Quotes.
Finally finished "The Moral Animal" over the break after something like 2 years. I was always reading+writing for school so never felt much like reading extra things; even if it was an enjoyable book, it still paralleled too closely to school. It's a book on evolutionary psychology that explains why we are the way we are through a Darwinian perspective. Just wanted to quote two paragraphs that I found interesting:
"We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. (Of course, we're designed to pursue happiness; and the attainment of Darwinian goals - sex, status, and so on - often brings happiness, at least for a while. Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive."
"Affection is a tool of hostility. We form bonds to deepen fissures. In our friendships, as in other things, we're deeply inegalitarian. We value especially the affection of high-status people, and are willing to pay more for it - to expect less of them, to judge them leniently. Fondness for a friend may wane if his or her status slips, or if it simply fails to rise as much as our own. We may, to facilitate the cooling of relations, justify it."
"We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. (Of course, we're designed to pursue happiness; and the attainment of Darwinian goals - sex, status, and so on - often brings happiness, at least for a while. Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive."
"Affection is a tool of hostility. We form bonds to deepen fissures. In our friendships, as in other things, we're deeply inegalitarian. We value especially the affection of high-status people, and are willing to pay more for it - to expect less of them, to judge them leniently. Fondness for a friend may wane if his or her status slips, or if it simply fails to rise as much as our own. We may, to facilitate the cooling of relations, justify it."