Quotes from Edward Slingerland

Thinking that you are good can make you bad. Talking about positive behavior can encourage negative behavior. Laozi is clearly on to something when he warns us that consciously trying to be righteous will, in fact, turn us into insufferable hypocrites and that anyone striving to attain virtue is destined to fail.

Because of the distinctive adaptive challenges we face as a species, we require a way to inject controlled doses of chaos into our lives.

This work is part of what is now a huge literature on the often harmful effects of rumination and explicit analysis on people's ability to experience and identify pleasure.

faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive. This is because the problem of choking or freezing up extends

Let alone, without the help of or hot cognition, cold cognition is simply paralyzed by choice.

The conscious mind, ungrounded by the wisdom of the body, is remarkably incapable of taking care of business.

If we have to translate it, wu-wei is probably best rendered as something like "effortless action" or spontaneous action.

People who are in wu-wei has de, typically translated as "virtue," "power," or "charismatic power." De is radiance that others can detect, and it serves as an outward signal that one is in wu-wei.

Given that the pre-frontal cortex is a key to our success as a species, consuming any amount of alcohol or other intoxicant seems really stupid.

The great power of adopting a scientific approach to human behavior is the ability to unmask deep puzzles about human existence that otherwise hide in plain sight.

Evolution is not stupid, and works much faster than most people realize.

At best, we base our thinking on disconnected facts or snippets of scientific knowledge uninformed by a broader evolutionary perspective.

The Gospel of Matthew declares, "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." An early Chinese Daoist text, the Daodejing or Laozi, compares the perfected sage to an infant or small child, perfectly open and receptive to the world.

Intoxication is an antidote to cognitive control, a way to temporarily hamstring that opponent to creativity, cultural openness, and communal bonding.

After a glass or two, your attention is narrowed to only the immediate surroundings. You meander unpredictably, more free to follow wherever the conversation might take you. You feel happy and unconcerned about future consequences. Your motor skills are rubbish. On the other hand, if you speak a second language, you might find yourself suddenly a bit more confident and fluent. In other words, you are a child again, with all of the benefits and costs that come with stunting the PFC.

awakening' drinkers to their optimum creative moments…to be intoxicated is to be inspired."10 It is not uncommon for ancient Chinese poets to have entire series of poems under the rubric, "Written While Drunk," including this one from the Zhang Yue (667 to 730): Once drunk, my delight knows no limits— Even better than before I'm drunk. My movements, my expressions, all turn into dance, And every word out of my mouth turns into a poem!11

If with water you fill up your glasses You'll never write anything wise But wine is the horse of Parnassus That carries a bard to the skies.

Human rulers get poisoned or decapitated or simply voted out of office all the time, as our set of personal desires, our chimpanzee DNA, rears its individualistic head.

Our dependence on culture means that our minds need to be open to others, so that we can learn from them.

Humans transform the world through our creative technologies, and we cannot survive without them.

As the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik and her colleagues have observed, general intelligence, behavioral flexibility, ability to solve novel problems, and a reliance on learning from others tends to roughly correlate with an extended period of helpless immaturity.13 This relationship is found across a broad range of animals, including birds and mammals, suggesting that it tracks a fundamental evolutionary trade-off between narrow competence and creative flexibility.

If we think of alcohol, for instance, as disabling negative barriers to cooperation (lying, suspicion, cheating), we have to also see its positive role in building affiliative, pair bond–like emotional ties between members of the group through the stimulation of endorphins and serotonin.

Even in the most low-tech societies, however, humans are completely helpless without tools and the creative insights that generate them. We need creativity simply to function.

If you tasked a cultural engineering team with designing a substance that would satisfy specs aimed at maximizing individual creativity and group cooperation, they would come up with something very much like alcohol.