September 30, 2024 • 32 mins
We often assume that we can’t fix the big problems we see in the world around us. And that trying is for suckers - who’ll just end up sad, exhausted and defeated.
Dr Laurie Santos and Dr Jamil Zaki meet people who have tried to make a difference in their communities - often against great odds - and have found the process made them happier and more hopeful.
Jamil's book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness is out now.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. If a psychologist ever looks at your life, at say,
your level of emotional maturity or the way you handle
daily problems, and says that you're well adjusted, you'd probably
be pretty pleased. I mean, nobody wants to be called maladjusted.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Right well. In nineteen sixty seven, one speaker at a
meeting of the American Psychological Association made the case for
being maladjusted. There are some things in our society, he said,
some things in our world to which we should never
be adjusted. In the face of bigotry, violence, extreme inequality,
and war, feeling good makes no sense. The speech made
(01:01):
major waves among psychologists, in part because it was not
given by a psychologist, but by Martin Luther King Junior,
the great civil rights leader, told psychologists that in many cases,
their focus on happiness was backwards. When the norms of
a culture are unjust, true social health requires what MLK
(01:21):
called creative maladjustment. Creative maladjustment, he argued, had two parts.
The first was a sense of fury about how things are.
We need to be upset in the face of an
unfair status quo, but we should also do so in
a creative way. We need to bring a sense of
hope that the future could be different. I'm Jamil Zaki,
(01:44):
and in my book Hope for Cynics, I explore doctor
King's idea of creative maladjustment and find that it is
deeply prescient. A lot of evidence from psychology bears out
what he said. Hope isn't a complacent feeling that causes
people to ignore their problems. It's a key ingredient in
our ability to yearn for a better future and to
(02:06):
fight for it.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
In this special season on Finding Hope, Jamiale and I
have shared study after study showing that we humans are kinder,
less divided, and more cooperative than most people realize. But
being a good person doesn't necessarily mean that you have
the courage to do good things, and that is the
subject of our final show of this series. Many of
us feel pretty cynical about problems like inequality and justice
(02:30):
and bigotry. We feel powerless to bring about change, so
we just kind of go on with our lives. But
what if we embrace the creative maladjustment Doctor King recommended?
What if we got pissed off enough to think differently
and found the hope needed to act differently. Our minds
are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
(02:52):
But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
minds are lying to us, leading us away from what
will really make us happy. The good news is that
understanding the science of the mind can point us all
back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab.
Would meet doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
And me doctor Jamil's.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
I actually hate politics.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Katie Fahey wasn't exactly a poster job for creative maladjustment.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
The fact that we live in America and that we
have a government that is supposed to be derived by
the people, I think all that's great, but the actual
like politics, us versus them, party versus party, I just
have never.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Liked Many of the people in the Michigan town where
Katie grew up didn't take part in local politics or elections.
Katie did care about the issues facing her community.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
But I was also busy in twenty seven and trying
to get my masters and trying to keep my day
job and like have social relationships and like all that
kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
But in Michigan there was a lot going on.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
This was around the time of the Flint water crisis.
Local officials in Flint, Michigan, had decided to switch the
location of the city's water supply to save money. Soon after,
the residents of that low income community started complaining about
the smell and color their water. By the time anyone
tried to do anything to fix it, it was too late.
All the pipes in the community had become corroded and
(04:17):
the water was polluted with lead, bacteria, and other contaminants.
Katie spent her hour long daily commute listening to the
radio and hearing about this awful public health crisis.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
I really felt like, doesn't anybody care? How is this
going on? And yet nobody's doing anything about it. Nobody
was talking about like how do we prevent the next
flootwater crisis? How do we make sure this never happens again?
And I just felt so disheartened that this is the
world we were in.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I was just so disheartened. Katie was starting to experience
the first step of creative maladjustment. She was getting pissed off.
But there's a second step to creative maladjustment that goes
beyond anger. We need to do the creative part. And
that was where Katie got stuck. It just didn't seem
like the political system was working for communities like hers.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Our politicians are not afraid of us as the vote.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
They aren't worried about winning our vote or if we
like what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Things seemed intractable, but Katie wanted to find a way
to fix things.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
I can't keep going to work every day knowing that
children can't drink water at their school and like, think
that's okay. And I didn't know what to do. But
I was kind of seeing all those pieces and felt like,
maybe there's something to do that isn't just nothing, or
isn't just listening to the radio and getting frustrated every
single day.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
So Katie decided to take a deeper dive. So why
so many of her local politicians were checked out?
Speaker 4 (05:38):
I was like, Okay, how do we actually start getting
accountability in Michigan. Maybe we could try and fix one
of those systemic problems that make it so that our
legislators don't have incentives to want to listen to the voters.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
America's political system is, at least in theory, supposed to
prevent problems like this. People within each district vote for
the person whose policies they like best. If a community
hates what a politician is doing, they should be able
to vote that person out. But as Katie learned, it
doesn't always work like that because of a process called jerrymandering.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
Where politicians decide what voting districts are instead of voters.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Once elected, a politician can monkey around with the boundaries
of their voting district. They can even move those borders
so much that they exclude a huge percentage of votes
that would be hostile to their policies. The word jerrymandering
comes from a redistricting bill back in eighteen twelve signed
by Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Jerry. His party redrew the boundaries
(06:39):
of Boston voting districts in order to win more power.
The result was a set of strangely shaped districts. One
famous electoral map looked a bit like a salamander, or
rather a jerrymander. Jerrymandering is a process that's helpful for politicians,
but it's very bad for governance. It makes it harder
to vote out incumbents and encourages entire communities to be ignored.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
People end up not being able to actually get government
to deliver on the basic things that it's suppose to
be delivering up.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
As Katie read more about jerrymandering, she was shocked at
how much this unfair process affected her Michigan community.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I knew it was bad.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
I didn't know much else besides that, But I was like, hey,
I think if we started there, Like if we could
fix that problem where politicians get to choose who their
voters are and instead had voters choosing who their politicians
are based on their voting districts, Like, maybe there's something there,
But I didn't actually know.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
What we could do to fix it.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Jerrymandering was infuriating, but it had been around for hundreds
of years. It wasn't like some random recycling plant worker
was going to single handedly fix such a big problem.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
So I was kind of feeling, like, why doesn't anybody care?
I was feeling pretty hopeless.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
I was feeling pretty hopeless. Katie was feeling what a
lot of cynical people do. She saw a huge problem
but couldn't envision a solution, so she didn't take action.
In Martin Luther King's terms, Katie was feeling maladjusted but
didn't feel the creative hope we need to do something
about it. Which finds that Katie is not alone here.
(08:11):
Cynics don't vote or protest as much as their more
hopeful counterparts. They leave the work to others, and even worse,
people who feel hopeless sometimes belittle that work. They are
quick to talk about society's ills, but also claim there
is no cure and it's dumb for anyone to try.
Speaker 5 (08:29):
To fix it.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
We often think of cynicism as a radical feeling which
will hold power to account. In fact, it's often the opposite,
a duel of the status quo. But is there any
way to find the hope that Katie was lacking? To
get that creative nudge, we need to start taking action.
We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns from the break.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
So the exhausted majority, it's sixty seven percent of America.
That is the majority of America.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
This is political strategist Emily Amic. Emily used to work
for Senator Chuck Schumer, but these days she spent her
time working with people like Katie Fahey, folks who find
politics to be a massive turnoff.
Speaker 5 (09:14):
And that doesn't mean these people are centrists or moderates.
But the thing that really brings them all together, that
connects them all, is that they are like profoundly exhausted.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Political scientists often categorize people by their willingness to engage
in issues. Some folks, the ones we tend to hear
from a lot on social media and in op eds,
fall into what scholars call the wings. These are the
hardcore conservatives and progressive liberals, voters on the tail ends
of the political spectrum. But the devoted folks on the
wings are a minority. The bulk of Americans, the others
(09:45):
seventy year or so percent fall into the exhausted category.
Speaker 5 (09:49):
They heard like profoundly exhausted, and they don't view every
single political issue as a war. They really just want
the government to work, the trains to run on time,
their kids to be able to go to school, the
water to be clean.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
You know.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
They just want to be able to live their lives.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
The exhausteds want things to be better, but they're cynical
about their ability to fix things. They wind up disengaging
and feeling left out of the democratic process. So says
Emily's collaborator Sammy Sage, these.
Speaker 6 (10:17):
People just feel like everything is corrupt, this is pointless.
They're frustrated by politics, but it has turned to apathy.
Nothing I do will matter. Nothing anyone I know does
will matter. So I wish I didn't have to hear
about this.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
As you've probably guessed, this sort of helplessness doesn't make
for a happy nation, especially when nearly seventy percent of
us are feeling that way.
Speaker 6 (10:38):
But the opportunity there is that if all of these
people were to start engaging, we would be able to
have a much more productive conversation.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
And that's why Emily and Sammy are on a mission
to turn our collective exhaustion into more democratic engagement. They've
even written a fabulous how to guide. It's called democracy
in Retrograde, how to make changes big and small in
our country and in our lives.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
The goal is for politics to be a daily habit,
not a biannual freakout. We want you to figure out
how to make civic life upfilling part of your life.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
It should be additive, It should make you happy.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
It should bring you joy so that you keep going
back to it.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
The book begins by analyzing why so many of us
got so exhausted when it comes to politics. One factor
that pair says involves a toxic way that our political
discourse has evolved over the past few decades, whether it's
on Twitter or cable news, we've all seen what should
have been a thoughtful political discussion turn into a polarized
shouting match, and honestly, what's more exhausting than that. Emily
(11:39):
worries that this change has caused some voices to be
silenced while the trolls on the wings show even louder.
Speaker 5 (11:45):
And then the people who then want to talk about
these issues are people who are.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Doing it not with the best intentions.
Speaker 5 (11:50):
Right if the only political conversation you have is your
uncle Chad screaming at you about politics, he's going into
that conversation without good intentions. He just wants to get
in an argument. He just wants to shit on you.
That is not the normal conversation.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
And extreme individuals don't just skew political to be they
also spend huge amounts of effort to impose their political
will on the rest of us. They lobby politicians, attend
city hall meetings, and complain to school boards to get
their goals realized.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
Sixty percent of book bands were done by eleven people.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
The reality is.
Speaker 5 (12:23):
There are people who are extremely active and they are
willing to do the work to get extremist policies in play.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
With so many toxic voices pushing for extreme policies, it
can be hard to figure out what the average person thinks.
It's a cognitive error that psychologists call pluralistic ignorance. We
wind up mistakenly assuming that extreme positions are the norm
and that pretty much everybody disagrees with how we think
things should work. Consider one of the most famous examples
of pluralistic ignorance, a study of Princeton students' perceptions of
(12:55):
their classmates. Undergrads were brought into the lab and asked
how often they thought the average Princeton student drank to excess.
Most students assume that the typical student drank a lot,
even though they themselves had a moderate approach to partying.
And it's easy to see where this bias comes from.
I mean, think about who's taking up the most space
in campus conversations. Students don't often regale each other with
(13:18):
stories about how they stayed up in their room watching TV,
but they talk a lot about the raging parties they attended.
And study after study has shown that our political discourse
has become a lot like those campus errors. We simply
don't realize just how much we agree on the big issues.
Speaker 6 (13:33):
Majority Americans support abortion rights at any point in the pregnancy.
More than half of Americans support some form of gun
control or gun safety laws. They support taking action on
the climate. Ninety percent of Americans think that LGBTQ individuals
should not suffer from discrimination. All of those people because
they're not talking about politics, they're not finding each other.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
The uncle chads make so much racket that we think
they're everywhere, while the exhausteds are so well exhausted that
they just don't speak up, which creates a vicious cycle
and which the average person winds up feeling even more
angry about the state to the world and even more cynical.
Anything can be done to fix it. But Jamille, explain
how your work gives us a path forward.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Well, Laurie, the good news here is that if you
aren't exhausted, you are probably way less alone than you think.
And research shows that when we take stock of how
many people actually share our beliefs, this can energize us.
It can help us turn cynicism into action. I think
a lot about the work of psychologist Greg Sparkman. Recently,
(14:37):
he surveyed thousands of Americans and found that more than
two thirds of them supported aggressive policies to slow down
climate change. But this same group assumed that barely forty
percent of their fellow citizens wanted the same thing. Classic
pluralistic ignorance. But Sparkman also found when people learned how
angry others were about climate change, they felt less alone
(14:59):
and were more willing to take action. A super important
part of this work is that to overcome pluralistic ignorance,
all you need is accurate information. We've seen many times
in this series on Finding Hope people often underestimate one another.
But that means that when we awaken to what the
people around us are really like, our sense of efficacy
(15:21):
and possibility swell. Accurate faith in each other now opens
pathways to a future more of us want.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
That sounds awesome, Jamille, But how do we do that?
Speaker 2 (15:33):
The first step is to start talking about the issues
we care about with one another, and we can do
that through what political scientists call relational organizing.
Speaker 5 (15:43):
Relational organizing is a fancy way to say talking to
people you already know about voting and about elections. It
is eight times more effective than door knocking, because who
do you trust?
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Right if you.
Speaker 5 (15:55):
Want to go to a restaurant, You're gonna look at reviews,
You're gonna look at what people say, and you might
ask a friend. If a friend tells you to go
to a restaurant, you're not gonna double chuck it. You're
just gonna be like, sounds good. I trust what you
have to say. I understand that we share the same values.
We both like greasy peas za, so therefore I will
trust your opinion on what is a good pizza restaurant.
And relational organizing, it's the similar concept, and it's one
(16:16):
that works based on a lot of research.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
In one study, people who got a text from a
friend reminding them to vote were eight percent more likely
to show up to the polls. That may not sound
like much, but it's far far more effective than nearly
any other get out the vote technique political scientists have
come up with. But the benefits of talking about the
issues we care about go beyond just boosted voting numbers.
(16:39):
Some political scientists have argued conversations like these and the
relationships they forge, can even save our democratic way of life.
Speaker 6 (16:48):
Hannah Arent wrote that fascism and a totalitarian society is
really just a bunch of atomized individuals who are separated
and have no identity other than to submit to the state.
So in that way, and she says this is that
friendship can be an act of resistance. Having relationships with
real people who could take care of each other is
at authoritarian states worst enemy, because when people get together,
(17:12):
they are able to talk and you know, figure things out.
So having real, engaged, connected civic fabric is healthy for
our democracy.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
And being part of an engaged, connected civic fabric is
also healthy for us personally. If you're a fan of
the Happiness Lab, you've probably already heard about the benefits
of social connection. Connecting with your neighbors about important issues
is a great way to build relationships that last Emily
says this is one of her favorite parts of civic engagement.
Speaker 5 (17:43):
So I recently had cancer and a just completed treatment.
The people who showed up to help me are people
who I met through civic life, people who I met
through this work. Being engaged in civic life isn't only
giving you also received when you.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Have cancer and you need people to rely on.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
And the people who you meet in civic life, who
you meet because you are volunteering and giving yourself.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
It comes back to you.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
But to get the benefits of civic life, we actually
have to engage. We need to take that first hopeful
step and talk to people about the issues we value.
And as Sammy and Emily have found out in their
own work, getting that first step can be a tall order.
Speaker 6 (18:24):
The challenge and the opportunity with the exhausted majority is
that they are extremely repelled by the political conversation.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
So how can we get the exhausted majority to start
that dialogue. Next we'll return to Katie Faihe and hear
what happens when she started a conversation about jerrymanderin and
see how that first hopeful step was more effective than
she could have dreamed.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
There was no guarantee we were going to be successful.
Everybody told us all the reasons we would fail, and
yet we were willing to try.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Anyways, The Happiness Lab will return after the break.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
I make plenty of Facebook posts that don't lead to anything.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
When we last left Katie Fahee, thing recycling plant worker
was fed up with the jerrymandering in her Michigan community,
Confuming about politics in her car on the way to
work for overriding thought at the time something has to change.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
So I went on social media. I have a normal
amount of followers for the age I am in. I'm
not an influencer or anything like that, but I just
thought i'd say, like, I'd reach out to my friends
and see if anybody else cared about jerrymandering and if
they wanted to do something about it. So my one
little step before work was like, Hey, I want to
end jerrymandering in Michigan. If you want to help, let
me know smiley face emoji. And I did not think
(19:43):
that would lead to really much of anything, if I'm
being honest.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
But that's not what happened. Katie's post blew up, and.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
All of a sudden, all these people were saying, Oh
my gosh, I'm so glad you're working on this. I've
cared about it for such a long time. Let me
know how I could help. What happened when I made
that Facebook post is I got instantly connected to a
community I never knew existed, thoughtful people who paid attention
but didn't really love hyper partisanship and didn't really know
(20:11):
what to do, but still cared and still wished that
something could be done.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
For the first time in a long time, Katie didn't
feel alone.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
I think I had this aha moment of like, look
at all these people who've also been sitting in their
car or at home being mad online, thinking like, why
doesn't somebody do something about this? Meanwhile all of us
not realizing like we are actually people who can do
something about this.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
But that positive feeling was quickly followed by panic. The
people who replied to Katie's post seemed to think that
she knew what the next step was for fixing things,
and I was.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Like, oh, no, I have no idea what I'm doing.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
And so were the people that came together, like, you know,
experienced political activists, So no, they were not.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
That short answer is none of them knew what they
were doing either.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
So I quickly literally googled.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Like how do you end jerrymandering and saw that in
Michigan we had something called the ballot initiative process, which
meant that if you could write constitutional language, which I
had no idea how to do. It's not a lawyer,
but it's like, okay, step one, and then if you
could take that constitutional language and get a bunch of
people to sign a petition saying yes, I want to
vote on this. When I looked at the number, it
was three hundred and fifteen thousand, six hundred and fifty
(21:21):
four registered Michigan voter signatures in.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
One hundred and eighty days.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
And I lived in the second largest city in Michigan,
Grand Rapids, And even the total population if I talked
to every single person who lived in my city, was
only two hundred thousand, so nowhere close to three hundred
and fifteen thousand. So I was like, oh no, okay,
also sounds impossible. All right, that's step number two. And
then step number three would be getting at least fifty
percent of the population to vote yes on that law
(21:46):
in the general election, which would be about two and.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
A half million people.
Speaker 4 (21:50):
And I certainly didn't know two and a half million people,
so that also sounded impossible.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
But I was like, Okay, at least there's a pathway here.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
So ryal loyally petition convinced hundreds of thousands of people
to sign it and then get two point five million
voters to back you at the ballot box. Right, most
people would have walked away then in there, but he
was already too creatively maladjusted to step away.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
If we do nothing.
Speaker 4 (22:14):
We for sure know we're going to get more jerrymandered maps.
But if we succeed, my gosh, millions of people, over
ten million people for the very first time, will actually
be able to vote in a fair election.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
So how do you even start on such a moment
as task.
Speaker 4 (22:29):
So I was like, Okay, we probably need like a
fundraising department because you know, I don't have any money
and it sounds expensive to do. And we probably need
like a legal department because we have to write constitutional
language and like, how the heck do you do that.
We probably need like an education department because like we
have to talk to apparently millions of people about what
the heck jerrymandering is.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Katie had found a group of ordinary folks who are
as fired up as she was, but how could she
turn that enthusiasm into a more directed effort.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Although most people this is the very first quote unquote
political thing they were ever trying to do besides vote,
they had a lot of life experience that translated to
things that a campaign needs to do. For example, somebody
who who had worked at the Renaissance Fair for years
in Michigan, and she's like, you know, as the executive director,
I have to like raise a lot of money for
(23:16):
weird stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
And I was like, cool. Perfect.
Speaker 4 (23:18):
We had a math teacher who had a little bit
of canvassing experience, had done some door knocking before, so
she was like, Okay, I think I can break down
this really big number of like three hundred and fifteen
thousand and figure like out how many signatures per day
that is, and like what we need to do.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
And I was like, okay, great, you go for it.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
And you know, somebody who had been like an accountant
for nonprofits before, who hadn't done a political campaign before,
but said she was willing to get trained on how
to do that. So like slowly it started to feel like,
even though none of us really knew what we were doing,
that maybe if we could like piece together all of
our individual little skills and contributions, maybe just maybe we
could figure out.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
How to do this.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
The cyniciness might say, great, the CEOs, the math teachers,
the accountants, of course they can contribute, but what can
Joe the plumber do or Rebecca the single mom jazzer
size instructor.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
So Rebecca was awesome. She called me and she's like,
I really want to help, but I.
Speaker 4 (24:08):
Just feel like there's there's no way I can contribute.
She's like, you know, I'm dressed a mom, there's nothing else.
And I was like, first of all, being a mom
like definitely comes with a ton of skills, so we
need all of those skills.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
But also like, are there any other hobbies or something
that you have? And she had mentioned that.
Speaker 4 (24:22):
On the side she was a jazzer size instructor, which
I still haven't quite figured out how to tie to
Jerry Bandrick, but also that she was a wood carver.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Katie thought Rebecca could carve a big wooden sculpture showing
just how weird Michigan's jerrymandered voting districts looked. It was
a nice idea, but Rebecca wasn't sure it would work,
Like it was.
Speaker 4 (24:42):
Not feasible to have a statue stand up because it
was like so out of balance and it would have
potentially like crushed children at an art fair or something
if like the wind blew the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Rebecca's contribution wound up being much simpler and much more valuable.
She found an easy way for people to sign Katie's petitions.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
They're kind of like a long document and they aren't
a standard size for a clipboard, And so Rebecca goes,
you know, what, are there any other word carvers in
our Facebook group? And actually we had like three of them.
So they all go and they meet together, and they
figured out, like if they could go to home depots
and lows and reserve a certain amount of wood, that
we could actually make our own clipboard. So instead of
(25:23):
seventeen dollars a piece, it could actually end up being
closer to like eleven cents a piece per clipboard. And
then because they were thinking about these clipboards so much
and like the size, and how do we make it
more advantageous, they figured out and we make it a
little bit longer. We can ask people for their contact
information to see if they want to be volunteers. If
we throw on the back a map of the district,
it can actually work as an education tool where we
(25:45):
can show somebody a picture of their district and start
the conversation by saying, do you think this makes sense?
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Is this how you would define our community? Which ended
up being a great tool for all of those who
are a little more.
Speaker 4 (25:55):
Introverted and scared of talking to strangers that we could
have them look at our clipboard instead of us. And
also we made like raincoats for these clipboards for when
you're standing.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
On the rain.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
All these kind of innovations we would have never done that.
We would have never paid attention to this, But because
we had and those other wood carvers on our team,
we ended up creating like this really fabulous tool that
I know even I today like cherished my clipboard with
all the accomplishments that has seen us through.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Rather than just her community of Grand Rapids, Katie wanted
the whole state to have a voice. With eighty three
counties in Michigan, she had to trust the judgment of
her fellow campaigners. One suggested collecting signatures at his town's
annual cheeseburger festival. Another thought the local tractor pull would
be ideal.
Speaker 4 (26:38):
I was like, I don't know what a tractor poll
contest is, but if you think we should go there,
we absolutely should go there. And they took their clipboard
and they would go and stand outside and try to
talk to a bunch of strangers about redistricting.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
We did end up making costumes.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
We ended up carving pumpkins, and in the winter we
made snowmen who are also holding the clipboards and basically
found every way we possibly could to be creative to
stop people and just say, are you sick of politics
as usual? And if so, here's a way that we
can do something about it. And we had hundreds of
thousands of converse stations. We ended up gathering over four
hundred and forty thousand signatures.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Four hundred and forty thousand signatures is an amazing feat,
but it was only the first of Katie's hurdles. For
her Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission to become a reality, she
needed half of Michigan's voters to back it.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
So then we had to get into campaign mode and
door knocking to keep.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
Talking to a bunch of strangers.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
And we ended up door knocking hundreds of thousands of
doors to building those relationships in those communities.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
So we just kept talking to our neighbors about here's
why we should care.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
But in the end, did her neighbors care? Would she
be able to get out the vote to fight redistricting?
Could a woman with no legal experience who was barely
old enough to rent a car actually fight a two
hundred year old policy like gerrymandering and win?
Speaker 2 (27:54):
I kind of have a feeling it's going to have
a happy ending.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
We ended up getting sixty one percent of the vote.
Speaker 4 (27:59):
We only needed fifty and it was really exciting to see,
especially for a concept that most people hadn't even really
thought about before. We reached over two and a half
million people who said, yes, let's try something different here
in Michigan, and.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Katie's efforts have now spread far beyond her own state.
People have seen what she did in Michigan and are
copying her approach, not just to fix jerrymandering, but for
other issues too.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
In Idaho, there was some boddies who are talking about
how healthcare had like really poor access, and they decided
to get an RV and go travel across their state
and talk to their neighbors about how do we expand
Medicare because we need it and our neighbors do not
have access to healthcare. There were these brandmas in North Dakota,
one a Democrat, whan a Republican who are having this
(28:43):
conversation about they've been kind of civil servants bust of
their life, and they just said, there is like an
ethics problem, like our legislators are not self regulating. We
need some kind of ethics Commission, and they ended up
deciding to do a ballid initiative like we did to
create an ethics commission in North Dakota. They call themselves
the badass Grandmas now fighting for their grandchildren's future.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Katie hadn't successfully changed medical care or fought ethics reforms,
but what she did do for the people who are
her story was something even more important. She convinced them
that hope was possible.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
And at those town hall meetings we were holding, when
we were talking to people, all these people, they would
all raise their hand at the end and keep bringing
up this question, isn't it impossible?
Speaker 3 (29:24):
Isn't it impossible? I've tried something before it didn't work out.
Speaker 4 (29:27):
And what I realized was that a lot of people
just needed somebody else to be a little bit more
hopeful than them.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Like what I was.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
Doing, the best way I was contributing was being like
unafraid of the consequences.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
And so as you think back to kind of how
hopeless you're feeling before, and maybe how kind of annoyed
with your fellow man you were feeling before, how different
does it feel now that you've taken action?
Speaker 3 (29:48):
It feels so inspiring.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
I think it's so easy to let current events feel overwhelming.
That's totally the place I was in was like, oh
my gosh, why does anybody do anything about this? And
also like doesn't anybody care that it is this bad?
And now when I start feeling that way about other issues,
I start thinking about how I can literally picture a
person and like every part of the state I live in,
(30:14):
who we were strangers, yet we were willing to volunteer
our time, energy, money, creativity, Like we were willing to
trust each other and fight like heck, even though all
the odds are stacked against us to try and make
a better future. And it's just like this constant reminder
that like when we actually have the option and when
there's a pathway, even if it's a really slim pathway
(30:35):
that might be really hard, but when there's a pathway
to change being actually possible, I think Americans in general
are just like willing to try and.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Put in the hard work to do it.
Speaker 4 (30:45):
And it just makes me feel a lot more hopeful
but also grateful.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
This is our final show and this special series on
finding hope, and Jamie and I both hope. No pun
intended that the stories we've shared today have helped you
become a little less cynical and a bit more creatively maladjusted.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
There are plenty of reasons to be hopeful, ones we
don't get to see every day on TV or social media.
The majority of us agree on much more than we think,
and people like Emily, Sammy and Katie show us that
we can unite across our differences to help our communities.
Whether you're the CEO of a renaissance fair, a math teacher,
or a wood carving jazzer size instructor, there's going to
(31:25):
be a cause that fires you up and a contribution
that you can make.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
So give yourself a much needed dose of self help
via political action the science shows it might just make
you feel happier. And speaking of feeling happier, Jamille, can
I just say how much I've loved having you on
the show. It has been a blast to have an
actual co host and I'm finally feeling a little bit
more hopeful.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Oh man, this has been delightful, and it's just been
great to be able to connect the science of Hope
to happiness and well being. And as a longtime fan
of the show, it has just been an absolute thrill
to be able to join you in this effort.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
Well, it's sad that it is over, but I will
say for the last time thanks out there for everyone
listening to the Happiness Lab with me doctor Laurie Santos
and me doctor Jamil Zaki.
Pushkin. If a psychologist ever looks at your life, at say,
your level of emotional maturity or the way you handle
daily problems, and says that you're well adjusted, you'd probably
be pretty pleased. I mean, nobody wants to be called maladjusted.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Right well. In nineteen sixty seven, one speaker at a
meeting of the American Psychological Association made the case for
being maladjusted. There are some things in our society, he said,
some things in our world to which we should never
be adjusted. In the face of bigotry, violence, extreme inequality,
and war, feeling good makes no sense. The speech made
(01:01):
major waves among psychologists, in part because it was not
given by a psychologist, but by Martin Luther King Junior,
the great civil rights leader, told psychologists that in many cases,
their focus on happiness was backwards. When the norms of
a culture are unjust, true social health requires what MLK
(01:21):
called creative maladjustment. Creative maladjustment, he argued, had two parts.
The first was a sense of fury about how things are.
We need to be upset in the face of an
unfair status quo, but we should also do so in
a creative way. We need to bring a sense of
hope that the future could be different. I'm Jamil Zaki,
(01:44):
and in my book Hope for Cynics, I explore doctor
King's idea of creative maladjustment and find that it is
deeply prescient. A lot of evidence from psychology bears out
what he said. Hope isn't a complacent feeling that causes
people to ignore their problems. It's a key ingredient in
our ability to yearn for a better future and to
(02:06):
fight for it.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
In this special season on Finding Hope, Jamiale and I
have shared study after study showing that we humans are kinder,
less divided, and more cooperative than most people realize. But
being a good person doesn't necessarily mean that you have
the courage to do good things, and that is the
subject of our final show of this series. Many of
us feel pretty cynical about problems like inequality and justice
(02:30):
and bigotry. We feel powerless to bring about change, so
we just kind of go on with our lives. But
what if we embrace the creative maladjustment Doctor King recommended?
What if we got pissed off enough to think differently
and found the hope needed to act differently. Our minds
are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
(02:52):
But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
minds are lying to us, leading us away from what
will really make us happy. The good news is that
understanding the science of the mind can point us all
back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab.
Would meet doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
And me doctor Jamil's.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
I actually hate politics.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Katie Fahey wasn't exactly a poster job for creative maladjustment.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
The fact that we live in America and that we
have a government that is supposed to be derived by
the people, I think all that's great, but the actual
like politics, us versus them, party versus party, I just
have never.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Liked Many of the people in the Michigan town where
Katie grew up didn't take part in local politics or elections.
Katie did care about the issues facing her community.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
But I was also busy in twenty seven and trying
to get my masters and trying to keep my day
job and like have social relationships and like all that
kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
But in Michigan there was a lot going on.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
This was around the time of the Flint water crisis.
Local officials in Flint, Michigan, had decided to switch the
location of the city's water supply to save money. Soon after,
the residents of that low income community started complaining about
the smell and color their water. By the time anyone
tried to do anything to fix it, it was too late.
All the pipes in the community had become corroded and
(04:17):
the water was polluted with lead, bacteria, and other contaminants.
Katie spent her hour long daily commute listening to the
radio and hearing about this awful public health crisis.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
I really felt like, doesn't anybody care? How is this
going on? And yet nobody's doing anything about it. Nobody
was talking about like how do we prevent the next
flootwater crisis? How do we make sure this never happens again?
And I just felt so disheartened that this is the
world we were in.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I was just so disheartened. Katie was starting to experience
the first step of creative maladjustment. She was getting pissed off.
But there's a second step to creative maladjustment that goes
beyond anger. We need to do the creative part. And
that was where Katie got stuck. It just didn't seem
like the political system was working for communities like hers.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Our politicians are not afraid of us as the vote.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
They aren't worried about winning our vote or if we
like what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Things seemed intractable, but Katie wanted to find a way
to fix things.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
I can't keep going to work every day knowing that
children can't drink water at their school and like, think
that's okay. And I didn't know what to do. But
I was kind of seeing all those pieces and felt like,
maybe there's something to do that isn't just nothing, or
isn't just listening to the radio and getting frustrated every
single day.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
So Katie decided to take a deeper dive. So why
so many of her local politicians were checked out?
Speaker 4 (05:38):
I was like, Okay, how do we actually start getting
accountability in Michigan. Maybe we could try and fix one
of those systemic problems that make it so that our
legislators don't have incentives to want to listen to the voters.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
America's political system is, at least in theory, supposed to
prevent problems like this. People within each district vote for
the person whose policies they like best. If a community
hates what a politician is doing, they should be able
to vote that person out. But as Katie learned, it
doesn't always work like that because of a process called jerrymandering.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
Where politicians decide what voting districts are instead of voters.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Once elected, a politician can monkey around with the boundaries
of their voting district. They can even move those borders
so much that they exclude a huge percentage of votes
that would be hostile to their policies. The word jerrymandering
comes from a redistricting bill back in eighteen twelve signed
by Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Jerry. His party redrew the boundaries
(06:39):
of Boston voting districts in order to win more power.
The result was a set of strangely shaped districts. One
famous electoral map looked a bit like a salamander, or
rather a jerrymander. Jerrymandering is a process that's helpful for politicians,
but it's very bad for governance. It makes it harder
to vote out incumbents and encourages entire communities to be ignored.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
People end up not being able to actually get government
to deliver on the basic things that it's suppose to
be delivering up.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
As Katie read more about jerrymandering, she was shocked at
how much this unfair process affected her Michigan community.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I knew it was bad.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
I didn't know much else besides that, But I was like, hey,
I think if we started there, Like if we could
fix that problem where politicians get to choose who their
voters are and instead had voters choosing who their politicians
are based on their voting districts, Like, maybe there's something there,
But I didn't actually know.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
What we could do to fix it.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Jerrymandering was infuriating, but it had been around for hundreds
of years. It wasn't like some random recycling plant worker
was going to single handedly fix such a big problem.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
So I was kind of feeling, like, why doesn't anybody care?
I was feeling pretty hopeless.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
I was feeling pretty hopeless. Katie was feeling what a
lot of cynical people do. She saw a huge problem
but couldn't envision a solution, so she didn't take action.
In Martin Luther King's terms, Katie was feeling maladjusted but
didn't feel the creative hope we need to do something
about it. Which finds that Katie is not alone here.
(08:11):
Cynics don't vote or protest as much as their more
hopeful counterparts. They leave the work to others, and even worse,
people who feel hopeless sometimes belittle that work. They are
quick to talk about society's ills, but also claim there
is no cure and it's dumb for anyone to try.
Speaker 5 (08:29):
To fix it.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
We often think of cynicism as a radical feeling which
will hold power to account. In fact, it's often the opposite,
a duel of the status quo. But is there any
way to find the hope that Katie was lacking? To
get that creative nudge, we need to start taking action.
We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns from the break.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
So the exhausted majority, it's sixty seven percent of America.
That is the majority of America.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
This is political strategist Emily Amic. Emily used to work
for Senator Chuck Schumer, but these days she spent her
time working with people like Katie Fahey, folks who find
politics to be a massive turnoff.
Speaker 5 (09:14):
And that doesn't mean these people are centrists or moderates.
But the thing that really brings them all together, that
connects them all, is that they are like profoundly exhausted.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Political scientists often categorize people by their willingness to engage
in issues. Some folks, the ones we tend to hear
from a lot on social media and in op eds,
fall into what scholars call the wings. These are the
hardcore conservatives and progressive liberals, voters on the tail ends
of the political spectrum. But the devoted folks on the
wings are a minority. The bulk of Americans, the others
(09:45):
seventy year or so percent fall into the exhausted category.
Speaker 5 (09:49):
They heard like profoundly exhausted, and they don't view every
single political issue as a war. They really just want
the government to work, the trains to run on time,
their kids to be able to go to school, the
water to be clean.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
You know.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
They just want to be able to live their lives.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
The exhausteds want things to be better, but they're cynical
about their ability to fix things. They wind up disengaging
and feeling left out of the democratic process. So says
Emily's collaborator Sammy Sage, these.
Speaker 6 (10:17):
People just feel like everything is corrupt, this is pointless.
They're frustrated by politics, but it has turned to apathy.
Nothing I do will matter. Nothing anyone I know does
will matter. So I wish I didn't have to hear
about this.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
As you've probably guessed, this sort of helplessness doesn't make
for a happy nation, especially when nearly seventy percent of
us are feeling that way.
Speaker 6 (10:38):
But the opportunity there is that if all of these
people were to start engaging, we would be able to
have a much more productive conversation.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
And that's why Emily and Sammy are on a mission
to turn our collective exhaustion into more democratic engagement. They've
even written a fabulous how to guide. It's called democracy
in Retrograde, how to make changes big and small in
our country and in our lives.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
The goal is for politics to be a daily habit,
not a biannual freakout. We want you to figure out
how to make civic life upfilling part of your life.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
It should be additive, It should make you happy.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
It should bring you joy so that you keep going
back to it.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
The book begins by analyzing why so many of us
got so exhausted when it comes to politics. One factor
that pair says involves a toxic way that our political
discourse has evolved over the past few decades, whether it's
on Twitter or cable news, we've all seen what should
have been a thoughtful political discussion turn into a polarized
shouting match, and honestly, what's more exhausting than that. Emily
(11:39):
worries that this change has caused some voices to be
silenced while the trolls on the wings show even louder.
Speaker 5 (11:45):
And then the people who then want to talk about
these issues are people who are.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Doing it not with the best intentions.
Speaker 5 (11:50):
Right if the only political conversation you have is your
uncle Chad screaming at you about politics, he's going into
that conversation without good intentions. He just wants to get
in an argument. He just wants to shit on you.
That is not the normal conversation.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
And extreme individuals don't just skew political to be they
also spend huge amounts of effort to impose their political
will on the rest of us. They lobby politicians, attend
city hall meetings, and complain to school boards to get
their goals realized.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
Sixty percent of book bands were done by eleven people.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
The reality is.
Speaker 5 (12:23):
There are people who are extremely active and they are
willing to do the work to get extremist policies in play.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
With so many toxic voices pushing for extreme policies, it
can be hard to figure out what the average person thinks.
It's a cognitive error that psychologists call pluralistic ignorance. We
wind up mistakenly assuming that extreme positions are the norm
and that pretty much everybody disagrees with how we think
things should work. Consider one of the most famous examples
of pluralistic ignorance, a study of Princeton students' perceptions of
(12:55):
their classmates. Undergrads were brought into the lab and asked
how often they thought the average Princeton student drank to excess.
Most students assume that the typical student drank a lot,
even though they themselves had a moderate approach to partying.
And it's easy to see where this bias comes from.
I mean, think about who's taking up the most space
in campus conversations. Students don't often regale each other with
(13:18):
stories about how they stayed up in their room watching TV,
but they talk a lot about the raging parties they attended.
And study after study has shown that our political discourse
has become a lot like those campus errors. We simply
don't realize just how much we agree on the big issues.
Speaker 6 (13:33):
Majority Americans support abortion rights at any point in the pregnancy.
More than half of Americans support some form of gun
control or gun safety laws. They support taking action on
the climate. Ninety percent of Americans think that LGBTQ individuals
should not suffer from discrimination. All of those people because
they're not talking about politics, they're not finding each other.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
The uncle chads make so much racket that we think
they're everywhere, while the exhausteds are so well exhausted that
they just don't speak up, which creates a vicious cycle
and which the average person winds up feeling even more
angry about the state to the world and even more cynical.
Anything can be done to fix it. But Jamille, explain
how your work gives us a path forward.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Well, Laurie, the good news here is that if you
aren't exhausted, you are probably way less alone than you think.
And research shows that when we take stock of how
many people actually share our beliefs, this can energize us.
It can help us turn cynicism into action. I think
a lot about the work of psychologist Greg Sparkman. Recently,
(14:37):
he surveyed thousands of Americans and found that more than
two thirds of them supported aggressive policies to slow down
climate change. But this same group assumed that barely forty
percent of their fellow citizens wanted the same thing. Classic
pluralistic ignorance. But Sparkman also found when people learned how
angry others were about climate change, they felt less alone
(14:59):
and were more willing to take action. A super important
part of this work is that to overcome pluralistic ignorance,
all you need is accurate information. We've seen many times
in this series on Finding Hope people often underestimate one another.
But that means that when we awaken to what the
people around us are really like, our sense of efficacy
(15:21):
and possibility swell. Accurate faith in each other now opens
pathways to a future more of us want.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
That sounds awesome, Jamille, But how do we do that?
Speaker 2 (15:33):
The first step is to start talking about the issues
we care about with one another, and we can do
that through what political scientists call relational organizing.
Speaker 5 (15:43):
Relational organizing is a fancy way to say talking to
people you already know about voting and about elections. It
is eight times more effective than door knocking, because who
do you trust?
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Right if you.
Speaker 5 (15:55):
Want to go to a restaurant, You're gonna look at reviews,
You're gonna look at what people say, and you might
ask a friend. If a friend tells you to go
to a restaurant, you're not gonna double chuck it. You're
just gonna be like, sounds good. I trust what you
have to say. I understand that we share the same values.
We both like greasy peas za, so therefore I will
trust your opinion on what is a good pizza restaurant.
And relational organizing, it's the similar concept, and it's one
(16:16):
that works based on a lot of research.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
In one study, people who got a text from a
friend reminding them to vote were eight percent more likely
to show up to the polls. That may not sound
like much, but it's far far more effective than nearly
any other get out the vote technique political scientists have
come up with. But the benefits of talking about the
issues we care about go beyond just boosted voting numbers.
(16:39):
Some political scientists have argued conversations like these and the
relationships they forge, can even save our democratic way of life.
Speaker 6 (16:48):
Hannah Arent wrote that fascism and a totalitarian society is
really just a bunch of atomized individuals who are separated
and have no identity other than to submit to the state.
So in that way, and she says this is that
friendship can be an act of resistance. Having relationships with
real people who could take care of each other is
at authoritarian states worst enemy, because when people get together,
(17:12):
they are able to talk and you know, figure things out.
So having real, engaged, connected civic fabric is healthy for
our democracy.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
And being part of an engaged, connected civic fabric is
also healthy for us personally. If you're a fan of
the Happiness Lab, you've probably already heard about the benefits
of social connection. Connecting with your neighbors about important issues
is a great way to build relationships that last Emily
says this is one of her favorite parts of civic engagement.
Speaker 5 (17:43):
So I recently had cancer and a just completed treatment.
The people who showed up to help me are people
who I met through civic life, people who I met
through this work. Being engaged in civic life isn't only
giving you also received when you.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Have cancer and you need people to rely on.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
And the people who you meet in civic life, who
you meet because you are volunteering and giving yourself.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
It comes back to you.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
But to get the benefits of civic life, we actually
have to engage. We need to take that first hopeful
step and talk to people about the issues we value.
And as Sammy and Emily have found out in their
own work, getting that first step can be a tall order.
Speaker 6 (18:24):
The challenge and the opportunity with the exhausted majority is
that they are extremely repelled by the political conversation.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
So how can we get the exhausted majority to start
that dialogue. Next we'll return to Katie Faihe and hear
what happens when she started a conversation about jerrymanderin and
see how that first hopeful step was more effective than
she could have dreamed.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
There was no guarantee we were going to be successful.
Everybody told us all the reasons we would fail, and
yet we were willing to try.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Anyways, The Happiness Lab will return after the break.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
I make plenty of Facebook posts that don't lead to anything.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
When we last left Katie Fahee, thing recycling plant worker
was fed up with the jerrymandering in her Michigan community,
Confuming about politics in her car on the way to
work for overriding thought at the time something has to change.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
So I went on social media. I have a normal
amount of followers for the age I am in. I'm
not an influencer or anything like that, but I just
thought i'd say, like, I'd reach out to my friends
and see if anybody else cared about jerrymandering and if
they wanted to do something about it. So my one
little step before work was like, Hey, I want to
end jerrymandering in Michigan. If you want to help, let
me know smiley face emoji. And I did not think
(19:43):
that would lead to really much of anything, if I'm
being honest.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
But that's not what happened. Katie's post blew up, and.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
All of a sudden, all these people were saying, Oh
my gosh, I'm so glad you're working on this. I've
cared about it for such a long time. Let me
know how I could help. What happened when I made
that Facebook post is I got instantly connected to a
community I never knew existed, thoughtful people who paid attention
but didn't really love hyper partisanship and didn't really know
(20:11):
what to do, but still cared and still wished that
something could be done.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
For the first time in a long time, Katie didn't
feel alone.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
I think I had this aha moment of like, look
at all these people who've also been sitting in their
car or at home being mad online, thinking like, why
doesn't somebody do something about this? Meanwhile all of us
not realizing like we are actually people who can do
something about this.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
But that positive feeling was quickly followed by panic. The
people who replied to Katie's post seemed to think that
she knew what the next step was for fixing things,
and I was.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Like, oh, no, I have no idea what I'm doing.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
And so were the people that came together, like, you know,
experienced political activists, So no, they were not.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
That short answer is none of them knew what they
were doing either.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
So I quickly literally googled.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Like how do you end jerrymandering and saw that in
Michigan we had something called the ballot initiative process, which
meant that if you could write constitutional language, which I
had no idea how to do. It's not a lawyer,
but it's like, okay, step one, and then if you
could take that constitutional language and get a bunch of
people to sign a petition saying yes, I want to
vote on this. When I looked at the number, it
was three hundred and fifteen thousand, six hundred and fifty
(21:21):
four registered Michigan voter signatures in.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
One hundred and eighty days.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
And I lived in the second largest city in Michigan,
Grand Rapids, And even the total population if I talked
to every single person who lived in my city, was
only two hundred thousand, so nowhere close to three hundred
and fifteen thousand. So I was like, oh no, okay,
also sounds impossible. All right, that's step number two. And
then step number three would be getting at least fifty
percent of the population to vote yes on that law
(21:46):
in the general election, which would be about two and.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
A half million people.
Speaker 4 (21:50):
And I certainly didn't know two and a half million people,
so that also sounded impossible.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
But I was like, Okay, at least there's a pathway here.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
So ryal loyally petition convinced hundreds of thousands of people
to sign it and then get two point five million
voters to back you at the ballot box. Right, most
people would have walked away then in there, but he
was already too creatively maladjusted to step away.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
If we do nothing.
Speaker 4 (22:14):
We for sure know we're going to get more jerrymandered maps.
But if we succeed, my gosh, millions of people, over
ten million people for the very first time, will actually
be able to vote in a fair election.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
So how do you even start on such a moment
as task.
Speaker 4 (22:29):
So I was like, Okay, we probably need like a
fundraising department because you know, I don't have any money
and it sounds expensive to do. And we probably need
like a legal department because we have to write constitutional
language and like, how the heck do you do that.
We probably need like an education department because like we
have to talk to apparently millions of people about what
the heck jerrymandering is.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Katie had found a group of ordinary folks who are
as fired up as she was, but how could she
turn that enthusiasm into a more directed effort.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Although most people this is the very first quote unquote
political thing they were ever trying to do besides vote,
they had a lot of life experience that translated to
things that a campaign needs to do. For example, somebody
who who had worked at the Renaissance Fair for years
in Michigan, and she's like, you know, as the executive director,
I have to like raise a lot of money for
(23:16):
weird stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
And I was like, cool. Perfect.
Speaker 4 (23:18):
We had a math teacher who had a little bit
of canvassing experience, had done some door knocking before, so
she was like, Okay, I think I can break down
this really big number of like three hundred and fifteen
thousand and figure like out how many signatures per day
that is, and like what we need to do.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
And I was like, okay, great, you go for it.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
And you know, somebody who had been like an accountant
for nonprofits before, who hadn't done a political campaign before,
but said she was willing to get trained on how
to do that. So like slowly it started to feel like,
even though none of us really knew what we were doing,
that maybe if we could like piece together all of
our individual little skills and contributions, maybe just maybe we
could figure out.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
How to do this.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
The cyniciness might say, great, the CEOs, the math teachers,
the accountants, of course they can contribute, but what can
Joe the plumber do or Rebecca the single mom jazzer
size instructor.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
So Rebecca was awesome. She called me and she's like,
I really want to help, but I.
Speaker 4 (24:08):
Just feel like there's there's no way I can contribute.
She's like, you know, I'm dressed a mom, there's nothing else.
And I was like, first of all, being a mom
like definitely comes with a ton of skills, so we
need all of those skills.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
But also like, are there any other hobbies or something
that you have? And she had mentioned that.
Speaker 4 (24:22):
On the side she was a jazzer size instructor, which
I still haven't quite figured out how to tie to
Jerry Bandrick, but also that she was a wood carver.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Katie thought Rebecca could carve a big wooden sculpture showing
just how weird Michigan's jerrymandered voting districts looked. It was
a nice idea, but Rebecca wasn't sure it would work,
Like it was.
Speaker 4 (24:42):
Not feasible to have a statue stand up because it
was like so out of balance and it would have
potentially like crushed children at an art fair or something
if like the wind blew the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Rebecca's contribution wound up being much simpler and much more valuable.
She found an easy way for people to sign Katie's petitions.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
They're kind of like a long document and they aren't
a standard size for a clipboard, And so Rebecca goes,
you know, what, are there any other word carvers in
our Facebook group? And actually we had like three of them.
So they all go and they meet together, and they
figured out, like if they could go to home depots
and lows and reserve a certain amount of wood, that
we could actually make our own clipboard. So instead of
(25:23):
seventeen dollars a piece, it could actually end up being
closer to like eleven cents a piece per clipboard. And
then because they were thinking about these clipboards so much
and like the size, and how do we make it
more advantageous, they figured out and we make it a
little bit longer. We can ask people for their contact
information to see if they want to be volunteers. If
we throw on the back a map of the district,
it can actually work as an education tool where we
(25:45):
can show somebody a picture of their district and start
the conversation by saying, do you think this makes sense?
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Is this how you would define our community? Which ended
up being a great tool for all of those who
are a little more.
Speaker 4 (25:55):
Introverted and scared of talking to strangers that we could
have them look at our clipboard instead of us. And
also we made like raincoats for these clipboards for when
you're standing.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
On the rain.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
All these kind of innovations we would have never done that.
We would have never paid attention to this, But because
we had and those other wood carvers on our team,
we ended up creating like this really fabulous tool that
I know even I today like cherished my clipboard with
all the accomplishments that has seen us through.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Rather than just her community of Grand Rapids, Katie wanted
the whole state to have a voice. With eighty three
counties in Michigan, she had to trust the judgment of
her fellow campaigners. One suggested collecting signatures at his town's
annual cheeseburger festival. Another thought the local tractor pull would
be ideal.
Speaker 4 (26:38):
I was like, I don't know what a tractor poll
contest is, but if you think we should go there,
we absolutely should go there. And they took their clipboard
and they would go and stand outside and try to
talk to a bunch of strangers about redistricting.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
We did end up making costumes.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
We ended up carving pumpkins, and in the winter we
made snowmen who are also holding the clipboards and basically
found every way we possibly could to be creative to
stop people and just say, are you sick of politics
as usual? And if so, here's a way that we
can do something about it. And we had hundreds of
thousands of converse stations. We ended up gathering over four
hundred and forty thousand signatures.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Four hundred and forty thousand signatures is an amazing feat,
but it was only the first of Katie's hurdles. For
her Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission to become a reality, she
needed half of Michigan's voters to back it.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
So then we had to get into campaign mode and
door knocking to keep.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
Talking to a bunch of strangers.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
And we ended up door knocking hundreds of thousands of
doors to building those relationships in those communities.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
So we just kept talking to our neighbors about here's
why we should care.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
But in the end, did her neighbors care? Would she
be able to get out the vote to fight redistricting?
Could a woman with no legal experience who was barely
old enough to rent a car actually fight a two
hundred year old policy like gerrymandering and win?
Speaker 2 (27:54):
I kind of have a feeling it's going to have
a happy ending.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
We ended up getting sixty one percent of the vote.
Speaker 4 (27:59):
We only needed fifty and it was really exciting to see,
especially for a concept that most people hadn't even really
thought about before. We reached over two and a half
million people who said, yes, let's try something different here
in Michigan, and.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Katie's efforts have now spread far beyond her own state.
People have seen what she did in Michigan and are
copying her approach, not just to fix jerrymandering, but for
other issues too.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
In Idaho, there was some boddies who are talking about
how healthcare had like really poor access, and they decided
to get an RV and go travel across their state
and talk to their neighbors about how do we expand
Medicare because we need it and our neighbors do not
have access to healthcare. There were these brandmas in North Dakota,
one a Democrat, whan a Republican who are having this
(28:43):
conversation about they've been kind of civil servants bust of
their life, and they just said, there is like an
ethics problem, like our legislators are not self regulating. We
need some kind of ethics Commission, and they ended up
deciding to do a ballid initiative like we did to
create an ethics commission in North Dakota. They call themselves
the badass Grandmas now fighting for their grandchildren's future.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Katie hadn't successfully changed medical care or fought ethics reforms,
but what she did do for the people who are
her story was something even more important. She convinced them
that hope was possible.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
And at those town hall meetings we were holding, when
we were talking to people, all these people, they would
all raise their hand at the end and keep bringing
up this question, isn't it impossible?
Speaker 3 (29:24):
Isn't it impossible? I've tried something before it didn't work out.
Speaker 4 (29:27):
And what I realized was that a lot of people
just needed somebody else to be a little bit more
hopeful than them.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Like what I was.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
Doing, the best way I was contributing was being like
unafraid of the consequences.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
And so as you think back to kind of how
hopeless you're feeling before, and maybe how kind of annoyed
with your fellow man you were feeling before, how different
does it feel now that you've taken action?
Speaker 3 (29:48):
It feels so inspiring.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
I think it's so easy to let current events feel overwhelming.
That's totally the place I was in was like, oh
my gosh, why does anybody do anything about this? And
also like doesn't anybody care that it is this bad?
And now when I start feeling that way about other issues,
I start thinking about how I can literally picture a
person and like every part of the state I live in,
(30:14):
who we were strangers, yet we were willing to volunteer
our time, energy, money, creativity, Like we were willing to
trust each other and fight like heck, even though all
the odds are stacked against us to try and make
a better future. And it's just like this constant reminder
that like when we actually have the option and when
there's a pathway, even if it's a really slim pathway
(30:35):
that might be really hard, but when there's a pathway
to change being actually possible, I think Americans in general
are just like willing to try and.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Put in the hard work to do it.
Speaker 4 (30:45):
And it just makes me feel a lot more hopeful
but also grateful.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
This is our final show and this special series on
finding hope, and Jamie and I both hope. No pun
intended that the stories we've shared today have helped you
become a little less cynical and a bit more creatively maladjusted.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
There are plenty of reasons to be hopeful, ones we
don't get to see every day on TV or social media.
The majority of us agree on much more than we think,
and people like Emily, Sammy and Katie show us that
we can unite across our differences to help our communities.
Whether you're the CEO of a renaissance fair, a math teacher,
or a wood carving jazzer size instructor, there's going to
(31:25):
be a cause that fires you up and a contribution
that you can make.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
So give yourself a much needed dose of self help
via political action the science shows it might just make
you feel happier. And speaking of feeling happier, Jamille, can
I just say how much I've loved having you on
the show. It has been a blast to have an
actual co host and I'm finally feeling a little bit
more hopeful.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Oh man, this has been delightful, and it's just been
great to be able to connect the science of Hope
to happiness and well being. And as a longtime fan
of the show, it has just been an absolute thrill
to be able to join you in this effort.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
Well, it's sad that it is over, but I will
say for the last time thanks out there for everyone
listening to the Happiness Lab with me doctor Laurie Santos
and me doctor Jamil Zaki.
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