By 1973, Harvey Milk had already been many things: naval officer, high school teacher, bit-part actor, and wandering hippie.
But as he embarked on yet another life running a camera shop in San Francisco, he already found himself distracted.
From the Watergate hearings on national news, to the teacher who had to rent a projector when her school couldn’t afford one, Harvey saw a desperate need for political reform.
Milk strongly believed that tight knit neighborhoods were essential to the fabric of the city, and that government should solve those community’s most practical problems.
From fixing potholes and putting up stop signs, to promoting a friendly culture of cooperation, Milk envisioned a more personal approach to local government.
This philosophy led him to run for the city’s Board of Supervisors as the representative for his own district, which included the heart of American gay culture, the Castro.
At this time, police brutality, discrimination and media stereotyping plagued the LGBT community, labeling Harvey and his supporters as political outsiders.
But Milk refused to downplay his sexuality.
He was sure that gay rights could never be won from the closet, and he saw the Castro as one of many minorities without representation in city politics.
Milk was determined to bring these basic government services to all of San Francisco’s disenfranchised groups, regardless of race, age, or sexuality.
But despite his flair for public speaking and open-hearted approach, voters couldn’t see Milk’s radical vision.
In 1973, he lost his first bid for the Board of Supervisors.
In 1975, he lost again.
A year later, he ran for the California Assembly– and lost.
Yet he tirelessly continued to support his district, befriending bartenders, construction unions, and local Chinese grocers.
This earned him the affectionate title, the "mayor of Castro Street.”
And when he ran his third campaign for the Board of Supervisors in 1977, Harvey finally won the seat– becoming one of the first openly gay public officials in US history.
Elated, Milk arrived in office determined to make lasting change.
He immediately introduced a bill outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sexuality and launched a major clean-up of the city.
But not everyone was happy with this direction.
Anti-gay sentiment was gaining national momentum, especially in the form of California’s Proposition 6.
The proposition, which sought to make it illegal for homosexuals to work in Californian schools, would prove to be the biggest battle of Milk’s career.
Supporters of Prop 6 attacked the LGBT community, calling them unfit to work with students.
But Milk urged them not to hide in fear: “Come out to your relatives.
Come out to your friends, if indeed they are your friends.
Come out to your neighbors, to your fellow workers… break down the myths.
Destroy the lies and distortions.
For your sake.
For their sake.”
Alongside other activists, he ran an incandescent campaign against hate.
On November 7, 1978, Prop 6 was defeated in a landslide.
It was proof that Milk’s message was gaining traction.
But just twenty days after this inspiring victory, he was assassinated at City Hall– killed alongside San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.
Both men had been murdered by Dan White, a former fellow supervisor, who had positioned himself against those he called "radicals, social deviates and incorrigibles.”
He had frequently clashed with Harvey at Board meetings, and resented the spirit of change which Milk personified for many.
The night of Milk's murder, thousands marched by candlelight through the city.
In the wake of this tragedy, yet another injustice arose.
In a highly controversial verdict, White received a sentence of only seven years and eight months– a decision that sparked uproar throughout the city in what became known as the White Night Riots.
But even after his death, Milk continued to preach his hopeful cause.
He left his friends and followers a total of three different tapes to be played in the event of his assassination.
They leave us with a call to action, and a reminder that everyone is welcome in the fight against injustice: "I ask for the movement to continue… and if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door…”
♫ Where do we go from here? ♫ ♫ How do we carry on? ♫ ♫ I can't get beyond the questions ♫ ♫ Clambering for the scraps ♫ ♫ in the shatter of us, collapsed ♫ ♫ It cuts me with every could have been ♫ ♫ Pain on pain on play, repeating ♫ ♫ With the backup, makeshift life in waiting ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫ ♫ What of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ There is nothing to see here now ♫ ♫ Turning the sign around ♫ ♫ We're closed to the Earth 'til further notice ♫ ♫ A crumbling cliche case ♫ ♫ crumpled and puffy faced ♫ ♫ caught dead in the stare of a thousand miles ♫ ♫ All I want, only one street level miracle ♫ ♫ I'll be an out and out born again ♫ ♫ from none more cynical ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ that time heals everything ♫ ♫ But what of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ And sit here cold? ♫ ♫ We will be long gone by then ♫ ♫ In lackluster ♫ ♫ In dust we lay around old magazines ♫ ♫ Fluorescent lighting sets the scene ♫ ♫ for all we could and should be being ♫ ♫ in the one life that we've got ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫ ♫ And what of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ Just going to sweat it out? ♫ ♫ Just going to sweat it out? ♫ ♫ Wait it out ♫ (Applause)
Namaste.
I'm from India.
The home of ancient mathematics.
But me, I just hated math.
(Laughter) Until it saved my life.
I grew up in Akola, a small town 700 miles away from the capital city.
In my community, we never had a culture of girls attending school beyond the age of 10 or 12 years.
In fact, some women would tell me, "Why do you need education?
Just learn the household work so that you can take care of your family."
But I never wanted to abide myself by the "normal" rules for girls.
And I would think to myself, instead of just learning the household work, why not learn how to make money so that I can actually take care of my family?
(Laughter) I knew if I had to do something different, I would have to stay in school.
But that was hard.
As it was socially not accepted, everybody was against it.
But I was a stubborn young girl.
I did everything I could to continue studying, even if that meant stitching school uniforms or making festival greeting cards.
I did all that.
Well, I had excellent grades in all subjects.
All except one.
You guessed it: math.
All these calculations, formulas, multiplication; I just couldn't get them right.
After I finished college, I realized I had no future in Akola, so I decided to do something almost nobody in my town had ever done before: to leave my home town, by myself, a single woman.
Nobody wanted me to do that.
I remember when I walked up to my mom and told her, "Mama, I'm leaving."
She looked at me and said, "Uma, I know how difficult it is for you and even for me, and I cannot even support you openly, but I want you to have this."
And she hands me a gold bangle.
That was the only jewelry left with her.
She said, "I don't have much but this is for you to buy the bus ticket."
You can see the bus ticket here.
It's been ten years.
I still have this.
As a promise that I won't let my mom sacrifice anything more for me.
So, on 22nd of July, 2007, I arrived in Pune, a city of four million people.
I had never been out of my village before so being in the city for the first time, I was mesmerized and excited.
And scared as well.
I didn't even know if I could trust the taxi driver while taking the taxi for the first time in an unknown city.
Life in the city was extremely mmeyers@example.net.
I was away from my family, didn't have any friends.
I had brought very little money with me; around three and a half dollars.
So I used to eat every second day - every other day - so that I can save as much as I can.
Yes, good things take time, but they do happen.
And finally, it happened to me.
I was given an opportunity to work in a primary school, as a teacher.
Wow, I was so happy.
Until I got to know the subject they gave me to teach.
(Laughter) Yes, it was math.
(Laughter) And I'm like, "Oh God, how will I teach something I hate so much?"
(Laughter) But I had no choice so I started teaching math.
You know, the basics like multiplication tables.
I remember I struggled every night to figure out lessons for my students.
I was hating it.
And I was afraid if I didn't do well, I might not make it.
But the more I worked on it, trying to make it interesting, trying to make it fun, the more I realized the pattern in these numbers.
As if these multiplication tables were sending me a message, I sensed as if these numbers were talking to me.
And that's when I figured out the magic these odd and even numbers have; the poetry, the symmetry they have.
Let me show you what I mean: Let's look at table of three for example.
Feels like we are back in school?
(Laughter) Three, we all know it's an odd number.
And if I multiply three with another odd number, it gives me a result which is definitely an odd number.
Like this one here: Three times three gives us nine.
An odd number.
And then I noticed something very interesting about it.
If I multiply an odd number with an even number, it ultimately becomes an even number, like this one here.
Three times four gives us 12.
An even number.
So, odd multiplied with odd, the result has to definitely be an odd number.
But odd multiplied with something even, no matter how many times you do it, it will definitely give us an even number.
And I'm like, this is quite me.
With all the odds I was up against, if I multiply my odd situation, with my odd behavior ...
(Laughter) (Applause) So what happens?
I get myself into another odd situation.
(Laughter) But the magic is, if I multiply my odd situations with my even behavior, with my positive behavior, it gets me to better results, to even results.
And if one doesn't stop when the situations are odd like this, if one keeps pushing himself, keeps multiplying his blessings, keeps multiplying his skills, even though the beginning is, the end will never be odd.
Wow, so once I got to know this, I was like, if something odd can teach me such a valuable lesson of life, I'm sure there is something interesting about the even numbers as well.
(Laughter) So, let's look at table of two, for example.
What I notice here is every time, right from the beginning to the end, all multiplication results are even, without any odds.
And how is it possible?
That's possible because the number itself which is getting multiplied, is an even number.
This tells me if I am even to myself, as an individual, nothing odd will come my way.
(Laughter) Now this of course doesn't mean I don't come across any odd or bad situations.
I certainly do.
But facing them with even attitude makes the whole difference.
That's how, even though I have to struggle hard for my basic rights, instead of being upset and angry, I am happy and even to myself, because the struggle made me stronger, made me who I am today.
Now I have these learnings, these secrets from all different multiplication tables.
One of my favorites is table of 11.
And I think most of us liked, when we were in school, because that is the easiest one to multiply.
What I love about this is the perfect symmetry in it.
The one and one, the two and two.
Isn't that beautiful?
And easy, of course.
For me, the question was: How can I have my life this similarly easy and beautiful?
For me these two symmetrical numbers reflect the outside me and the inside me.
I can live in harmony, I can live in peace only when my outside matches my inner being.
Isn't this all we're looking for?
We can be anybody; maybe two, maybe three.
Whoever we are, unless or until our inside personality matches our outside personality, our outside personality matches our inside personality, we cannot live in peace, we cannot live in harmony.
Now, because math became my art, became my reminder, my guide of what I needed to do, and what my goal was, I started loving math.
Because of this, I was not only able to keep my job, but also make it interesting for others.
Now ten years down the line, I have a wonderful job in a great company.
I am able to move my entire family to Pune to live with me.
Now nobody says I shouldn't have done this.
Rather everyone appreciates for what I stood for.
As kids, we all are asked to solve math problems.
But in reality, math solved many of my problems.
Thank you for having me.
Dhanyavaad (Thank you).
(Applause) (Cheers)
Suppose that two American friends are traveling together in Italy.
They go to see Michelangelo's "David," and when they finally come face-to-face with the statue, they both freeze dead in their tracks.
The first guy -- we'll call him Adam -- is transfixed by the beauty of the perfect human form.
The second guy -- we'll call him Bill -- is transfixed by embarrassment, at staring at the thing there in the center.
So here's my question for you: Which one of these two guys was more likely to have voted for George Bush, which for Al Gore?
I don't need a show of hands, because we all have the same political stereotypes.
We all know that it's Bill.
And in this case, the stereotype corresponds to reality.
It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience.
People who are high in openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel.
People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable.
If you know about this trait, you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior, like why artists are so different from accountants.
You can predict what kinds of books they like to read, what kinds of places they like to travel to and what kinds of food they like to eat.
Once you understand this trait, you can understand why anybody would eat at Applebee's, but not anybody that you know.
(Laughter) This trait also tells us a lot about politics.
The main researcher of this trait, Robert McCrae, says that "Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views ..."
They like a society which is open and changing, "... whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right-wing views."
This trait also tells us a lot about the kinds of groups people join.
Here's the description of a group I found on the web.
What kinds of people would join "a global community ... welcoming people from every discipline and culture, who seek a deeper understanding of the world, and who hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all"?
This is from some guy named Ted.
Well, let's see now.
If openness predicts who becomes liberal, and openness predicts who becomes a TEDster, then might we predict that most TEDsters are liberal?
Let's find out.
I'll ask you to raise your hand, whether you are liberal, left of center -- on social issues, primarily -- or conservative.
And I'll give a third option, because I know there are libertarians in the audience.
So please raise your hand -- in the simulcast rooms too.
Let's let everybody see who's here.
Please raise your hand if you'd say that you're liberal or left of center.
Please raise your hand high right now.
OK.
Please raise your hand if you'd say you're libertarian.
OK.
About two dozen.
And please raise your hand if you'd say you are right of center or conservative.
One, two, three, four, five -- about eight or 10.
OK.
This is a bit of a problem.
Because if our goal is to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder.
Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team.
And once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open-minded thinking.
When the liberal team loses, [United States of Canada / Jesusland] as it did in 2004, and as it almost did in 2000, we comfort ourselves.
(Laughter) We try to explain why half of America voted for the other team.
We think they must be blinded by religion [Post-election US map: America / Dumbf*ckistan] or by simple stupidity.
(Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) So if you think that half of America votes Republican because they are blinded in this way, then my message to you is that you're trapped in a moral Matrix, in a particular moral Matrix.
And by "the Matrix," I mean literally the Matrix, like the movie "The Matrix."
But I'm here today to give you a choice.
You can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions, or you can take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral Matrix.
Now, because I know -- (Applause) I assume that answers my question.
I was going to ask which one you picked, but no need.
You're all high in openness to experience, and it looks like it might even taste good, and you're all epicures.
Anyway, let's go with the red pill, study some moral psychology and see where it takes us.
Let's start at the beginning: What is morality, where does it come from?
The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank mmeyers@example.net.
Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others.
The best definition of innateness I've seen, which clarifies so many things for me, is from the brain scientist Gary Marcus.
He says, "The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience.
Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.
'Built-in' doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience."
OK, so what's on the first draft of the moral mind?
To find out, my colleague Craig Joseph and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches: What sorts of things do people talk about across disciplines that you find across cultures and even species?
We found five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality.
The first one is harm/care.
We're all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable.
It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm.
This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I've heard mmeyers@example.net.
The second foundation is fairness/reciprocity.
There's actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer.
This Norman Rockwell painting is called "The Golden Rule" -- as we heard from Karen Armstrong, it's the foundation of many religions.
That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I've heard mmeyers@example.net.
The third foundation is in-group/loyalty.
You do find cooperative groups in the animal kingdom, but these groups are always either very small or they're all siblings.
It's only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate and join together into groups, but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups.
This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology.
And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun.
(Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.
We get to exercise some ancient drives.
The fourth foundation is authority/respect.
Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species.
But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality as it is in other primates.
It's based on more voluntary deference and even elements of love, at times.
The fifth foundation is purity/sanctity.
This painting is called "The Allegory Of Chastity," but purity is not just about suppressing female sexuality.
It's about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body and what you put into your body.
And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is doing a lot of it with food.
Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays.
A lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch or put into your body.
I believe these are the five best candidates for what's written on the first draft of the moral mind.
I think this is what we come with, a preparedness to learn all these things.
But as my son Max grows up in a liberal college town, how is this first draft going to get revised?
And how will it end up being different from a kid born 60 miles south of us, in Lynchburg, Virginia?
To think about culture variation, let's try a different metaphor.
If there really are five systems at work in the mind, five sources of intuitions and emotions, then we can think of the moral mind as one of those audio equalizers that has five channels, where you can set it to a different setting on every channel.
My colleagues Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham and I made a questionnaire, which we put up on the mmeyers@example.net.
And so far, 30,000 people have taken this questionnaire, and you can, too.
Here are the results from about 23,000 American citizens.
On the left are the scores for liberals; on the right, conservatives; in the middle, moderates.
The blue line shows people's responses on the average of all the harm questions.
So as you see, people care about harm and care issues.
They highly endorse these sorts of statements all across the board, but as you also see, liberals care about it a little more than conservatives; the line slopes down.
Same story for fairness.
But look at the other three lines.
For liberals, the scores are very low.
They're basically saying, "This is not morality.
In-group, authority, purity -- this has nothing to do with morality.
I reject it."
But as people get more conservative, the values rise.
We can say liberals have a two-channel or two-foundation morality.
Conservatives have more of a five-foundation, or five-channel morality.
We find this in every country we look at.
Here's the data for 1,100 Canadians.
I'll flip through a few other slides.
The UK, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia.
Notice also that on all of these graphs, the slope is steeper on in-group, authority, purity, which shows that, within any country, the disagreement isn't over harm and fairness.
I mean, we debate over what's fair, but everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter.
Moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group, authority, purity.
This effect is so robust, we find it no matter how we ask the question.
In a recent study, we asked people, suppose you're about to get a dog, you picked a particular breed, learned about the breed.
Suppose you learn that this particular breed is independent-minded and relates to its owner as a friend and an equal.
If you're a liberal, you say, "That's great!"
because liberals like to say, "Fetch!
Please."
(Laughter) But if you're a conservative, that's not so attractive.
If you're conservative and learn that a dog's extremely loyal to its home and family and doesn't warm up to strangers, for conservatives, loyalty is good; dogs ought to be loyal.
But to a liberal, it sounds like this dog is running for the Republican nomination.
(Laughter) You might say, OK, there are differences between liberals and conservatives, but what makes the three other foundations moral?
Aren't they the foundations of xenophobia, authoritarianism and puritanism?
What makes them moral?
The answer, I think, is contained in this incredible triptych from Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights."
In the first panel, we see the moment of creation.
All is ordered, all is beautiful, all the people and animals are doing what they're supposed to be doing, are where they're supposed to be.
But then, given the way of the world, things change.
We get every person doing whatever he wants, with every aperture of every other person and every other animal.
Some of you might recognize this as the '60s.
(Laughter) But the '60s inevitably gives way to the '70s, where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more.
Of course, Bosch called this hell.
So this triptych, these three panels, portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay.
The truth of social entropy.
But lest you think this is just some part of the Christian imagination where Christians have this weird problem with pleasure, here's the same story, the same progression, told in a paper that was published in "Nature" a few years ago, in which Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter had people play a commons dilemma, a game in which you give people money, and then, on each round of the game, they can put money into a common pot, then the experimenter doubles what's there, and then it's all divided among the players.
So it's a nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues, where we're asking people to make a sacrifice and they don't really benefit from their own sacrifice.
You really want everybody else to sacrifice, but everybody has a temptation to free ride.
What happens is that, at first, people start off reasonably cooperative.
This is all played anonymously.
On the first round, people give about half of the money that they can.
But they quickly see other people aren't doing so much.
"I don't want to be a sucker.
I won't cooperate."
So cooperation quickly decays from reasonably good down to close to zero.
But then -- and here's the trick -- Fehr and Gächter, on the seventh round, told people, "You know what?
New rule.
If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren't contributing, you can do that."
And as soon as people heard about the punishment issue going on, cooperation shoots up.
It shoots up and it keeps going up.
Lots of research shows that to solve cooperative problems, it really helps.
It's not enough to appeal to people's good motives.
It helps to have some sort of punishment.
Even if it's just shame or embarrassment or gossip, you need some sort of punishment to bring people, when they're in large groups, to cooperate.
There's even some recent research suggesting that religion -- priming God, making people think about God -- often, in some situations, leads to more cooperative, more pro-social behavior.
Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere, in part for the purpose of trusting each other and being more effective at competing with other groups.
That's probably right, although this is a controversial issue.
But I'm particularly interested in religion and the origin of religion and in what it does to us and for us, because I think the greatest wonder in the world is not the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon is really simple -- a lot of rock and a lot of water and wind and a lot of time, and you get the Grand Canyon.
It's not that complicated.
This is what's complicated: that people lived in places like the Grand Canyon, cooperating with each other, or on the savannahs of Africa or the frozen shores of Alaska.
And some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of Babylon and Rome and Tenochtitlan.
How did this happen?
It's an absolute miracle, much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon.
The answer, I think, is that they used every tool in the toolbox.
It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups.
Yes, you need to be concerned about harm, you need a psychology of justice.
But it helps to organize a group if you have subgroups, and if those subgroups have some internal structure, and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality -- to pursue higher, nobler ends.
Now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives: liberals reject three of these foundations.
They say, "Let's celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership," and, "Let's question authority," and, "Keep your laws off my body."
Liberals have very noble motives for doing this.
Traditional authority and morality can be quite repressive and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people who don't fit in.
Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed.
They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos.
This shirt says, "Stop bitching, start a revolution."
If you're high in openness to experience, revolution is good; it's change, it's fun.
Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions.
They want order, even at some cost, to those at the bottom.
The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve.
It's precious, and it's really easy to lose.
So as Edmund Burke said, "The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights."
This was after the chaos of the French Revolution.
Once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability, then I think the way is open to step outside the moral Matrix.
This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained.
Think about yin and yang.
Yin and yang aren't enemies; they don't hate each other.
Yin and yang are both necessary, like night and day, for the functioning of the world.
You find the same thing in Hinduism.
There are many high gods in Hinduism.
Two of them are Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer.
This image, actually, is both of those gods sharing the same body.
You have the markings of Vishnu on the left, so we could think of Vishnu as the conservative god.
You have the markings of Shiva on the right -- Shiva's the liberal god.
And they work together.
You find the same thing in Buddhism.
These two stanzas contain, I think, the deepest insights that have ever been attained into moral psychology.
From the Zen master Sēngcàn: "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be 'for' or 'against.'
The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind's worst disease."
Unfortunately, it's a disease that has been caught by many of the world's leaders.
But before you feel superior to George Bush, before you throw a stone, ask yourself: Do you accept this?
Do you accept stepping out of the battle of good and evil?
Can you be not for or against anything?
So what's the point?
What should you do?
Well, if you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions and combine them with the latest research on moral psychology, I think you come to these conclusions: that our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth.
So what should you do?
Am I telling you to not strive?
Am I telling you to embrace Sēngcàn and stop, stop with the struggle of for and against?
No, absolutely not.
I'm not saying that.
This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much, using so much of their talent, their brilliance, their energy, their money, to make the world a better place, to fight wrongs, to solve problems.
But as we learned from Samantha Power in her story about Sérgio Vieira de Mello, you can't just go charging in, saying, "You're wrong, and I'm right," because, as we just heard, everybody thinks they are right.
A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people.
And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are -- understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we're right -- and then step out, even if it's just for a moment, step out -- check in with Sēngcàn.
Step out of the moral Matrix, just try to see it as a struggle playing out, in which everybody thinks they're right, and even if you disagree with them, everybody has some reasons for what they're doing.
Step out.
And if you do that, that's the essential move to cultivate moral humility, to get yourself out of this self-righteousness, which is the normal human condition.
Think about the Dalai Lama.
Think about the enormous moral authority of the Dalai Lama.
It comes from his moral humility.
So I think the point -- the point of my talk and, I think, the point of TED -- is that this is a group that is passionately engaged in the pursuit of changing the world for the better.
People here are passionately engaged in trying to make the world a better place.
But there is also a passionate commitment to the truth.
And so I think the answer is to use that passionate commitment to the truth to try to turn it into a better future for us all.
Thank you.
(Applause)