Fostering Understanding in Our Community: How Can We Unite?
A Psychological Perspective - Watch the Recording

Cornell Morton:

Good evening. Welcome. My name is Cornell Morton and I'm privileged to be President of the Diversity Coalition, San Luis Obispo County. On behalf of the board of directors, we are very, very excited and pleased to have you join us tonight for what I know will be a very interesting, informative, and hopefully inspiring dialogue conversation. Most of you know, of course, that the coalition has been around since March of 2011, that we are a nonprofit organization interested first and foremost in providing opportunities for conversation, opportunities for advocacy and the development of a community as we call it that fosters understanding across difference. The coalition was formed essentially or initially as the Five Cities Diversity Coalition. We're now referred to as the Diversity Coalition San Luis Obispo County. That initiative was underway back in March of 2011 when in Arroyo Grande, a number of citizens responded to a very tragic hate crime, a hate crime directed at a family of color, an African-American family who awoke and found a cross burning in their front yard.

            Of course, law enforcement intervened. Others intervened. But most importantly or just as importantly, a number of people came together to support that family. I think it's notable that this month, March 2021, four years ago, Dr. David Kahn, who was one of those people who helped to found the organization just back in 2017 now, Dr. Khan passed away suddenly. But we remember David for all the good work that he did and we remember others who have done good work in this county and who've passed on. We also want to acknowledge the volunteers and people who work with us, the collaboration we have underway. And Kathy's going to talk a bit more about all of that, especially related to the work we're doing with local schools.

            I want to mention as I close off here very quickly... and I'll say something about this again, at the end of our program... on May 6 at 6:00 PM, we'll host another dialogue. This will be a conversation about human rights, and we're very happy to know that we will very likely have human rights lawyers join us. So then we'll talk about the original United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which is now referred to as a United Nations Human Rights Council. But that ought to be an interesting discussion. I would just have you make note of that on May 6, 6:00 PM. So I'll stop there and I will introduce [Kathy Me 00:03:15], Chair of our Education Committee. And again, thank you so much for being with us. We're always excited to have numbers like I see here on the board show up, and it's great to have our speaker with us tonight. Dr. Justin Frank will be introduced later. Thank you.

Kathy Me:

Okay. Thank you, Cornell. I'd like to update all of you on what the Education Committee has done since our last meeting. As you know, the distance learning and uncertainties faced by teachers and administrators this past year has made it very difficult to achieve the goals for our speaker program that we've had in the past. That said, we were able to bring Fanshen Cox speaking about race and ethnicity to the Morro Bay High School students last semester via Zoom. And last month we brought Rita Lurie, a Holocaust survivor to Lucie Mar School District, and Ben Furuta, a Japanese American internment survivor, to Morrow Bay high school students, both via Zoom. We hope to restart our speaker program in earnest next school year. In addition, the Education Committee is again providing scholarships for the peace Academy summer school. This is for kindergarten through second graders. In the past, its student body has represented nine languages and several faith backgrounds, and ethnicities.

            We feel it's so important to immerse our children in diversity at that young age. So please go to Peace Academy, slo.org if you'd like more information on their programs. and now on to tonight's program. As our speaker is presenting, if a question pops into your head, we encourage you to type it into our Q&A tab right away, and we'll get to it when our presenter is finished. If you'd just like to make a comment, use the chatroom feature for that.

            Okay. After January 6th, I was watching... excuse me... the Thom Hartmann program, a national show on Free Speech TV. His guest that day was Dr. Frank speaking about mob mentality. At one point, Thom Hartmann asked Dr. Frank, "Should we just agree not to talk politics with our friends?" And Dr. Frank's response surprised both me and Thom Hartmann. He answered, "No. We have to discuss politics." He went on to give his thoughts and insights about that and I thought, "We have to spread the word about this," and that's what we're helping to do tonight.

            Dr. Justin Frank is the author of the bestselling books Bush on the Couch, Obama on the Couch, and Trump on the Couch. And he's been a recent guest numerous times on the Thom Hartmann show and the Joy [Reid 00:06:35] show. He's a highly-regarded psychoanalyst and teacher and clinician with more than 30 years experience. He currently contributes to huffingtonpost.com, dailybeast.com, and salon.com. He's a former clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center and the co-director of the Metropolitan Center for Object Relations in New York. Dr. Frank did his psychiatric residency at Harvard medical school and was chief resident at the Cambridge Hospital. He was awarded the DuPont Warren fellowship by Massachusetts General Hospital. He lives in Washington, DC, where he's Zooming to us from tonight. So please extend a warm welcome to Dr. Justin Frank. Thank you, Doctor.

Dr. Justin Frank:

Okay. Thank you. Nice to be here. Let me see if I can move this thing around. So it's really hard to figure out how to talk with people who are at great divergence from one's own politics. So I'd like to start with... I'm going to talk for about half an hour and then we'll have plenty of time for discussion, which I enjoy much more than hearing my own voice. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote about two men who were conversing. And the first one said, "I hate that man." And the second one asked "Why?" And the first one answered, "Because I don't know him." And over the past five years, Americans have begun to act as if they don't know one another anymore. As former friends and family members have become strangers, we don't talk together. We're a nation polarized, even among friends and family, and it's really a problem.

            So what I'd like to do first is... I'm a psychoanalyst, so I'd like to offer my views about how we got this way. And the fact is that there are multiple psychological sources of how we got this way, but I wanted to say at the start to go over a little history because we've always been, to some extent, a divided nation, even though we're called the United States. Our division right now is the worst it's been probably since the beginning of the Civil War in 1860. So that's 161 years ago. And then there was a split between the North and the South, as everybody knows. But what's interesting is even terminology was different from the two sides in that war. People from the North call it the Civil War, which is what most of us know it as. But people from the South always called it the War of Northern Aggression. It was not called the Civil War.

            So the War of Northern aggression is a very interesting name because it means that the people who were aggressed against, the South, were innocent and were attacked by the North. It's an early example of blaming other people for attacking you and feeling self-righteous in your defense and that there was no reason to be attacked. And that's one of the divisions that I think people have that we need to talk about because we have a chasm, I think, in this country, unlike we've ever seen since that time. There were other splits between groups like unions and management. During the 1880s, there was the Pullman Strike. There were shootings. Union members were shot and scabs were beaten up. And it was a very tense time in terms of a struggle between groups. And again, all management was bad to the unions, and all unions were bad to the management.

            And in fact, I'm reminded as I'm saying this of having met a lawyer politically when I first moved to DC, and I was telling him about a fight I was having with my landlord for my psychiatry office. And he looked at me and he said, "All landlords are pigs, unless of course your client is a landlord and then all tenants are pigs." So that's sort of part of the human psyche.

            In 1917, there was the Russian Revolution, which you all know about. And that led to an incredible red scare in this country where people were shot, arrested. There's a famous trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1920, and they were executed in 1927 as anarchist bastards. There was a great fear of Communism. And when Roosevelt took over during the Great Depression, people were afraid of him because they were afraid he was going to turn America into a Socialist country even though he came from a wealthy family.

            The fear of Communism persisted, as we all know. It was there as a huge split in the 1950s with Joseph McCarthy accusing everybody. And I'm reminded of a comedian then, Mort Sahl, who was making fun of the Congress people who were so afraid. And McCarthy said that the government is full of Communists and homosexuals. And one of the congressmen timidly raised his hand and said, "Mr. McCarthy, is it possible to belong to both groups?" So that's sort of where we've been. And then we had the Vietnam War. We had the Southern law projects and Southern voting. We had splits and in the '60s, there was a famous slogan which was, America, Love it or Leave it. And that was a Barry Goldwater type comment.

            So we've had a long history of paranoid splits. And what's important about the splits is that they're absolute. You are monolithically good or monolithically bad. There is nothing in between. So what I want to talk about is the psychology a little bit of those splits and where they come from both in individuals and in groups because one of the things that is important is to talk about how we've become such a tribal nation and so divided. But the original... We have one of the people in the group here. I just had a baby. It was a month old. And I remember that one of the great things about babies is they love to nurse. They love to be held. They love to be cuddled. But when they're cold or hungry, they might cry and demand that the mother be there immediately. But what happens to a baby is that eventually the baby gets a little bit conflicted inside between good and bad, between hunger and satiety, between being warm and cuddly or being cold and needing one's diaper changed. So there's good and bad experiences.

            And the problem with the baby is that the bad experiences, he cannot tolerate the fact that the bad experiences have something to do with his mother. So he projects the bad experiences into the world, meaning he starts experiencing other people as being dangerous. He has stranger anxiety at around eight months and that persists in one form or another even to the present day because we all have a bit of the baby inside of us. And there's a lot of stranger anxiety that was mentioned in my opening quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

            But that's where we are. We are in a situation of either or. And what happens in growth and development is that eventually the baby realizes that his mother is maybe not perfect. And sometimes she's late. Sometimes she doesn't do the right thing and he doesn't know what to do with those feelings because he can get angry at the same person that he also loves and cherishes and wants to keep.

            And so what happens is the baby starts developing a new kind of anxiety, which is about having to tolerate and manage loving and hating the same person, loving and being resentful of the same person. We certainly see this throughout people's development. So teenagers argue and fight with both parents in different ways, and there's a lot of loving and hating as a way of coming to terms with problems of separation. But the early part of good and bad persists. So there are always in-groups and out-groups in school. Kids are in an in-group or an out group, and there's always a situation where that kind of thing persists throughout development.

            And that goes into political parties. We are a country that has only two political parties, really, and therefore it's easier to make a split between good and bad. And that's something that has happened over the years. All Democrats are bad if you're a Republican and all Republicans are bad if you're a Democrat. And that's sort of how it's been for a long time, and it makes it very difficult for the two sides to talk to each other. The concept, for instance, of loyal opposition is really a British concept and it's not really seen in this country.

            So the next thing to talk about is why do people keep this split in two? And there's lots of examples from my own practice. There's lots of examples in my own family. It's very simple that my boys, when they were young, used to ask me, "Who's better? Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds?" As if that was a very important thing, because they had to make a hierarchy of those two players. And I kept saying, "Well, they're both great. What can I say?" And they said, "No, we want to know who's better."

            Do we like this person? Or don't we like this person? I'd be watching a speech on TV. They would say, "Dad, do we like them or don't we like them?" These are all efforts at trying to organize their minds. But one of the most important passion, I think, that has kept splitting into good and bad so in place for so many people is fear. People are afraid of the destructive feelings that they've put into someone else. So the other people become menacing to them. Other people may get not safe for them. And the other people contain their disavowed feelings of aggression put into other people. I'm not used to talking without people interrupting me with questions and comments, because I'm an awful lot here.

            It's funny. Your next meeting on May 6th is on Freud's birthday, for those who are interested, but Freud was... One of his greatest contributions was the idea of inner conflict, that people have an internal conflict between loving and hating. And then it becomes into something about loving and hating the same person.

            Now we've seen a lot of examples of either-or thinking. We've seen it in the media. We've seen it with Fox News, which is either-or. It's all bad or all good. And that's been promoted. There's been a tribal way that I could look at my own Twitter account and realize that the people I read are people who agree with me, and the people that other people read are people who agree with them. So there's a splitting that's constantly happening of good and bad. And if you talk about complexity, you're in trouble.

            So George W. Bush was asked about it because he said when he was President, "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." And then he was asked at a press conference, "What do you think about the fact that you see the world as one side or the other? What does that mean to you inside?" And you know what he said? He just said to the press person, "Well, the only time I look in the mirror is to comb my hair in the morning." So much for introspection and thinking about complexity. President Obama did think about complexity. He was very interested in seeing good and bad in both sides and trying to deal with being a person who really understood that people can be very patriotic but also have political views that really he objects to. And the problem with Obama was that he was the first president in some ways... although Roosevelt had some of that... who was like... I call a both-and president. He could see both sides of things and many sides. But the country that he was the president of was an either-or country.

            It was very hard in a nation we're either number one, were exceptional, we're USA, all of that stuff. And he was attacked for being unpatriotic because he felt that other countries felt exceptional. So there's a long history of hate between Republicans and Democrats, more likely for Republicans hating Democrats. I've had a lot of people in my practice. One guy had to break up with his girlfriend because every time he went to her parents' house, all they would talk about was how much the Democrats were evil. This was in the '70s or '80s, I guess, and he couldn't take it anymore.

            And then there's the fact that kids have problems integrating these different feelings of loving and hating. And the earliest example I've found is what I call the green speck theory. And the green speck theory, which is my name for a theory, is that when a child has a mac and cheese that's all nice and creamy and cheesy, but there's a little piece of parsley in it, he won't eat it. He'll push it away. It's disgusting. It's gross. It's contaminated. And it makes him anxious. That little green speck is like some kind of poisonous germ or something, which of course is interesting now in terms of COVID. There's other factors obviously that have led to splitting. One of them is, of course, racism that is really very serious in this country. And it has been. And when Obama was president, Mitch McConnell vowed to make him a one-term president.

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Dr. Justin Frank:

Mitch McConnell vowed to make him a one term president, and also block many of his appointments.

            But one of the things that happen in the process of growth, when you can see good and bad in the same person, is that you've had an experience of loss, when the baby loses the breast, say, or when the child has mixed feelings about a parent. Or when one of my patients had a terrible conflict because her mother was an hour late picking her up, and she was the last kid, she was sitting on the curb, everybody else had gone home, she must have been in the third grade, and she was sobbing. And she gets into the car sobbing, and her mother puts her arms around her to comfort her. That's a terrible position for the child because she's being comforted by the very person who hurt her so badly, and scared her, she's being comforted. So if she just yells at the mother for being late, she risks losing the comforting part of her, but if she only feels for the comforting and doesn't talk about the yelling, she's only a part person, and she can't really come to terms with angry feelings towards her own mother.

            That's why people split, and why people have to stop the divisions in their mind. And what happens is that there's loss, and that loss is the easiest way to talk about it. In one sentence, if I were writing a book about Joe Biden, it would be subtitled, Sorrow is The Vitamin of Growth. He's a person who's faced loss, who's faced sorrow, and who tries to help us face our losses from COVID and various other things, and that always leads to growth and change. And the more he's faced loss, and he's had several terrible losses, the more he's been able to grow as a person, and hopefully he's growing as a president beyond what some people's expectations of him were.

            There's so many different ways people want to be superior to other people, they use contempt, but one of the things that I wanted to mention briefly is the concept of group narcissism. What Donald Trump tapped into was the fact that many people felt deeply injured, marginalized, ignored by Washington, ignored by the changes that happened. They would go to church, many of them, they would be God-fearing citizens, but they felt really injured. And Donald Trump tapped into that by calling the DC 'the swamp', and what he did was he made the injured people feel good about themselves. He helped them able to be angry, and to have positive feelings about themselves.

            So he actually promoted a kind of split, because one of the ways he made them feel good about themselves was by attacking the press, by attacking institutions, by attacking Washington DC, where I live, I'm speaking to you from the swamp, and he turned good, although there's problems with politicians, he turned basically good into bad, and he turned hurt and rage into something good and justified, and that's what led to January 6, when people really did storm the Capitol as Patriots. They didn't storm it for many other reasons, they wanted to kill members of Congress, but that was because they were trying to save our country and they were storming it as Patriots. These are all either or a people.

            Group narcissism is something about that, and Trump would tap into with his rallies, group narcissism, where people felt empowered, and the bad people were Hillary Clinton, were the press, lock her up, beat up the press. They were bad, they were evil. There was an either or phenomenon, and that actually is something that has its roots, that we've already talked about, in infancy, but it can be made worse in groups. That's where nationalism is an issue. Many people who in this country opposed to having the United Nations because the United States should never have to answer to any other country, because we're the best. So nationalism also has an either or quality.

            So fear and hate are related, and I think that at the Trump rallies, there was fear and hate that are related, but that there was a link between the two. And I'm just going to mention very briefly what that link is. The link is an attack on truth, and an attack on learning. So one of the things that happens is, let's say I meet with you, this group, and I have a preconception about who you are, and what you're going to be like. But I'm speaking into a computer and into a void, and I don't see anybody's faces, and I don't know who's there listening, I don't know if you're awake or asleep, or whatever. I have no idea. So I develop a paranoid reaction or thought about you. I don't know if you're on my side, or if you want to say this is just a ridiculous talk. That's a split in my mind, and it affects my perception.

            But in a group that's large like this, one of things that happens is, as a leader, I try to see both sides. So I would much rather have an interaction when, at the end of this talk, people will confront things I say, or ask questions, or put me on the spot, and also appreciate it. But what happens is I have a realization that this group is more coherent. Once the talk is over I'll say, "Hey, these people are really good." So now I've gone from a preconception about you, which is anxiety-based, to a new realization that you guys are really interested in discussing things. And then I have a new preconception for something else, which is that this group is probably under attack by other groups who don't like diversity. So I have a new preconception that's based on a new kind of paranoia, and it just keeps going.

            That's how we learn. We have preconceptions, we have a realization that brings us something new, and then we have a new conception which becomes the preconception for the next thing, and that's about learning and growing. And part of that learning and growing is about the pursuit of truth. And what has happened with the attacks on the news media, and the attacks on the election, is that essentially truth has been called into question. So how do we talk about the fact that it's true that Trump won the election, and it's true that Biden won the election? I think that they're both true, and that's a very hard thing to accept and to come to terms with. So that's where we're at.

            So how do we start to bridge the gap and bring people together? Reconciliation means facing the serious differences that we have, and accepting them as facts. The discrepancies and differences are facts, and we need to accept the fact that people have such a massive diff difference of opinion from one another in groups, it has to be accepted in order to begin any kind of a conversation. We have to be able to look in the mirror, and we also have to be able to put ourselves in the other person's shoes. We have to be able to say, "Boy, those Republicans really hate me. Why do they hate me so much? What have I done to them? Are they afraid of me? Do they think I'm a communist and going to take away their guns, or control their lives, or whatever?" And I need to figure out why they hate me and why they're afraid of me, and I have to look at things I've done that may have made them more afraid.

            Those are all parts of the beginning of a reconciliation process, where people have to actually talk and put themselves in each other's shoes. Because in both cases, these people are defending against anxiety, they're defending against fear, they're trying to protect themselves against fear of the other. So the other is bad, we're good. The other is the Northern aggression, we are the Confederates. The other is the Republicans, or the Trump people, we are the Democrats who hate them. It's one thing after another that leads to tribalism and division. Now the issue has to do also with empathy, being able to put yourself in the other person's shoes, and that's a very hard thing to do.

            And what Kathy was mentioning in the beginning, from my interview with Tom Hartman was, "Should we talk about politics at the dinner table?" And I said, yes, because we have to face these things. It's not going to be easy, but with family where we love each other, supposedly, or friendships, we need to face these things together, and by facing limit means facing the fact that there really are differences, and they're major, and that we need to try to put ourselves in the other person's shoes, and one of the ways to do that is psychologically to sit side by side, rather than opposite each other, and that emotionally it would be interesting that, if you sit side by side, you can start to think about what it is that we have in common. Well, we have family in common, or we have love, or we have a long history of affection in common, and what do we do about having those things in common when we have these political views that are at such odds? And I think the important thing is to try to find a way to bring each other together.

            So I say that one of the best ways is obviously through empathy and compassion. Schopenhauer said, actually, that compassion is the basis of our own morality, and I do agree with that, because once you can put yourself in somebody else's shoes, you have a much more moral relationship to them, and they to you, and that you can learn to deal with complexity, and you can learn to not have to have absolute bad and good things.

            Once in a while I find myself saying that Trump did something I really liked. When I would say that to my friends, they were horrified. "How can you say that?" "Well, he did somethings I sort of liked." I liked the fact that he's been pulling troops out, and I like the fact that we haven't had a war during his four years, in the sense. We've had a war on our government. we've had a war on institutions, we've had a war on the press, but we haven't had a shooting war in the Middle East. I don't know if that's all he's doing, but I like the fact that we haven't had that. But if I say that to other people, they think I'm a horribly deranged person, and how can I do that?

            So I want to say a couple of more things about this. Listening is the new talking, putting yourself in the other person's shoes. You need to try, we all need to try, to listen to what the people who hate us hate about us, and they hopefully can listen to what it is that we hate about Trump, let's say, and why that is, and what it's about. And what we also have in common is very important. I feel like quoting all these old people, Milton, when he wrote Paradise Lost, quoted Satan, he gave Satan the words who said, "By my mind, I can create a heaven out of hell, and a hell out of heaven." And I think that's what happens, and that's what's happened in this country. That's what's happened with Fox, that's what's happened with various groups that are adamant about certain things.

            And that one of the dangers of a president, all of us identify to some extent with the president, all of us, but we also very much identify against the president, and we can see things in, for instance, Trump, the people who oppose him, see him as all bad, and the only way to deal with him is to start using his techniques, which are he's all bad and everything is all bad. You can never have a negotiation with that, you can never have a discussion with that, you can never reach for truth, or any kind of shared relationship. And Trump has attacked truth, and I have no question about that. He even said, don't believe what you see. So there's a great deal of questioning our own experience, and the attacks have to do with an attack on perception.

            So we have to find a way to see why these attacks are occurring, and what we've done to promote them. And if we can find other people who are willing to talk, so much the better. The problem is what to do with hate, what to do with suspicion, and it's not easy to deal with. I mean, Obama couldn't stand the idea of hate, he even talked about it. But what I'm trying to say is that even the press can make people feel hated, make politicians feel hated, because the press learned, since Watergate, to ask questions. They want to get to answers, they don't just go along with whatever the person in charge is saying, they ask tough questions, that's their job. But does that mean they're evil and destructive? To Trump they were. To Biden, I'm not sure how he feels yet, but we'll see. He had his first press conference today, and I think it went pretty well.

            So there are roadblocks everywhere. The people in the opposition become like the person opposed, and that's a danger. If you want to have diversity, and want to have discussion and openness, people have to face their own contribution to the problems. And before I close, because I really think that there's a long history of contempt and hatred that we see in our political life, mocking other people, but it's always defensive, it's always a way of avoiding the work of having to think.

            The work of having to think is work, and it makes people anxious, and that's one of the things that Obama actually said when he was talking about the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, at the first big meeting with the entire Senate in February of 2010, they started attacking him and arguing with him, and he finally said, "Listen, I can say exactly the same thing you just said to me, and you will argue with it because it's me who's saying it. And the problem with that is that you'll never get anywhere, because you're going to paint yourself into a corner by thinking that everything I do is bad, even when you say something that I agree with, as soon as I agree with it, it becomes bad. You change good into bad." And he said that to them, to John McCain, actually, and a couple of other people at that meeting.

            It was a very important observation and important comment, that people will change. It's like the green speck theory, anything, I mean, Obama was really the black speck in a white house, but it really is like the green speck theory, and people couldn't stand it, they couldn't accept anything that he said. And that's about racism and about contempt, and it's about avoiding having to think, and having to have a new position that involves complexity.

            So finally, it's impossible to really have this discussion without at least mentioning James Baldwin, who was just a great writer and spokesperson. And he said that, "It's necessary to bear witness for all of us, and by bearing witness it means speaking the truth of our own experience." And that's certainly for African-Americans to bear witness, but other people to bear witness, and for speaking truth about our own prejudices and our own discomforts. And he said, "Part of that bearing witness has to do with bearing witness about our own memory, and how are we going to remember things?" And he essentially said, "So what are we going to remember, the garden, or the serpent in the garden? How are we going to think about these things?" So there's a lot to discuss, he felt very clearly that when hatred was gone, people would have to face their own pain, and I agree that hatred is a defense against hurt, against narcissistic injury, and against pain.

            So I think I want to stop here, because there's so much to talk about, and I'll just close with a riddle that has a little bit of humor, since it's not exactly a funny talk, and it's this, what is the difference between a terrorist and a soprano? You can negotiate with a terrorist. Okay, thank you very much.

Kathy Me:

Thank you.

Dr. Justin Frank:

Thank you.

Kathy Me:

Thank you, Dr. Frank. I know that it's not easy for you, not having the interaction on the whole Zoom thing, but you did a good job. Thanks for being here and for taking your time to be here with us. We do have quite a few questions already.

Dr. Justin Frank:

Okay.

Kathy Me:

So hopefully this will be a good engaging rest of the time we have together. So I'll just get right into it with one of the questions. So Susan asks, in order to be able to hear the other point of view, do you think we need to understand that point of view?

Dr. Justin Frank:

Yes, we need to understand the other point of view in order to hear it. By putting ourselves in their shoes and looking at what it is that might be leading them to have that other point of view, and where it comes from in them, without judging it, but accepting it, and then thinking about it. That's a very hard thing to do, but I think that it's doable, it just requires a lot of work on the part of the people who want to start to talk. I mean, there's a wonderful book written during the nuclear arms race called Getting to Yes, and it was really about how you can discuss things where you both agree, and it was really about an attempt to get to yes in terms of the various SALT agreements and the accords.

            But basically yes, you have to put yourself in the other person's shoes. You have to understand that enough, because I think we confuse understanding was agreeing. We can understand something and not agree with it. I can understand where they're coming from and have a very different point of view, and in fact, that's one of the ways to avoid having a big argument, which is to say, I actually do get what you're saying, and my experience is different of what is happening, and I'd like to share it with you, but I really do, I think I do get what you're saying, and I don't have the same take on it, but it's the same thing.

Kathy Me:

Do you think that's possible in all situations, is there always something you can understand? I'm just thinking of conversations I've had recently where I can see where that would be harder.

Dr. Justin Frank:

I can understand, but I don't know that I can agree, but I also don't know that I can convince the other person that I do understand. And I could see that, there are people who are so set in their hatred and in their anger that they won't ever try to understand. And just like I said, how people were very upset when I said something nice about Trump. I can't believe it. In fact, one of the people who reviewed my book wrote to me and said that she would only review my book if I didn't say anything positive about Trump, which I really had a hard time saying anything positive about, I have to tell you, when I wrote the book, but there are some things that he's done about the war thing, for instance, that I actually think it's amazing that we haven't had a war. Already we're revving up for war since Biden's become president. So it bothers me.

Kathy Me:

Yeah. This might be a hard one to answer, but Bruce asks, what specific things can we do as a society to have people learn to be more compassionate and empathetic, and realize it's not a zero sum equation?

Dr. Justin Frank:

Well, I think that learning is a long-term process, and the learning requires an attitude towards hate, but it also requires education, for a long-term education starting-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:46:04]

Dr. Justin Frank:

... and for a long-term education, starting in kindergarten, about learning about respecting other people's points of views, trying to put yourself in other people's shoes. My Newsome kids in junior high school, where the teacher had a Jewish kid roleplay being a Nazi guard. That's pretty amazing and vice versa.

            So those things are really interesting. If you're going to play a Nazi guard and you're Jewish, you have to really be for that half hour or 20 minutes or whatever it is like a Nazi guard. So I think there are ways to do this, but when people are dedicated to hate, like say, Mitch McConnell, you cannot argue with him. You can't argue with psychopaths because they have no sense of right and wrong and they don't feel guilt.

            So there are some people you can't argue with, but we have to start somewhere and we have to start talking about compassion. I mean, for instance, the people who fought the War of Northern Aggression didn't ban the Confederate flag. I think that was a terrible mistake. I tell you the truth. I think we should have done what the Nazis did with the swastika and ban it. You can't have it because it's destructive to the whole country, but that's never happened. So sometimes you have to be tough and clear and then you can move towards getting to, yes.

Kathy Me:

I don't know if maybe you just answered this question, but someone just mentioned, where did the question go, about ... You talked about how destructive McConnell was. So this person asks, "When do you talk to someone who is murderous? How do you talk to them? Why do you talk to someone filled with murders hate and how do you talk to a Holocaust denier, for example?

Dr. Justin Frank:

It's very hard first of all. So I don't have a magic answer, but I will say that the best way to talk to a Holocaust denier or to a person like Mitch McConnell is to say, "I don't think it's any point in arguing with you. I really do understand that you have a completely different point of view and mine is completely different from yours. I do understand your point of view, but I do think that mine is probably more accurate and more truthful than yours. But I don't want to get into a shouting match about it. I'm not interested in getting into a shouting match. I'm interested in trying to learn about your point of view and why you have it and where it comes from, if it's a genuine point of view. I'd like you to hopefully be a little bit interested to learn about my point of view."

            In other words, it's not like turning truth into something that's relative and only it's whatever you think. It's not. The truth has to be stood. You have to stand up for truth, but you also have to respect that the other person doesn't agree at all. So to them, Trump won the election. I want to find out about that. I don't think it's easy and I don't think you can do it with everyone. I agree with the question. I mean, there are people who are just determined to destroy Obama, no matter what, and they're not going to listen. Obama always believed in the power of reason. In my book about him, I was troubled by that even though I appreciated it. So I made a diagnosis of him as the only president I made a diagnosis of him. I said that he suffers from obsessional bipartisan disorder. He had to see people getting along.

Kathy Me:

Okay. Let's see. So Alice asks, I'm looking for tools to give my Cal Poly teacher credential candidates. I'm researching, Rosenberg's nonviolent communication as a tool for finding common ground and collaboration. Do you have any knowledge or experience with NBC with nonviolent communication?

Dr. Justin Frank:

I don't have any experience of it. I have some knowledge of it, and I think it's very important to use nonviolent communication, but again, it involves respecting the other person and it involves making a decision to pursue truth and fact. One of the things that I've learned over the years in my practice is that people who lie to themselves, they lie to themselves before they lie to other people. One of the problems when you're a habitual liar and don't pursue things and nonviolent combinations of discussing is that you end up losing a part of your mind. I had a professor who used to say that truth is to the psyche, like food is to the body and without truth, the psyche starves. What that means is obvious that one of the things that we see is that the more people hate the truth and hate facts, the less their arguments make sense. They really don't make sense if you listen to people like Gohmert and Congress and different people like that.

            But I do think it's important to try to be able to say, "I don't agree with you, but I do know that this is how you think what you think, and I'm interested in learning more about it." It's a process. Getting to yes is a good one because that's about negotiating in good faith and giving something up versus getting an agreement. Trump never wants to give anything up in a negotiation because that means losing. So giving some things up for a person who literally sees the world in black and white is experienced as losing. Compromise is a loss for people like that. It's real.

Kathy Me:

What are your thoughts on the political divide or ideological divide that sometimes exists between, she says, young adults and their parents, I think maybe any age though, kids versus parents, can often feel like parents aren't willing to listen to the viewpoint of their kids and on the flip side, there's the respect your elders mentality with kids confronting their parents. How do we overcome their faces?

Dr. Justin Frank:

It's a tough thing, because respecting your elders can mean keep your mouth shut. It doesn't necessarily mean respecting your elders. So when my kids, each of them was one year old, I got them a shirt that said, "Question authority." I think that's important. You can be respected and very violently in arguing really disagree. But I think again, listening is the new talking.

            So the issue for parents is to try to listen to their kids and vice versa, because people have preconceptions and then they fit people into their preconceptions. "He's a fool. He's an idiot. He's too young. She's too passionate. She's too dogmatic." All of those things are pre inceptions that label people without thinking about them. It's easier to label people and to think about what they're saying. So I think it can happen. I mean, the stories in generations are very interesting.

            I mean, being from California, the free speech movement in Berkeley screwed a lot of students in the future years where a lot of money was withdrawn from University of California system and there was a lot of backlash. How can we pay for tuition for these kids if they disagree with us about Vietnam