Trish > Books: psychology‎ (59)

Iyengar’s hypothesis is that partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages…”The old theory was political parties came into existence to represent deep social cleavages. But now party politics has taken on a life of its own—now it is the cleavage,” says Iyengar.

”evil can be opposed without being mirrored…oppressors can be resisted without being emulated…enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.”

"The unspoken agreement among white to protect white advantage and not cause another white person to feel racial discomfort by confronting them when they say or do something racially problematic…Why speaking up about racism would ruin the ambiance [at the dinner table or in a social situation] or threaten our career advancement is something we might want to talk about."

"meritocracy is a precious ideology in the United States, but neighborhoods and schools are demonstrably not equal; they are separate and unequal."

"We are taught we lose nothing of value through racial segregation."

"Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has some terrible damage to the state and to the nation. Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America—the South, the West. the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, Kansas and Louisiana more dysfunctional, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future."

"To strike it rich is still the Texas dream...Texans are always talking about how much they loved the state, but I wondered where was the evidence of that love."

"I’ll tell you something. I don’t think my family were originally Arabs…I think [we] were Sabean who converted to Islam,” said Mahmoud.

“…who’s to say how criminal someone is? That’s a question the Magician raised one day. ‘Each of us has a measure of criminality…’”

“a critical form of self love is a more valuable affect to be cultivated by white people who care about racial justice.”

“People of color have long been aware of the toxicity of white people’s affections and emotions…Love has not been the dominant affect that characterizes white people.”

“Actors, when they are preparing for a role, often talk of the clothes as key…So, in the great gender debate, maybe clothes are one of the key drivers of change…If we want to transform what men can be, maybe central to their performance will be a costume change.”

“I asked a men’s group what women may not know about men. What came up was just how attracted to risk men are. These were middle-aged, middle-class men in therapy, yet they all had tales to tell of reckless driving, drug taking, sex and violence, and they told them with relish. In all-male company, risk is a shared enthusiasm.”

“…Men are their own worst enemy.”

“sex boils and ferments below a crust of civility. The comedian Phill Jupitus describes masturbation as the ‘male screen saver.’ If a man is not concentrating on something, his brain goes into sleep mode and sex swims into his awareness. [I particularly like this analogy.] Instead of a view of Yosemite Valley or a swirling universe, a back catalog of diary porn shuffles across his mind screen, and the desire to jerk off takes over.”

“the power plays and dramatic roles we act out in our sex lives, we learn as children…The scripts of our sexual fantasies are usually roughed out by our experiences as children. [Including fetishes.]”

“that men who do housework have less sex than men who don’t, and men who do more traditional ‘work around the house,’ like yard work, have more sex than men who don’t.”

“Masculine maturity is inherently a lonely thing to possess. That’s why maturity and despair go together for men. The splendid isolation of masculinity has emerged from so much iconography—the cowboy, the astronaut, the gangster—that almost every hero in the past fifty years has been a figure of loneliness. Current pop culture is even more extreme: it doesn’t merely celebrate the lonely man; it despises men in groups. That contempt runs counter to male biology. Men, every iota as much as women, are social creatures who live in a permanent state of interdependence and require connection for basic happiness. In periods of vulnerability the male suicide rates spike.”

“Diogenes the Cynic masturbated in the marketplace and called it philosophy. Of all the wisdom available in ancient Athens, his was the earthiest, the most practical. He refused to condemn the body out of social propriety. If he was built to ejaculate, he should ejaculate, and therefore he ejaculated where everyone could see him. The Athenians loved him for his frankness, which provoked laughter as much as disgust. When asked why he masturbated in public, he answered, “Would that by rubbing my belly I could get rid of hunger.” Diogenes offered the pagan view of masturbation: Why be ashamed of the easiest expression of masculine desire? Why fear the erasure of male sexual appetite by the lightest, the most harmless of gestures?”

“who we work for and with, and how our work either affirms or questions the directions of the larger society. And, in our present situation, how we deal with the malignant normality that faces us.”

“Any time there is precise number that divides people into two different groups, a discontinuity, economists can compare, or regress, the outcomes of people very very close to the cut off.”

”As my time in venture wore on, more and more I began to notice my colleagues’ desperate unwillingness to depart from what they knew. The fear seemed, to me, to come from social anxiety. Almost all these men—and they were nearly all men—were awkward with each other and filled the awkwardness with clunky, inappropriate conversations. They might spend a full hour discussing porn stars and debating their favorite type of sex worker…Some would check out and flirt with the much younger administrative assistants—half to a third their age—and some would make racist jokes that weren’t funny…Or sexist jokes…week after week after week, and sometimes more than once in the same day.”

“One can view as misinformation or ignorance the perceptions among rural folks that they are victims of distributive injustice, but the conclusion that people vote the way they do because they are stupid is itself pretty shallow. It overlooks that much of political understanding is not about facts; it is about how we see those facts.”

“Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.”