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That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.
there’s one lesson to be drawn from the nocebo effect, it’s that ideas are never merely ideas. We are what we believe. We find what we go looking for. And what we predict, comes to pass.
The news, according to dozens of studies, is a mental health hazard.
‘there seems to be none or even a negative relationship between news and reality.’
‘News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.’
Belyaev’s theory was that people are domesticated apes. That for tens of thousands of years, the nicest humans had the most kids. That the evolution of our species, in short, was predicated on ‘survival of the friendliest’.
If Neanderthals were a super-fast computer, we were an old-fashioned PC – with wi-fi. We were slower, but better connected.
People are social animals, but we have a fatal flaw: we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.
the image cooked up by Hollywood has about as much to do with real violence as pornography has with real sex.
‘There’s a failure to recognise that not only problems but also solutions can grow exponentially,’ Professor Boersema told me. ‘There’s no guarantee they will. But they can.’
The sad truth is that empathy and xenophobia go hand in hand. They’re two sides of the same coin.
Just as most of us would instantly go vegetarian if forced to butcher a cow, most soldiers become conscientious objectors when the enemy gets too close.
Much as mass production once sidelined traditional craftspeople, God lost his job to bureaucrats.
when you’re subjected to low expectations, you won’t perform at your best, which further diminishes others’ expectations and thus further undermines your performance.
‘In my experience, managers tend to have very few ideas. They get their jobs because they fit into a system, because they follow orders. Not because they’re big visionaries. They take some “high-performance leadership” courses and suddenly think they’re a game changer, an innovator.’
‘School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.’
remember that cynicism is just another word for laziness. It’s an excuse not to take responsibility. Because if you believe most people are rotten, you don’t need to get worked up about injustice. The world is going to hell either way.
