“In our argument it was not that the Wars of Religion simply exhausted confessional and doctrinal disputes. Rather there was a transformation at the institutional level. The leading European states shifted away from identity rules towards more general rules. This shift was related to 19th-century historian Henry Sumner Maine’s discussion of the passage from status to contract: Status was imposed and ascriptive. Contracts, in contrast, are the outcome of voluntary choices. Status-based rules are invariably identity rules. Contracts provide the foundation for a system of general rules.
Moving from a fixed status to a contractual society helped set in motion a range of developments, including the growth of markets and a more extensive division of labor. But it had the unintended consequence of diminishing the political importance of religion, and this made liberalism feasible for the first time in history.”
“There’s a lot more to this book, but it all seems to be pointing at the same central, hard-to-describe idea. Something like “All progress comes from violations of the efficient market hypothesis, so you had better believe these are possible, and you had better get good at finding them.”
The book begins and ends with a celebration of contrarianism. Contrarians are the only people who will ever be able to violate the EMH. Not every weird thing nobody else is doing will earn you a billion dollars, but every billion-dollar plan has to involve a weird thing nobody else is doing.
[… But] When everybody is already trying to be weird, who wins?”
(Answer: watch the Lego Movie.)
Squad Leader TD-73028 Soliloquy (A Star Wars meets Shakespeare Short Film)
“COWEN: And where does it come from, the hostility toward extreme altruists? Is it people feeling envy or that they don’t measure up?
MACFARQUHAR: I think it comes from many, many sources, and I tried to unravel some of them in the book. I think it comes from a sense that is trickled down from many academic disciplines, that humans are fundamentally egotistical, and therefore, insofar as they are not, it must be some kind of pathology or perversion. Psychoanalysis is especially suspicious in that regard.”
“Humans are a social–we are social primates. Humans do not survive alone in nature. They die. They die almost immediately. The reason that we survive, and the reason in fact we thrive, is because we work in groups where the individual contributes to the common good and the group ensures the safety of the individual. And that basic reciprocal arrangement has allowed humans to thrive for hundreds of thousands of years. So, in a crisis, whatever the crisis may be, in a crisis–and I would argue that hunter, the hunter/gatherer economy is an ongoing low-level crisis of survival–in a crisis, people–and I’ve seen this in combat with soldiers–people put others first because their survival depends on the good will of others. There is no survival without the group. And so, all of a sudden, everyone is thinking in group terms. And you can see that in crisis after crisis in this country: 9/11 in New York, white, black, rich, poor–all those distinctions fell away in Manhattan right after 9/11. As a result, the suicide rate went down; after 9/11, the violent crime rate went down. People really stuck together, and they stopped making those ghastly distinctions of affluence and race that are such a curse on our society today.”
“One key is that the suicidal tendency of Protestants is more pronounced in areas with low church attendance. The strongest effect is thus more likely to be found in areas with little social integration rather than in areas with high devotion to the Protestant doctrine.
Finally, more contemporary data shows that, while Protestants still have a higher suicide rate than Catholics, it is highest among people without a religious affiliation who are not subject to theological doctrine.”
“Responses to someone’s vulnerability largely seem to depend on how others perceive that person beforehand. If she appears strong and capable before showing vulnerability, people are sympathetic; the vulnerability is humanizing, like that time Jennifer Lawrence tripped on her way to accept the Best Actress award at the 2013 Oscars. But if the person doesn’t seem competent, people are repelled; she really does seem like a mess, nothing beautiful about it.
The pratfall effect can be especially pronounced in the workplace, where, in America at least, there’s been an overall push for people to open up and be “authentic.” But if you haven’t established your competence first, showing vulnerability can damage your credibility.”
“In the movie version of this story, this man moves to an island to rediscover the good life, or figures out he loves woodworking and opens a shop. But that’s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive. You don’t fix burnout by going on vacation. You don’t fix it through “life hacks,” like inbox zero, or by using a meditation app for five minutes in the morning, or doing Sunday meal prep for the entire family, or starting a bullet journal. You don’t fix it by reading a book on how to “unfu*k yourself.” You don’t fix it with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or “anxiety baking,” or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.
The problem with holistic, all-consuming burnout is that there’s no solution to it. You can’t optimize it to make it end faster. You can’t see it coming like a cold and start taking the burnout-prevention version of Airborne. The best way to treat it is to first acknowledge it for what it is — not a passing ailment, but a chronic disease — and to understand its roots and its parameters.”
“Shinto is considered to be, at least in its origins, one expression of animism, the world’s oldest religion. Thus, we are left with Shinto as both a religion unique to Japan and an expression of the world’s oldest faith.”
“Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it — only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle.”
“What I call slaveholder religion isn’t exclusive to white Christians; it applies to anyone who says you can be saved without being caught up in creating the kingdom of God in this life and the life to come. Anyone who separated spiritual freedom and eternal security from the demands of justice in this life. But in the United States in 2018, it is manifesting itself as Christian nationalism.”