Al Owski’s Reviews > The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion > Status Update

“Atran and Henrich suggest that religions are sets of cultural innovations that spread to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative. Atran and Henrich argue that the cultural evolution of religion has been driven largely by competition among groups. Groups that were able to put their by-product gods to some good use had an advantage over groups that failed to do so, and so their ideas…spread.”

“When I began writing The Happiness Hypothesis, I believed that happiness came from within, as Buddha and the Stoic philosophers said …You'll never make the world conform to your wishes, so focus on changing yourself and your desires. But by the time I finished writing, I had changed my mind: Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others…”

“Creating a nation of multiple competing groups and parties was, in fact, seen by America's founding fathers as a way of preventing tyranny. More recently, research on social capital has demonstrated that bowling leagues, churches, and other kinds of groups, teams, and clubs are crucial for the health of individuals and of a nation.”

“When a…hive is scaled up to the size of a nation and is led by a dictator with an army at his disposal, the results are invariably disastrous. But that is no argument for removing or suppressing hives at lower levels. In fact, a nation that is full of hives is a nation of happy and satisfied people. It's not a very promising target for takeover by a demagogue offering people meaning in exchange for their souls.”

“But is that really such a bad thing overall, given how shallow our care for strangers is in the first place? Might the world be a better place if we could greatly increase the care people get within their existing groups and nations while slightly decreasing the care they get from strangers in other groups and nations?”

“Hiving comes naturally, easily, and joyfully to us. Its normal function is to bond dozens or at most hundreds of people together into communities of trust, cooperation, and even love. Those bonded groups may care less about outsiders than they did before their bonding—the nature of group selection is to suppress selfishness within groups to make them more effective at competing with other groups.”

“Fascist rallies, Ehrenreich notes, were nothing like this. They were spectacles, not festivals. They used awe to strengthen hierarchy and to bond people to the godlike figure of the leader. People at fascist rallies didn't dance, and they surely didn't mock their leaders. They stood around passively for hours … cheering wildly when the dear leader arrived and spoke to them.”

“Ehrenreich devotes a chapter of Dancing in the Streets to refuting this concern [fascism]. She notes that ecstatic dancing is an evolved biotechnology for dissolving hierarchy and bonding people to each other as a community. Ecstatic dancing, festivals, and carnivals invariably erase or invert the hierarchies of everyday life. Men dress as women, peasants pretend to be nobles, and leaders can be safely mocked.”

“Fascism is hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights. It's the doctrine of the nation as a superorganism, within which the individual loses all importance. … Any leader who tries to get people to forget themselves and merge into a team pursuing a common goal is flirting with fascism, no? Asking your employees to exercise together isn't that the sort of thing Hitler did at his Nuremberg rallies?”

“from Stewart Kyd's 1794 Treatise on the Law of Corporations: "[A corporation is] a collection of many individuals united into one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession under an artificial form, and vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual." ”