![]() ![]() ![]() In the first part of the book – titled “Two Mountains” – Brooks offers a theoretical foundation for his belief that individualism is not the path to living a happy and moral life, i.e., is not the mountain you should climb to reach the summit of your existence. “The Second Mountain PDF Summary”Įven though divided into five parts, The Second Mountain is actually a two-part counter-intuitive and possibly even revolutionizing examination of “how we function and conduct our lives.” ( The Philadelphia Enquirer). He is the bestselling author of five books: Bobos in Paradise, On Paradise Drive, The Social Animal, The Road to Character and this one, The Second Mountain. He makes regular appearances as a commentator on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “PBS NewsHour.” The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper-individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain.David Brooks is a Canadian-born American author and journalist, most renowned as an op-ed columnist for The New York Times.īefore becoming one of New York Times most read columnist, Brooks worked as a film critic for The Washington Times and a reporter for The Wall Street he is also a senior editor at Weekly Standard and a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly and Newsweek. It’s not enough to work on your own weaknesses. I now think that living a good life requires a much vaster transformation. The emphasis on self-individual success, self-fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization-is a catastrophe. I now think the rampant individualism of our current culture is a catastrophe. Over the past few years, as a result of personal, national, and global events, I have become radicalized. Furthermore, I no longer believe that the cultural and moral structures of our society are fine, and all we have to do is fix ourselves individually. And that serenity arrives as you come closer to embodying perfect love. But there’s a better thing to have-moral joy. Character is a good thing to have, and there’s a lot to be learned on the road to character. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you. I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away. I no longer believe that character building is like going to the gym: You do your exercises and you build up your honesty, courage, integrity, and grit. “an individual task, or is achieved on a person-by-person basis. The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life They are questions such as, What crossroads do we stand at right now? What can we build together? How can we improve our lives together? What talents do we have here that haven’t been fully expressed?” The better community-building conversations focus on possibilities, not problems. All conversations are either humanizing or dehumanizing, and problem-centered conversations tend to be impersonal and dehumanizing. ![]() If you abstract away from the cumulative nature of life and define the problem as one episode, you are abstracting away from how life is lived. It takes a whole series of shocks before a kid drops out of school. It takes a whole series of shocks before a person becomes homeless-loss of a job, breakdown in family relationship, maybe car problems or some transportation issue. A problem conversation tends to focus on one moment in time-the moment when a student didn’t graduate from high school, the moment when a young person commits a crime, the moment when a person is homeless. How do we fix our failing schools? How do we reduce violence? These problem-centered questions are usually the wrong ones to ask. “Life is a series of problems to be analyzed and addressed. ![]()
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