“If you show up at the gym 5 days in a row—even for 2 minutes—you're casting votes for your new identity. You’re not worried about getting in shape. Youre focused on becoming the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts”
2. “social anxiety is overwhelmingly common. Natural selection shaped us to care enormously what other people think..We constantly monitor how much others value us..Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others”
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents...Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without a believe in a devil.”
"if politics becomes a morality pageant, then the contestants have an incentive to keep problems intact...politics becomes a forum to show off moral qualities...people will be dedicated to activism for its own sake, as a vehicle to preen"
“Across diverse cultures, a man who lives in the house with another man’s children is about 60 times more likely than the biological father to kill those children.”
"In this ritual, members of a group compete for status and show their loyalty by how vicious they can be to an 'outsider.' Pleading, fighting, passivity will be interpreted as proof of 'otherness' and justification to escalate."
Our Kids by Robert Putnam
Children born to unmarried mothers
Upper class in 1977: 5%
Working class in 1977: 22%
Upper class in 2007: 10%
Working class in 2007: 65%
Soviet authorities purged those who were "too independent, too influential, along with those who were too well-to-do, too intelligent, too noteworthy...Thus the population was shaken up, forced into silence, left without any possible leaders of resistance"
"All organisms are shaped to behave in ways that increase fitness even if that decreases health and happiness...Our emotions benefit our genes far more than they do us." amzn.to/2ObRVYK
“when a chimpanzee learns an effective way to crack nuts open as a member of one group and then switches to a new group that uses a less effective strategy, it will avoid using the superior nut cracking method just to blend in with the rest of the chimps” amzn.to/3eKu26n
“Researchers studied polygynous households in more than 50 different cultures..co-wives engage in some of the most intense violence that occurs between women..A woman and her children do better when she is in a strong monogamous relationship with a man” amzn.to/2NmNxWu
“habits form based on frequency, not time. One common question is ‘How long does it take to build a new habit?’ But what people should be asking is ‘How many does it take to form a new habit?’ That is, how many repetitions are required?” amzn.to/3eKu26n
"those who lost jobs were more likely to kill themselves in the subsequent year than those who had not lost jobs...effect was particularly strong for men: those who lost jobs were 2-3 times more likely to have killed themselves"
“The standard way to tell it a drug will be an effective antidepressant is to see if it makes an animal persist in useless efforts. The Porsolt test measures how long a rat swims when dropped in a beaker of water. Rats on Prozac swim longer.” amzn.to/3aH7Bzt
“We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility..adherents have a strong sense of liberation even though they live in an atmosphere of strict adherence..this sense of liberation comes from having escaped an untenable individual existence” amzn.to/39iSqJP
"Enforcing monogamy causes dissatisfaction. Allowing sex with others arouses jealousy...Most cultures have emphasized controlling sexuality to preserve relationships. Now, some are trying to control attachments to preserve sexual opportunities” amzn.to/3pkxcCk
"Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, Alexander envied Hercules, who never existed...get away from envy by avoiding comparisons w/ those you imagine, perhaps falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself"
"having worked as a doctor in some of the poorest countries...I have little hesitation in saying the mental, cultural, emotional, impoverishment of the Western underclass is the greatest of any large group of people I've encountered"
"getting married cuts a man's chances of committing a crime by half, both for property crimes and for violent crimes...not only did a man's likelihood of committing a crime go up after a divorce...it also increased after his wife passed away"
Codes of the Underworld
"Friends, young men especially, often salute one another by resorting to abusive epithets...the ritual tests the solidity of friendship, for if the target bore a grudge, such lighthearted abuse could not be delivered without causing a reaction"
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Fertility among college-educated women hasn't changed much since a generation ago. Fertility collapse is among poor women. In 1994, the average age of a first-time mother without a university degree was 20. Today, two-thirds of women without degrees in their 20s have no children.
A generation ago, a poor woman would have children with a man in the hope that this would lead to marriage and family. This seldom happened. Those children witnessed this failure, absorbed its lessons, grew up, and now are simply not having kids.
Wrong. They're expensive. Takes yrs to cultivate an understanding of them; to keep up with them, to express them without error. Helps to be immersed in affluence from birth. This is why Bourdieu, Fussell, Fitzgerald etc wrote real mobility is something of a myth.
Saying defund the police in 2024 is like wearing Canada Goose in 2019. You reveal yourself as behind the fashion; a wannabe; an arriviste. Cringe. etc. Gotta be close to the source of the trends (typically elite institutions). Requires money, connections, cultural capital etc.
Luxury beliefs are expensive for the believer to acquire (money, connections, education, habitus, cultural capital, etc.) and costless to express.
1. On Tinder, women in their twenties are roughly twice as likely to swipe right (“like”) for the same man if he has a master's degree compared with a bachelor's degree.
2. Sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) is a stronger predictor of happiness than socioeconomic status. This finding held up after controlling for gender, ethnicity, and extraversion.
3. From Thomas Sowell’s book Vision of the Anointed: “The family is inherently an obstacle to schemes for central control...Engels’ first draft of the Communist Manifesto included a deliberate undermining of family...Marx was astute enough to leave that out of the final version."
1. In contentious disputes with another person, a man is nearly twice as likely to apologize if his adversary is a woman and 3X more likely to physically attack if his adversary is a man.
2. Despite being only 1.2 percent of the population, psychopaths commit 30 to 40 percent of all violent crimes.
3. When two women are engaged in conversation, they usually face each other. But when two men are engaged in friendly conversation, they almost always stand at an angle of about 120 degrees, so that they are nearly standing side-by-side. This is because typically the only time men stare straight at each other is when they are about to engage verbal or physical conflict.
Lots of discussion at the sexual revolution debate about whether the revolution failed men, or failed women, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know. Too depressing a topic.
The sexual revolution did not fail— it succeeded in its aim: more freedom. Today people (esp women, are less happy but more free. What’s more important—happiness or freedom? For adults, freedom. Better for people to have the ability to choose badly than have no choice at all.
But children lack the maturity to make good choices, so for kids happiness is more important than freedom.
So what’s more important, happiness for children, or freedom for adults? Our society has decided, and there’s no going back.