How to Stay Human When Everything Wants You to Stampede | Passed By | Chad Belew

What is he talking about?

How is this even-- like, how does this sound logical to you?

How were people agreeing with, like--

so I grabbed the camera, set it up,

and I recorded a response.

And it was good.

It wasn't crazy.

I felt like it was pretty articulate.

But it was definitely, like, sharp.

And you could hear the frustration of my voice.

You could probably see it in my eyes.

But before I posted it, I did something

that I don't always do.

I've gotten better at it.

But I was like, let me think about this.

And then I mentioned it to some people close to me,

like, Mottie.

And I was telling her why it was mad and what happened.

And like, I knew, like, she's going to get it.

And she did get it.

But her reaction wasn't the same as mine.

It was like-- she wasn't like, yeah, you need to post that.

Or like, you nailed it.

She wasn't super supportive, even though it was Valentine's

week.

[INAUDIBLE]

Her reaction was, like, quieter.

And when I saw that, I realized, like, something uncomfortable,

I might be right.

But my approach wasn't going to actually accomplish

what I'd hoped it would.

I think it would have expressed something.

It might have felt good.

It might have felt right.

I probably would have made a really good point.

There definitely would have been, like, confirmation bias.

Like, people that believe and think like me

would have given me the validation that I need.

They would have liked it.

They would have shared it.

They would have commented.

But would it have changed anything?

Would it have helped anyone see differently

was the question that I've sat back and asked.

Or would it have just added heat to an already burning room?

[LAUGHTER]

So I didn't post it.

It's sitting on my desktop.

Do you guys want to see it?

No, I'm just kidding.

I'm kidding.

No.

[LAUGHTER]

I'm just kidding.

I'm joking.

I didn't post it.

I sat with it.

I was like, you know what?

This isn't going to help anything.

No, it's still on my desktop.

It's still there.

[LAUGHTER]

If I ever run into this congressman,

I'll just have a conversation face-to-face.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is

to just kind of get small, not physically,

but internally your world narrows.

You stop noticing most things around you.

You stop noticing nuance.

You stop noticing the person.

You only see the position or the thing

that they're saying, your breathing changes.

Everything feels urgent.

Everything feels personal.

And from that narrowed place, you react.

You send the text.

You fire off the comment.

You assume the motive.

You label the person.

And later, sometimes just a couple of minutes later,

sometimes it's hours or days later,

you realize, like, you weren't really seeing clearly

when you posted that, or you weren't

maybe seeing exactly what you were seeing intensely,

but not clearly, not with that clarity.

So that thought kind of set up this week for me.

Because we're living in a time, I think, that makes it feel.

Very easy.

It makes me very easy to narrow our focus.

Every headline, every clip, every algorithm fed outrage.

And it's not because nothing's happening to my computer.

I think Jane's in my office.

The mouse is moving on my computer right now.

Stop it.

They're taking over, guys.

What in the-- wait.

Stop.

Somebody doing this?

Let me turn off my Bluetooth.

You're right here?

Somebody's moving it.

There we go.

Let's turn my Bluetooth off.

Maybe that'll help.

Where was I had?

I don't have a nice show.

Sam said, you were showing us the video.

Look, it's one of the-- this is our time right now.

And I don't think most of us are trying

to become hardened.

I think most of us actually care deeply.

But I think caring deeply without space, without breath,

without kind of widening the-- not being so narrow in our focus--

can turn into something else.

The question that's been sitting with me in this,

that I think sometimes we don't ask as much in the church

because we remove our humanity a lot of times

when we start talking about spirituality.

The question is, how do we stay human when everything

around you is trying to shrink you?

So we're going to talk about it today.

I have a lot of notes.

We're going to go just get ready.

I'm going to try and--

I might go fast today.

Don't let me squirrel.

I should have taken like double my ADHD

back there or something.

[LAUGHTER]

There's a psychologist, Jonathan Heit,

you guys-- if you've been here for a little bit,

you've probably heard about him.

He wrote a book called The Righteous Mind.

Yeah, it's a good one.

The Righteous Mind, it's why good people

are divided on religion and politics.

Super solid book-- I love his stuff.

But one thing he says is the emotional tale wags

the rational dog.

In other words, we like to think we reason our way

to our position or our logic.

But most of the time, we feel our way there first.

And then we build arguments afterward.

He uses another metaphor throughout the book,

an analogy that he talks about in the book where he--

it's really helpful.

He says, your mind is in two parts.

It's like a writer sitting on top of an elephant.

So this is the picture I want you to get.

Your mind is two parts.

There's a writer, and then there's an elephant.

The elephant is the emotional, impulsive part of your brain.

And then the writer is the logical, rational part

of your brain.

The elephant's much bigger.

It's much stronger.

It reacts much more quickly.

The impulsive, emotional part of your brain.

Something happens, and impulse happens.

You hear something, you see something, impulse happens.

And then while you're running on this elephant,

the writer is like, all right, let me explain

why this is happening.

Let me give you a good reason.

But it's explaining why you're running that direction.

Does this make sense?

You'll emotionally react before you actually

use reason or logic to do something.

If the elephant decides to move, the writer

is mostly just holding on and explaining where they're going.

And the uncomfortable part is when

it comes to moral issues, which Jonathan Hite

is a moral psychologist, a social psychologist,

so he talks a lot about morals.

When it comes to moral issues, justice, politics, religion,

harm, fairness, the elephant almost always moves first.

You see this in all of these things,

like that tightening you feel?

When I saw this video, the tightening

I felt, that's not my logic.

That's my elephant.

My emotions are engaged, and I'm reacting.

And the argument that I start forming in my head, then,

is the writer trying to catch up with my emotions.

And explaining, I'm not trying to slow the elephant down,

just trying to explain why we're running.

You guys tracking?

No, maybe?

This is why two people can see the same video,

hear the same words, see the same event,

and walk away absolutely convinced of opposite conclusions.

It's not always about intelligence.

It's often about just instinct.

And Hite's research shows that we all

have different moral taste buds.

Some people are wired strongly toward care and protection.

Some are wired strongly toward loyalty.

Some toward authority, some toward fairness, some toward liberty,

freedom.

He has these six moral taste buds.

So when something happens, your elephant

reacts based on what feels morally threatened to you.

If loyalty feels threatened, you react one way.

If harm feels threatened, you react another way.

If authority feels threatened another way.

And the writer shows up later to say,

here's why this makes perfect sense.

Here's why my reaction, my statement, the thing

that I did, this is why it makes perfect sense.

I'm going to explain this to you.

But it's just explaining what has already happened, which

means I think something really important for us,

if you're trying to change someone's mind

and you go straight for their logic,

you're trying to talk to a writer that's

on top of a running horse.

I mean, a running elephant, a horse makes more sense to me.

Who rides elephants?

You're trying to talk to a writer.

The logic make a rational point when

the emotional, impulsive part of this mind

is already running.

The elephant's running.

When the elephants are running, arguments just don't land.

They just bounce because the body is already in motions.

Things are already happening.

So what I realized when I watched my video back

is I wasn't trying to persuade.

I was just trying to discharge feelings.

And there's a difference.

Because if the goal is just to make a point loudly,

then mission accomplished.

But if the goal is transformation,

then that's a much taller task that

takes a little bit of slowing down.

I think about if you're in an argument

with someone close to your significant other,

you're just a friend, they say something like it's attacking.

Do we just like-- let me take a second.

What do they really mean by that?

And then reason it logically and then respond?

No, because your elephant's like, heck no, let's go.

Come on, that the elephant is ready to fight.

And then you say it, and you're like,

now I've got to make a reason why that makes sense.

Because when they come back at me, I go, no, no, no.

You were wrong.

Here's why.

Because you didn't think.

Not your fault.

None of us do.

Because the way we're wired, impulse happens.

So you have to be very, very thoughtful and specific

in trying to slow yourself down.

And it won't always happen, because the elephant's

going to take off.

But if you're trying to reason, make a logical point,

we've got to know that we're not just talking to the writer,

to the reason, the logic of someone.

You're talking to a nervous system.

You're talking to their belonging.

You're talking to their identity.

There's so much wrapped up in what we are talking about,

especially when it comes to these massively moral things.

And here's where this kind of gets even more layered, height.

Also talks about how moral conversations

are rarely neutral.

When you challenge someone's moral view,

you're not just disagreeing with an idea.

You're threatening something sacred to them.

And when something sacred feels threatened,

the elephant doesn't slow down.

It accelerates.

So the question becomes, if elephants are running,

what actually slows them down?

Because yelling at an elephant doesn't call them it.

Logic alone doesn't call them it.

Embarrassing it doesn't call them it.

If anything, that just makes it harder like charging.

I think this is where this conversation gets really--

like when we step back, a lot of us are things right now

are heated.

Anybody else?

Is that just my Facebook and Instagram and TikTok

and anything else that exists?

And there's a reason for it.

I won't go into it, but I'll give you this.

Jonathan Heit, this psychologist,

also wrote an article for The Atlantic,

where he talks about how the reason we are here

happened in about 2009.

Because about that time is when Facebook added the Like button,

and when Twitter added the retweet.

The reasoning-- so the Twitter retreat was a big one.

Because you could put something out.

People like it.

They retweet it.

It can go viral.

And now we've got this big group that

believes what I said too.

And in fact, with all of that happening,

we start to get these like segmentation,

is this divide, and you guys--

I mean, one, you guys know that I love the psychology

and how it intersects with theology.

But I'm also back in school for psychology,

so I'm reading a lot right now.

So all of this is just like working for me.

But so you take height, his idea of the writer

and the elephant, and you look at some like long before,

like modern psychology, there were other people that

observed this too.

And what they observed was crowds and systems

make this even bigger.

Like we widen this out.

It's one thing if it's just your elephant.

It's another thing when you're in a herd of elephants.

There's a sociologist from like the late 1800s.

Emil Durkheim.

He studied religion, culture, crowds,

how groups behave when they gather around like a shared symbol

and a shared identity.

And he used this phrase, collective effervescence.

You ever do like this, maybe in school,

like take a big-- there was a big nail or like a big screw.

And then you took wire, and you like wrapped the wire around

to create-- like then you put batteries on it,

and it creates this electricity.

Did you guys do this?

It's science.

I know I get-- so he had this thing

where like people circle around this central symbol,

identity in religion and politics.

And there's this thing that people circle around.

And as they move, it's this collective effervescence.

It's like described as like an energy that

rises when people come together around a shared cause,

a belief, an identity.

Like you felt this, right?

Go to a sports event.

You've got a team.

They've got a team.

We're all rallied around.

People are yelling at each other, maybe.

You got a concert.

Some kind of rally.

You're-- you got a worship night.

Or a protest, like we're all rallied around this thing.

And you feel this kind of like energy.

The emotion multiplies.

The conviction intensifies.

The sense of belonging gets stronger.

And that's not automatically bad.

Because belonging is powerful.

And I think we are all looking for belonging.

Shared identity, it can be beautiful.

But Durkheim also understood something else.

When emotion multiplies in a crowd,

individual reflection often decreases.

It's harder for you to reason and logic

through something when the crowd around you all

agrees with your thoughts, right?

Or you agree with their thoughts.

Don't scroll.

So you don't just have one elephant moving.

You just track them with the elephant?

Is it a weird analogy?

OK, so you don't have this one elephant moving anymore.

You have this herd of elephants all moving in the same direction.

And when herds of elephants run, they don't check maps.

They just kind of follow movement, right?

So now imagine this.

Your elephant reacts to something.

But you're not alone.

You open your phone.

And suddenly, you see hundreds, thousands of elephants reacting

to the same way, and the energy rises.

And now it's just moral reaction.

Like, it's not just moral reaction.

It's identity.

It's tribe.

It's us versus them.

And when belonging then fuses with reaction,

it gets very hard to slow down.

Because now, if you question the movement,

you're not just questioning an opinion.

You are risking your place in the herd.

And belonging is powerful.

We underestimate, I think, how powerful belonging can be.

So Durkheim wasn't seeing crowds as evil.

He was saying, crowds are intense.

An intensity amplifies whatever is already there.

Which means, if elephants are running,

the herd makes it louder.

And when it's loud enough, the rider can't hear itself think.

So now we've got-- height has this psychology idea.

You've got a sociology that comes in with a herd.

And this group think, so it's not just instinct anymore.

It's culture.

So yeah, height, the elephant moves first.

Riders just kind of trying to keep up.

Durkheim, the herd, amplifies that movement.

And then we talked last week about a guy named Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer was a theologian, a pastor.

He watched what happened when someone at the front of a herd

learns how it can keep the herd running.

Bonhoeffer, he lived in Nazi Germany

in the late '30s, early '40s.

And he watched ordinary people, intelligent people,

become swept into something destructive.

And he wrote this line, stupidity

is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.

And he wasn't insulting people in this.

He was diagnosing something.

He was saying that under the influence of power, propaganda,

fear, people could lose independent perception,

independent think.

They weren't thinking freely anymore.

They were reacting collectively, captive to the movement.

So here's the connection.

You've got height and Durkheim if the elephant moves first

and the herd amplifies it.

Then all a leader has to do is keep the elephants moving.

Because if the herd's moving, then the rider

can't hear anything.

Fear works, outrage works, perceived threat works,

constant crisis works.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Because a running herd is very narrowly focused.

When elephants are running, they are not reflecting on things.

They're not evaluating nuance.

They're not calmly reconsidering.

They are surviving.

And if things start to slow down, if people begin to breathe,

that the herd begins to settle, the easiest way

to regain control is to create another perceived threat,

another crisis, another enemy, another emergency.

You've got to get them running again.

Because a running herd is easier to steer than a calm one.

And Bonhoeffer saw this.

He saw how this happened in his people

and in the church in Germany.

And here's the hard part.

He believed that arguing inside the stampede rarely works.

You can shout logic at a running herd, but it will not land.

The noise is too loud.

The fear is too active.

So what did he suggest?

He believed that sometimes the lead elephant

has to be removed.

In his time, that meant political resistance.

It meant refusing compliance.

It meant eventually overthrowing a regime.

Bonhoeffer actually was part of a whole assassination

attempt on Hitler.

Like he went a little calm down.

For us, I think, yes, voting matters.

I think it's our voice.

We get to use that.

I think participation matters.

I think structural change matters.

But Bonhoeffer also understood that something deeper--

there's something deeper here.

If you only remove a lead elephant without changing the herd's

instinct to stampede, then another one will just rise.

Because the deeper issue isn't just leadership,

it's formation.

It's how easily we allow fear to mobilize us.

How quickly we surrender perception to the loudest voice.

So the question becomes, how do you

calm a herd without becoming another panicked voice in it?

How do you interrupt fear without weaponizing fear?

How do you resist without mirroring the frenzy?

Because if we fight panic with panic,

we just create two stampedes.

And history shows us that that rarely ends well.

And I say this because I think that that's--

my natural instinct is to do this.

It's to fight back.

It's to argue.

It's to make points.

Most of you guys know, I'm a trained interrogator.

I'm ready to argue.

I can make some good points, but it doesn't get us anywhere.

It doesn't end well.

So the question then is, what slows elephants down?

You don't scream at them.

You don't shame them.

You don't humiliate them.

You create safety.

You reduce threat.

You introduce a calm presence in wildlife biology.

Elephants calm when the perceived threat decreases,

when a trusted member of the herd begins to slow down,

when the environment feels safe again.

In other words, they kind of co-regulate their nervous

systems.

One calm body can influence another.

And this is where I think we shift from political theory

to something deeper for us, more transformational,

more spiritual, what I believe that we are called to.

Because Jesus walked into a deeply divided time also.

Roman occupation, religious, factionalism, zealots,

Pharisees, power struggles, public spectacles.

And he refused to run with the herd.

He refused to be mobilized by fear.

And he stayed honestly, really, really human.

Which for a lot of us, that doesn't make an eye, he was God.

Jesus was showing us what humans really can be.

So I'm going to look at Jesus.

Because this isn't just psychology, right?

He's a church.

This is formation.

Matthew tells us something in Matthew 4.

It's simple, but it's important.

He says that Jesus was led by the spirit

into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

So when you see Jesus in this early on in his ministry

and in Matthew, he doesn't begin in a crowd.

He begins in silence.

He doesn't begin in applause.

He begins in hunger.

He's on a 40-day fast.

No food.

He's alone.

He goes out into the wilderness.

And in that wilderness state, the pressure comes.

Let me read the whole passage and just let it sit.

Matthew 4, verse 1.

Matthew 4:1

Then Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness

to be tempted by the devil.

After fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry.

The tempter came to him and said, if you are the son of God,

tell these stones to become bread.

And Jesus answered, it is written,

man shall not live on bread alone.

But in every word that comes from the mouth of God,

then the devil took him to the holy city

and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.

If you are the son of God, he said, throw yourself down.

For it is written, he will command his angels concerning you,

and they will lift you up in their hands

so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.

Throw yourself, let the angels catch you,

and just prove who you are.

And Jesus answered him.

It's also written, do not put the Lord your God to the test.

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain

and showed him all the kingdoms of the world

and their splendor, all this I will give you.

If you will bow down and worship me,

Jesus said to him, away from me Satan,

for it is written, worship the Lord your God

and serve him only, then the devil left him,

and angels came and attended to him.

Now, step back from the story for a minute

because we've probably heard this story a lot

from a reduced to personal morality, right?

Don't turn stones into bread, don't jump off buildings,

don't worship Satan.

If you grew up in the '90s, early 2000s,

like worshiping Satan would have meant

like listening to the wrong music.

Don't listen to it backwards.

That's countries that you said.

But look what's actually happening in this moment

with Jesus, every temptation is about power.

If you are the son of God, prove it, demonstrate it,

use it, exploit it, perform it, leverage it.

The first temptation is economic power.

It's, you're hungry, solve it.

Use your ability to self-preserve.

The second is the spectacle power.

Throw yourself down, create a viral moment.

Let heaven catch you, imagine the crowd, right?

And then the third is political power.

All the kingdoms of the world I will give you.

It's not subtle, that's empire.

And here's the thing, none of these offers were imaginary.

Jesus could have done them.

And that's what makes it temptation for him.

Because if power was the point, if dominance was his mission,

if controlling the system was the goal, he would have taken it.

But he doesn't take it, he refuses.

Not because power is inherently evil,

but because power divorced from love always narrows focus.

And Jesus refuses to let his identity be mobilized by ego.

So every temptation begins the same way, if you are the son of God.

In other words, are you secure enough in who you are?

Not to prove it?

Are you grounded enough not to perform?

Are you beloved enough not to weaponize it?

And this is the part that it hits me.

Because when I look at a lot of what passes for spirituality

or leadership in the church, in the U.S.,

there's this obsession with influence and with access

and proximity to power and with building bigger platforms

and how do we take, we need to be in power.

That's what God wants for us to be in power here.

But I can't help but think if power was the strategy

then Jesus would have taken it.

If controlling Rome was the mission he would have aligned with Rome.

If dominating culture was the goal, he would have grabbed the kingdoms.

But instead, he walks back to Galilee.

He touches lepers.

He eats with tax collectors.

He tells stories about seeds and lost coins.

He calms storms.

He refuses to mirror the frenzy.

He doesn't energize the herd.

He tries to slow it all down.

And for me, this is where it connects back

to everything we've been talking about.

Height says instinct moves first.

Durkheim says crowds amplify instinct.

Bonhoeffer says systems exploit instinct.

And Jesus says you don't fight that with more instinct.

You don't calm a stampede by charging harder.

You don't, you can't stop, you gotta root yourself

so deeply in belovedness that you cannot be baited by power.

Because here's what I think the wilderness shows us.

The wilderness is where you learn to sit with hunger

without grabbing control.

That's where you learn to sit with identity

without having to prove it.

It's where you learn to sit with influence without exploiting it.

And if you don't learn that in the wilderness,

you'll reach for power in the crowd.

So if you think about this culturally for a second,

I'm gonna try and get us there.

We're in a moment where power is constantly offered.

Political power, social media power, religious power,

narrative control, and the temptation is subtle.

If you really cared, you dominate.

If you really loved justice, you'd crush your opponents.

If you really believed truth, you'd control the narrative.

But Jesus, his refusal, tells us something profound.

The kingdom is not built by force of volume.

It's built by force of formation.

And I think we've been talking about this a lot.

I think this is where awe comes back in.

Because awe does something power cannot,

awe, this emotion that we see something,

we realize that we're part of something so much bigger,

that we are small in this big thing,

that it doesn't make us small in a bad way.

It makes us more connected to each other.

It does something that power cannot,

all reduces the ego and it widens your perception.

It reconnects you to something larger than yourself.

When you experience awe, whether it's in nature,

or music, like moral beauty, grief, silence,

your nervous system softens.

Your sense of self shrinks in the best way.

You become less obsessed with proving

and more open to seeing.

And a person who's been widened by awe

is harder to mobilize by fear,

harder to manipulate by outrage,

harder to bait into dominance.

So maybe the question isn't, how do we win?

Maybe the question is, how do we stay human?

Because if we stay human, we stay interruptible.

If we stay interruptible, we become,

we don't become captives to the stampede.

We can ask questions, we can listen.

And maybe that's what resisting looks like in this moment.

Which is hard, like maybe you guys don't wanna yell at people.

I do.

(laughs)

Maybe resisting just looks like slowing down,

listening, I think, very sad, like, yes.

I sat with some pastors this last week.

All pastor churches that are majority African American.

And man, to listen to them talk about like social justice

and the need to vote.

And like, it's just something I didn't grow up with

because in the evangelical church is kind of like,

here's who you vote for.

I mean, I didn't tell you that, but if you are a Christian,

but I'm not gonna tell you that,

and then that's kinda it, right?

But I do think like, yes, vote, yes, speak,

yes, advocate against injustice.

But don't surrender your nervous system to panic.

Don't surrender your humanity to outrage.

And don't surrender your formation

of becoming who you're called to be to the herd.

We're living in a moment designed to keep us running,

designed to keep us reactive, keep us tribal,

keep us angry, keep us afraid.

And when we run long enough, we forget what calm feels like.

Jesus steps into wilderness.

He faces the offer of power and he refuses,

not because he's passive, not because he doesn't care,

not because injustice doesn't matter,

but because he refuses to let fear form and shape him.

He refuses to be the kingdom with the tools of the empire.

He refuses to let ego define leadership,

and he shows us what being a healthy, whole human can look like.

Maybe that's the call right now.

Not to withdraw, not to be silent, not to stop caring,

but to refuse to become what we oppose.

Refuse to let outrage become our oxygen.

Refuse to let fear be the thing that forms us.

Because here's what I realized this week,

when I didn't post that video,

nothing changed out there.

But something did change in here.

I wasn't as small, I wasn't as tight,

I wasn't as reactive.

And I think that matters.

Because the kind of person that I become

determines the kind of world that I help create.

And if I speak from a narrowed place,

I contribute to narrowing.

If I live from a widened place, I contribute to widening.

And awe is one of the ways that we widen.

It reminds us that we're small, but not insignificant.

Reminds us the world is bigger than the algorithm.

Reminds us that the person across from us

is more than their position.

It doesn't make us passive, it makes us grounded.

And grounded people can tell the truth

without becoming violent in spirit.

Robert's not here today, he would argue with me.

Grounded people can resist injustice

without surrendering their humanity.

And grounded people can speak clearly without mirroring chaos.

I see a lot of chaos like fueling it.

So here's the invitation this week.

Before you post, before you react, this is to me,

before you react, before you escalate, pause,

breathe and ask yourself,

am I responding from fear?

Or from belovedness, from knowing I'm loved?

Am I trying to dominate?

Or am I trying to widen the conversation?

Am I running with the herd or am I staying human here?

Because I think this is the way of Jesus.

Not grasping, not proving, not performing, not conquering,

but rooted, present, unhurried and clear.

And when we live like that, we become hard to manipulate,

hard to mobilize by outrage, hard to recruit, interfere

and that quietly is resistance.

So arsenal, stay awake, stay grounded, stay interruptable,

and above all, go love well.

Because love is not naive,

it's not weak, it's not silent,

but it's the only thing strong enough to calm a stampede

without becoming one.

So go do that, love well, that's who you're made to be.

(audience applauds)