Sublime

Every time I do this exercise, no matter where I am in the world, the results are always the same. Some people name their family, their peeps from college, a close group of friends, maybe their coworkers, a sports club they are a part of, a band, or some other special-interest social group. I’ve heard many of them over the years. No matter what the

When we shift our focus from an individual to their network of relationships, we start asking different questions: how the communities an individual belongs to are structured; what is their dynamics; how the influence spreads within them; who are the most active and/or valuable members. This shift reveals not our inferred, but our actual taste.

Essentialists are quick to use stereotypes to categorize vast swaths of people. Essentialism is the belief that certain groups actually have an “essential” and immutable nature.

when people come to belief it is usually as a result of being led to knowledge by other people. Faith is social.

When we ‘see’ a landscape, we situate ourselves in it. If we ‘saw’ the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us. Who benefits from this deprivation? In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is strivin

Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it. That part of a woman’s self which is the surveyor treats the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would l

Belonging to a team, a group, an organization, or an institution has a greatly diminished appeal as a convergent culture that once preferred belonging to groups has given way to a divergent culture that prefers individual experiences.

But in this system, there is a distinction between the actual system state and the perceived state. The actor tends to believe bad news more than good news. As actual performance varies, the best results are dismissed as aberrations, the worst results stay in the memory. The actor thinks things are worse than they really are. And to complete this t

Walter Truett Anderson, writing in 1996, puts it more strongly: “We are in the midst of a great, confusing, stressful and enormously promising historical transition, and it has to do with a change not so much in what we believe but how we believe…. People all over the world are making such shifts in belief—to be more precise, shifts in belief about