Vanity and Virtue: The Federalist Papers’ Insight into Human Nature
James Madison pinpointed the root cause of violent factionalism: the boundless desires and varying abilities of people to acquire, as Alexander Hamilton described in Federalist #12,
James Madison pinpointed the root cause of violent factionalism: the boundless desires and varying abilities of people to acquire, as Alexander Hamilton described in Federalist #12,
original Olympic Games
Deuteronomy: “neither exalting himself above other members of the community nor turning aside from the commandment, either to the right or to the left.”
Our intense co-evolution for desire has led to our signature inclination for worship
Charismatic Tyrant
Lincoln: “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
“this binding force has been the emergence of laws, which were then disseminated by common languages to ever larger populations. “
Charles S. Sherrington: “millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern”
Shakespeare: “Life’s but a walking shadow”
Our complex communication and understanding depend on our uniquely evolved cooperative interactions.
Darwin: “Language is the instinctive tendency to acquire an art.”
Sonnet 73: As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
It is truly as if dogs live inside our mind. In this same way, our human ancestors lived within the mind of the groups that domesticated them.
Because these newly acquired traits all enhance the capacity of this burgeoning organism to survive, it is transformed into a subject with the intention to survive, and in the process has achieved the rudiments of mind.
Though emotions and motivations are shaped by family and social environments, our focus here is on the genetic aspects subject to natural selection, including sexual, social, and group selection.
cellphone users push start button below Monogamy Facts: Approximately 85-95% of birds and 3-5% of mammals are monogamous. Among primates, about 15% are monogamous (Díaz-Muñoz, 2013). Monogamous social systems began evolving in some primates around 16 million years ago, emerging from promiscuous mating systems similar to those of chimpanzees and bonobos (Opie, 2012). Monogamy typically …
Belief, in the Enlightenment sense, became an individual cognitive stance rather than a communal act of trust and loyalty.
“God” is the principle that creates the universe by bringing unity out of the state of multiplicity known as matter. —John F. Haught
Vaclav Haval: The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.
Hand Ax: these diurnal chains of communal functioning wove an unbroken fabric for 50 thousand generations across the expanse of entire continents.