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

“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.”

“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." ”

“From cradle to grave we are surrounded by corporations and things made by corporations. What exactly are corporations, and how did they come to cover the Earth? The word itself comes from corpus, Latin for "body." A corporation is, quite literally, a superorganism.”

“Just seeing someone else smile activates some of the same neurons as when you smile. The other person is effectively smiling in your brain, which makes you happy and likely to smile, which in turn passes the smile into someone else's brain.”

“In humans the mirror neuron system is found in brain regions that correspond directly to those studied in macaques. But in humans the mirror neurons have a much stronger connection to emotion-related areas of the brain—first to the insular cortex, and from there to the amygdala and other limbic areas. People feel each other's pain and joy to a much greater degree than do any other primates.”