Xinchun Li

“There is also a more cynical explanation for that proliferation. One way to reconcile poor people to their plight is to convince them that material pleasures aren’t fun anyway. Exhortations to forswear indulgence could be simply an instrument of social control, of oppression. So too with Jesus’ assurance that in the afterlife the “first shall be last and the last shall be first”—it sounds a bit like a way of recruiting low-status people to his growing army, a recruitment that may come at their own expense, as they cease to struggle for worldly success. Religion, in this view, has always been the opiate of the masses.”
― Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

“But whether such pragmatism can outweigh real truth—whether a self- fulfilling “belief” in free will can survive the ever-more-manifest dubiousness of free will as a metaphysical doctrine—is another question altogether.
And, anyway, even if this artifice succeeds, and the idea of “blame” remains conveniently robust, we are back to the challenge of confining it to useful proportions: blaming people only when blame serves the greater good, not letting self-righteousness get carried away (as it naturally tends to do). And, meanwhile, we will still face the deeper challenge of reconciling necessary moral sanction with the limitless compassion that is always, in fact, appropriate.”
― Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

“Another antidote to despair over the ultimate baseness of human motivation is, oddly enough, gratitude. If you don’t feel thankful for the somewhat twisted moral infrastructure of our species, then consider the alternative. Given the way natural selection works, there were only two possibilities at the dawn of evolution: (a) that eventually there would be a species with conscience and sympathy and even love, all grounded ultimately in genetic self-interest; (b) that no species possessing these things would ever exist.”
― Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

“This question goes way beyond my own little episodes of transcending overcaffeination and melancholy. It applies, in principle, to all negative feelings: fears, anxieties, loathing, self-loathing, and more. Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.”
― Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology