VIDEO: Murphy At Harvard Kennedy School: "We Got To Take A Big Step Back And Try To Understand: Why Are People Feeling So Crappy?"
Press (Murphy)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 05, 2024
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Deni Kamper
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
MURPHY AT HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL:
“WE GOT TO TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND TRY TO UNDERSTAND: WHY ARE PEOPLE FEELING SO CRAPPY?”
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CAMBRIDGE— U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Professor Richard Weissbourd, Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government, on Monday joined students at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics for a conversation about the values needed to sustain a healthy democratic society and political community, and the growing dangers of prioritizing individualism ahead of the common good. The discussion touched on some of the key issues of the day, including gun control, climate change, and the upcoming presidential election.
In explaining why policymakers must pay attention to the spiritual health of the country, Murphy said: “I think a lot of us have this sense that this country in some ways is falling apart at the seams of it— just rising rates of self-harm, rising addiction rates, rising rates of violence, rising rates of political extremism. It's not just that our politics are frayed, right, it's that so many of our very lives and existences seem frayed and pulling apart. And so it's not surprising that people are being drawn to more extreme messages. It's reached the point where I don't think it's sufficient for people in my job to just kind of adjust the dials of public policy on the existing machine. We got to take a big step back and try to understand: why are people feeling so crappy?”
Murphy explained how a growing identity crisis is fueling instability and political polarization in the United States: “At the heart of it to me is that a lot of the really positive identities that people have, and sources of meaning and purpose, have been erased, or have atrophied in a very short amount of time. Some examples: You used to belong to a unique place, a town, that felt different than the town next to you. Springfield is not Shelbyville, right? That doesn't exist any longer. We all belong to the same economy, the same flattened culture. We don't feel that we have a place-based identity and meaning or purpose any longer. Work used to be a more healthy identity. We worked for a company that believed in us, believed in me, felt a responsibility to the people that worked for the company. Now we're just pawns, right, we're just sources of profit… But all of a sudden, places where people historically have found identity, meaning and purpose are a little bit harder to grasp, and political identity is there for the taking, right? Political identity never disappears, but political identity is a dangerous one, a corrosive one, because, yes, it gives you community and it gives you a set of beliefs, but it's purely oppositional in that it's not just who you are, but it's who you are not. And so when more and more of the country loses other ways to be able to define themselves, they search out for politics, which is always there and never goes away.”
On the role of commoditization in devaluing concern for the common good, Murphy said: “It is harder to find common experiences in which you get to meet folks of differing, at the very least, income levels, because you can pay your way out of common experiences, right? There's now three different lines at TSA. There are four different sections on the airplane. You are able now to just pay to consort with only people of your income bracket and that makes us feel as if the only thing that defines us is the amount of money that we have to be able to pay for experience rather than experiencing things together. It also is true that there were big parts of our life for a long time that we thought were so important that we should collectively own them. That everything shouldn't just be a mechanism for rent taking and profit seeking. When I was young, healthcare was in that bucket, right? All the insurance companies were not for profit. Hospice care was not for profit. Now, all of that is just another way to make money, which makes you feel like we are no longer in it together on maybe the thing that matters the most, keeping ourselves healthy. Schools are going the same way, right? More and more of higher education is now just a means for the owners of those institutions to make money, not a means to enrich our lives. And so I think as more and more of our economy becomes stratified, as we have fewer access to common experiences that bring us all together, and when everything just instead of being a common good is a mechanism for financial gain, it sends a clear message that your personal financial attainment is what matters most, not any common experience or any prioritization of the common good.”
Murphy emphasized the prospects for a political realignment that ignores traditional right – left binaries: “The case I'm making is that there's a set of things that people are feeling across the spectrum, right and left. Economic powerlessness is one of them. A frustration with suffocating consumerism, right, commoditization of the world is another, a skepticism about technology is a third, and then, this disconnection, this feeling that it's harder than ever to make a connection, this feeling of loneliness is a fourth. Those things, you know, are there for the taking in a new realignment between right and left. But it requires my party to be less judgmental about the folks that are thinking those things that don't agree with us on all of our social and cultural priorities…And that's the case that I'm making, is that there is a potential realignment largely around economic issues, and the question for Democrats is whether we want to go discover that or whether we want to continue to say 'If you don't agree with us on 100% of our non-economic priorities, we aren't interested in you being part of the coalition. I think that's a mistake. But I understand that's a tough political conversation for my party to have.”
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