Love your enemies : how decent people can save America from our culture of contempt /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

To get ahead today, you have to be a jerk, right?

Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an "outrage industrial complex" that prospers by setting American against American, creating a "culture of contempt"--the habit of seeing people who disagree with us not as merely incorrect, but as worthless and defective. Maybe, like more than nine out of ten Americans, you dislike it. But hey, either you play along, or you'll be left behind, right?

Wrong.

In Love Your Enemies, social scientist and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength Arthur C. Brooks shows that abuse and outrage are not the right formula for lasting success. Brooks blends cutting-edge behavioral research, ancient wisdom, and a decade of experience leading one of America's top policy think tanks in a work that offers a better way to lead based on bridging divides and mending relationships.

Brooks' prescriptions are unconventional. To bring America together, we shouldn't try to agree more. There is no need for mushy moderation, because disagreement is the secret to excellence. Civility and tolerance shouldn't be our goals, because they are hopelessly low standards. And our feelings toward our foes are irrelevant; what matters is how we choose to act.

Love Your Enemies offers a clear strategy for victory for a new generation of leaders. It is a rallying cry for people hoping for a new era of American progress. Most of all, it is a roadmap to arrive at the happiness that comes when we choose to love one another, despite our differences.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction: Are You Sick of Fighting Yet? (p. 1)
• 1 The Culture of Contempt (p. 19)
• 2 Can You Afford to Be Nice? (p. 45)
• 3 Love Lessons for Leaders (p. 65)
• 4 How Can I Love My Enemies If They Are Immoral? (p. 87)
• 5 The Power and Peril of Identity (p. 109)
• 6 Tell Me a Story (p. 129)
• 7 Is Competition Our Problem? (p. 153)
• 8 Please Disagree with Me (p. 175)
• Conclusion: Five Rules to Subvert the Culture of Contempt (p. 201)
• Acknowledgments (p. 215)
• Notes (p. 219)
• Index (p. 235)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

An economic conservative proposes that those at opposite poles of the political spectrum should learn to love each other.American Enterprise Institute president Brooks (The Conservative Heart, 2015, etc.) welcomes the opportunity to share his views with those who might not agree with him. After a recent talk on a particularly progressive campus, one student told him, "I came ready to fight, but I really connected with that speech." Many readers will have the same reactionor at least the author hopes they will since he largely avoids grinding an ideological ax. "What is the cure for our culture of contempt? As I have argued throughout, it's not civility and tolerance, which are garbage standards. It is love for each other and our country." So how do we get there? Brooks argues that we must build bridges rather than walls, replace contempt with empathy, focus on the many values where we agree rather than on the relatively few where we disagree, and embrace each other's common humanity. "Your opportunity when treated with contempt is to change at least one heartyours," he writes. "You may not be able to control the actions of others, but you can absolutely control your own reaction. You can break the cycle of contempt." Because Brooks feels that the country at large has become addicted to contempt, much of the material parallels 12-step jargon; at the end, he provides "Five Rules to Subvert the Culture of Contempt." He draws from neuroscience and psychology to support his hypotheses and rarely indulges in the sort of finger-pointing that proceeds from who-started-it accusations. "In the long run," writes Brooks, "people are instinctively attracted to happy warriors who fight for others." Since the last to embrace the "happy warrior" label was Hubert Humphrey, it will be fascinating to see whether a book like this has any influence.Hardly groundbreaking but a straightforward and practical guide back toward human decency. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.