David McElroy

As soon as Brené Brown started talking about shame, she had my attention. I had been told that Brown was talking about vulnerability and connection to others, but to get there, she started in a much uglier place — one I could identify with.

Brown is a researcher in social work at the University of Houston. In a 20-minute TED talk she gave a few years ago, she talked about her research into love and human connection — and those things inevitably lead to vulnerability, authenticity and (for some of us) shame.

I had been told that her talk was about human connection — and how her work had convinced her that’s why we’re living this life — so I was curious what she had to say about it. It was easy to see it as interesting academic research when I first heard about it. What I got from listening was far more than academic. (I’ve embedded Brown’s TED talk at the bottom of this article, and I hope you’ll take the time to listen to her.)

Brown said her research showed that shame and fear are the things that keep connections from happening. We don’t connect when we feel shame about ourselves — and we’re afraid that others won’t see us as good enough if they see who we really are. That’s the part where she really had my attention.

I grew up in a family where shame was a common thing. I grew up feeling as though I could never be good enough. No matter what I did, I didn’t feel as though I was loved and accepted for who I was. There was always another hoop to jump through — emotionally — in order to be “good enough.” And I could never jump through enough hoops. My father would swear today that I imagined it all, but both of my sisters grew up feeling the same way. We’ve carried it into our adult lives and it’s reflected itself in different negative ways for all three of us.

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When governments create problems and shortages, the free market rushes in to try to give people what they need. But in the face of almost every innovation, there are politicians and their corrupt friends in the private sector trying to make sure nobody upsets the status quo.

Do you ever take taxis? I rarely do, but I find the experience unpleasant when I have to. You call a dispatcher — who’s frequently surly and unpleasant — and then wait for a cab driver to show up. You might get a decent driver or you might get a jerk who’s unpleasant to deal with. Then you’re taken to where you want to go, at which point you pay a fee that some government bureaucrat set — very possibly in collusion with the people who own the taxis.

In many cities, there aren’t even cabs to meet the demand. There are set numbers of permits available for taxis and nobody can legally go into business without one of the permits. The people who own the existing permits fight to prevent more permits from being issued, because they don’t want competition. They like a world in which a government agency decides how many people can be in the business. That way, they don’t have to use things such as better services and lower prices to compete for business. (Actually, they’re prohibited from charging lower prices.)

There’s a free market solution to this terrible situation, but politicians and bureaucrats are trying to kill it. There are new smartphone apps — Lyft, Sidecar and Uber — that allow anyone to get a ride from someone who has a car that’s registered with the service. If you need a ride, you tell the app what you need and the app tells you who’s available. You choose your driver (and car) and that person picks you up. At the destination, you’re given a suggested “donation” and you’re allowed to rate the driver.

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Is there anybody who hasn’t felt the need at some point to get away from the insane world and escape to a place of relative sanity? I feel it a lot, and I’ve been feeling it more strongly again recently. It’s occurred to me that I don’t really need Galt’s Gulch right now. I need to find my own version of Hugh Akston’s diner.

If you’re a fan of “Atlas Shrugged,” you know what the two represent. Galt’s Gulch was a brand new society, cut off from the mainstream world — existing without outsiders’ knowledge. It had been founded to give the world’s productive people a place they could go to escape the “looters” who were taking their money and their ideas.

The diner that Dr. Hugh Akston ran, on the other hand, was a part of the mainstream world, in plain view of everyone. Akston had been a philosophy professor who found the world uninterested in his ideas, so he was forced to retreat from university teaching and run a small, remote diner in Colorado. The two places represented entirely different things. Galt’s Gulch was an entirely new free world. Akston’s diner was all about living honestly within the existing world until you could get to the new world.

I want to live in Galt’s Gulch. I want that new world to exist. I believe it’s possible, and I believe we’re going to build it. In the meantime, though, I have to live in the same old world that everybody else does. And if I’m going to remain sane, that requires finding my own version of Akston’s diner.

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