“Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines delusion as "a false conception and persistent belief unconquerable by reason in something that has no existence in fact." As an intuitionist, I'd say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion. It's the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the gods (for Plato) or that brings us beyond the "delusion" of believing in gods (for the New Atheists). The rationalist delusion is not just a claim about human nature. It's also a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power, and it usually comes along with a utopian program for raising more rational children.”
― The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
― The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.”
― The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit
― The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit
“If your moral matrix rests entirely on the Care and Fairness foundations, then it's hard to hear the sacred overtones in America's unofficial motto: E pluribus unum (from many, one). By "sacred", I mean... the ability to endow ideas, objects, and events, with infinite value, particularly those ideas, objects, and events that bind a group together into a single entity. The process of converting pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth. Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.”
― The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
― The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“Socialism is the fantastic younger brother of almost decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed; its efforts are, therefore, in the deepest sense reactionary. For it desires such an amount of state power as only despotism has possessed— indeed, it outdoes all the past, in that it aims at the complete annihilation of the individual, whom it deems an unauthorised luxury of nature, which is to be improved by it into an appropriate organ of the general community.”
― Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
― Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
“It is a misconception to think of the function or result of machines as primarily one of creating jobs. The real result of the machine is to increase production, to raise the standard of living, to increase economic welfare. It is no trick to employ everybody, even (or especially) in the most primitive economy. Full employment—very full employment; long, weary, back-breaking employment—is characteristic of precisely the nations that are the most retarded industrially. Where full employment already exists, new machines, inventions and discoveries cannot—until there has been time for an increase in population—bring more employment. They are likely to bring more unemployment (but this time I am speaking of voluntary and not involuntary unemployment) because people can now afford to work fewer hours, while children and the overaged no longer need to work.”
― Economics in One Lesson
― Economics in One Lesson
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