02UndatedThe president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
03UndatedReligiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring." (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
04UndatedThe most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
07UndatedBut if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual & ideological diversity.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
08UndatedExperiment participants asked to pick which politician looked more confident in a photograph picked the winner of the race two thirds of the time. This phenomenon held up even when they only glimpsed the photographs for a 10th of a second.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
10UndatedIt is not clear that married people are, on average, happier than those who never married, because unhappily married people are the least happy group of all and they pull down the average.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
11UndatedLoyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
12UndatedAsking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language―a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
14UndatedUnderstanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
15UndatedGroups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
16UndatedMoral 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.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
17UndatedThe mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
18UndatedYou can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
19UndatedThe strong version of the adversity hypothesis might be true, but only if we add caveats: For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
20UndatedIdealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path. People have little respect for rules; we respect the moral principles that underlie most rules. But when a moral mission and legal rules are incompatible, we usually care more about the mission.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
21UndatedThose who think money can't buy happiness just don't know where to shop … People would be happier and healthier if they took more time off and spent it with their family and friends, yet America has long been heading in the opposite direction. People would be happier if they reduced their commuting time, even if it meant living in smaller houses, yet American trends are toward even larger houses and ever longer commutes. People would be happier and healthier if they took longer vacations even if that meant earning less, yet vacation times are shrinking in the United States, and in Europe as well. People would be happier, and in the long run and wealthier, if they bought basic functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invested the money they saved for future consumption; yet, Americans and in particular spend almost everything they have – and sometimes more – on goods for present consumption, often paying a large premium for designer names and superfluous features.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
22UndatedBaumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls "the myth of pure evil." Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
23UndatedI quickly realized that there are two main kinds of diversity—demographic and moral. ... Once you make this distinction, you see that nobody can coherently even want moral diversity. If you are pro-choice on the issue of abortion, would you prefer that there be a wide variety of opinions and no dominant one? Or would you prefer that everyone agree with you and the laws of the land reflect that agreement? If you prefer diversity on an issue, the issue is not a moral issue for you; it is a matter of personal taste.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
24UndatedSacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.Jonathan Haidt / quote ↗
