being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none.
intellectually understanding how to change your behavior doesn’t change your behavior.
Your Consciousness Car becomes a Clown Car when your Thinking Brain has completely capitulated to your Feeling Brain, when your life’s pursuits are determined purely by self-gratification, when truth warps into a cartoon of self-serving assumptions, when all beliefs and principles are lost in a sea of nihilism.
Economic prosperity outran human impulses.
The overindulgence of emotion leads to a crisis of hope, but so does the repression of emotion. 27 The person who denies his Feeling Brain numbs himself to the world around him. By rejecting his emotions, he rejects making value judgments, that is, deciding that one thing is better than another. As a result, he becomes indifferent to life and the results of his decisions. He struggles to engage with others. His relationships suffer.
Equalization is present in every experience because the drive to equalize is emotion itself.
This desire for equalization underlies our sense of justice. It’s been codified throughout the ages into rules and laws, such as the Babylonian king Hammurabi’s classic “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” or the biblical Golden Rule, “Do unto others what you would have done unto you.” In evolutionary biology, it’s known as “reciprocal altruism,” 11 and in game theory, it’s called a “tit for tat” strategy.
we look back and wonder how we ever spent so much time caring about such a silly, trivial thing, why we wasted so much energy on issues and causes that didn’t matter.
These pangs of regret or embarrassment are good; they signify growth.
A person who believes he deserves special treatment because of how great he is isn’t so different from someone who believes she deserves special treatment because of how shitty she is.
We all tend to believe that we’re more honest and ethical than we actually are. 24 We will each, given the chance, delude ourselves into believing that what’s good for us is also good for everyone else.
Your early experiences become your core values,
The only way to change our values is to have experiences contrary to our values.
I still thought stuff like this was about reason and evidence, not feelings and values. And values cannot be changed through reason, only through experience.
We are the most impressionable when things are at their worst. 11 When our life is falling apart, it signifies that our values have failed us, and we’re grasping in the dark for new values to replace them.
starving people will believe anything if it will keep them fed.
Some people’s God Value is themselves—or, rather, their own pleasure and empowerment. This is narcissism: the religion of self-aggrandizement. 21 These people place their faith in their own superiority and deservedness.
supernatural beliefs can never be proven or disproven.
Interpersonal religions give us hope that another human being will bring us salvation and happiness, that one individual (or group of individuals) is superior to all others.