The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion — By Jonathan Haidt // Quotes
Intuitions (including emotional responses) are a kind of cognition. They’re just not a kind of reasoning
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“It is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles” — Hume
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“If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.” — Henry Ford
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“It is easy to see the faults of others , but difficult to see one’s own faults. one shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.” — Buddha
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Juries are more likely to acquit attractive defendants, and when beautiful people are convicted, judges give them lighter sentence, on average.
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As hominid brains tripled in size over the last 5 million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge your scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why rather than using all that brainpower justified evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think is more important for our ancestors survival: truth or reputation.
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Suppose the gods were to flip a coin on the day of your birth. Heads you will be supremely honest and fair person throughout your life yet everyone around you will believe you’re a scoundrel. Tails, you will cheat and lie whenever it suits your needs, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a paragon of virtue. Which outcome would you prefer?
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We are multiple from the start. Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other potential concerns are left undeveloped and unconnected to the web of shared meanings and values that become adult moral matrix.
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A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. Before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it, then he cooks and eats it.
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We are selfish primates who long to be part of something larger and nobler than ourselves.
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The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimise responses to the omnivore’s dilemma.
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Muller asserted the modern day conservatism is really about creating the best possible society.
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We are all stuck here for a while so let’s try to work it out.
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The scene and the experience awed him, shut down his “I”, and merged him into a giant “we.” “it started him on the path so creating a new kind of business embodying some of the communalism and ego suppression he had felt at the rave.
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