Kadir

“This progression is a manifestation of synaptic pruning. When our brains are growing, we make more neurons than we need. As we navigate our lives, solving problems and adapting to different environments, we use certain networks of neurons more than others. These commonly used networks become more numerous and better able to compute information; then they streamline their connections and become more efficient. By the time we are adults, our brain networks are stripped down and specialized. We lose plasticity, but our cognition becomes better at solving the problems we are most likely to face.”
― Brian Hare, Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity

“In the Russian model, investigative reporting must be marginalized so that news can become a daily spectacle. The point of spectacle is to summon the emotions of both supporters and detractors and to confirm and strengthen polarization; every news cycle creates euphoria or depression, and reinforces a conviction that politics is about friends and enemies at home, rather than about policy that might improve the lives of citizens. Trump governed just as he had run for office: as a producer of outrage rather than as a formulator of policy.”
― Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

“Demoralized by their inability to change their station in life, they must accept that the meaning of politics lies not in institutional reform but in daily emotion. They must stop thinking about a better future for themselves, their friends, and their families, and prefer the constant invocation of a proud past. At the top and throughout society, material inequality creates the experiences and the sentiments that can be transformed into a politics of eternity.”
― Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

“One can record that these people were not fascists or Nazis or members of a gay international conspiracy or Jewish international conspiracy or a gay Nazi Jewish international conspiracy, as Russian propaganda suggested to various target audiences. One can mark the fictions and contradictions. This is not enough. These utterances were not logical arguments or factual assessments, but a calculated effort to undo logic and factuality. Once the intellectual moorings were loosed, it was easy for Russians (and Europeans, and Americans) to latch on to well-funded narratives provided by television, but it was impossible to work one’s way towards an understanding of people in their own setting: to grasp where they were coming from, what they thought they were doing, what sort of future they imagined for themselves.”
― Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America