Chapter 9: Political Democracy
The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. — H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)
Goodness in man can only grow in a climate of liberty. — F.A. Harper (1905–1973)
Chapter 6: Tragedy of the Commons and Human Behavior
What is common to the greatest number has the lease care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the commone interest. — Aristotle (Politics, Book II, ch.3)
Chapter 7: Obedience to Authority
The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority. — Stanley Milgram (1933–84)
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. — Voltaire (1694–1778)
Chapter 8: Complexity, Adaption, and Order: Visualizing the Invisible Hand
Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. — Henry David Thoreau (1817–62)
Do not think of what you see but see what it took to produce what you see. — Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010)
Life is not only stranger than we imagine; life is stranger than we can imagine. — John Haldane (1954–)
Whatever one might say about liberals (i.e., leftists or progressives), one thing is certain: When it comes to socialism, they get it. They understand that welfare-state programs like Social Security and Medicare are socialist programs. That’s fine by them because they love socialism.
Leave it to a leftist to highlight and try to straighten out the confused minds of conservatives, including that of the leader of the conservative movement, Donald Trump.
Chapter 5: Discrimination, Beliefs, and Expressions
The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. — Lao Tzu (604–531 BC)
Chapter 3: Doing Good: Nice Guys Finish First
The notion that animal behavior evolved for the good of the species was a longstanding myth that met its demise as a result of the work of several biologists.
Chapter 4: Fairness and Equality
There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. — Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59)
Chapter 2: Barbaric Civility
While nature does not have a sense of good and evil or moral and immoral acts, feedback from man’s conduct has led to a vocabulary that describes them. We call conduct “good” and “moral” when it leads to our well-being and “evil” and “immoral” when it leads to unhappiness.
