Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression.

And she draws Boethius's imagination far up into the heavens so that he can look down on the Earth and see it as a tiny speck on which even tinier people play out their comical and ultimately insignificant ambitions. She gets him to admit that riches and fame bring anxiety and avarice, not peace and happiness.

European travelers to every continent witnessed people coming together to dance with wild abandon around a fire, synchronized to the beat of drums, often to the point of exhaustion. In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich describes how European explorers reacted to these dances: with disgust.

moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

intersectionalism," as Crenshaw said in her 2016 TED Talk, is that "where there's no name for a problem, you can't see a problem, and when you can't see a problem, you pretty much can't solve it."61

In one of the most bizarre demonstrations of this effect, Eric Helzer and David Pizarro asked students at Cornell University to fill out surveys about their political attitudes while standing near (or far from) a hand sanitizer dispenser. Those told to stand near the sanitizer became temporarily more conservative.27

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."26

It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together."52 I was stunned. Chimps are arguably the second-smartest species on the planet, able to make tools, learn sign language, predict the intentions of other chimps, and deceive each other to get what they want. As individuals, they're brilliant. So why can't they work together? What are they missing?

On the other hand, members of the military, law enforcement personnel, and students who have well-organized dorm rooms tend to lean right. (Seriously.

We took such an infinitesimal amount of psilocybin, and yet it connected me to infinity.

Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould

What is new today is the premise that students are fragile. Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection. There is no expectation that students will grow stronger from their encounters with speech or texts they label "triggering.

a modern version of the muscular bonding that Ehrenreich and McNeill had described. The scene and the experience awed him, shut down his "I," and merged him into a giant "we.

Los grupos cohesionados y moralmente homogéneos son propensos a las cazas de brujas, en particular cuando experimentan una amenaza, sea externa o interna.

The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows cheaply from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. Charles Darwin

If we could just erase the borders and boundaries that divide us, then thew world would "be as one". It's a vision of heaven for liberals, but conservatives believe it would quickly descend into hell... If you destroy all groups and dissolve all internal structure, you destroy your moral capital.

make altruism pay, and two back-to-back breakthroughs in evolutionary thinking showed how to do that. In chapter 3 I presented kin altruism (be nice to those who share your genes) and reciprocal altruism (be nice to those who might reciprocate in the future) as two steps on the way to ultrasociality. Once these

life is much like a movie we walk into well after its opening scene, and we will have to step out long before most of the story lines reach their conclusions.

Las cazas de brujas, en general, tienen cuatro atributos: parecen surgir de la nada; incluyen acusaciones de delitos contra el colectivo; las ofensas que dieron lugar a esas acusaciones son a menudo triviales o fabricadas; y las personas que saben que los acusados son inocentes guardan silencio, o en casos extremos, se suman a la multitud.

leadership can only be understood as the complement of followership.45 Focusing on leadership alone is like trying to understand clapping by studying only the left hand.

The ability to reason combined with a lack of moral emotions is dangerous.

Empathy is an antidote to righteousness

What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance. EPICTETUS, 1st–2nd century1

This is a book about three Great Untruths that seem to have spread widely in recent years: The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.