Quotes About Society

Como muitos já notaram, a forma que a inovação assume no capitalismo é a simulação contínua do novo, enquanto as relações de poder e de controle existentes permanecem, na prática, as mesmas.

Of course, no individual can ever be shopping, gaming, working, blogging, downloading, or texting 24/7. However, since no moment, place, or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume, or exploit networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life.

24/7 has produced an atrophy of the individual patience and deference that are essential to any form of direct democracy: the patience to listen to others, to wait one's turn to speak.

A people are not made for rulers, but rulers for a people.

The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other, is by music. When I would form in my mind an idea of a society in the highest degree happy, I think of them as expressing their love, their joy, and the inward concord and harmony and spiritual beauty of their souls by sweetly singing to each other.

Government is necessary to defend communities from miseries from within themselves; from the prevalence of intestine discord, mutual injustice and violence; the members of the society continually making a prey one of another, without any defence one from another.

Almost all the prosperity of a public society and civil community does, under God, depend on their rulers. They are like the main springs or wheels in a machine that keep every part in their due motion, and are in the body politic, as in the vitals in the body natural, and as the pillars and the foundation in a building.

Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.

Durkheim frequently criticized his contemporaries, such as Freud, who tried to explain morality and religion using only the psychology of individuals and their pairwise relationships. (God is just a father figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society.

If you take home one souvenir from this part of the tour, may I suggest that it be a suspicion of moral monists. Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places—particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation. Human societies are complex; their needs and challenges are variable.

Putting this all together, it makes sense that WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That's the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.

We have paid a price for our inclusiveness, but but we have bought ourselves a more humane society, with greater opportunity for racial minorities, women, gay people, the handicapped, and others - that is, for most people. And even if some people think the price was too steep, we can't go back, either to a pre-consumer society or to ethnically homogeneous enclaves. All we can do is search for ways that we might reduce our anomie without excluding large classes of people.

To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words.

Yet most of the Indian subjects—even the five-year-old children—said that these actions were wrong, universally wrong, and unalterably wrong. Indian practices related to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues, not social conventions, and there were few differences between the adults and children within each city.

Darwin, writing in Victorian England, shared Glaucon's view (from aristocratic Athens) that people are obsessed with their reputations.

Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD).

WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That's the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.

I believe it is dangerous for the ethic of divinity to supersede the ethic of autonomy in the governance of a diverse modern democracy. However, I also believe that life in a society that entirely ignored the ethic of divinity would be ugly and unsatisfying.

Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society."46

los grupos crean seres sobrenaturales no para explicar el universo, sino para poner orden en sus sociedades.

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?

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

The consequences of a generation unable or disinclined to engage with ideas that make them uncomfortable are dire for society