- In other words, people who treat themselves as means will treat others as means. People who don’t
respect themselves won’t respect others. People who use and destroy themselves will use and destroy
others. - Ideological extremists usually look to some great leader. Spiritual extremists tend to think that the
apocalypse is coming and that their savior will descend from heaven and pour them a coffee or
something. - It is possible that all God Values that do not adhere to the Formula of Humanity end in paradox. If
you are willing to treat humanity as a means to gain greater freedom or equality, then you will
inevitably destroy freedom and equality. More on this in chapters 7 and 8. - By political extremism, I mean any political movement or party that is inherently antidemocratic
and willing to subvert democracy in favor of some ideological (or theological) religious agenda. For a
discussion of these developments around the world, see F. Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity
and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). - Globalization, automation, and income inequality are also popular explanations with a lot of merit.
Chapter 7: Pain Is the Universal Constant - The study this section describes is David Levari et al., “Prevalence-Induced Concept Change in
Human Judgment,” Science 29 (June 29, 2018): 1465–67. - Prevalence-induced concept change measures how our perceptions are altered by the prevalence of
an expected experience. I will be using “Blue Dot Effect” in this chapter a bit more widely to describe
all shifting of perception based on expectations, not just prevalence-induced expectations. - Whenever I see a news story about college kids freaking out over a campus speaker they don’t like
and equating offensive speech with trauma, I wonder what Witold Pilecki would have thought. - Haidt and Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, pp. 23–24.
- Andrew Fergus Wilson, “#whitegenocide, the Alt-right and Conspiracy Theory: How Secrecy and
Suspicion Contributed to the Mainstreaming of Hate,” Secrecy and Society, February 16, 2018. - Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its
Method (New York: Free Press, 1982), p. 100. - Hara Estroff Marano, “A Nation of Wimps,” Psychology Today, November 1, 2004,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200411/nation-wimps. - These three false Einstein quotes were gathered from M. Novak, “9 Albert Einstein Quotes That
Are Totally Fake,” Gizmodo, March 14, 2014, https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/9-albert-einstein-
quotes-that-are-totally-fake-1543806477. - P. D. Brickman and D. T. Campbell, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society,” in M.
H. Appley, ed. Adaptation Level Theory: A Symposium (New York: Academic Press, 1971). - Recent research has challenged this and found that extremely traumatic events (the death of a
child, for instance) can permanently alter our “default level” of happiness. But the “baseline” happiness
remains true through the vast majority of our experiences. See B. Headey, “The Set Point Theory of
Well-Being Has Serious Flaws: On the Eve of a Scientific Revolution?” Social Indicators Research 97,
no. 1 (2010): 7–21. - Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert refers to this as our “psychological immune system”: no
matter what happens to us, our emotions, memories, and beliefs acclimate and alter themselves to keep
us at mostly-but-not-completely happy. See D. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2006), pp. 174–77. - By “we,” I am referring to our perceived experience. Basically, we don’t question our perceptions;
we question the world—when, in fact, it’s our perceptions that have altered themselves and the world
has remained the same. - Throughout this chapter, I don’t use the Blue Dot Effect in the exact scientific way that the
researchers studied prevalence-induced concept change. I’m essentially using it as an analogy for and
example of a larger psychological phenomenon that takes place: our perceptions adapt to our preset
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