Quotes from Azar Gat

The cognitive aspect of ideology is rooted in the fact that knowledge and frameworks of interpretation are collective and cumulative human constructs.

In addition to the emotive appeal of its eschatological promise, there was the tremendous attraction of Marxism as a cognitive framework for the interpretation of history and reality. With a largely justified reputation, Marxism functioned as a modern-day theology in the sense that it offered the best of minds a doctrine of very high level of intellectual sophistication with which to grapple, work, and identify.

As members of the same species, human beings broadly share notions and precepts of morality, of what is socially regarded as a proper conduct. But again, there is no reason to think that these notions and precepts should fully converge and cohere between different people and different communities, or even in the minds of the individuals themselves.

People can cooperate, compete peacefully, or use violence to achieve their objectives, depending on what they believe will serve them best in any given circumstance.

the evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers in their evolutionary natural environment and evolutionary natural way of life, shaped in humankind's evolutionary history over millions of years, widely engaged in fighting among themselves. In this sense, rather than being a late cultural 'invention', fighting would seem to be, if not 'natural', then certainly not 'unnatural' to humans.

As Thomas Malthus pointed out, a new equilibrium between resource volume and population numbers would eventually be reached, recreating the same tenuous ratio of subsistence that has been the fate of most pre-industrial societies throughout human history.

As we have seen, the conceptual frameworks through which we comprehend reality are necessarily partial; and although not all propositions capture truth in equal measure, or are true at all, many of them may incorporate kernels of truth, offer suggestive perspectives, and illuminate reality from neglected angles.

Still, connecting others to the world economy -voluntarily, by pressure, and even by force- constituted, in principle, their only road to sustained real growth and away from the material deprivation, stagnation, zero-sum competition, and high mortality of 'agraria'.

The history of ideologies should teach modesty, or at least warn against fixations and biases.

Reason --open-minded and self-critical-- remains the key to our species' tremendous success.

Ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations are as old as civilization.

Humans employ simplified conceptual frameworks and normative cues to make sense of and cope with the infinite complexity of the natural and social world. This is the magical devise that has made our species' amazing trajectory possible, and it relies on our unique capacity for social learning.

Reason is still our signature tool for coping with a complex reality, yet it is easily subverted by overconfidence, cognitive closure, and biases.

The claim that nations and nationalism are modern ideological constructs invented by intellectuals and spread by means of state authority and the state's apparatuses is a misleading half-truth that is itself a modernist (or postmodernist) ideological construct originating with intellectuals and requiring deconstruction.

Cooperation is dramatically more effective when cultural codes -above all language, but also customs, values and other patterns of thought and behavior- are shared. Culture, cultural diversity, and, hence, the facility of shared culture cooperation are unique to humans and differentiate them from other social animals. Hence the innate human tendency to prefer those who belong to their kin-culture community over strangers.

The adoption of conceptual frames and grids put together by the collective efforts of others is the ingenious shortcut to knowledge that our species has carried far beyond anything known among other animals. The human world of ideas is a product of a division of intellectual labor over extended periods, whose fruits are socially shared and cumulative.

The oldest and most enduring element of the religious phenomena is probably the existence of hidden, mysterious, and powerful forces and agencies in the world around us, which are feared, handled with care, and negotiated with.

Love, sex, and eroticism, with their hormone rush and idealized images, on the one hand, and deep frustrations, on the other, have been variably perceived as either a major source of transcedence or the nadir of the profane.

People are naturally inclined to be far more attuned to the blame game of social bargaining than they are to the nuances and the balance of the facts, whether historical or contemporary.

The quest to trascend life's pains would become far more central to the religious experience as human societies expanded dramatically, beyond the small-scale kin communities of prehistory, with the advent of agriculture, the rise of state societies, and the coming of modernity.

The United States, the West, capitalism, liberalism, and democracy were collapsed into one and castigated in this sweeping discourse as the source of all evil or at least as no better than others. In some minds they still are.

The expansion of the state thus had the effect of gradually diminishing tribal and local boundaries within the same ethnos, and of reducing the differences between separate -ethnies- in multi-ethnic states and empires, subsuming them within supra-ethnic identities, even to the point of creating new, transformed, and larger ethnic identities.

Again, as young males have always been the most aggressive element in society whereas older men were traditionally associated with a counsel of moderation and compromise, it has been suggested that the decline in young men's relative numbers may contribute to the pacificity of developed societies while explaining the greater belligerency of developing ones, particularly those of Islam.

Deeply entrenched fantasies and persistent, most cherished illusions can at least partly be explained as 'bugs' or 'viruses' in, or 'mis-activations' of, our sophisticated and highly sensitive intellectual software, which is driven but also easily disrupted by, and addicted to, our restless and insatiable need for meaning, order, control, and reassurance.