Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

We have the ability (under special circumstances) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. I called this ability the hive switch.

don't want you to be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That's different. I'm not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I'm not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that's the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.

Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together.

It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective.

Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion does most of the work.

the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered. Like those nineteenth-century religious communes, they used their gods to elicit sacrifice and commitment from members.

Only groups that can elicit commitment and suppress free riding can grow.

I think these drugs could just as well be called Durkheimogens, given their unique (though unreliable) ability to shut down the self and give people experiences they later describe as "religious" or

Morality binds and blinds.

rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.

Muller began by distinguishing conservatism from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the view that there exists a "transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.

You can take the IAT yourself at ProjectImplicit.org

Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing."4

The author says we enlist reasons to convince others to join the direction of our instincts.

A college football game is a superb analogy for religion.

Hanna Holborn Gray, the president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, once offered this principle: "Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.

Fear of defending the accused: When a public accusation is made, many friends and bystanders know that the victim is innocent, but they are afraid to say anything. Anyone who comes to the defense of the accused is obstructing the enactment of a collective ritual. Siding with the accused is truly an offense against the group, and it will be treated as such. If passions and fears are intense enough, people will even testify against their friends and family members.

One use of language is that it partially freed humans from "stimulus control.

But anyone who tells you that all societies, in all eras, should be using one particular moral matrix, resting on one particular configuration of moral foundations, is a fundamentalist of one sort or another.

The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights. But at the same time, it offers a valuable perspective from which we can understand and critique some of the ugly parts of secular societies.

When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn't protect somebody from harm, then it can't be morally justified. It's just a social convention.

The controlled system allows people to think about long-term goals and thereby escape the tyranny of the here-and-now, the automatic triggering of temptation by the sight of tempting objects.

The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy (i.e. moral concerns about individuals harming, oppressing, or cheating other individuals). It is broader — including the ethics of community and divinity— in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies.

No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.