The Drum Major Instinct | Pain, Pills and Emotion.
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2018
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if greatness isn't about what you accomplish, but how you serve? Some 50 years ago, in February 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon entitled The Drum Major Instinct. It invites people to redefine greatness as service, while at the same time recognizing the very human instinct for attention and praise and inviting it to harness it for something bigger. That's what we're talking about in today's riff.
And, in our Good Life Science Update, we dive into a fascinating analysis of studies that reveal something stunning about over-the-counter pain medicine like ibuprofen and acetaminophen. Turns out, they don't just dull physical pain, they also may well dull emotions and thinking, too. And, as always, here's a direct citation - [Ratner et al. Can Over-the-Counter Pain Medications Influence Our Thoughts and Emotions? Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2018].
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, so here's my question. Is ego a good thing? A bad thing or just a thing? |
| 0:09.9 | Well, this came up in a bit of a nod way, actually, during a super bowl commercial this year |
| 0:16.7 | that turned into a bit of a controversial commercial. It was something that was drawing |
| 0:23.6 | a passage from a famous sermon from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about something called |
| 0:30.6 | the Drum Major instinct. And I got curious, not just about the small kerfuffle, but the |
| 0:37.5 | actual sermon. And I went back and read it. And there's some really powerful thoughts. |
| 0:42.2 | And I wanted to actually share a bit of that and a bit of my experience with this whole |
| 0:48.5 | idea of the role of ego in doing good, doing bad, motivating us, shutting us down. And how |
| 0:55.2 | it relates to this idea of the Drum Major instinct. Along with that, in our Good Life Science |
| 1:01.0 | Update today, really fascinating new research on over-the-counter pain medication, like the things |
| 1:10.0 | that you can buy in a local pharmacy. And how it affects how it potentially dulls not just the |
| 1:17.3 | pain that we're taking it for, but it may also dull our thinking and our emotions, our feelings |
| 1:25.0 | at the same time. More on all of this in just a moment, I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. |
| 1:37.8 | And we're back with thoughts on this thing called ego and the need for praise and the |
| 1:45.6 | quote Drum Major instinct. So almost 50 years ago, February 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. |
| 1:54.9 | gave a sermon titled The Drum Major Instinct. And that was based partly on a homily that was given |
| 2:03.8 | about 15, 16 years earlier, created by J. Wallace Hamilton. And in this, King identified sort of an |
| 2:12.7 | alternative definition for greatness, which he built around service, and offered his idea of how |
| 2:23.9 | this instinct can mess with our definition and pursuit of greatness in the world. Now, what do |
| 2:30.7 | he mean by the Drum Major instinct? Well, when you read the sermon, it becomes pretty crystal clear, |
| 2:36.2 | pretty quickly that what we're talking about here is the sort of innate human impulse to seek praise, |
| 2:44.7 | to seek recognition, to a certain extent, to seek fame. And he acknowledged that this actually |
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