Trump’s Anti-Semitism Agenda Isn’t About Jews

by | Apr 4, 2025 | The Atlantic

The Trump administration wants you to know that it’s just looking out for Jews. In recent weeks, the White House has cited anti-Semitism as the motivation for many of its controversial moves, whether deporting foreign students who allegedly engaged in pro-Hamas activism or threatening to pull millions of government dollars from Ivy League schools. “SHALOM COLUMBIA,” quipped the White House’s X account, after it canceled federal funding to the university over its “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment.”

But this branding is profoundly misleading. In reality, Donald Trump and his allies have been using “anti-Semitism” as a pretext to advance a radical agenda that has nothing to do with Jews at all—and that most American Jews do not support.

Take the detentions and deportations. A handful of high-profile cases purportedly pertain to the targets’ anti-Semitic conduct. But most of them do not. In just the past month, the administration’s immigration agents have reportedly held a former Canadian actor for 12 days across three prisons; jailed a Harvard Medical School researcher for transporting undeclared scientific samples for her boss, and threatened to send her back to Russia, which she had fled; revoked the visa of the two-time president of Costa Rica, apparently over his criticism of Trump; and deported hundreds of Venezuelans—including a makeup artist seeking asylum and a Maryland father with no criminal record—to a notorious prison in El Salvador, some of them possibly on the basis of misunderstood tattoos .

[Read: Trump’s Salvadoran gulag ]

These stories underscore that the administration’s deportation spree is clearly not about defending Jews, but rather part of a broader anti-foreigner agenda whose goal is to make America into a country for a narrowly defined set of citizens. “America is not just an idea,” Vice President J. D. Vance declared at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation. Now it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” U.S. Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller put it more bluntly at an October rally: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

This nationalist agenda explains why one of the first things Trump did after assuming office was sign executive orders to end birthright citizenship and suspend refugee resettlement , after which he began deporting foreign-born residents on every possible pretext. Fighting anti-Semitism is not the rationale for this overhaul of the American experiment, so much as it is a convenient crowbar to pry open the door for more ambitious aims. The crackdown on foreign students offers a case in point: Last week, Axios reported that “the Trump administration is discussing plans to try to block certain colleges from having any foreign students if it decides too many are ‘pro-Hamas.’”

The push to purge outsiders from the homeland also explains the crude theatrics that have accompanied the administration’s actions. Having masked agents arrest the Turkish graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk on the street in broad daylight, sharing cartoons that celebrate deportations on social media, and filming Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in front of shaved and shirtless prisoners in El Salvador are all stunts that don’t just target specific people, but sow fear among everyone else. Witnessing the recent roundups, many promising young foreign students will not want to risk coming to an American university, knowing that a change in political leadership could mean a sudden change in their status.

The administration is similarly using Jewish concerns to cloak more aggressive aims in its efforts to defund American universities. Presented as an attempt to protect Jews on campus, these threats are actually part of a much wider war against American higher education, which Trump and his allies perceive as a citadel of hostile cultural power.

“I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” then-Senator Vance told the National Conservatism Conference in 2021. Christopher Rufo, one of the most effective and forthright conservative activists against academia, told The New York Times last month that forcing “the university sector as a whole into a significant recession” would be “a very salutary thing,” and that “putting the universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets, into a greater competitive market pressure, would discipline them.”

Rufo has some experience remaking higher education. In 2023, he was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis as a trustee for New College of Florida, where he and his allies shut down the DEI bureaucracy and the gender-studies department and transformed the school, in his words , into a “liberal arts college in the classical tradition.” Now in and out of Washington, Rufo is working to take his “counterrevolution” national. On November 12, 2024, he posted on X, “Abolish the Department of Education.” On March 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at dismantling it.

Whatever the merits of this sweeping agenda, most American Jews did not vote for it. During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to expel anti-Israel protesters, and even included a pledge to “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE OUR COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN” in the Republican Party platform . Nonetheless, for the third straight presidential election, Jews voted overwhelmingly for Trump’s Democratic opponent. By contrast, many protesters against the war in Gaza equivocated and did not endorse Kamala Harris , voted third party, stayed home, or swung to Trump . (Some partisans on social media have demanded that American Jews answer for Trump’s policies—a good example of how Jews, like other minorities, are often scapegoated for majority decisions most of them opposed.)

American Jews did not reject Trump because they approved of the protest movement or how it was handled by universities. On the contrary, many Jews felt abandoned by schools that failed to neutrally enforce their rules when it came to anti-Israel activists, even when some engaged in vandalism and violence; violated time, place, and manner restrictions for campus protests; or prevented other students from learning. Many Jews were similarly shocked when administrators who had bent over backwards to eliminate every possible microaggression against other marginalized groups—down to policing offensive Halloween costumes and poor-taste party invitations —prevaricated in the face of open hostility against Jewish students. Others wondered what happened to the progressive principle that the impact of a statement matters more than its intent when the statements were “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea”—or when Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated the October 7 massacre as “a historic win,” and those behind Columbia’s encampment repeatedly cheered Hamas’s murders of civilians.

[Read: The war at Stanford ]

These Jews were not asking for special treatment; they were asking to be treated like everyone else on campus, for better or worse. In the words of Columbia’s Task Force on Anti-Semitism, “Speech or conduct that would constitute harassment if directed against one protected class must also be treated as harassment if directed against another protected class. This must be true not only in the way rules are written, but also in the way they are enforced.”

The Trump administration has not surgically targeted these failings at America’s universities for rectification; it has exploited them to justify the institutions’ decimation. Jews are caught in the middle —used by the White House to shield its agenda from criticism, yet attacked by Trump’s critics as enablers of that agenda due to their advocacy for themselves and against anti-Semitism.

Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population and are a famously fractious people. A minority of this minority supports Trump’s policies, seeking the shelter of a strongman amid the anti-Semitic storm. But the lesson most American Jews have drawn from their history as a persecuted people is that narrow nationalisms never end well for those who are different, because no matter their patriotism or contribution to the collective, their difference will always make them suspect. Jews may be inside the circle of concern today, but that circle is always shrinking, and Jews will ultimately not determine who it includes.

“They don’t care about the country at all,” the influential right-wing personality Tucker Carlson told a podcast host in 2023, assailing a prominent Jewish commentator and those like him. “But I do because I have no choice, because I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like, I’m shocked by how little they care about the country, including the person you mentioned.” The person he was referring to was the pro-Trump Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro.

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Democrats Have a Problem

by | Apr 4, 2025 | The Atlantic

Democrats have a problem: too many problems. Identifying the problems is not one of those problems.

“Democrats have a trust problem,” suggests Representative Jason Crow of Colorado.

“Democrats have a big narrative problem,” adds Representative Greg Casar of Texas.

“Democrats have a vision problem,” says Representative Ro Khanna of California.

In general, Democrats have a “Democrats have a problem” problem.

This is to be expected from a party suffering through a “major brand problem” and a “major image problem ,” and whose favorability ratings have plunged to new lows , in part thanks to its “smug problem” and “media and communications problem .”

“Over the last decade, the Democratic Party has had a working-class voter problem,” Representative Brendan Boyle, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, told Politico last week. “It started out as a white working-class voter problem,” Boyle said. “And it has, as I’ve long feared, spread. It is not just a white working-class issue. It has now spread to the Latino working class and African American working class.”

[Mark Leibovich: Have the conversation before it’s too late ]

So many problems! Where to begin? Perhaps last November. Since their election wipeout, Democrats have been engaged in—and subjected to—a free-for-all of problem-naming. It’s hard to know whom to believe, if anyone, about what the party’s biggest problem is—which itself is a problem (see the aforementioned “trust problem,” as well as the “credibility problem” and the “authenticity problem” ).

It can also be hard to keep track of all the problems. New interpretations and analyses are constantly being circulated (and regurgitated). Fresh polls and focus groups attempt to quantify the various problems, which include the party’s perception problem , Gen Z and young-bro problems , working-class and plutocrat problems , man problems , woman problems , and transgender problems .

Here’s another problem: Problems are tedious. Talk about them endlessly, and people will start to avoid you at parties. It can foster self-loathing—and exacerbate the Democrats’ preexisting “big problem with its own voters .”

In fairness, Democrats themselves aren’t the only ones focused on their party’s problems. Podcasters, Substackers, YouTubers, and other geniuses across the political spectrum have also obsessed over the Democrats’ latest this problem or that problem. Also in fairness, headline and chyron writers have a cliché problem. They tend to overwork the “Democrats Have a (Blank) Problem” construction. This only heightens the tedium.

Parties that lose big elections are always wallowing in their problems. They are said to be “in the wilderness,” “rudderless,” and “in disarray.” Their putative leaders attend “policy retreats”—sometimes held in the actual wilderness. They engage in circular hand-wringing and browbeating, and arrive at “key takeaways.”

The media tends to amplify the losing party’s most self-hating and scornful voices. “If we don’t get our shit together, then we are going to be in a permanent minority,” Democratic Senator John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, said last week . (Important context: Every party that loses an election supposedly risks becoming a “permanent minority.” This concern usually lasts no longer than an election cycle or two. “Permanent” minorities usually turn out to be temporary.)

Both parties tend to over-dissect their problems and defeats. After President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012, the Republican National Committee commissioned an “autopsy” report. The problem with autopsies is that they are, by definition, backward-looking. The patient is already dead. After 2012, various Republican steering committees and task forces determined that the party had done a poor job reaching Black, Latino, immigrant, young, and women voters. They had a big “diversity problem” and needed to stop speaking in a way that alienated so much of the electorate. This appeared self-evident, except that it also proved to be exactly what Republican voters did not want. As it turned out, they wanted Donald Trump.

[Jonathan Chait: The Democrats show why they lost ]

Yes, Democrats do have many problems. But a good election can solve many of them. Campaigns should be about the future, as Bill Clinton used to say. And Democrats should get on with theirs. They can start the 2028 presidential clock now and find their next cohort of leaders. Good candidates can solve a lot of problems too.

Good candidates can also hurl the discussion back to the Republicans’ own problems, which seem to be mounting: the tariff problem and the inflation problem , the Signal problem and the Elon Musk problem . That last problem was laid bare on Tuesday by the liberal judge Susan Crawford’s victory in Wisconsin’s state-supreme-court election (this despite—or because of—the $25 million Musk spent against her campaign).

As a politician, Trump has many special qualities, but he also has a knack for creating new problems, for himself and for his party. His announcement of sweeping new tariffs spurred a massive stock sell-off yesterday and accelerated a global trade war . His aggressive foreign-policy posture has strained long-standing alliances, in addition to the patience of global leaders .

Here is another problem: Republican voters have proved unreliable when Trump is not on the ballot—which he will not be in 2026. This is “the GOP’s big voter problem .” Theoretically, Trump also won’t be on the ballot in 2028, although he keeps suggesting that he might try to run for a third term, which would temporarily solve the GOP’s big voter problem.

But this could also be problematic. Constitutionally, for starters.

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Iran Wants to Talk

by | Apr 4, 2025 | The Atlantic

Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Early in March, a high-ranking Emirati diplomat delivered a letter from Trump to Khamenei. Iran has now sent Khamenei’s response through its preferred mediator, the Sultanate of Oman.

Iran’s letter is detailed and leaves the door open for negotiations, a source close to the Iranian establishment told me, on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. In addition to the official response, Iranians have used multiple channels, including private business ones, to send signals to Trump and his team, the source added.

About two months ago, Khamenei said that talking with the U.S. was “neither rational, nor smart, nor honorable.” This seemed consistent with his posture during Trump’s first term: In 2018, he said Iran would “never” talk with the Trump administration in particular. In June 2019, when Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, brought a letter from Trump to Tehran, Khamenei rebuked him in front of cameras and said that the U.S. president was not “worthy” of a response. A few months later, Emmanuel Macron went out of his way to host a videoconference between Trump and his Iranian counterpart, then-President Hassan Rouhani. The logistical arrangements had been made, but in the end Rouhani didn’t take the meeting.

[Read: The Axis of Resistance keeps getting smaller ]

Yet the supreme leader has been known to buckle under pressure and call it a strategic retreat. Decades ago, he coined the phrase heroic flexibility in praise of a Shiite imam who had made peace with a bitter enemy. He used the term in 2013 to justify Iran’s talks with the Obama administration (talks that started with an exchange of letters between Barack Obama and Khamenei.)  

Khamenei is not about to give up his lifelong anti-Americanism at this late hour, at the age of almost 86. Still, Iran is in dire economic straits, and domestic pressure is mounting. Trump’s message to Iran, meanwhile, has been constant and clear: Talk with me, agree to a deal in which you stop pursuing nuclear weapons and arming regional militias, and I’ll let you prosper.

If Iran declines, Israel, flush from having battered the Iranian allies Hamas and Hezbollah, could finally strike Iran’s nuclear program. But even short of that, Trump’s policy—his previous administration called it “maximum pressure”—could fatally damage the already beleaguered Iranian economy. The U.S. has threatened to seriously crack down on Iran’s oil trade with China, which would cost Iran its most important source of foreign currency. The markets are already speaking: The U.S. dollar now trades for more than 1 million rials, an almost 75 percent increase from a few months ago, making the Iranian currency among the most worthless in the world (in 2015, when Iran last signed a deal with the U.S., the dollar was just 29,500 IRR).

This explains why Iran is coming to the table. But knowing just how weak his hand is, Khamenei has tried to appear tough. In an Eid al-Fitr speech on Monday, he affirmed that Iran’s positions had not changed, “nor has the enmity of America and the Zionist regime, which continue to threaten us with their evil doings.” He went on to threaten the U.S. and Israel with “a firm blow in response” if they attack Iran—which, he added, was “not very likely.” As per usual, he threatened Israel with destruction: “Everybody has a duty to work toward eliminating this evil and criminal entity from the region,” he said.

His is not the only bluster from Tehran. Iran’s military leaders have recently threatened American bases in the region. Ali Larijani, a centrist politician and adviser to Khamenei, said that Iran has no intention of building a nuclear weapon, but it could be forced to do so if attacked by the U.S. or Israel.

These might sound like fighting words, but what they really are is a negotiating tactic. Larijani has himself said that he hopes for “a tangible result” to come out of diplomacy with America and praised Trump as “a talented businessman.” Other Iranian officials have made similar indications, even as they complain about Trump’s “bullying” and his threats to bomb the country. Iran is “always ready to negotiate on an equal footing,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Monday. Iran is not averse to negotiations, and “the ball is in the U.S.’s court,” a top communication official in the office of President Masoud Pezeshkian said a day earlier.

If the messages seem mixed, that’s because Iran has “readied itself for both negotiations and confrontation,” Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based expert on the Iranian security establishment, told me. He said that the Iranian authorities had reached out to the Trump team even prior to the U.S. president’s inauguration, as diplomacy is their preferred course—but they have also prepared the country’s defenses in case this effort fails.

According to Najafi, Iran wants a two-step process, with direct talks following the current indirect contact. Tehran prefers that these talks take place in secret, and it wants Iran’s missile and drone capabilities to be off the table, he added. But it would be happy to talk about “lessening tensions in the region.” Najafi continued, “This doesn’t mean making deals over the Axis of Resistance groups, but, if Iran sees it as necessary, it can align them with a new agenda.”

This push for talks has a clear constituency in Iran. Op-eds in business and political dailies argue that the country has no choice but to come to a deal with the West. An online poll on a major news website showed a whopping 82 percent in favor of direct talks with the U.S., with 7 percent favoring indirect talks and only 11 percent opposed to all talks. Mohammad Ali Sobhani, a former Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Jordan, and Qatar, even suggested that Iran should offer business opportunities to American companies to sell the Trump administration on dealmaking.

[Read: The Iranian dissident asking simple questions ]

If Iran and America do get to talking again, many outside forces will try to shape the result. Israel might nudge Trump away from negotiations, in favor of attacks that could keep Iran weak and destabilized. And Trump might very well prefer that outcome too. But prominent voices in the Trump camp seem to be urging a more diplomatic approach. The talk-show host Tucker Carlson, known for his close ties to the president, has strongly pushed against attacking Iran. His interview with Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, in which the latter seemed open to discussions with Iran, was watched closely in Iran. Witkoff’s apparent favorability toward negotiations was cited by regional sources speaking to an Israeli newspaper as one reason Khamenei softened up and wrote back to Trump. Then, yesterday, came the disappearing X comment heard halfway round the world: Araghchi wrote a long post urging “diplomatic engagement” while asserting that “there is—by definition—no such thing as a ‘military option’ let alone a ‘military solution.’” Witkoff responded, “Great”—then deleted the comment. Judging from the flurry of social-media posts and op-eds, however, his message appears to have been received in Tehran.

The leaders of America’s Arab allies in the Gulf are also likely to discourage Trump from further inflaming the region by attacking Iran—this is in sharp contrast to their attitude during the Obama era, when they feared that a nuclear agreement with Tehran would leave them out.

Trump’s epistolary relationship with Khamenei is unlikely to develop into the sort of bromance he experienced with Kim, and even those personal talks collapsed because they weren’t accompanied by the necessary technical negotiations. But Iran is now going out of its way to affirm that it held up its end of the old nuclear deal and forswore developing nuclear weapons. What the Iranians also seem to know is that if they want to get a new deal with America, they will have to learn Trump’s style, and that includes the president’s love of letters.

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To Be Happier, Stop Resisting Change

by | Apr 4, 2025 | The Atlantic

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In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought. To this end, Herrigel took up his archery studies with the master Awa Kenzō, which he later chronicled in his 1948 book, Zen in the Art of Archery .

Herrigel’s archery program was arduous and frustrating. “Drawing the bow caused my hands to start trembling after a few moments, and my breathing became more and more laboured,” he wrote . “Nor did this get any better during the weeks that followed.” Indeed, the weeks became months, and the months wound up becoming five years. At long last, Herrigel learned how to loose an arrow and hit his mark. When he finally acquired the skill, he also realized that he now understood the Zen attitude. “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise,” he wrote—when you “let go of yourself.”

In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight. To figure out what sources of resistance are holding you back, and discover how to find release from them and live better, read on.

[From the January/February 2012 issue: Arrow envy ]

Unless you are a monastic, your life is probably characterized by a lot of resistance, especially to change. Even the most adventurous people are susceptible to this because change almost always means an uncertain or challenging future. Researchers have found that our resistance to change is rooted in at least four sources: routine seeking (a preference for boredom over surprise), emotional reaction to imposed change (stress aversion), a short-term focus (seeing change as a hassle of adjustment), and cognitive rigidity (a reluctance to rethink things).

Scholars have argued that change-resistance is a behavioral pattern that can be epigenetic —that is, a trait that becomes heritable because, without altering a person’s actual DNA, it modifies the way their genes are expressed at a cellular level. Change-resistance, the argument goes, gets reinforced and passed on because it provides a way to conserve energy, rather than having to learn the same routines over and over. And people almost certainly evolved a resistance to change in the first place because it leads to stability in decision making, and that makes living in social groups easier.

This helps explain why most people naturally resist change—whether that change involves becoming single even when a relationship has gone south, remaining in a job that bores you, or staying put in a city you haven’t liked for years. And that also explains why, as natural as change-resistance is, it tends not to improve your happiness. Change in life is inevitable, after all—and always resisting it is onerous. In fact, your resistance to change may well be making you unhappier, because it is positively correlated with neuroticism, a trait that personality research has found to be a driver of unhappiness.

An especially common area of change-resistance is unwillingness to think differently, which manifests as a rejection of ideas and opinions that vary from our own. In 2017, three psychologists used a series of experiments to demonstrate that most people prefer to hear the views of those who vote as they do, and that on cultural issues, most would forgo a small cash sum ($3) rather than have to hear a view opposing their own. Neuroscientists have shown that hearing political views you don’t share activates the amygdala, which is implicated in the human response to perceived threats.

Once again, this mechanism probably evolved from a time in human prehistory. In this case, what we think of today as an opposing ideological allegiance back then actually implied membership in a different, and potentially hostile, tribe or kinship group. Today, that trait persists in maladaptive ways: I find your view on climate change so disagreeable that my Pleistocene brain reacts as if you’re an unwelcome interloper who’s come along to burn my village. Aren’t we always complaining about how tribal politics has become?

[Read: In praise of pointless goals ]

The impulse to resist is so natural, then, that it’s encoded in your genes. As that suggests, a degree of resistance can be perfectly appropriate and healthy. But your predisposition to resistance may affect your life in negative ways when it makes you rigid, like Herrigel locked in place with his arms trembling, not knowing how to take a shot. Such rigidity in the face of change will lower your happiness.

As the years passed, Herrigel finally understood that productive nonresistance means effortless effort, a phrase Herrigel used elsewhere to describe how he ceased to focus consciously on trying to hit the target and—in something akin to a “flow state” —lost himself in the process of shooting. In other words, he became indifferent to performing correctly at each stage, such as the release of the string from his finger or the business of keeping aim; rather, his self dissolved into a state of nonjudgmental absorption in the complete action of drawing the bow and shooting the arrow when the string’s time came to slip his finger.

Herrigel had thus mastered the whole “way of the bow.” One word of caution: Herrigel may sometimes have taken his own advice too far, as when, after his return from Japan to Germany in 1929, he acceded to the demand that he join the Nazi Party. Nonjudgmental absorption in the moment is not an alibi for bad judgment.

Nevertheless, from his philosophy of archery, we can infer three valuable lessons for tackling a situation in which resistance is natural but is also lowering the quality of life.

1. Focus on process, not outcome.
Some common business advice is Do things well and let the results come naturally, but this applies equally well more generally. Take the case of your job: Focusing on an involuntary change, such as the possibility of being laid off, will make you fearful and rigid, and distract you from what you’re working on from moment to moment. By all means, think about that potential problem for a few minutes when it crosses your mind, but then put it aside and refocus on doing a great job today. Be kind and generous to others who may also be worrying about their job. Live in what the self-improvement author Dale Carnegie called “day-tight compartments.” Resisting an outcome you probably have little control over will make you miserable. So, instead, allow yourself to work on the processes that you can control more, and you will feel better.

2. Practice mindful absorption.
Now that you are mentally released from obsessing over outcomes, the next step is to practice being completely absorbed in the necessary action. This will improve your performance and reduce your stress. Say, for example, that your romantic relationship is in trouble: Shelve your fear that your partner might leave you at some future date, and instead be mindful of your role in the relationship today and what you can do to make it better. This might or might not save the relationship ultimately, because it can’t make past difficulties disappear, but being fully present and attentive as a partner gives you a better chance of success—if not in this relationship, then in your next one—than trying some shortcut fix or melodramatic gesture.

3. Release the ego.
Herrigel emphasized that, as an archer, he had to learn to focus on the arrow as opposed to himself. In other words, he had to exercise a degree of ego erasure, an exclusion of self-consciousness. This is a topic I’ve touched on before, about what it means to shift from the “me-self” to the “I-self” and how that can produce greater happiness. Let’s return to the situation of being confronted by a point of view with which you strongly disagree. Given your resistance to changing your own view, your amygdala will tend to make you overreact and see this contrary argument as a threat. Instead, release your ego and tell yourself, “This opinion has nothing to do with me.” Then simply listen with detached curiosity; you may learn something interesting about why this person thinks that way and avoid an unnecessarily negative encounter. And if you do choose to engage further with this interlocutor, you will probably be more persuasive by being a listener. Not that it matters to you, O enlightened one.

[From the October 2015 issue: How an 18th-century philosopher helped solve my midlife crisis ]

I first read Zen in the Art of Archery at the age of 20—I’ll admit, not with the purest of motives. My purpose was to become a better French-horn player for fame and fortune rather than for the zen of playing. Obviously, I was completely missing the real message. I picked up Herrigel’s book again at 55, when I was in the necessary process of changing jobs, careers, and cities, and in a state of abject terror.

Clearly, I had some resistance to overcome. Now the book made sense to me. It helped me stop thinking so much about how I was going to hit the target of my professional shift, and instead get mindfully absorbed in my daily work. That largely took my ego out of the equation and enabled me to allow the shift to occur naturally, without judgment or forcing anything. The openness to change that I learned from Herrigel’s mastery of archery has made these past five years among the happiest and most fulfilling of my life.

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