The Daily Beast Podcast - Uncertainty Looms as Trump’s Inauguration Day Approaches

Episode Date: December 29, 2024

Stanford professor Jamil Zaki, author of Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, joins The New Abnormal podcast to discuss hope and the weaponization of hopelessness as President-elect Donald Trump again ascends to the highest office in the land. He explained, “People who lose their sense of value, who lose that compass for what they want as a society, are easier to control.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Welcome back to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here.

Today we're joined by Dr. Jamil Zaki, Stanford professor and author of Hope for Cynics, the surprising science of human goodness. And he's here to talk about the emotional fallout of the recent election and the power of pragmatic hope and community engagement and how it can combat collective despair. Folks, I am so excited to welcome back to the new abnormal Dr. Jamil Zaki, who is the author of the book, Hope for Cynics, the surprising science of human goodness, and is also a professor at Stanford. And I will tell you that your book for me has become quite a guide, particularly, I would say Dr. Zaki, after this election cycle. We had over the summer, those of us who believe in democracy, who believe in the possibility of America,

had a burst of hopefulness, a burst of joy that came with the changing of the top of the ticket when Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz began their 100-day sprint to try and change the hearts and minds of Americans. Election night, however, we were met with the reality that 50% of the country doesn't want hope and joy and democracy.

And there has been, I think, since then, as we make the March to inauguration day, we have descended in many ways into a state of hopelessness. And I want to get your thoughts on that, this sense of collective despair, and how we manage this. how we manage this reality where many people are waking up and they're saying, this is not who America is. And other people are saying, this is exactly who America has always been. So please, help us.

I have so much to say here, hopefully, some of which can be helpful. But if you don't mind, Daniel, I want to start by asking you how you have experienced hope. You said that you've been sort of thinking about our past conversation and about the science of hope. Has it been useful to you? Have you found ways to keep your sense of hope alive or to make it useful to you? Yes, because I think that for me, it has been looking at really what it means to be a cynic. And I think that you offer in your book, you know, the historical context of where the term actually comes from. But the way that we've cloaked ourselves in cynicism in this, I'm too smart to kind of fall for, to kind of fall for hope. Right. Like I'm too good for that. And I think that even the snarkiest of people, which I am a part of that class, I wouldn't do the work that I did in trying to educate the public if I didn't have hope. If I didn't believe in the possibility of this country meeting its core creed. But at the same time, how do I maintain it? I think over the months of the summer, I poured everything that I could into trying to get the vice president elected.

And what happened on election night for days, Dr. Zaki, I didn't cry. I actually had no real emotion. I wasn't filled with rage. I didn't cry. So I wasn't filled with a sense of grief. I was utterly and completely numb. Yeah. I've talked with a lot of people who expressed something very similar that in 2016, they felt

fear and rage after the election. And in 2024, they felt anesthetized. emotionally, like there was nothing left. And I think that that's a completely understandable response and one that we should have compassion for, if that's what we're feeling. I love the way that you are mission-driven in your hope, right? You are managing your inner self in order to accomplish what you want to give to the world. And I think that that's an important North Star to keep with us these days. I've been thinking a lot lately about the case of Vaclav Havel. Havel was a Czechoslovakian dissident, a playwright, friends with Kurt Vonnegut and Sam Beckett and all these cool people. And

he was part of what was known as the Prague Spring, this movement to make Czechoslovakia more democratic and less restrictive. And then the Prague Spring was defeated by Soviet forces. And Havel was put in prison for years as a dissident. And you can imagine the lack of hope that he might have had. I mean, here he had felt hope. He and his fellow progressives had put their lives, had put all of their energy into this movement, and it appeared to be working until it really wasn't working. And the country went in the exact opposite direction. Havel, though, from his prison cell, wrote to his wife that this was the time that hope is most important.

And that when you can't locate hope in the events around you, you have to find it in yourself. And that's what allowed him to keep on struggling for democracy in what eventually became the Czech Republic. So I've been thinking a lot about that for no particular reason. For no particular reason. But I think that it's just critical right now for people to understand that hope is not optimism. Optimism is the belief that the future will turn out well. And generally, when people are optimistic, they can be happier. But they can also get pretty complacent.

If a bright future is on its way, you could just sit on your capital. and await its arrival. I think that optimism for many people, disheartened by the election, would feel ridiculous. I mean, it would be almost insulting to tell people to feel optimistic. Hope is, as you know, an acceptance of uncertainty.

And I have seen a lot of certainty after the election. I've seen people upset by the election saying, I knew that the country was no better than this. I know now that things will get worse and worse in the years to come. and maybe that there'll be no recovery from this. And Lord knows that is an understandable fear. I think that's completely valid to fear that.

What I think is we need to be cautious about is acting as though we know that that's what will happen because we don't know the future, just like Vaclav Havel didn't know the future from his cell. We don't know what's going to happen. And in that uncertainty, there is still room for our actions to matter. Right? So I think that it's important to know that hope is not a rosy,

feeling. It's not a way to burry your head in the sand and avoid thinking about really difficult things that are happening. Instead, it's a pragmatic feeling of possibility that we use to push and struggle and scratch for what we want, even and especially during the hardest times. I so appreciate the distinction that you draw and that you've drawn in your book as well between optimism and hope, because I think that people conflate the two and believe that in order to have hope, well, then I just need to be optimistic that all things will work out. And then that is where the sense of deflation comes from. But I also recognize during the last several years, this overt weaponization of hopelessness. It is when, you know, you had one of Donald Trump's,

you know, main advisors, Steve Bannon, say, we're going to flood the zone. Because when you're inundated with negativity, with cruelty, with vindictivity. with hate, you feel like you're drowning. And you're looking everywhere for land, for a life raft, but there isn't any. And I think that it is the weaponization of hopelessness that is most concerning to me, because it is directed at the core of what I think had us believe in this thing called the American dream, in this thing called American democracy, this project. And when you recognize that hopelessness is being weaponized, what do you think is the best reaction to that?

I would say resistance. And I think you lay it out so beautifully. And if I can just add to this, Hannah Arendt in her book on totalitarianism talks about exactly what you're describing. She says that the totalitarian state, and I'm paraphrasing here, that the totalitarian state, what they want is not for you to believe in. them, they want you to believe in nothing. Yes. Because a population that doesn't believe in itself, a citizenry that doesn't believe in each other, and people who lose their sense of value,

who lose that compass for what they want as a society are easier to control. And absolutely, this is what propagandists do. They are less concerned with making sure that they are consistent all the time, for instance. They can contradict themselves as much as they want. And if that makes people more leery of everything, less willing to trust. And I think that we as Americans have lost lots of faith in institutions. That's true of both Democrats and Republicans, but Republicans have lost far more faith in institutions than Democrats. And I think it's worth noting, for instance,

that people who voted for Trump were more likely to believe, for instance, that violent crime was rampant and that you couldn't trust anybody in the public sector, in any way, right? So that mistrust and cynicism is part of getting people sometimes to support authoritarian leaders. And so when we are fed information that makes us feel mistrustful of others, when we are fed information that almost makes our hope collapse, you might ask yourself, who's benefiting from me losing hope? Who does that help? And you might realize that the people it helps are not the people you want to help. So again, I'm not saying that we should be

hopeful because everything is fantastic and we should just look on the bright side. I'm saying that we should remain hopeful because that's how we continue to struggle and that our cynicism, even though it can feel sometimes and trust me, I understand this like getting in a warm bath, you know, and just letting go. And if you need to have those moments, of course, take them, but realize that that cynicism is probably benefiting the very people and forces that you you disagree most with in many cases? This is the thing that I have tried to tell and express to a lot of people who follow my work, is that we have to reframe why hope and joy are important and why they are actually

tools of resistance. Because I think that when you look at these words, when you look at these feelings as a nice to have, as opposed to necessary, then you allow. them to kind of fall by the wayside. You, you poo-poo those that are, are looking for bright lights in the middle of this storm. Aren't you paying attention? How are you not paying attention so that you stay locked in this state of rage and this state of exhaustion all the time? Because we've told ourselves that to pay attention, quote unquote, be woke, is to be locked in this state of rage. And to me, as somebody who has a show called Woke AF, what I've realized is that you cannot be full of rage all the time.

That that is actually playing into, to the point that you've made, playing into the hands of the opposition. That if we are not looking at the ways, varying ways that we can resist, then we end up actually playing their game instead of creating and designing the life and the future. that we want. We become accepting. We acquiesce to what is in front of us. And so I wonder for you from that, how do we talk to people about hope and joy being tools of resistance and not a nice to have, but necessary? I think, frankly, in the way that you just did. Another thing that maybe can help is to understand the structure of hope. So hope entails three pieces. One is a goal that you have for the future.

Again, you have no idea if that goal will be accomplished or not, but it's something that you would like to happen and that you think might be within reach. A second piece is willpower, that is the desire to move towards that goal. And the third is what psychologists call waypower, which is a sense that there is a path that you can see between where you are and where you would like to be where that goal is.

And that can be for personal goals. It can be for collective goals. And I think that when I talk with people about hope, especially after this election, folks who are feeling quite hopeless, I say, well, listen, hope again, it's critical for any goal that you have to be able to see a world in which that goal is accomplished.

Without that, our energy flags, we stop representing ourselves. in the world the way that we might want to. And I think that one reason that it becomes so easy to feel hopeless, especially these days, is because we are more than ever tuned in to massive problems at a national and global scale. And it's really difficult to feel like there's any waypower whatsoever

for us as individuals. You know, it feels like, okay, if I'm worried about a national issue, what the hell am I supposed to do? If I'm worried about a global issue, I'm even more helpless. So what I often tell people to do, is think globally, but hope locally. I know maybe that's a little bit chuggy, but it's true.

You know, I think that one of the most important things, especially in a moment like this, where you feel hopelessness wrapping itself around you, is to find a place in your life that you have control over something. You know, so if you're thinking about national issues, ask yourself, is there a local chapter of an organization or a local presentation of that issue? that I can get to work on, where I can make a difference and see and feel that difference as it's made.

Seeking out those moments of empowerment within our own community, I think A, is a salve against hopelessness, and B, can help us continue to feel empowered in ways that can grow over time. And I think that that, see, and I agree wholeheartedly, I think that one of the ways that you fight against, that you resist these cruel, these hateful forces that want to turn neighbor against neighbor is actually to move in front of your screen and move back out into your community because it is very hard to turn neighbor against neighbor when you know them. You are engaged with those people on a regular basis. It's very hard then to be fed lies that are easy for you to believe. If I don't know you, then I can make all source of assumptions. And that's why I think that community building in this moment at the local

level is incredibly important to go back to kind of, I guess, what some would refer to as old school values of meeting people where they are, but literally in real life and organizing in that way. And we've lost that lattice work of activism and of community, which are really two separate pillars of American life and of human life, right? So when you get off your screen and return to your community, a bunch of things can happen. One, you will feel a lot better. I mean, there's decades of evidence at this point finding that when people feel like they are embedded in community, they thrive psychologically, physically, and socially. But second, community, especially these days, is where we still have power. It's where we can

make real difference. And so I completely agree. I think that the more that we become that we allow ourselves to be screened, the more assumptions we will have about people who are different from us and the less connected we'll feel to people who want what we want. And so we'll all just be helpless in our saran-wrapped individual single-serving reality. And I think the antidote for that is to step outside and and join one another again. And like you said, it's old-fashioned American values. But I think that this is the time that we need them more than ever because they've become so endangered. Yeah. Well, Dr. Zaki, we will have to leave it there today.

But I could think of no one better to speak with as we are moving into this new year, but also this new administration to provide us with some significant grounding about how we move forward. So I greatly appreciate you joining the new abnormal. It's my total pleasure. They're always great talking with you. Folks, the book is, again, hope for cynics, the surprising science of human goodness. And you should give this gift to everyone you know. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal.

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