The Pursuit of Happiness - JEFFREY ROSEN - President & CEO of the National Constitution Center

"There's no more empowering act for me than simply turning the devices off. The simple rule that I'm not allowed to browse in the morning until I've done my reading has opened up worlds. So much of tech and the net are designed to capture our attentions, to turn us into consumers rather than citizens, to fan our base passions and emotions, and to send us down rabbit holes. That the best thing we can do is to turn it off.

'The pictures in our minds,' I guess that was Walter Lippmann, are confirmed by the enlightenment empiricists like John Locke, who insists that our reality is shaped by our external sensations and what we put into our minds. And then, of course, we are what we think. Life shaped by the mind, as The Dhammapada states. And then, the great injunction that my dad used to quote from Paracelsus, 'As we imagine ourselves to be, so shall we be.' “

Jeffrey Rosen is President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He is the author of seven previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law. His essays and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; on NPR; in The New Republic, where he was the legal affairs editor; and in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer. His latest book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.

https://constitutioncenter.org/about/board-of-trustees/jeffrey-rosen
www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Pursuit-of-Happiness/Jeffrey-Rosen/9781668002476
https://constitutioncenter.org/news-debate/podcasts

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