Ryan

“When we donate to a good cause, it “says” to our associates, “Look, I’m willing to spend my resources for the benefit of others. I’m playing a positive-sum, cooperative game with society.” This helps explain why generosity is so important for those who aspire to leadership. No one wants leaders who play zero-sum, competitive games with the rest of society. If their wins are our losses, why should we support them? Instead we want leaders with a prosocial orientation, people who will look out for us because we’re all in it together.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“do well to turn Matthew 7:1 on its head: “Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“LIVE OR DIE': the graffiti message on the pier at Santa Monica is mysterious, because we really have no choice between life and death. If you live, you live, if you die, you die. It is like saying 'be yourself, or don't be!' It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic. You could read it to mean that you should live intensely or else disappear, but that is banal. Following the model of 'payor die!', 'your money or your life!', it would become ' your life or your life!'. Stupid, again, since you cannot exchange life for itself. And yet there is poetic force in this implacable tautology, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood. In the end, the lesson of this graffiti is perhaps: 'if you get more stupid than me, you die!”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“It is a wonderful quirk of our species that the incentives of social life don’t reward strictly ruthless behavior. Leaders who are too domineering are often penalized. Rampant lying and cheating are often caught and punished. Freeloaders frequently get the boot. At the same time, people are often positively rewarded—with friendship, social status, a better reputation—for their service to others. As if our oversized brains and hairless skin didn’t make us an uncanny enough species, our genes long ago decided that, in the relentless competition to survive and reproduce, their best strategy was to build ethical brains.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life