as neither free nor fair. A few days later the European Union’s voters will choose 720 lawmakers for its 27-nation parliament amid an extremist surge in which an attempt to kill Slovakia’s prime minister is only the latest outrage. I could go on, as some two billion people are voting in 2024 in 64 national elections for a dizzying array of office-holders.
This global march to the polling booth is unprecedented in scope. Sadly, it is also history-making as in virtually all of these elections our primitive minds are on full display. But still, there’s only one election with truly global stakes and ramifications — our presidential election less than six months from now, a ticking time bomb. However imperfect the options, the choice is clear: the man who sat watching TV as hate-spewing rioters ransacked our Capitol in his name must be resoundingly defeated. His daughter begged him to call it off. His son-in-law pleaded. But he could not be moved, and that says all you need to know about his character to lead — well, almost everything.
From the tenor of elections around the world waged on fear, to book bans in local school districts, to the culture wars that have weaponized the acronym “DEI” for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (a complex topic for me), to insulting language as the new norm in congressional hearings, the performative arms race escalates and accelerates as the dopamine rush of a 30-second TikTok is the new coin of the primitive mind realm.
An appeal to intellect and reason
On May 7, the seventh-month anniversary of 10/7, I marked the occasion with my own message in a bottle, tossed into the sea of invective in the hope it might reach the opposite shore: An Appeal to America’s College Protesters: Examine Your Own Captivity, the Seizure of Your Hearts and Minds. There I wrote:
“… Exactly six months ago, on 11/7, I wrote about the perverse tyranny of a word, of “but” — this conjunction that invites false equivalence into our speech and thought. It struck a chord in the wake of the horror of 10/7 and the mass antisemitism — and silence — that followed… Six months later, however, I am writing of a different tyranny, and hoping to address those at the plywood ramparts on more than 100 campuses, with arrests at some 54 encampments, from Columbia to my own University of Texas at Austin. I have little doubt as fellow humanitarians that we share in the heartbreak for the misery of the Gazan civilians and the mounting death toll. I hope and pray that you also share in the agony of the hostages captured and hidden by Hamas somewhere in Gaza or rather, under Gaza, within their 300 miles of underground terror tunnels. I realize the specter of antisemitism, the vandalism, the outbreaks of campus violence, the cops in riot gear, and the students in balaclavas are sometimes exceptions to the more peaceful protests that we don’t see on the nightly news. So I want to appeal to your intellect and reason, as well as your avowed pursuit of justice…I won’t ask you to break ranks or abandon your values, although I would love you to think deeply about what you are actually protesting…”
In that post, I also shared a number of initiatives in which I find hope and inspiration that our ascent to the higher mind is more than an aspiration. They are endeavors that have only grown in scope and number since I first wrote of them. Among those leading us to a higher mind:
One is Daniel Lubetzky’s Builders of the Middle East project, forging dialogue between “builders” from around the world to challenge extremism (i.e., “destroyers”) with practical problem-solving. The founder of KIND Snacks, Daniel is a successful entrepreneur, a friend, and fellow Austinite. He described his endeavor in a talk at this year’s TED Conference, which we both joined. It is now online and I encourage you to view it. This initiative grew from Daniel’s creation in 2001 of the PeaceWorks Foundation and its OneVoice Movement that has supported some 2,000 youth leaders in every Israeli and Palestinian university. Most recently, Daniel has also launched the domestic movement Starts With Us. In Wisconsin, Starts With Us has brought citizens from diverse perspectives together to build a platform of proposals to address the root causes of abortion, empower reproductive decision-making, and support families. In Tennessee, Starts With Us has built a project with recommendations and ideas from an ideological cross-section of 30,000 Tennesseans to reduce gun violence with solutions that respect Second Amendment rights but respond to gun dangers and the trauma of gun violence.
An excerpt from the Starts With Us website is telling:
“… Are you one of the 87% of Americans from all walks of life who sees a world beyond “us vs. them?” Are you tired of polarizing politics and endless culture wars? The power to reclaim our culture Starts With Us… Our movement is founded on the beliefs that diversity of thought is a strength that leads to our most innovative ideas and that we must cooperate across our differences to solve the most pressing societal challenges of our time… We’re a community of problem solvers focused on rebuilding our social fabric through daily behaviors that encourage trust, goodwill, and skills that empower each of us to have productive and meaningful dialogue across differences…”
Count me in on Starts With Us and Daniel’s growing network of higher mind initiatives.
Meanwhile, another higher mind organization is IsraAID, a leading humanitarian organization in Israel I’ve long supported that for two decades has responded with rescue and medical workers to floods in Asia, earthquakes in Haiti and Turkey, famine in Darfur, and countless other emergencies.
Just before leaving for my Wharton reunion, I hosted a meeting at my home with IsraAID’s founder, Israeli Shachar Zahavi, on the work his new organization is doing to deliver tents, food, and medical supplies to thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. Yes! Quietly and without fanfare or publicity-seeking, IsraAID — and SmartAID, his new sister organization to bolster emergency response teams with mobile power, internet, water purification, and telecoms — is on the ground to help women and children in Gaza. Here’s Shachar in a webinar conducted by Americans for Peace Now. Here’s an excerpt from one of the few interviews that Shachar has given, to the website Israel Today:
“We have been doing this quietly for months,” Zahavi said, adding that he wants critics of Israel “to know that we are an international humanitarian aid organization, and yes, we are Israeli, and yes, helping our people, and yes, we are helping our enemies….”That is what Jews do,” he said, noting that during the Syrian civil war, the Israel Defense Forces quietly arranged for injured civilians to be brought to Israel for treatment. Zahavi said his group carefully monitors deliveries to prevent the aid it is supplying from ending up in Hamas’s hands. Staff coordinate with the IDF, which has given them the names of reputable US charities that they can work with.. “I’m not doing this lightly, but there is also the Jewish side of us, the Holocaust side of us, the human side of us,” said Zahavi, who comes from a family that had few survivors of the Holocaust. “How are we going to live with everything that is going on in Gaza?”
Another group I just learned of is “Atidna International”, an organization of Jewish, Palestinian, and other Muslim and Arab students founded at my other alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. Locally in Austin, Atidna has only been profiled once, last November, by NBC affiliate KXAN. That news of their work stands alone in Austin amid the dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of stories on the UT protests, the chants, the violence, the arrests, and the continuing turmoil that our local radio, television, and newspapers have reported is frustrating. Nonetheless, I take heart that this group was profiled nationally by ABC News Nightline in a riveting interview with a dozen students across the cultural and political divide, who spoke calmly and earnestly of their hopes for peace, coexistence, and mutual flourishing among Palestinians and Israelis. I hope you can listen to the full and brave discussion among these inspiring students on ABC News, a conversation that took place in a UT conference room while other students chanted outside. Here’s an excerpt I transcribed from founder and president, Elijah Kahlenberg, who is Jewish, and Jadd Hashem, who is Palestinian. Both are undergraduates at UT:
Here’s Elijah: “We’re called Atidna, so we combine the Hebrew word ‘atid; for ‘future’, with the Arabic suffix ‘na’, for ‘our”’. Put those two together, it means ‘our future.’ We gave ourselves that name as we truly view ourselves as one family. And we think it important to allow families to speak. Here’s Jadd: “I believe firmly that you can be pro-human being first and foremost, because we are human beings, and human rights must extend to everyone on an equal level. We still think at the end of the day that this is the time to do it [work for peace and reconciliation]. We must take action somehow, we both have family affected, this is the least we can do to get something on the ground here at a grassroots level. “
And not to be neglected is my son Levi’s just-completed 2024 Presidential Candidate Analyzer, a new AI bot (and we believe a first) that he constructed atop GPT-4o (OpenAI’s newest model). It is trained on virtually everything candidates President Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have said or promised in campaign statements, policy positions at their websites (including all of their videos), and material from their public speeches, including President Biden’s State of the Union Addresses. It’s a remarkable tool that he hopes will move political discourse from primitive-minded, raw emotion, and blind partisanship to enable higher-minded conversation about the upcoming election. Levi put this in the world in the hope it would make a real difference in such an important election.
I could continue at length on others among the higher-minded about whom I’ve written, whose voices the world desperately needs to hear. The first discussion released online from this year’s TED conference was its opening discussion of the conference. It was a stirring conversation between Palestinian peacemaker Aziz Abu Sarah and Israeli peacemaker Maoz Inon. You could hear a pin drop in the audience during it. Abu Sarah and Inon received a standing ovation after sharing the immeasurable tragedies they’ve experienced growing up in the region — and how they choose reconciliation over revenge, again and again. There’s also Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian born and raised in Gaza who immigrated to the United States as a teenager. An exemplar of the higher mind, Alkhatib has written passionately and eloquently in dozens of places, including The Atlantic, about the horror and brutality of Hamas, the horrors of antisemitism on campus and elsewhere, and the need for durable peace and cooperation in the Middle East. He has and continues to be attacked relentlessly on X/Twitter and other social media venues for his views. Here’s a post he made to X/Twitter as I was penning this article:
“… I am motivated by a sincere desire to see my people obtain their legitimate and undeniable rights, which they have not had for decades… Yet I, and many others, especially those who are silent or are forced to be quiet, struggle with finding a political home in today’s pro-Palestine movement. Increasingly, it feels as if pro-Palestine activism is dominated by maximalists (wanting all of historic Palestine and other zero-sum positions and approaches), slogan-driven voices, and narratives. There is a lack of pragmatic and humanistic ability to hold multiple truths at once and to advocate nuanced and color-rich positions and views that are not black-and-white depictions and understandings of the Israel and Palestine conflict.”
Finding truth in the synthesis of ideas
Yet one of the most salient, informed, and instructive frames of our route to a higher mind, to empathetic discourse and real solutions, came after my return from Wharton. This was the commencement speech on the synthesis of ideas as the driver of human evolution by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. He delivered his address to the students of Italy’s University of Perugia, and it is among the most philosophical and historical reflections on this moment — and the role the technology of AI will play in that moment — that I have heard. You can listen to the English original here (as read by REID AI). Or, you can watch Hoffman’s “digital twin” deliver the address in Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi, or Arabic here. Hoffman never used the phrase “higher mind”. Rather, he embodied it with what I’ll summarize as two profound points.
First, truth is never simply revealed, as dogma to be accepted as an unquestioned whole. Citing the work of 19th century German philosopher Georg Hegel, Hoffman placed today’s polemics in the framework of Hegel’s central argument, that the development and progression of history and ideas is a continuum, a “dialectic” in his terminology, of contested views. The initial view is the “thesis”, that proposition or narrative that exists at a certain point of time. It contrasts with the “antithesis”, the challenge to its validity or completeness. Using a quote that Hoffman attributed to Hegel: “Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.”
His second seminal argument was that we are not merely “homo sapiens” or “thinking humans”, the scientific term for the human species. Rather, we are in a term of his invention, “homo techne”, humans as tool creators and tool users. And it is through the use of tools that our humanity has evolved and that we have gained access — to carry the point I made at the outset — to the higher mind of rationality, the liberation from the primitive mind of our ancestors into which we risk descent.
An excerpt:
“… The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck. But it was also the advent of shipping civilizations. We are a myriad of syntheses, an ever-improving thesis as we shape new technology — and new technology shapes us. In fact, if you look throughout history, technology is the thing that makes us us… Through the tools we create, we become neither less human nor superhuman, nor post-human. We become more human. Along with getting smarter and more productive, we could be getting kinder, healthier, and more emotionally generous in our interactions with others. I think the full potential of this is going to be a much bigger deal than people realize…”
So I’ll leave readers, and my colleagues from Wharton, with that thought from Hoffman. Yes, technology is to blame for problems, from nuclear weapons to pollution, and from social media-driven depression and self-harm among teenagers to the invasion of privacy. But it also is what has created us, “homo techne”, and the extraordinary lives, unimaginable just a century ago, that we lead in more and more of the world. And I truly believe technology generally, and AI specifically, are the keys to a better, kinder, more empathetic, and higher mind world.
Our higher minds should be reflected in our elections. Now, amid the most consequential election perhaps ever, this is sadly not the case. We are in a moment of an exponential technology curve, with a backdrop of Israel and Ukraine fighting for their existence, Taiwan perhaps to follow amid the fight for western values, of growing climate disasters, of the worst flows of migrant refugees globally in history, of all the polarization I’ve been discussing, and so many more challenges. We must learn to recognize real grievances, call out those that are manufactured, and learn to listen to points of view at odds with our own. In short, we must strive to think and act with our higher minds.
We won’t always get it right, as I acknowledged in my own reflection on my misstep on WhatsApp, wondering if my son and I would be greeted upon our Thursday night arrival by protesters at Wharton. In fact, we were not; the university had cleared the encampment. But on Friday, the protesters had returned as we walked back to our hotel, and had taken over a building. They were chanting and invoking praise to “Al Aqsa Flood”, the Hamas name for its 10/7 assault and murderous carnage that ignited the war.
We’ve got our work cut out for us. I’m hoping we’ll make real progress toward evolving our higher minds by the next reunion of my Wharton MBA class of 1999… in 2029.
