Jeremy Sherman is an out-of-the-box thinker who has made it his life’s work to contemplate and write about humanity’s most challenging dilemmas. He has spent decades of study on the human condition, and is an expert on the many ways we employ language to advantage and also to make our lives more difficult and painful. Jeremy has invented over 2000 novel terms for those times when current terminology just doesn’t suffice. He has also published over 1000 articles on Psychology Today and written two books.  His insight and irreverence really shine through in his newest book, titled “What’s Up With Assholes? How to Spot and Stop Them Without Becoming One”, which is due out this year. 

Using Jeremy’s writing and quotes as jumping-off points, our conversation runs the gamut from whether humans possess innate wisdom, to working with fear skillfully. We also discuss the two prime directives of every organism, the need to protect against things that degenerate it (us), and the need to repair what does degenerate.  

 This underlying principle applies to language and concepts as well, which leaves us humans with a confirmation bias, favoring those things that reinforce what we like to hear and filtering out concepts/language that we think threaten us. While some of us treat this as a problem to manage, others take it as a license to simply avoid things that bring up doubt. On that topic, Jeremy discerns the difference between healthy doubt and useless doubt.

 Of language, Jeremy says “We worry emotionally, the way other animals do, but we get these feedback loops going where we rev out because we can remember past horrors, and we can anticipate future horrors, we can imagine all sorts of unreal horrors.“   He adds, “That’s one thing that language does, it overwhelms us and makes us anxious.  The other thing it does is affords us easy ways to deflect that which makes us anxious.  So we’ve got climate change, but then we’ve got all these people who are worried about Dr. Seuss books being canceled, that would be an example of threat displacement.”

 There’s a lot more in this episode that we cover, of course, sprinkled throughout with Jeremy’s wry sense of self-deprecating humor.  

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