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Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egois...more

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Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language―a p...more

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The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (tho...more

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I quickly realized that there are two main kinds of diversity—demographic and moral. ... Once you make this distinction, you see that nobody can coher...more

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Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

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Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.

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Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

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The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

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You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they ...more

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Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to ...more

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Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.