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Commonplace Book:

Latest Quotes

These are the latest additions to my commonplace book.

“Always difficult decisions needing to be made”

Human affairs were so messy. You could do your best to lead a quiet life, to keep out of unnecessary conflict, to put in your forty years or whatever it was of working to the best of your ability without creating too many ripples, but there were always difficult decisions needing to be made . And however hard you tried, there would be times when you could not avoid causing pain to others, because pain and disappointment seemed an inevitable concomitant of human life. The moment you accepted any promotion, any slight advantage over those below you in the pecking order, you had to accept that you might have to do things that others would prefer you not to do — make rulings that would dash the hopes of others, give one person advantage over another, make people do things they would rather not do. All this came with seniority; all this came with working in a hierarchical organization; all this came with simply being human.

Alexander McCall Smith, 2022 from the book The Man with the Silver Saab

© 2022 Alexander McCall Smith

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“The main cause of capitalism's problems is overpopulation”

Despite its successes, and perhaps because of them, capitalism created, or could not prevent the creation of, the two problems that now threaten its survival: enormous economic inequalities both between and within countries, and the largely worsening if not the destruction of the natural environment. As we have analyzed in a previous chapter, the main cause of these problems is overpopulation in relation to the resources provided by the Earth.

Theodore P. Lianos, 2024 from the book Capitalism, Degrowth and the Steady State Economy Debating Future Economic Models

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“You create a world of your own”

In 1983, when he [Ken Thompson] and [Dennis] Richie won the Turing award, which has been called the Nobel prize of computer science, Thompson explained, “I am a programmer. On my 1040 form, that is what I put down as my occupation.” He has called programming an addiction of sorts, and it was in the Berkeley computer center that he got hooked. Sitting in the Bell Labs offices years later, he described the appeal as having all the craftsman’s satisfactions of making things, without the cost and trouble of procuring the materials. “It’s like building something where you don’t have to order the cement,” Thompson said. “You create a world of your own, your own environment, and you never leave this room.”

Ken Thompson, 2001 from the book Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists, and Iconoclasts-- the Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution

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“Human psychology will never be fully explained”

It’s all the reasons why human psychology will never be fully explained or pictured by scientific investigation — there are just too many variables, too many vectors pressing in on every incident. It’s the reason why storytelling and songwriting and poetry-making will always be so much more effective organizers and vehicles of our experience than studies in social science.

Adam Gopnik, 2024 from the book All That Happiness Is

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“Play is a thing on its own”

The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

Johan Huizinga, 1938 from the book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture

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“Great public space is a kind of magical good”

Most things that people buy in stores give them a lot of satisfaction the moment they buy them. But after a few days, that satisfaction decreases, and months later, it completely melts away. But great public space is a kind of magical good. It never ceases to yield happiness. It’s almost happiness itself.

Enrique Peñalosa, 2013 from Happy City: Transforming our Lives through Urban Design

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“What we need for happiness”

And what are our needs for happiness? We need to walk, just as birds need to fly. We need to be around other people. We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And most of all, we need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of equality.

Enrique Peñalosa, 1997

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“A myth that a person need only do inner work”

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself … The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

Christopher Alexander, 1979 from the book The Timeless Way of Building

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“Our tribal instincts are not bugs”

Especially in a time of powerful and shifting politics, we shouldn’t ignore our quintessential human capacities to bond with our communities. Nor should we delude ourselves that the thin gruel of rationality and universalism will mobilize people to accomplish desired goals.

I write as a convert to the advocacy of tribalism. I used to consider group-related instincts as a detrimental force in human affairs. I was raised (as you may have been too) to see rationality, creativity, and morality as the hallmarks of humanity, and I viewed conformity, status-seeking, and traditionalism as fallibilities. But based on what I’ve learned from decades as a behavioral scientist, I’ve come to see my former humanities worldview as naive, or at least incomplete. Our tribal instincts are not bugs in the system that hinder an otherwise intelligent species. They are the distinguishing features of our kind that enabled its evolutionary ascent—and still drive many of its greatest achievements today. They are not human foibles that hold us back; they are human superpowers that create our distinctive cultures.

Michael Morris, 2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together

© 2024 Michael Morris

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“Tribal living is what made us truly human”

In Tribal, I hope to reclaim the original meaning of the word as community enabled by shared culture. This is how humankind first transcended the narrow bonds of kith and kin to accomplish bigger things in clans. And it’s how we later ventured into exchange and collaboration with strangers in the broader networks called “tribes.” In these nested groups, our forebears first felt the empowering experience of access to myriad individuals and ideas, the ongoing experiment that we call society. It was an engine for group change and differentiation. By showing that tribal living is the source of cultural change and progress, I hope to put to rest any lingering association of tribes with stasis and primitivism. Tribal living is what made us truly human.

Michael Morris, 2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together

© 2024 Michael Morris

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“Cultural complexity began to expand exponentially”

Once all three tribal instincts [the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct] were in place, in the last hundred thousand years, our forebears began to thrive and to live in recognizably human ways. Within an evolutionary eyeblink, they suddenly had much more sophisticated tools, weapons, arts, and rituals. After millions of years of achingly slow change, cultural complexity began to expand exponentially. The pools of shared knowledge in human communities began to accumulate across generations and adapt to local ecologies. This tribe-level learning (not heightened individual brainpower) is the secret to how our kind adapted to widely differing climates and terrains. Humans became the earth’s dominant species, threatened only by our own success.

Michael Morris, 2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together

© 2024 Michael Morris

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“Three Layers of Tribal Instincts”

In this book, I peel the onion of our special human talent for sharing with groups to distinguish three layers of “tribal instincts.” They originated in the Stone Age, but we can still recognize these evolved systems in our minds and hearts today. Our sideways glances at classmates, coworkers, and neighbors are part of the peer instinct, as is our impulse to mesh with their patterns in our everyday inferences and actions. Our upward-directed fascination with celebrities, CEOs, MVPs, and other elites comes from the hero instinct, as do our aspirations for glory and our drive to contribute. Our backward-gazing nostalgia is part of the ancestor instinct, as is the comfort we find in traditions and the duty we feel to maintain them. These instincts are like three characters inside every person: the conformist who seeks belonging and understanding, the contributor who dreams of esteem and tribute, and the traditionalist who cherishes continuity. Each of these systems has its fallibilities, but—as we’ll see—each generally guides people in adaptive directions.

Michael Morris, 2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together

© 2024 Michael Morris

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“Humans are the tribal animal”

Humans … cooperate based on kinship and friendship, but we also have more powerful forms of social glue that other species lack. From the early Stone Age, we started evolving specialized brain systems that facilitated sharing knowledge in groups. If someone in your foraging band figured out how to dislodge coconuts from a tree, you would learn by watching, and soon the whole group would share the skill. Then you could work in closer coordination with each other by following this shared script. In this way, groups living in different ecologies developed different pools of common knowledge: different cultures. Members of each group gained increased mutual understanding; even if the topic wasn’t coconuts, the common ground of shared coconut expertise could help in learning other survival-relevant skills. Group membership became increasingly manifest in behavior, making peers more similar, predictable, and sympathetic. Our forebears began to experience the elevating sense of “Us,” an expansion of identity beyond close kinship and direct friendship to a broader group. In these larger clans, they began to highlight their membership through distinctive styles of dress and self-adornment. At the same time, human brains kept evolving to share new kinds of knowledge, such as reputation in these broader groups, all of which further boosted our fitness as social animals. In time, interactions using new forms of knowledge, such as ritual, coalesced across clans to forge broad networks of sharing in mates, resources, and knowledge. Humans began feeling solidarity with these large communities (thousands of other people living in small groups nested within larger groups) held together by the glue of common cultural knowledge. This form of social organization is not a hive or a troop but a tribe.

Surviving through sharing knowledge in these solidaristic, nested groups is tribal living. With apologies to Aristotle, it’s misleading to call humans “the social animal.” We are more accurately “the tribal animal.”

Michael Morris, 2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together

© 2024 Michael Morris

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“Culture and psyche are inexorably intertwined”

…by the late twentieth century, it became hard to miss that cultural patterns — of societies and of individuals — were in flux. Across the world, societies were evolving as globalized generations developed new lifestyles through selective retention of their parents’ ways and heightened borrowing from other traditions. Individuals were migrating more than ever but not always assimilating — instead, maintaining multiple cultural worldviews that they switched between situationally. Scholars began to appreciate that it was not simply collective institutions or individual psychologies that determined culture, but the interplay between them. Cultural institutions shape the individual’s mind, and the individual’s mind shapes cultural institutions. Culture and psyche are inexorably intertwined.

Michael Morris, 2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together

© 2024 Michael Morris

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“The Three Tribal Instincts”

For a better understanding of the partisan conflict straining US democracy and the role of our evolved group psychology within it, we can do better by focusing on the three tribal instincts that we have come to know in this book. These are psychological systems for meshing with peers, helping the clan, and maintaining the tribe. These drives have helped human groups survive from the Stone Age to today because they guide constructive collaboration.

Michael Morris, 2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together

© 2024 Michael Morris

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“Rationality is not the strong suit of our species”

My recommendations are not the typical tips from an academic about how to encourage more rational decisions. I think that rationality is not the strong suit of our species. We are Homo tributus, not Homo economicus. Certainly, tribal instincts are part of the problem in many pressing conflicts, but they also can be — and, I think, have to be — part of the solution.

Michael Morris, 2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together

© 2024 Michael Morris

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