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Nov. 14, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
58:34
Timeless Wisdom - Becoming a Deeper and Better Person
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
For my last talk on happiness, we'll recall, and it will be reaffirmed in an interesting and different context today, how central, I believe, gratitude is to life.
And I cannot help but say for my wife and myself our gratitude to IPO for the way they conducted yet another university.
I find the amount of preparation daunting.
Being a terribly unorganized person, I particularly appreciate it.
And as well to the Indian people that we have had the privilege of coming into contact with.
I can tell you I've been to 72 countries and I have enjoyed many of them, but I have not enjoyed any country more than I have enjoyed India, both in the past and at the present time.
And I said to an Indian gentleman who typically walked me to a destination rather than told me where it was, that I prayed that with the economic advancement that will take inevitably take place in a country of so many intelligent people, it cannot but be otherwise, providing governments do not sabotage such efforts, which have been known to happen in human history.
But it is virtually inevitable.
And I said to him, I just hope that your people do not lose the preciousness of their personality and values that they have retained.
And I then said something that will be germane to my talk today.
Believe it or not, money is a much greater challenge to one's values than is poverty.
And that is not something that is usually spoken of.
In fact, it's usually the antithesis because of the widespread, utterly, utterly, utterly erroneous belief that poverty causes crime.
A widespread belief in the Western world showing that Marx, though overthrown wherever there was a Marxism, has really prevailed in the intellectual arena, where the belief that poverty causes crime is widespread, is almost a mantra in Western thought.
If it did, if it were true, then I always say there are two questions I have.
One, then presumably affluence causes decency, a supposition of such absurdity that it immediately reduces the notion poverty causes crime to the lack of sense that is inherent to it.
And secondly, this country would be a tinderbox of evil.
The rape and pillage would be awesome if poverty caused crime.
And yet I have walked in areas the poverty of which is unknown in my country, feeling safer than in my own city of Los Angeles after 8 p.m. in much of its environs.
Thoughts to reflect on when we hear clichés like poverty causes crime.
If anything, I would argue affluence degenerates the human condition more readily than poverty does.
Anyway, the talk.
Oh, one final opening word.
I don't make a living from my tapes, so I feel perfectly free to advertise in the following way.
Many of you, many, four of you.
Let me not exaggerate.
Exactly four.
asked me if you could get a copy of the last talk I gave.
For the four of you and four others who may be interested, my address is in the book and many of my tapes are available through that.
My living is, thank God, through radio, and so my tapes are a work of love rather than a source of mortgage payment, the only way in which a Los Angeles thinks of money.
I will address becoming deeper and becoming better, better as in goodness.
It's fascinating.
I wish the word in English were gooder.
It's better, and therefore better doesn't, it's not clear that I mean ethical moral quality of a human being rather than better health or better able to cope with certain things.
So that's what I mean.
More deep, more good.
Having done this in 16 sessions at a university, a seminary actually in Los Angeles, I need to get all of them into the hour, so I will have to talk in very succinct phrases.
Number one, depth, on becoming a deeper person.
Most people in my experience actually have not made this a major goal of their life.
If you would ask people what do you want to attain in life, people will mention many wonderful things.
But I want to be deeper is just something you don't think of.
It's almost jarring.
I want to be deeper.
What does that mean?
I don't know why it is that depth and its correlate, wisdom, are not greatly valued by many.
They are certainly valued by some, but not by many, at least in the world that I have greatest acquaintance with.
Knowledge is valued, happiness is valued, success is valued, brilliance is valued.
We want our children to be brilliant and we want them to be successful and we want ourselves to have all the...
We want to be psychologically healthy.
Healthy is a big word now in the world, both physical health and mental health.
But deep, it's not even on the list, as it were.
It's just not thought of.
And yet, why go through this life if wanting to be the deepest person you can is not one of the great ideals?
So what if you're brilliant?
Really, so what?
But in terms of information, the phone directory is a genius.
Computers are brilliant, but they don't have any depth.
They have no wisdom.
Maybe at least in the Western world, part of the devaluing of old age, the fear of becoming old, is that we don't value the one thing the old do have a chance of having that the young tend not to have, and that's wisdom.
If we valued depth and wisdom more, we wouldn't fear getting old as much.
Because old age, at least in the Western world that I come from, is identified with getting sick, with getting less healthy, with getting less successful, with all of the things that we value.
But the thing that I'm talking about that we ought to value is the thing you do get, or can get, as you get older.
Of course, there's no fool like an old fool.
That's true.
But there is the possibility, if you wanted to be wise, of accumulating that.
And wisdom and depth, while not synonymous, are very similar.
Are certainly not similar.
They're very related.
So, the first thing on becoming a deeper person is to want to.
It has to become a part of the list of things you would like to be.
I am convinced that part of the reason that people do not wish to become deeper, at least when not thinking it through, I think if you think it through, you would want to be, but not thinking it through, is to be quite honest, unlike all the other things I mentioned, it is impossible to become deeper painlessly.
And the avoidance of pain is a very normal human tendency.
Who's going to choose pain over non-pain?
But it is not possible to mature, to be wise, to be deeper painlessly.
It is not possible.
And let me give you the areas in which I'm going to address the depth issue: intellectual depth, psychological depth, and emotional depth.
Each one involves challenging yourself.
It involves overcoming your human nature, which I spoke about in my happiness lecture, and it is certainly true with regard to depth.
Let me talk to you first about intellectual depth and give you some examples of what I mean.
The difference in depth between pop music and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Bach is deeper music.
I am not here to argue whether the Beatles are as great as Beethoven.
Okay?
And forgive me, I use these examples because though they are Western, the Beatles and Beethoven are certainly universally listened to.
So I'm not even dealing with the Beatles versus Beethoven.
I'm dealing with regular pop music, music to do your dishes by, if you will, versus a Bach cantata or the B minor mass or his sweets for harpsichord.
Very few people love classical music the moment they first hear it.
Very few.
Some do.
Some are born with a love of classical music, but most people need to work at loving it.
The first time you hear a Broadway tune, you like it.
It's a tune, you walk away and you whistle a happy tune, as one of them goes.
The first time you hear a Beethoven quartet, you do not walk away whistling it.
Because by and large, it's not terribly whistleable in any event.
It will take about 10 hearings to even understand what Beethoven is trying to say.
The difference, however, is once you have begun to enjoy and understand Beethoven, you are richer.
You are in that regard.
I don't say you're kinder, that's part two of the lecture.
But you are richer, you are a deeper person.
But it has taken an effort.
It took me, I have loved classical music since I'm 15 years of age.
It took me till this past year to first begin to love Bach.
It took me all that time.
Others get to it far more readily.
Now I am in love with Bach, and I am grateful that I have been able to open that pleasure up to myself because there's no pleasure like deep pleasure.
I didn't mention this in my happiness talk, but this is related.
The difference between fun and happiness.
Fun is what you experience doing an act.
Happiness is what you experience afterwards.
It was not fun getting up yesterday for a one o'clock flight to Varanasi.
Okay?
I am a happier human being for having gone to Varanasi yesterday.
Fun would have been watching TV, going to bed, or talking to some friends, going to bed, having a full night's sleep.
Okay?
The economy section of the airline we chartered for this 6'4, that's over 2-meter human being, was not fun.
It was among the happiest days of my life.
Fun and happiness are often not related.
I would not express yesterday as a fun time, but my God, was it a happy time?
And we confuse the two, thinking that if you add up enough fun, you become happy.
That is not true.
Happiness is happiness as fun is fun.
I'm not against fun.
There is a place for fun in life, but happiness is happiness.
I am happier for what I have gotten from years of study of classical music than I would be if I merely listened to music for the sake of having a nice background to hum to.
It's true for anything.
It is much more fun to read a best-selling novel than to read Dostoevsky.
To give another, pardon me, Western example.
Crime and punishment is not on the bestseller list, but Sex in Hollywood, a novel containing that will be on the bestseller list.
Okay, and it is fun to read a novel like that, and I have no problem with doing it.
You cannot read Dostoevsky all day, all your life.
I know that.
I live in this world too and love fun.
But at a given point, does one wish to be deeper?
I give the pop music versus Bach example.
I give the popular novel versus Dostoevsky example.
I give television news versus newspapers.
Television news is largely worthless.
I live in the media.
My work is media.
I talk about the news three hours a day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday on the American Broadcasting Company in Los Angeles.
Three hours a day.
I have to be well versed in international and American news.
I do not watch television news.
In order to be well-versed, I do not watch television news.
I am better versed in the news because I do not.
I know that the news, at least in many countries, and especially the United States, is chosen for entertainment value to keep you watching, not in order to inform you.
Newspapers, good newspapers.
There are cheap newspapers.
Good newspapers inform.
Good journals inform.
Television news is there to excite you.
Now watch the latest pictures of the latest train wreck in whatever country it is.
I know people who think of themselves, they call themselves dentists, they say I'm a news junkie.
I watch CNN all day.
I feel for them.
They are news.
They are junkies, but not of news.
They are junkies of television images that keep their adrenaline running through excitement.
It's a classic example of do you wish to be deeper?
It's easy to watch television.
It is more difficult to read the entire article in the London Times.
It is as simple as that.
However, you will learn a lot more from one article in the Times of London or whatever fine newspapers you have in your country than you will from television news.
It's just another example.
I'll give you a fourth example of intellectual depth.
Habit versus questioning.
How many people question what they believe that they inherited from their childhood?
I don't say reject.
I say question.
I find this interesting because I happen to be a religious person, which in the media in my country is very rare.
It is overwhelmingly secular.
And I am challenged because I talk about all subjects, not only the news.
I am always challenged.
How can you believe in God?
Look at all the evil in the world.
How can you believe in God?
Aren't you rational?
How can you believe in religion?
Look at all the evil done in the name of religion.
I'm challenged every day virtually.
And it's good.
But I always ask my secular caller, your challenges are very valid to me.
Now let me ask you a question.
Do you ever challenge your secularism?
And the words are so confusing.
I mean, they understand the words, but they've never been asked that.
What do you mean, do I ever challenge my secularism?
Yes, you say to me, how can you believe in God or religion?
You see children dying.
So I say to you, how do you not believe in God or religion when you see children born?
Why is that not a good challenge to your non-religiosity?
I know I have challenges.
The challenge of evil is a real challenge to religiosity.
I agree with that.
But the challenge of good is a real challenge to atheism or secularism.
Do you, whatever it is, whatever your politics are, did you ever challenge them?
Or are you the same as you were when you were 15?
You're born into this party.
It's almost like parties are almost like religion.
I was born into this political party.
I will die in this political party.
Why?
Do we challenge ourselves?
I'm not saying we should reject anything.
I'm saying we need to challenge ourselves.
That is what depth is about.
I challenge my musical taste.
I will try to get deeper.
I challenge my reading taste.
I will read a deeper novel.
I challenge my knowledge of the world.
I will read a newspaper rather than rely just on television.
It's easy not to do, but I said depth comes painfully.
That's the intellectual.
Now, before I go to psychological and emotional depth, let me give you one overview of what I believe is the essential ingredient of becoming a deeper person.
And that is experiencing the other.
The more of the other we experience, I mean experience.
I don't mean necessarily take a week tour, for example, a week-long tour of another country, and you've experienced it.
You, and I've certainly not patronized you, so here is an example of where I feel a compliment is certainly due.
By attending this university, those of you certainly from outside of India, and those of you Indians who attend universities outside of India, you have consciously decided to experience the other.
Not merely visit, take a picture of the Taj Mahal and say, look at what I saw.
But rather experience the other.
Truly experiencing the other is the essential element to becoming a deeper human being.
Most people don't like to.
We like to be with the familiar.
We want to be with the people we grew up with.
Not the exact persons, but the same type.
I grew up with X type.
I want to live with X type.
I want to die with X type.
Don't trouble me.
Let me give you examples of other.
How many people experience, for example, who are in a religion, truly experience people of another religion?
We all meet people of another religion, of course.
You can't help but do that in a modern cosmopolitan city.
But experience.
Does a Christian ever attend a synagogue service?
Does a Jew ever attend a mosque?
Does a Hindu ever attend a mass?
And so on and so forth.
Have any of them ever truly spoken to a Hindu about, as we had the great privilege with a woman yesterday who explained her morning meditation and her morning prayers to Ganesh and what it meant to her to speak to that specific God in her life.
That's to experience.
It doesn't mean you convert.
It doesn't mean you say, ah, now I believe.
It means now I understand.
I understand better the other.
And you are never the same again when you meet another, especially if you are religious and you believe in your religion and then see others who believe in their religion and note that they are fine also and they are believers too and they are decent too and smart too and they have all the things you think you have, but they do it in their religion.
That's a challenge to your depth.
If it's a challenge to your religion, that's fine too.
I have become stronger in my religion seeing other people deeply committed to their religion, not weaker, but it is an effective and good challenge and I'm certainly not the same as I was when I grew up in my, in my home to experience another culture, whatever culture you're from and everyone is from some culture to experience again, not just visit, but to experience people of another culture, understand where they're coming from.
That doesn't mean you have to accept everything about it, but at least to understand it you become different, you become deeper.
Other nationalities and let me give you now two others that you might not have thought of, the other sex.
I am convinced that aim, that a reason that society must encourage marriage, is because there are many reasons.
The most obvious is children should be raised ideally by a mother and father.
But there is a subtle, more subtle and important reason.
That is, we are deeply enriched by experiencing the other and, ladies and gentlemen, there is no one more other than the other sex, that is, the most other you will ever meet.
The women in this group Hindu Jewish Catholic Protestant Muslim, Atheist have more in common with each other than they do with a fellow member of their religion or nationality who is a man, by virtue of their womanhood, as men do with other men.
Now obviously, we have so many parts of us.
We're not only men and we're not only women.
We are also whatever we are and those things we share obviously, with the opposite sex.
Nevertheless, though in important ways, my maleness is truly an other to my wife's femaleness, and marriage forces you if done rightly, it is the most maturing experience it forces you to relate to the other, and we don't always want to, and many couples don't relate precisely for that reason, and I will talk about that in a moment.
But the other other is generation.
It is very tempting.
We all do it.
I do it.
I would say for most of us, our closest friends tend to be about our age.
Give or take 10 years.
And that's very natural and the way it ought to be.
That's fine.
Again, though, I think it is extremely valuable in making us deeper to experience the other generation.
To experience, for example, older people.
Not put them away.
To actually experience them.
To talk to them.
To understand them.
To relate to them.
Not merely, again, to visit like another country.
So too, it is invaluable if you are blessed with the opportunity to do so and choose to do so, because I would never, ever try to talk someone into having a child who did not want one.
However, if you do wish to have one and are blessed with one, there is nothing more maturing, except marriage, than raising a child.
Every parent in this room knows how different he or she is since he or she had a child.
We are not the same people, correct?
We are changed permanently by having children.
First of all, we experience more pain than ever before in life.
It's partially a joke and partially not, but it is true.
There is terrible pain in having a child, even if your child is perfect, which doesn't exist.
But even if your child were, it's painful to be a parent because we're so vulnerable.
There is no vulnerability like the vulnerability of being a parent, and it never ends.
My mother still tells me, wear a jacket when you go out.
There is no change in that regard.
The vulnerability that a parent feels vis-a-vis a child's happiness, health, welfare in general.
And then if you talk to your children, and a lot of parents don't, or better, they talk to them, but not with them.
Let's be precise.
But if you can experience your child, and I especially address this to men, men visit their children often, like tourists visit the Taj Mahal.
Don't experience anything of India, but they visit.
Visiting your child is pointless.
It is as deep as visiting the Taj Mahal.
Experiencing your child is life transforming.
And it takes time to experience your child.
I do not believe in the concept of quality time.
I will spend 20 minutes of true quality time with my child.
Do you know when your child opens up to you?
After an hour or two hours of no quality time.
When I made it a point to talk every night I was home, which is most nights, almost all nights, to talk to my son when he would go to bed.
Most nights he talked to me about football, baseball, and hockey.
And I would have to keep my eyes open because I have no interest in baseball, football, or hockey.
But on every third night, in the middle of talking about hockey, all of a sudden a thought from his heart would be expressed to me.
I was there enough for hockey and baseball to actually hear something else.
And experiencing children is deepening.
That is why the move in the Western world for women to move to the workplace, I accept it, I welcome it, that women can do as good a job as men is so obvious to me that I don't even think twice about it.
I only want women not to think that because there is so much glamour in the outside world, that there is any equivalence of depth.
The truly deepening experience is with the children.
It's not fun all the time.
There's no question.
But it is certainly deeper.
And that's the question we all want.
Will I go to the glamour or will I go to depth?
That is, we are confronted daily with choices of the tree of knowledge, of good and evil, and the tree of life.
And every day is a choice that we make.
Now, psychological and emotional depth.
Emotional depth involves, again, the word experience is critical, and an other experiencing the other.
In this case, I believe women have a natural gift, a natural propensity to teach men the importance of emotional depth.
That does not come to most men naturally.
And when it does, what they do is they emote in the macro arena.
They'll write a symphony.
They'll write a book, but they still won't talk to their wife.
They will cry to the world in a speech.
They will cry through a novel, but they still won't talk that much to their wife.
They will still answer the question, well, what happened today, honey?
With nothing.
The famous male response to a day outside of the home or wherever it was, nothing.
I spoke about this in the happiness talk.
Women know that emotional intimacy, if you will, emotional depth, comes from talking.
The desire of the woman to talk to her man is a desire men need to understand, is a good desire.
It is a healthy desire.
It is a desire that we do not naturally have.
We rather work with the computer than talk to a human.
That's the way we're made.
And thank God men are made that way, or we would have no wheels.
The world would have spoken and been emotionally intimate, but we never would have invented a wheel.
It's good that men like machines.
Machines are helpful.
But machines aren't enough.
And men have to be dragged from their machines to be real, to be emotionally deep.
Men, you will want this once you have it.
In the same way you will want Bach or Beethoven in most instances, not all, once you truly learn him, learn it.
You will want emotional depth once you experience it.
But it is not easy.
It is painful, especially for a man.
Open up.
It is so funny.
If you have a daughter or a son, you know, girls just talk all day.
They tell you everything.
They're non-stop.
Right?
You need timeouts.
Okay, don't talk for two minutes.
Not boys.
That is not the issue with boys.
This completes the first part of this program.
please turn over for a continuation of the my boy god when my older boy when he was seven we were in the car together in los angeles And say, David, I want you to get in touch with your feelings.
I mean, I'm laughing at myself when I say this, but I have to tell it to you.
I want you to dig really, really deep and tell me what you're really feeling.
So he goes, so he closes his eyes.
He goes, I'm really, really feeling that I want an orange Julius.
That's an American orange drink.
That was what he really dug down and in his deepest feelings came out with.
I mean, that's like grown men.
What are we really, really thinking?
That there's a new Pentium computer that I really want.
What am I really, really thinking about the elections?
That's the way men are.
Women, women, that is your great gift.
We have gifts too.
I don't think one sex is better than another.
But if you want depth, emotional depth is the woman's inherent strength.
Now, life cannot be led on an entire level just obviously in talk and emotional relation.
There are other things, but this is one of the three depths that I think we should pursue.
And talking and listening is what it is.
That's why it is a typical wife's comment.
You never listen, right?
Because women know that listening is half of communicating.
Number three is psychological depth.
This is new.
This is a 20th century phenomenon, really.
And that is, just as I need to know the other sex, know the other culture, know the other religion, know the other in all those areas, I need to know me.
And that is very painful.
You know when you know that therapy is working at your psychologist or psychiatrist, the day you double over in pain.
That's when you finally, if your psychologist or psychiatrist makes you feel good every session, you have wasted your money.
That is my rule of thumb.
You must feel pain to know what is going on inside of you.
And that is also difficult, and there are cultural biases against it.
What?
I'm not crazy.
I should go to a psychiatrist.
No, the crazy are not helped by psychiatrists.
It's only the relatively crazy, all of us in this room, that can be helped by the psychiatrists.
The truly crazy need to be hospitalized, and really, I don't know if anything can be done.
But the rest of us, to be human, is to have pain.
It is not possible.
And if you're not in touch with it, it's actually worse.
Knowing the other and knowing the self.
Those are three elements, the intellectual, psychological, and emotional, for death.
Finally, I have some guide questions for you in terms of depth.
What do you do with your time?
It's a very interesting question we all need to posit.
And I'll give you a very simple example.
A Swiss attorney, I don't remember the name of the book or the attorney, a successful Swiss attorney was told that he had a year to live.
His physician told him, I'm sorry you have an inoperable cancer.
You have about one year to live.
Turned out to be correct.
He died in a year.
And he decided to keep a diary of his last year of life, or at least write his thoughts.
And one of the things that I found dramatic was the first thing he did was stop watching television.
Now, I'm not, this is not a talk that you all stop watching television, though there could be worse things in your life than if you stop watching television.
But rather it is to live as if, and I mentioned this in my happiness talk, live as if you have a terminal disease.
You would have a very different priority of behavior if you knew you would die in a year.
But the truth is, you may die in a year.
And you don't know in any event what year you will die.
So shouldn't we always live as if we have very limited time left?
Wouldn't that make our use of time much deeper?
And wouldn't one of the things you did pay more attention to your spouse and children?
I suspect if you had one year to live, you wouldn't say, oh, I better pay more attention to my business.
And I certainly think business success is wonderful.
But I'll bet if you had a year to live, business, improving business would not be your first priority.
But improving relations with those you love would be up there.
And perhaps then, and perhaps getting in touch with great works of literature and art.
Yes, all of which is part of depth.
My final thought on depth is we avoid becoming deeper by if, remember, if deeper means experiencing more, and experiencing more is painful, right?
Then clearly we will do things that are not painful in order to avoid getting deeper.
And I will give you very quickly five examples.
How we medicate our pain.
I learned this from the world of drugs.
I happen not to have been in it, but I know of it.
We will do things in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the other and the difficult.
Pursuit of fun, pursuit of alcohol, pursuit of money, pursuit of drugs, pursuit of television.
Whenever I have no problem with some alcohol drinking, no problem with some television, no problem with some, I have a problem with some drugs, but I have no problem with any of the others.
Certainly making a good living is a wonderful thing, and enjoying the physical things of life is a terrific thing.
It depends until what point.
And I think that we use these things to stop living our life more fully.
Now on to the issue of good.
Becoming a good person has the same problem with becoming a more deep person.
It's generally not on people's list of priorities.
Here is a simple test for you if you have children.
I have done this on American radio and it has been fascinating to get people's reactions.
Please ask your child or children the following question.
What do you think I most want you to be?
And then there are four choices.
Happy, successful, smart, good.
By asking them what they think you most want them to be, you'll get an honest answer.
I mean, because they want to give you the answer you want to hear.
And it will be very, that's the way you know they'll give you the honest answer.
I have had parents call me up shocked that their children did not answer good, that the others were answered first or came in third, or often second.
And it's not shocking.
How much time do many parents spend, for example, on their children receiving A's, excellent grades at school, and compare it to how much time we spend with our children that they be kind or good or that they or that they just treat other kids in their class nicely.
How much time do we spend with that?
Do we make sure all the time that they're good as much as we make sure all the time they do their homework?
I suspect the ratio of emphasis on their success is 10 to 1 in the average upper middle class home over their decency, their ethics, their goodness.
Unless you believe goodness comes naturally, all you have to do is love a child and they'll be good, which is not true.
They'll just become well-loved barbarians.
So please don't even think that for a moment.
So, number one problem with becoming a good person is that people don't make it their priority.
Smart, successful, happy, all of these other things, and I'm all for it.
I'm all for smart, I'm all for successful, all for happy.
But good is almost never up there, even tied with the others.
Problem number two: this is my favorite problem, as it were, that people have, because it's funny almost.
Did you realize that almost everyone in the world thinks that he is a good person?
This was a revelation to me.
I am convinced, ladies and gentlemen, that the heads of the mafia, the heads of police states, that the heads of the Gestapo in World War II, that wherever you know of true heads of drug, what is it, drug cartels, all walk around thinking that they are good people as much as any one of you in this room does.
When I, one of my first radio talk shows, I started with, call me up and tell me if you think you're basically a good person or not.
Every single person for two hours said on base, Dennis, you know what, Dennis?
I'm a good person.
I'm a good person.
So I figured either all my listeners are good people, or something else is at work here.
Now, after years, I know it.
I have studied some of the testimonies of Nazi war criminals.
All thought they were doing the right thing.
They're good people.
They love their kids.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, problem number two, and I'll come to the solution in a moment, is everybody thinks he's a good person.
So why do you have to try to be what you already are?
It's a waste of time, right?
And number three, and this is why number two exists: people monitor their feelings and intentions, not their behavior.
The reason that we believe that we are good is because we do not assess our behavior, we assess our intentions.
And nobody wakes up saying, Today is my day to be evil.
No one, no one, not even truly evil people.
Let me give you a non-moral example about the power of not seeing our behavior.
When video cameras first came out, I bought one.
It was heavy, it was in two big pieces: the camera and the video recorder.
And I hauled them to Florida to visit my parents one year, many years ago.
And I decided to set it up on a tripod to have a meal with my parents and my brother's family on videotape.
Remember, with old cameras, you get two minutes, a lot of lights, nobody was natural.
But with video camera, you don't need lights.
There's no sound, there's no noise, and it goes for two hours.
So I put it on a tripod, made sure that I was not in the picture, and that my family was, and I videoed a family meal on this visit.
Well, we sat down to watch it on the television set, and as fate would have it, the meal consisted in part of chicken.
Now let me explain to you, I left my parents' home when I was 21, but for the first 21 years that I remember, and on all subsequent visits, my mother would tell my father, please don't lick your fingers when you eat chicken.
And for their entire marriage, it was ineffective.
Well, you obviously know what the end of the story is.
The meal happened to have been chicken.
And my father looks at himself going like this and puts his head down in shame.
I can't believe how disgusting I look.
This experience, and he has never done it since.
All of my mother's talking, don't lick your fingers at the table, was to no avail.
One moment of seeing himself changed his life forever.
This was for me an epiphany.
I realized if everybody could be videoed for only one day, most people would behave so much better for the rest of their lives.
Because we don't see how we act.
We only know how we feel.
And nobody wants to hurt people.
People don't wake up, as I said, I want to hurt as many people today as I can.
It doesn't happen.
I wish we had moral videos.
If somebody would start a company, if any of you are entrepreneurial and want a side investment, start Moral Video Incorporated.
We will trail you for one day of your life inconspicuously and then show you, we won't look at it.
We won't embarrass you.
We will give you the video.
And if you have the courage to look at it, look at it.
My vision of heaven and hell is the good get to watch their video and the bad get to watch their video.
Some guidelines on becoming a more good human being.
First, the greatest battle is with ourself.
It is not in general with society.
In North Korea, and I mentioned this in the other talk, in a totalitarian state, in an oppressive world, the great battle is with society.
For being a good person, the great battle is with ourselves.
This teaching is universal in religion.
Every great religion teaches the greatest struggle is with yourself.
My Muslim friends tell me that many Muslims even misunderstand jihad.
The jihad that is really meant is with oneself, not holy war on others.
Holy war, as it were, on me, on my appetites, on myself, etc.
It is true for all religions.
Number two, great quick assessment of a person's decency.
And that's a strong word to use.
How do you, how do I, how does a person treat people of a lower social standing?
That to me is one of the great tests of character.
How do we treat people from whom we do not need anything?
I will treat my boss very well.
I want something, money.
I will treat a woman that I want to marry me or just in some cultures to sleep with because I want her body.
I will treat him well.
I want his money.
I will treat so-and-so well because I want such and such.
How do we treat the waiter or waitress in the restaurant, the janitor in our office building, the person who collects our rubbish, the person who cleans our room?
That, to me, is a great, simple thing for all of us to ask ourselves.
And how big is the difference in our thank yous, in our smiles, in our respect between the rubbish cleaner and our boss?
How big is that difference?
Number three, and this is particularly true for men who are work, or certainly women who work all day.
Can I tell my children with pride what I did that day for a living I had an I had a national American television show last year, and I thought at that time not many people in television can go home, at least in American television, and say to their children, I made the world a drop better today thanks to my television show.
Number four, do I have a code of behavior to which I feel accountable?
Or can I rationalize all of my behavior?
Most people do not have a code to which they feel accountable.
They feel that they'll go day to day and choose what to do on any given day.
I'll give you two simple examples.
The New York Times years ago had an article noting one out of every three Americans takes something from his or her hotel room.
I don't mean free shampoo.
You're allowed to take, please feel free to take the little shampoo, the little body gel.
You'll never use it, but please feel free to take it.
I have been to bathrooms where there is no more room in the medicine chest.
Free samples, people who make, God bless them, very serious sums of money each year will die for a little shampoo bottle.
This is really, it's a psychological phenomenon.
I don't fully understand it.
I mean, if you use it, I totally understand, but it becomes antiquities.
At any rate, what this article was talking about was not free shampoo or free body gel.
It was talking about ashtrays, towels, washcloths, television sets.
No, no, no, I'm joking about the television set.
Now, these people, if you would have seen them and they took a towel with them, or you would say to them, sir, is it wrong to steal?
Of course it is wrong to steal.
Sir, what does steal mean?
Steel means take something that belongs to somebody else.
Sir, are you stealing that towel?
No.
Now, how could the person say no?
They are taking something that belongs to somebody else.
It is as obviously stealing as anything can be.
But you know what people say?
The hotel overcharged.
Number two, they expect you to take it.
I have been told by people, I'm doing the hotel a service.
It's free advertising for the hotel.
Right?
It says holiday inn.
I have it in my bathroom.
I'm advertising for them.
Presumably, they should charge the hotel for taking their towel.
The ability of people to rationalize what is absolutely wrong is infinite.
And I'll give you one other example which is in the business world or affects the business world.
The ease with which people will copy software, computer software.
That is absolute theft.
Simple stealing.
Oh, here, take my copy of Word.
Here, take my copy of this.
Take my copy of that.
Well, why?
Why is that not stealing?
It's a very simple way to prove it's stealing.
If everybody did it, there would be no software.
One person would have bought it, and the rest of the world would have had copies.
And yet you tell people this, and it bothers them.
What do you mean I'm stealing?
All I'm doing is doing copy star dot star if you use DOS.
But it's stealing.
Somebody worked very hard to make that disc.
A lot of people worked hard to put the work into making it.
You're stealing their knowledge and stealing their income as if you had gone, give me your money on a street corner with a gun.
And that's what I mean, by the way, when I said this nonsense of poverty causes crime.
Poverty causes violent crime, but affluence causes non-violent crime.
The morality is the same, it's just it's a difference of how you do it.
The rich steal by copying software, the poor steal by holding you up.
It's still theft.
Finally, or penultimately, I think people should ask themselves this question.
What price does my character pay?
Does my life pay for my doing or my pursuit of money, fame, power, sex, alcohol, whatever it is?
What price do I pay?
What price does my spouse pay?
What price do my children pay?
What price does my character pay?
One of my rules of life, it's not certainly not my rule, anybody knows this, but there is a price for everything, right?
If you came to Bombay to this, then you didn't do something else.
You didn't make more money with your company, you didn't stay with your children, right?
We all paid a price.
I absolutely think it was a price worth paying.
This was one of the great weeks of my life.
But obviously, there was a price.
I knew the price, and we pay the price.
Nothing comes free.
Nothing.
We now know even the air doesn't come free.
Nothing comes free.
What price does my pursuit of my livelihood, what price is it exacting?
What price in my profession, what price does the pursuit of good ratings exact?
I think every day on the radio, am I saying the following because I believe it, or am I saying it because I know I will get better ratings if I say it?
I hope that I make the right choice each time, but I know how often my mind is aware of how easy it would be to do the wrong thing to get higher ratings, or in another case, to get more liked or to get more power or more money.
My final thought, two thoughts.
This is the final, final.
The other final was final on depth.
This is final on good.
I have a lot of finals.
Two things to keep in mind with regard to being a more good person.
One is what I call my grand unified theory of happiness and goodness.
I believe that good people are happier than bad people.
I believe that.
It's not a matter of faith.
I believe it empirically for reasons that you feel free to ask me.
But I will tell you the single greatest reason, and that is this.
And when I realized this, a lot of life became clearer to me.
The most essential component of goodness is also the most essential component of happiness.
And if you came to my talk on happiness, you recall the single most essential component is gratitude.
And lo and behold, I found that the single most prevalent characteristic of the good people that I have met is that they have gratitude.
And the single most universal characteristic of the people that I have met who are mean, who are cruel, who are amoral, is ingratitude.
If gratitude is the most happy, is the most essential component of happiness and of goodness, my God, is gratitude important.
And that is the link between happiness and goodness to link my two talks.
Be grateful, you will be kinder.
Be grateful, you will be happier.
And the second of the final thoughts, think about your funeral.
It's a funny way to think about the subject, but I believe in it deeply.
Think about anybody's funeral.
Yesterday, I had an interesting talk with a YPOer and a dear Indian who was with us.
And we were talking about the issue of rich people and becoming rich.
And the Indian chap was saying how it's sad, he said, but the fact is that the rich are far more respected.
Rich people just are far more respected.
That people don't look to how good you are.
People look to how wealthy you are to get respect.
And then I asked this question.
Is that true the day they die?
From the day they die onward, is that the case?
Forget the obvious rejoinder.
It's not essentially true.
I think Mother Teresa has more respect on this planet than any rich person, to be perfectly honest.
So even on that level, I'm not certain it's true.
People who are known for being good do in fact get a great deal of respect.
And a lot of rich people don't get respect at all.
They are feared.
Fear is not respect.
So let's not confuse that.
But I just want you to think of this.
Have you ever gone to a funeral and where the officiating clergyman said as follows, we are here to bury so-and-so?
He was a very wealthy man.
He did so well in stocks and bonds.
The man was just, he was remarkable.
He could look at the NASDAQ and in a moment know what to sell.
Did you ever hear that?
No!
Who cares?
Who cares?
Death makes life clearer.
We all immediately realize nobody says that.
What they care about is, do you know, his friends loved him if he had any.
His children loved him, which is not always the case, as you know.
That's very different.
And that puts the lie to the belief.
Sure, you get more fear in this life from people if you walk around as an extremely powerful monetary presence.
Respect?
Baloney.
And what if one day that rich person became a poor person?
He would have no contempt.
It is not he who is respected.
It is the amount of money that he has that is respected.
That is a very big difference.
If you want respect, you, not your money, you get respect for what you do, not for what you own.
And the sooner we all learn that, the better life treats us.
And as I said, I believe in the Garden of Eden parable.
I believe every day we have a choice of which tree, the beautiful, beautiful fruit of the wrong tree or the nourishing fruit that isn't quite as appealing from the tree of life.
Thank you very much. This completes the program.
Please advance to the end of the tape in preparation for future listening.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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