Allen Roberts > Recent Status Updates

A really fun, enjoyable read—and a much needed break from all the heavy nonfiction I’ve been immersed in lately…

“A society that fails to value communality—our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us—is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue.” p. 171

If only this book had been written 30 years ago, and I had read it then… oh, the trouble and darkness I could have avoided… 🫤

This is a book that anyone, anywhere can benefit from. This is nothing less than mind-blowing insight into human nature and our society.

If you’re a poli-sci person, you’ll love this book. Fascinating but academic.

“…[W]hat is considered normal and natural are established not by what is good for people, but what is expected of them, which traits and attitudes serve the maintenance of the culture. These are then enshrined as “human nature,” while deviations from them are seen as abnormal.” p. 120

…[T]he ideal of popular sovereignty plays much the same role in contemporary democratic ideology that the divine right of kings played in the monarchical era. It is a “quasi-religious commitment,” …a fiction providing legitimacy and stability to political systems whose actual workings are—and inevitably—less than divine.” p. 42

This book is brimming with astute observations of human psychology and its affect on physiology… Eye opening in so many ways!

“The case of quantum mechanics, then, is the perfect exemplification of the supremacy, in modern science, of Newton’s precept that, for the purposes of “experimental philosophy,” derivation of the observable is the only kind of explanation that counts.” p.135

“Science is driven onward by arguments between people who have made up their minds and want to convert or at least to confute their rivals. Opinion that runs hot-blooded ahead of scientific fact is the life force of scientific inquiry.” p.77

The story gets more interesting as it goes along… and more heartbreaking.

“Essentially, the power of any institution is predicated on followers who have been deceived.” p.209