Sublime

Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and sovereign self, but through imitation.

The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.

The baseball player has no clue about the exact heuristic, but he goes with it—otherwise he would lose the game to another, nonintellectualizing, competitor. Likewise, as we will see in Chapter 18, religious “beliefs” are simply mental heuristics that solve a collection of problems—without the agent really knowing how.

Dan Kahan’s explanation is the cultural cognition hypothesis. People respond to a message based not on the evidence behind it but on the cultural identity it signifies.

According to their “tribal instincts hypothesis,” human groups have always been in competition to some degree with neighboring groups. The groups that figured out (or stumbled upon) cultural innovations that helped them cooperate and cohere in groups larger than the family tended to win these competitions (just as Darwin said).

Ce principe d’intégration peut amener le sujet jusqu’au sacrifice de sa vie pour ce nous. L’être humain est caractérisé par ce double logiciel : l’un pousse à l’égocentrisme, à sacrifier les autres à soi ; l’autre pousse au sacrifice de soi pour les autres, à l’altruisme, à l’amitié et à l’amour.

But the really interesting thing is that the choice between trust and control is seldom debated on a rational level. It’s a choice that gets made based on deeply held, often unconscious assumptions we hold about people and their motivations.

J’ai compris que les systèmes de croyances partagées rapprochaient les gens, et qu’il n’était pas simplement question de convictions. Les individus qui suivent les mêmes codes deviennent prévisibles l’un pour l’autre. Ils agissent en fonction des attentes et des désirs de l’autre. Ils peuvent coopérer. Ils peuvent même se concurrencer de manière