“And it seems to me that something goes badly wrong with representative democracy in polities that grow beyond somewhere in the range 5-15 million people; direct accountability vanishes and we end up with what I’ve termed the beige dictatorship….My feeling is that we’d be better served by a group of much smaller nations working in a loose confederation or treaty structure.”

“…a long series of philosophers and psychologists from the 17th century down to the present day have developed a range of concepts for understanding selfhood. At their most elaborate, they combine at least three dimensions: a range of desires rooted in the body; a tendency toward communal interaction with and relation to others; and a capacity for standing back from the world and oneself in a state of dispassionate reflection or observation.”

“This, then, is the world-view Ghostbusters offers in place of the Cthonic duality. As in Lovecraft we have a surface world of institutions, with a horror zone beneath—which, if you read human history, is not far from the truth. Many bodies lie buried beneath our marble facades. But if you press through the marble and the rot—which takes work, humility, courage, and a sense of humor—you’ll be able to connect with living breathing human beings.”

“After reading Haidt, I’ve stopped thinking of students as people who simply make choices about whether to pay attention, and started thinking of them as people _trying_ to pay attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of which is their own propensity towards involuntary and emotional reaction.”

“But this new efficiency has had serious downsides—not least in the mismatch between the self-gratifying power available to consumers and consumers’ ability to manage it all. Humans, it’s safe to say, were not designed for a world of such easy gratification. Decades of research suggest that our brains, adapted for a prehistoric world of scarce resources and infrequent opportunities, are wired to prioritize immediate rewards and costs and to disregard rewards and costs that occur in the future. This natural bias against the future, so essential for our ancestors, is an Achilles’ heel in a modern economy built around immediate pleasure and deferred pain. Nearly every consumer proposition today, from credit to fast food and entertainment to social media and online shopping, capitalizes on our anti-future bias: in all cases, we’re provided immediate pleasure, while any costs, whether financial, physical, or emotional, are deferred so seamlessly that they vanish from our perception.”