Quotes from Robert Wright

In sum: you can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success, at least as success is conventionally defined.

the basic evolutionary logic common to people everywhere is opaque to introspection. Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves. As Freud saw, we are oblivious to our deepest motivations—but in ways more chronic and complete (and even, in some cases, more grotesque) than he imagined.

Darwin, on grounds such as this, believed that the human species is a moral one—that, in fact, we are the only moral animal. "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them," he wrote. "We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity.

The old Rolling Stones lyric "I can't get no satisfaction" is, according to Buddhism, the human condition.

In fact, one of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we'd often be better off.

When you're feeling either very good or very bad about yourself, it probably means that a large body of evidence is being hidden from view. The most truthful times come between the extremes.

the thoughts are arising, and there's a strong habit of mind to be identified with them. So it's not so much they have the intent to reach out and capture us, but rather there's this very strong habitual identification. This is how we've lived our lives, and it takes practice to try and break this conditioning- to be mindful of the thought, rather than be lost in it.

If one function of low self-esteem is to keep high-status people satisfied with your deference, then its level, strictly speaking, should depend on how much deference it takes to do that; you may, in the presence of someone powerful, feel a deeper humility—about your intelligence, for example—than an objective observer would see as warranted.

The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.

In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.

If people are basically selfish -and they are- then asking them to work hard yet earn no more than their unproductive neighbor is asking more than they'll rarely give. But we already know that; communism has failed.

After all, true brotherly love is unconditional compassion; it harbors utter doubt about the validity of harming anyone, however repugnant their behavior. And in a society where no one gets punished for anything, repugnant behavior will grow.

As a small nation buffeted by great powers, Israel often had to choose between war against potent enemies and a peace that many Israelites found humiliating. And the resultant hostility toward foreign powers was only intensified among commoners who resented the way cosmopolitan elites profited by befriending Israel's oppressors

United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities—cities, not military bases—and drew virtually no protest from Americans.

It may seem seem cynical to see all religion as basically self-serving, and indeed the idea has been put pithily by a famous cynic. H.L. Mencken said of religion, "Its single function is to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to him.

The truth depends on what we say the truth is. If men are told that the impulse to philander is deeply "natural," essentially irrepressible, then the impulse—for those men, at least— may indeed be so. In Darwin's day, though, men were told something else: that animal impulses are formidable foes but can, with constant and arduous effort, be defeated. This then became, for many men, the truth. Free will was, in an important sense, created by their belief in it.

The great American psychologist William James wrote, "Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw." In that sense, he observed, "our immediate family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone.

On the other hand, we do often pursue such things with, at the very least, an unbalanced view of the future. We spend more time envisioning the perks that a promotion will bring than envisioning the headaches it will bring.

Here is one scholar's description of life among the Navajo: "No one who actively seeks power is to be trusted. Leaders arise out of example and emulation. If someone is successful at growing corn, he is emulated and to that extent is a leader. If someone knows many verses to a curing chant, he is respected for that accomplishment and his status as a 'singer' is considerable. Politicking, handshaking Ã¢â'¬Â¦ have no place in traditional Navajo society.

It is no coincidence that demons and drug dealers often use the same opening line ("Just try a little; it will feel good"), or that religious people often see demons in drugs. For habituation to any goal—sex or power, say—is literally an addictive process, a growing dependence on the biological chemicals that make these things gratifying.

natural selection doesn't even care about our short-term happiness.

Some of our mental machinery is exquisitely geared to that function, including the essence-preservation machinery that makes our enemies more readily blameworthy for bad behavior than our allies and makes it easy to witness the suffering of our enemies with indifference.

Here, as with retribution, there is often a kind of symmetry: the more intense the stress and the more hopeless the situation, the more fabulous the coming times that are anticipated.

The pre-bite dopamine blast you're now getting is the promise of more bliss, and the post-bite drop in dopamine is, in a way, the breaking of the promise—or, at least, it's a kind of biochemical acknowledgment that there was some overpromising. To the extent that you bought the promise—anticipated greater pleasure than would be delivered by the consumption itself—you have been, if not deluded in the strong sense of that term, at least misled.