I just watched a short video with Sam Harris that made me feel better. I’ve been struggling, as many of us are, in 2025, to figure out where to put the emotions of recent events. How do I make sense of it? How do stop I being so angry? Do I succumb to dread and despair? How do I hope for the best? Is what I’m seeing now just part of the perpetual cycle of ups and downs of the human race? What if this turmoil is heralding in a new and wonderful world of human relations? Somehow though, I think human nature makes that outcome unlikely.
In the video, Sam says a lot of interesting things worth considering. It is a call to action to cooperate and solve our global problems together rather than by violence against each other. He wants conversation, a willingness for both parties to admit they could be wrong, negotiate in good faith, and compromise. Meet each other in the middle. It’s naïve, but I like the sense of hope he is trying to inspire in us.
The central message of the video is “Your mind is all you have”. He means that your perceptions and how you interpret them is necessarily all you have. This can be a frightening realization. If my mind is all I have, what is actually out there? What is real? Am I real? Now I’ve come full circle to the time I was fifteen. This is when I first found out about solipsism, the philosophical idea that I am the only reality and that nothing exists outside of me. I think, therefore I am and furthermore, it’s only me. I have struggled with that idea ever since and what it means in terms of having purpose in life.
This concept, that Sam alludes to, can be extremely terrifying for most people. To actually know it, to feel that one’s mind is all we have, is to have to come to grips with our fallibility, the uncertainty of our fragile beliefs, and our ego. It is acknowledging that we are trapped inside our perceptions and that we might be wrong about perhaps everything. That way lies madness for most people. It means I have to deal with the fear that my world might be solipsistic in this way. Not only am I trapped inside my perceptions of the world, but there is a chance that there is really nothing out there except me. It’s all in my head. There is possibly nothing but emptiness around me. And if there is something outside of me, I can’t know it. So limited am I by my perceptions. I am alone. And that loneliness is what I think could drive a person mad. As the creator and the created all at once, my connection to what I believe to be external reality becomes dangerously thin.
In this sense, I am not sure Sam’s call to action is framed the right way for the people he is trying to reach. To reach people who don’t want to make the world of humanity a better place for all of us, requires a patience, empathy, and compassion only a saint or monk could muster. It is easy for me to criticize because I don’t necessarily know how to solve the problem of how to get us to that place. Somehow though, I think, he wants us to realize that we have to try.