Sublime

in a Dark Forest landscape where the public is highly sensitive, and often hostile to, the tribes they don’t belong to. Trying to make the tribe appear bigger and more threatening would only put a target on its back; it’s more effective to weaponize individualism.

Power is a social game. To learn and master it, you must develop the ability to study and understand people.

Milton Erickson.

the people adopted just enough of the majority stance to be seen as acceptable members of the town.

they are most likely to be promising if people are asked to learn from and act like people who are like them—and whom they trust.

Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political. The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: “In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’

Marginality is an aspect of liminality, and it helps foster creativity. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner reviewed the lives of several highly creative people including Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, Mahatma Gandhi, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Martha Graham, and Albert Einstein. In his book Creating Minds (1993) he noted that they typically