Rod Olson

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What Is Real?: Th...
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How to Change a M...
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"Love this book! It confirms what’s proven: our memories aren’t reality—they’re easily manipulated, distorted, & now can be erased or reengineered to create a new you.

Proving we don’t have a soul or spirit is simply how our minds formed. That’s it. Full stop.

I wish people would face reality—clinging to things that aren’t real—MAGA, the GOP, religion, and other fairy tales—is destroying society."
Jan 25, 2026 01:47AM

 
Inside the U.S. G...
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See all 20 books that Rod is reading…
Book cover for Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997, Volume 2, Centrifugal Forces, 1975–80
When I was going down to get my lunch today Brother [David B.] Haight of the Quorum of Twelve was just coming out. He stopped me and said, “Say, I have been thumbing through that new book of yours, The Story of the Latter-day Saints. It ...more
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René Girard
“The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions.

This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims.

...

The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.

Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious...

Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.”
René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

Renzo Novatore
“The Socialists have found good the equality, and bad the inequality. Good the servants and bad the tyrants. I crossed the threshold of good and evil in order to live my life intensely. I live today and can not await tomorrow. The wait is of peoples and of humanity, so could not be my affair.”
Renzo Novatore, The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore

Daniel Kahneman
“It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman
“Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative. Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.”
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman
“Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

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