I asked another than the Dalai Lama, and I said, what do I do when I feel contempt for another person?

He said, show warm-heartedness. And I thought, you got anything else?

Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special. We are eager to welcome to the program, Arthur Brooks. He's the author of a new book, Love Your Enemies. He's also the head of the American Enterprise Institute. We'll get to his new book and all sorts of life-changing topics in just a second. But first, getting life insurance can feel like assembling the world's worst jigsaw puzzle. It's confusing. It takes forever.

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policygenius.com. In two minutes, you can compare quotes, find the right policy, save up to 40% doing it. I know. You don't want to think about life insurance. You don't want to think about death. But the fact is, if you're a responsible person, you need to make sure that your family is taking care of in case, God forbid, something should happen to you. Go get a life insurance policy right now. Go check out Policy Genius, the easy way to compare and buy life insurance. Arthur, thanks so much for stopping by. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Ben. I'm just so happy to be here. I've got to tell you, I have teenage kids. I have two sons, one's a junior at Princeton, and one is a farmer in Idaho, and they

both think you're cooler than I am. Well, that's very flattering, and I really appreciate it. Well, you know, your book is called Love Your Enemies, and it says how decent people can save America from the culture of contempt. And I have to get the elephant in the room out of the way immediately, which is that people are going to be asking, how is it that Ben Shapiro of Ben Shapiro

destroys blank fame

could possibly be interviewing you

and taking seriously the question of

loving your enemies, people who disagree with you. And so I want to go through sort of what

you mean by loving your enemies. And also, what is the best way to do that in a really fraught culture?

So let's start with the basics. How did you come up with this idea that the biggest problem we have in the culture is us not loving our enemies? Well, as I'm looking around, and look, we've been going through the same trials and the same tribulations, those of us who are on the political right, we've seen a lot of bad things happen. We've seen just the way that the whole discourse has been spoiled, and not just by people on the other side, by people on our own side as well. I thought to myself, what's the big problem? And people say, well, we need more civility or we need more tolerance. That's garbage. We don't need more civility. I mean, if I said, hey, Ben, my wife Esther and I were civil to each other. You'd be like, oh, man, dude, you need some hey, Ben, you know, my wife Esther and I were civil to each other.

You'd be like, oh, man, dude, you need some counseling. Or, you know, my employees at the American Enterprise Institute, they tolerate me and say, bad scene, man. These are not high enough standards, basically. And I started thinking to myself, what do we need? Well, when you go back to the sacred texts, but the pillars of philosophy in the West, what you find is that there's this

subversive teaching, which is basically to love your enemies.

This comes from the gospel of St. Matthew, the fifth chapter, the 44th verse, where Jesus tells us followers to love their enemies.

Why? Well, Martin Luther King actually sorted it out for the modern air. When you love your enemies, you find out they weren't your enemies after all. You know, people will say that, you know, when they look at the internet, they say, you know, Ben Shapiro destroys. One of the things I happen to know is you're not using that language. And when I watch you up on stage, you're tough. You're going hammer and tongs after the people who disagree with you. But by and large, I think that you're engaging with ideas and not treating the people with contempt. And I admire that. Could you be better? Could I be better? For sure. But in point of fact, I think we're going in the same direction. I think we're trying to make progress in the same way.

So let's talk about what it means for someone to be your enemy.

So you make the point in the book that there are people who obviously are enemies, right? I mean, they're obviously Islam-Fascists. They're members of the Taliban. Are those people that we should love? I mean, how do we deal with, are there gradations, in other words, to the enemies that we ought to love?

Are there the domestic political enemies, meaning, you know, President Trump's enemy of the people press and Democrats versus Republicans? Or are there's like a legitimate group of people that it's okay not to love? There are gradations, of course. And the main point that I'm making here, when I'm talking about how decent people can save America from the culture of contempt. I'm largely talking for an American audience,

where we have started to suffer from something

that political scientists call motive attribution asymmetry.

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