Jonathan Haidt Quotes

The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.

The more tightly packed the group, the greater the need for strict social ranks and orders.

Religion supports and perpetuates the social organization it reflects.

Primitive societies without religion have never been found.

The rehabilitation of order as a universal principle, however, suggested at the same time that orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular.

I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.

I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

Folklore provides a socially sanctioned outlet for the discussion of the forbidden and taboo.

Caste may be bad. Caste may lead to conduct so gross as to be called man's inhumanity to man. All the same, it must be recognized that the Hindus observe Caste not because they are inhuman or wrong-headed. They observe Caste because they are deeply religious.

I used to like Norse mythology, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology. All mythology!

I'm always wondering, if Bigfoot's not real, then why does this creature show up in all these different cultures? I'm always fascinated by that kind of stuff.

There is a close meshing with the ritual properties of persons and with the egocentric forms of territoriality.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others.

Any group or "collective", large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.

All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.

Sir, I do firmly believe that domestic slavery, regulated as ours is, produces the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth.

To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend? -I can barely remember Lord's Prayer. -A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends,myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values , and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.

In the Small group the individual can know the effects of his actions on his several fellows, and the rules may effectively forbid him to harm them in any manner and even require him to assist them in specific ways. In the Great Society many of the effects of a person's actions on various fellows must be unknown to him. It can, therefore, not be the specific effects in the particular case, but only rules which define kinds of actions prohibited or required, which must serve as guides to the individual.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Every culture, or subculture, is defined by a set of common values, that is, generally agreed upon preferences. Without a core of common values a culture cannot exist, and we classify society into cultures and subcultures precisely because it is possible to identify groups who have common values.