Elijah Broadbent

“It takes a tribe to raise a human.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Perhaps one reason why people – especially neo-Marxists – are coy about the precise comparisons they are making is that the comparisons they would cite (Venezuela, Cuba, Russia) would reveal the deeper underbelly of their ideology and the true reasons for the negative accounting of the West. But most often the question ‘Compared to what?’ will elicit only the fact that the utopia with which our society is being compared has not yet come about.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“The mystery is how a [theory] that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it. Many scholars have surely thought at one time or another of stories such as [the above examples], and casually noted that these stories did not jibe with utility theory. But they did not pursue the idea to the point of saying, “This theory is seriously wrong because it ignores the fact that utility depends on the history of one’s wealth, not only on present wealth.” As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert observed, disbelieving is hard work, and System 2 is easily tired.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow