Trump Rampage Continues, Republican Establishment Starting To Panic - How philosophy can save your life | Jules Evans | TEDxBreda

Trump Rampage Continues, Republican Establishment Starting To Panic




>> WE HAVE A
HELL OF A CATFIGHT
FOR YOU TONIGHT, IT IS DONALD
TRUMP VERSUS THE REPUBLICAN
ESTABLISHMENT. THIS IS AS
IMPORTANT AS IT GETS, AND IT
TELLS YOU WHERE THE FAULT LINES
IN THE GOP ARE. REPUBLICAN
INSIDERS HAVE REALIZED, OOPS,
TRUMP HAS BEEN LEADING FOR TOO
LONG. AS THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
HAS POINTED OUT --
>>OOPSIE DOOPSIE.
SO THEN JOE SCARBOROUGH ON
MORNING JOE SAID --
>>
SO NOW YOU MIGHT BE
WONDERING, WAIT, WHAT IS GOING
ON HERE? TRUMP IS A REPUBLICAN,
HE IS MASSIVELY RIGHT WING, WHY
DON'T THEY LIKE HIM? NUMBER ONE,
HE'S NOT GOING BY ALL THE
REPUBLICAN TALKING POINTS SO
THEY ARE VERY UPSET. WHEN HE
BLAMES BUSH FOR 9/11 AND SAYS
IRAQ WAS STUPID, THEY ARE LIKE,
NO, DON'T DO THAT. WE HAD
EVERYBODY TRICKED. THAT IS LESS
IMPORTANT, WHAT IS MORE
IMPORTANT IS WHEN HE SAYS THINGS
LIKE HEY, THE DONORS ARE THE
PROBLEM. WAIT A MINUTE, THEY ARE
THE DONORS. THE REPUBLICAN
ESTABLISHMENT IS NOT A SERIES OF
POLITICIANS, IT IS A SERIES OF
DONORS WHO CONTROL THE
POLITICIANS. SO WHEN TRUMP TAKES
A POT SHOT AT THEM THEY ARE
LIKE, WE DID NOT SANCTION THIS.
WHAT IS GOING ON? THE NUMBER TWO
PROBLEM THE DONORS HAVE, ON A
SERIOUS SIDE, IS WAIT A MINUTE,
WE CAN'T CONTROL HIM. WE ARE
USED TO THESE REPUBLICAN
POLITICIANS, AND ANY POLITICIAN
WE DONATE TO, BEING OUR BOY AND
CARRYING WATER FOR US. LIKE
SCOTT WALKER, HE WAS SUCH A GOOD
BOY. WHEN WE TOLD HIM TO DESTROY
THE UNIONS IN WISCONSIN HE
DESTROYED THE UNIONS FOR US, AND
WHEN WE TOLD HIM WE HAVE TO
CONSOLIDATE AGAINST DONALD TRUMP
AND ORDERED HIM OUT OF THE RACE
HE IMMEDIATELY BOWED HIS HEAD AND
SAID YES SIR, ABSOLUTELY SIR,
LET ME GET YOUR WATER SIR. THOSE
ARE THE REPUBLICAN POLITICIANS
DONORS ARE USED TO. WHEN TRUMP,
FOR BETTER OR WORSE -- AND I THINK
HE'S A MANIAC IN A LOT OF WAYS --
DOES NOT BOW HIS HEAD, THEY ARE
LIKE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? AND
WHEN HE SAYS ON TOP OF THAT I
MIGHT RAISE TAXES ON HEDGE FUNDS
-- LOOK, THE REST OF HIS TAX
PROPOSALS ARE, YOU KNOW, VERY
REPUBLICAN, VERY RIGHT WING, IN
THE END YOU WON'T BE SURPRISED,
DONALD TRUMP WILL LIKELY GIVE
HIMSELF A LARGE TAX CUT.
PROBABLY PART OF THE REASON HE
IS RUNNING. BUT WHEN HE SAYS
SOME OF YOU GUYS, HEDGE FUND
GUYS, PRIVATE EQUITY GUYS, I
WILL RAISE YOUR TAXES BECAUSE I
AM NOT IN YOUR GROUP? THEY GO,
WHOA, WHAT IS THIS? SO WHEN THE
WASHINGTON EXAMINER, WHICH IS A
RIGHT-LEANING PUBLICATION, ASKS
THE LEADING CONSERVATIVE WHAT
IS THE REACTION TO TRUMP AND THE
REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT? HIS
ANSWER IS MASSIVE RESISTANCE. HE
IS NOT A CONSERVATIVE. I DON'T
KNOW ABOUT THAT, BUT I KNOW THAT
HE DIDN'T SAY TAX CUTS FOR ALL
THE RICH, AND HE DIDN'T SAY HE
WOULD DO AS THE DONORS SAID --
MASSIVE RESISTANCE. HOW DOES
THAT RESISTANCE PLAY OUT IN THE
REAL WORLD? A REPUBLICAN
STRATEGIST SAID, THE ADS ARE
COMING. THEY'LL HIT HIM BELOW THE
BELT, THEY'LL HIT HIM REPUBLICAN
STYLE, AND THEY'LL HIT HIM A LOT.
HE SAID --
>> LET ME DECODE THAT FOR YOU,
THAT IS POLITICAL SPEAK. 10,000
POINTS MEANS 10,000 RATINGS
POINTS, THAT IS THEM BUYING TV
ADS BASED ON RATINGS POINTS. A
10,000 POINT BUY IN IOWA AND NEW
HAMPSHIRE IS MASSIVE, AND WHEN
HE SAYS SMART NEGATIVE IN IOWA
AND NEW HAMPSHIRE, THAT MEANS
SMART NEGATIVE POLITICAL ADS
AGAINST TRUMP. I DON'T KNOW WHAT
THEY WILL HIGHLIGHT, WHETHER IT
IS THE BANKRUPTCIES OR
SUPPOSEDLY LIBERAL THINGS HE HAS
SAID. I DON'T KNOW, BUT THEY ARE
COMING, AND THEY WILL UNLEASH
HELL ON DONALD TRUMP. EVERYBODY
GRAB YOUR POPCORN, THIS WILL BE
FUN. OF COURSE THAT IS THEIR
SIDE, THEY'RE COMING WITH THIS:
[NO SEATBELTS IN THE HOOD SOUND
EFFECT].
>>BUT TRUMP ALSO HAS SOMEBODY.
THAT SAME STRATEGIST SAID, IT
WOULD FORCE THEM TO SPEND MONEY.
THAT'S WHEN THIS STARTS TO GET
REAL FOR HIM. ONE OF THE
STRATEGIES IS ITS' NOT NECESSARY
TO DEFEAT HIM WITH NEGATIVE ADS,
ALTHOUGH THEY BELIEVE THEY CAN
DO A LOT OF DAMAGE WITH THOSE
ADS, AS I WILL TELL YOU, BUT
TO FORCE HIM TO SPEND SOME
MONEY. THEY THINK HE'S IN IT FOR
THE MONEY, IF WE FORCE HIM TO
SPEND REAL MONEY TO DEFEND
HIMSELF YOU WON'T WANT TO DO IT
AND HE WILL LEAVE. I KNOW, BUT
YOU HAVE HAD A LOT OF THEORIES
AS TO WHY HE WILL LEAVE, AND HE
HAS NOT LEFT YET. YOU MIGHT WANT
TO CHECK YOURSELF ON THOSE
THEORIES. ONE OF THE GROUPS
OPPOSED TO HIM IS THE CLUB FOR
GROWTH. I HAVE TOLD YOU ABOUT
THEM A LOT BEFORE, THEY ARE
MAINLY THE ANTITAX MOVEMENT.
THAT IS WHERE THE BILLIONAIRES,
THE MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS,
THEY ALL PUT THEIR MONEY IN, AND
THEN THEY ARE THE MAIN ARM FOR
BRIBING THE REPUBLICAN
POLITICIANS. IF ANYBODY SAYS WE
MIGHT EVEN THINK ABOUT RAISING
TAXES A HALF A PERCENT ON ANYONE
RICH IN THE COUNTRY, CLUB FOR
GROWTH COMES OUT ROARING.
THEY HAVE ALREADY DONE ADS
AGAINST DONALD TRUMP.
THEY SAY --
>> THIS IS THE CLUB FOR GROWTH
PRESIDENT, DAVID MCINTOSH.
>> SO THEY ARE LIKE, WE KNOW HOW
TO DO THIS, WE GO NEGATIVE ON
EVERYBODY. HOW DO YOU THINK WE
BEAT THE DEMOCRATS? SO WE WILL
UNLEASH THAT NEGATIVE HELL ON
DONALD TRUMP, AND I THINK IT
COULD WORK. THAT IS THEIR MAIN
GO-TO MOVE. HOW DO REPUBLICANS
EVER WIN WITH POLICIES THAT ARE,
ACCORDING TO NATIONAL POLLING,
DEEPLY UNPOPULAR? THEY WIN BY
RUNNING ATTACK ADS ON THEIR
OPPONENTS. SO THEY WILL DO IT TO
ONE OF THEIR OWN. SO WHEN ASKED
ARE THEY ON THEIR OWN OR ARE
THERE OTHER DONORS, THEY SAID --
>> SO NOW THE QUESTION IS, WILL
THE BATTLE BE ENGAGED? THE
WASHINGTON EXAMINER SAYS --
>> SO THAT IS [SEATBELTS SOUND
EFFECT] COMING BACK AT YOU. WHEN
REPUBLICANS GET DIRTY, THEY GET
DIRTY. AND WHEN TRUMP GETS DIRTY,
HE GETS FILTHY. SO THIS WILL BE
A MESS, AND AWESOME. CAN'T WAIT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COHvPn-L6qs


How philosophy can save your life | Jules Evans | TEDxBreda




So I'm going to tell you
how ancient Greek philosophy
inspired modern
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT.
And how through CBT

millions of people have got access
to the therapeutic wisdom
of the ancient Greeks.
We are realizing that philosophy
can help us as Socrates put it:
andquot;To take care of our souls.andquot;
So I'm going to begin
by telling you my story
of how philosophy helped me through
the most difficult phase of my life.
So when I was a teenager
in the mid 1990s,
my friends and I were -
I guess you could describe us
as amateur neuroscientists.
We liked to experiment on our own brains
with various different chemicals
every weekend.
So we began our experiments with marijuana
and we had some interesting results,
and then we moved on to experimenting
with LSD, also quite interesting,
and eventually we were
experimenting with MDMA,
amphetamines,
ketamine, magic mushrooms,
all thrown into our neural chemistry
like ingredients into a druid's cauldron.
I mean, we had some great times
and hilarious visionary and even
spiritual experiences.
But then I noticed
some of my raver friends
were beginning to wipe out.
My best friend had a psychotic breakdown
when he was tripping.
He was just 16 and locked up and
diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Other friends developed bipolar disorder,
depression, anxiety, paranoia.
And then in my
first term at university
I started to get panic attacks.
I didn't know what a panic attack was,
I just knew I'd be
in a quite unthreatening situation
and I'd suddenly feel
this full-bodied existential terror.
And that undermined my confidence

because I didn't know who I'd be
from one day to the next,
and it also made me more socially anxious
because I was never sure when panic
was going to jump out and humiliate me.
And my real terror
was that I had done some permanent damage
to the chemical balance in my brain,
in which case maybe there was nothing
I could do about it.
Maybe I'd ruin my life
before the age of 21.
So all the way through university
I'd became more and more miserable
and then I graduated
and I hit rock bottom.
I became a financial journalist.
(Laughter)
I got a job reporting
on the German mortgage bond market.
This is what happens if you mess around
with drugs. (Laughter)
My kind parents sent me to see quite
an expensive therapist trying to help me,
and he diagnosed me as suffering
from social anxiety, depression
and post-traumatic stress disorder.
I think he was being paid per diagnosis.
(Laughter)
He wasn't able to help me,

so I went away and researched
those conditions for myself
and found they could apparently
be treated by something called
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT.
I also discovered
there was a CBT support group
for people who suffered
from social anxiety
that met near me every
Thursday evening in London.
So one Thursday I went along.
I found ten people sitting in a circle
and there wasn't actually
a therapist present,
but someone in that group
had illegally downloaded a CBT course
for social anxiety from the Internet.
So we listened to that course
and practiced the exercises
and did the homework
and encouraged each other on,
and for me, at least, it worked.
I stopped having panic attacks
after a few weeks
and I began to understand
how to transform my emotions.
So I became fascinated by CBT
and I wondered where it had come from.
I discovered it had been invented
by an American psychologist
named Albert Ellis,
who lived in New York.
So one day in 2007,
I got on a plane to New York
and I went to interview him.
By that stage he was 92,
old, frail and sick,
and it turned out to be, sadly,
the last interview he ever gave.
He died a few months later.
But I got to thank him in person
for inventing this therapy
that had saved my life.
And I asked him where it had come from.
Ellis told me he had trained
as a Freudian psychoanalyst in the 1950s,
but he'd become frustrated with how little
progress his patients seemed to make.
So he looked around for other ways
to understand the emotions
and he turned back
to his first great love:
ancient Greek philosophy.
He'd been particularly inspired by a line
from a stoic philosopher called Epictetus.
Epictetus said:
andquot;Men are disturbed not by events,
but by their opinion about events.andquot;
That inspired Ellis' famous
ABC theory of the emotions.
A stands for the Activating events,
something that happens to us.
B stands for our Beliefs,
how we interpret that event,
and C stands for the Consequent emotion
that we feel through our interpretation.
It often feels that our emotions
just happen to us
automatically and involuntarily
in response to an event,
that it's just an action and a reaction.
Let's say we're walking
down the street
and we pass someone frowning,
we immediately feel offended and angry.
It feels that we're going
straight from A to C.
But if you look at that event closely,
what happened was
you interpreted it a certain way.
You thought:
andquot;That person is frowning at me.
They're looking down on me
in some way.
They shouldn't!
How rude! How offensive!andquot;
And that interpretation let you
feeling offended and angry.
Once we realize how our interpretations
lead to our emotions,
we can hold our interpretations
up to the light
and ask if they're definitely
accurate or wise.
We could ask ourselves,
for example:
andquot;Was that person definitely
frowning at me?
Maybe they were just frowning.
And if they were frowning at me,
so what?
Does that mean that I have to take
their bad mood with me
through the rest of the day?andquot;
We can start to choose our perceptions,
our interpretations more wisely
and this will affect how we feel.
So that might sound
quite simple, quite easy.
Unfortunately, it's not quite that easy
because all of the time
our interpretations
are unconscious and automatic.
We have a kind of running commentary,

an inner voice that's going through
our head all through the day,
making judgments about
the things that are happening to us.
Usually we don't question
that inner voice, we don't even notice it.
That inner voice would be made out
with all the beliefs and opinions
we've heard since we were children
and we'd internalized it.
We assume that running commentary,
that inner voice,
is always completely accurate and true.
But, unfortunately, it isn't;
it often gets things wrong.
You can think of that inner voice,
that running commentary,
as like a sort of 24-hour news channel,
constantly commenting on your life,
but in a very distorted
and biased way,
it never really checks its facts.
Now if you have emotional problems
like depression,
that would be because, probably,
your inner commentary
is jumping to very negative conclusions.
You might assume, for example,
that everyone dislikes you
or that everything you turn
your hand to will fail.
So according to the Greeks, then,
what often causes suffering
is our own beliefs.
We are our own imprisoners,
our own torturers.
We cling to our negative
or toxic beliefs
even when they hurt us
or even kill us.
So how do we free ourselves
from our self-made prisons?
Well, according to Socrates,
the father of Greek philosophy,
what we need to do
is learn how to ask yourself questions,
not just assume that that inner voice
is always telling the truth,
learn how to engage it
in a rational dialogue.
So that's what Socrates tried to teach
to his fellow Athenians.
He engaged them in a dialogue
in Athens,
getting them to think,
perhaps for the first time,
about their unexamined beliefs
and values and life philosophy.
And likewise,
if you go to see a cognitive therapist,
they'll also engage you
in a rational dialogue
asking you questions,
getting you to examine your beliefs.
You can do that for yourself as well.
Asking yourself questions and learning
to perceive, perhaps for the first time,
the bars of your prison cell,
your own beliefs.
Do we really have control over ourselves?
Can we really choose
how we react to things?
Aren't we the slave of circumstances,
the slave of our DNA, of our childhood,
of our social-economic situation?
So let me tell you
to explore that question
a little bit more about
this philosopher Epictetus.
He lived in the first century AD
and he was actually a slave,
his name meant andquot;acquired.andquot;
To be a slave in the Roman Empire
meant you had very little control over
your external life and your situation.
And yet Epictetus developed a philosophy
of inner freedom and resilience
which is still very powerful today.
The secret of his philosophy of resilience
was to divide all of life
into two spheres:
those things that we don't have
complete control over
and those things that we do.
And he said the secret of resilience
is to know the difference
between those two spheres.
So what we don't have
complete control over in life?
According to Epictetus
we don't control the weather,
the government, the economy;
we don't control other people.
We have some influence over them,
but they remain to some extent
out of our control.
We don't control our own bodies.
We can try and remain healthy
and we should,
but we all get injured sometimes,
we all get sick,
we're all getting older,
and we all eventually die.
And we don't have control
over our reputations either,
we can put a lot of effort into trying
to manage our online reputations,
but to some extent
they are beyond our control.
So what then we control,
according to Epictetus?
Well the only thing that we control
according to him is our beliefs.
And he thought that emotional problems
come from two mistakes
that humans often make.
Firstly, they try to exert
complete control
over something in that first area,
something external.
They insist that something in their
external life must be a certain way.
And then when it proves
beyond their control,
they feel frustrated
and helpless and angry.
Or they fail to take control over zone 1,
over their own beliefs and thoughts.
Instead, they use something
in the external world
as an excuse or an alibi.
They said: andquot;I had no choice because
this happened to me or because of that.andquot;
For example, when I had social anxiety,
I was very fixated
on what other people thought of me.
I thought: andquot;They must approve of me
and if they don't, it's a disaster.andquot;
Well, that was a classic recipe
for feeling very anxious
and alienated and out of my control.
I'd made myself a slave
of something external,
a slave of other people's opinions.
And the antidote to that
was always in my control.
At any moment I could say:
andquot;I'd prefer for other people to like me,
but that's somewhat out of my control,
I can still accept myself
and like myself
and do the right thing regardless.andquot;
As soon as I thought like that,
I felt less anxious and out of control
and more calm and in control.
So let's say you're here at a TED Talk
today and you have a light bulb moment.
You think:
andquot;Now I understand how to live my life.andquot;
The problem is that that might
change you for a few days or a few weeks,
but then you'll probably go back
to the person you were before
because we're very forgetful creatures,
we tend to sleepwalk through the day,
as Socrates put it.
And that's a problem for philosophy.
Can we really change ourselves?
The Greeks actually understood to what
extent we are habit-based creatures,
and they understood that if philosophy
is going to change us,
it can't be just beautiful ideas,
it has to be changed into
ingrained habits.
So the word andquot;ethicsandquot; in Greek
is very closely connected to the word
andquot;ethos,andquot; which means andquot;habits.andquot;
And I'm going to end by telling you
a few of their techniques
for creating habits.
One technique they used,
for example, was the maxim.
They would try to make their philosophy
easily memorizable
by turning it into maxims,
catch phrases like proverbs or mantras.
Things like, andquot;Know thyselfandquot;
or andquot;Everything in moderationandquot;
which students would repeat
out loud to themselves
over and over until they became
ingrained habits.
They'd also write it down
in little handbooks
which they'd carried with them
through the day called andquot;enchiridions.andquot;
CBT uses a very similar technique;
you repeat ideas over and over until
they become ingrained in your habits.
They'd also keep journals;
at the end of the day
the trainee philosopher
would write down in their journal
what they'd done well,
what they'd done badly.
The idea of that is that we
sleepwalk through the day,
we don't realize what we've done
or even who we are.
So the journal is a way of keeping
track of what you're actually doing
and also keeping track of your progress.
Are you really making progress
in weakening bad habits
and strengthening good habits?
Epictetus said: andquot;If you have a bad temper
and you're trying to improve it,
count the number of days in which
you've managed not to lose your temper
and if you get to 30 days, you can
consider you're making progress.
So CBT uses a very similar technique
of the journal.
The third technique
that the Greeks used was fieldwork.
It's not enough just for your philosophy
to be purely theoretical,
you have to go out and practice it
in real life situations.
Epictetus said to his students:
andquot;You may be very good
in the lecture room,
but drag yourself out into practice
and you're miserably shipwrecked.
So you need to practice in
all of different situations of your life.
Likewise, in CBT,
there's a big emphasis on changing
not just your thoughts but your behavior.
It's called
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
So when I was trying to overcome
social anxiety,
it wasn't enough to challenge my anxious
beliefs in the safety of the therapy room.
I had to go out and practice
in real life situations,
to go to parties, for example,
or practice public speaking,
so eventually one day
I might be able to do things like this.
So there are some other ways then
that CBT has rediscovered
the wisdom of the ancient Greeks
and CBT put it on a firm evidence base
which persuaded governments
to put a lot of money
into making CBT more available.
In my own country they put
half a billion of pounds
into making CBT free
on the National Health Service.
So if we have this new evidence-based
version of the ideas of the Greeks,
do we then still need ancient philosophy?
Perhaps now we have CBT
we don't need the Greeks anymore.
I think, finally,
it is worth going back to ancient
philosophy for two reasons.
First of all,
the ancient Greeks and Romans
wrote beautifully.
The works of Plato, Seneca,
Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus
are some of the most beautiful works
we have in Western literature
and that beauty makes it very persuasive.
And secondly,
CBT, though it created a wonderful
short-term therapy for emotional problems,
it left some things out.
It left out any ideas of virtue.
What does it mean
to have a good character,
a good life, a good career,
a good company or a good society?
And it also left out higher questions.
What's the meaning of life?
What does it mean to flourish?
Now the ancient Greeks and Romans
they answered those big questions
about what a good life looks like,
what a good society looks like,
but they had various different answers,
they didn't just have one answer.
Plato thought a good life
is a life that's close to God.
Epicurus thought a good life was a life
full of happiness here on Earth.
Aristotle thought a good life was a life
very much engaged with your society.
So I don't think psychology is ever
going to prove one answer to that question
of andquot;What is a good life?andquot;
We'll never find one scientific formula.
And that's why I think we need philosophy,
that's why I'd like to see
more practical philosophy
in our schools, universities
and companies as well.
So we learn not just techniques
for changing ourselves
but also we learn how to ask questions
about what it means to live a good life
so we can make up our own minds.
Thank you.
(Applause)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuwYvFlNGns