Download PDF The Righteous Mind Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Audible Audio Edition Jonathan Haidt LLC Gildan Media Books
Download As PDF : The Righteous Mind Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Audible Audio Edition Jonathan Haidt LLC Gildan Media Books
Why can't our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens?
In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition - the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong.
Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures.
But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim - that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.
Download PDF The Righteous Mind Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Audible Audio Edition Jonathan Haidt LLC Gildan Media Books
"This book was stressful for me to read because I really wanted to keep not liking the people I don't agree with. Challenge you to consider that those who do not agree with are not necessarily the devil. I will continue to refer to this in the future in my work as a therapist and minister."
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The Righteous Mind Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Audible Audio Edition Jonathan Haidt LLC Gildan Media Books Reviews :
The Righteous Mind Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Audible Audio Edition Jonathan Haidt LLC Gildan Media Books Reviews
- I've read a lot of books in my life. Psychology, Poetry, Biology, Business Theory, Self-Help, Nutrition, Economics and so many other subjects are represented in my home library.
The Righteous Mind is hands-down the most important book I've ever consumed. Haidt's understanding of human morality and the science of communication and decision making are weaved together into an approachable, beautiful and potentially life changing symphony.
Enough has been said about why you should read this book so I want to use the rest of this review to tell you exactly what I experienced after finishing this book and how it became "The most important thing I've ever read".
I have struggled for years to communicate with some of my friends and family. So many words were wasted discussing politics, religion and conspiracy theories and all we ever accomplished was self-fulfillment. We never had resolution and we never succeeded in convincing the other side.
I'm a person who considers myself well-read and a champion for pragmatism and logic. You can probably imagine how frustrated I felt when I was consistently unable to win arguments about out-there, government's coming for us-so buy some guns, conspiracy discussions.
Something had to give, so I went searching and ended up on this book. I read it, digested it and decided to try and apply the principles to my communications. I was determined to "align with their elephant" first so I could then shift their mindset to my point of view.
Let's be honest I was just trying to manipulate other people into seeing things my way.
Well, something incredible and completely unintentional happened I realized I was wrong, a lot.
One of the foundational pieces discussed in the book is the fact that we, as humans, make decisions in the parts of our brain that aren't subject to critical thinking. If you want to sway someones opinion, Haidt suggests, you must first appeal to their elephant (the emotional part of their brain or "why they feel the way they do").
In the effort to start practicing this I dedicated myself to asking "why do they believe this way?" first and only made suggestions after I felt that I could articulate what the other person was "feeling" about the subject.
A crazy thing happened many times I would find myself changing my mind about a subject mid conversation. As it turns out, other people aren't quite as crazy as I thought, they just have different experiences than I do.
After I spent some time training my brain, I started to conversate this way without any conscious effort. I actually seem to have re-wired my brain. The implication of this can't be overstated.
I now see the world in completely different ways and I feel that I can actually empathize for the first time in my life.
I only wish everyone could read this book, understand their natural decision making process and be aware of what's happening to them when they have disagreements or strong opinions on a subject.
You need to read this book. Everyone does.
To the author Thank you, Jonathan, for giving your life to understanding us a little better and for taking the time to write it all down and pass these lessons onto the rest of us. - Excellent read. Made me think about a lot of cultural and social factors I would never have considered. I lean toward "liberal" idealogies, but this book made me realize the value of a more diverse perspective for the survival of the human race and how my anti-religious viewpoints had incorporated "sacred" elements of their own. Subsequently, a few of my liberal views which I would not allow to be challenged in my own mind, I am now open to considering broader implications. In summary, this book moved a few of my black and white viewpoints back into the gray and was unexpectedly life changing for me.
- I purchased this book because I am interested in the idea that morals may be inborn -- part of human nature -- and that each culture shares certain basic values. I started reading the book enthusiastically, but by the end I was skimming pages and dismayed that the author had so seriously failed to provide any solutions to our political problems.
Haidt starts by dividing the human mind into what he calls the elephant and the rider. The rider is the reasoning, rational mind, whereas the elephant is the irrational, impulsive and intuitive mind. He argues that human moral decisions are guided by the elephant, and that the rider just comes up with a rationalized, post-facto "reasonable" justification after the decisions have been made by the elephant. Of course, anyone who has been alive for more than a couple decades may have noticed this kind of "logic" in his fellow humans. It goes like this "Here are my biases, now how do I make an argument to justify it."
Later in the book, he goes into more detail and lists the specific intuitions that may bias people towards certain moral conclusions care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation.
However, he doesn't call them biases (that's my own terminology). He describes them as something like the taste buds of morality, whereupon one may develop certain "tastes" over a lifetime that cause one to be liberal (progressive) or conservative. Just like we may have a preference for sweet food, we might also have partially inborn and partially acquired intuition for, to make an example, loyalty, which may lead one to make statements like "My country, right or wrong" in the face of unethical behavior by one's government.
Haidt rejects rational thinking entirely. Indeed, he goes so far as to label those who engage in systematic rational thinking as "autistic" (pg 136). He labels modern, civilized countries as WEIRD (an insulting acronym he made up). He also has no interest in individual rights, such as America's Bill of Rights. Rather, he finds solace in the ignorance of impoverished villagers in northeast Brazil and primitive people of India who wipe their butts with their hands (really! see pg 122). He praises studies which show that ignorant people prefer collectivism and use their intuitions (prejudices/biases) when making moral decisions. Critical thinking? Rights? To Haidt, they're irrelevant. He's openly hostile to critical thinking. He disparages psychological studies of advanced ("WEIRD") countries as "statistical outliers" (pg 112).
Essentially, his ethics can be summarized as "cultural relativism", except that Western cultures are always wrong and those on the upper half of the bell curve (advanced, civilized societies) are WEIRD. Since humans are incapable of reason (according to Haidt), we can only navigate ethical and political decisions by intuitions. Whose intuitions should we follow, you ask? Well, that's unclear, although he does provide some helpful graphs of the intuitions of different political views towards the end of the book. I guess whoever shouts the loudest gets to make the rules.
I don't actually disagree with any of Haidt's psychological studies. I just come to entirely different conclusion. When Haidt finds ignorance and prejudice, he wants to build a code of ethics out of it. Where I find ignorance and prejudice, I want to educate people and help them to understand the points of views of others. How can this come about? Well, first one must accept that there is a real, physical reality out there, and that certain actions make sense in the real world and others don't. If you compare today's political discussion with that of previous generations, you can see how far we've fallen. For example, read "The Federalist Papers" and compare that to any modern day politician's anti-intellectualism, and you can realize how much America has lost since our founding in terms of critical thinking and honest debate.
The Enlightenment-style system of individual rights has advanced society enormously. Unfortunately, there are still pseudo-intellectuals like Haidt who want to drag us back into the stone age, or worse, towards fascism, religious fundamentalism, or communism. I find this book disturbing and could go on and on about problems I have with it, however I think I've said enough to get my point across. - This book was stressful for me to read because I really wanted to keep not liking the people I don't agree with. Challenge you to consider that those who do not agree with are not necessarily the devil. I will continue to refer to this in the future in my work as a therapist and minister.
- I first heard about this book when two of my friends, a staunch atheist and an evangelical pastor, were both raving about it. What ?! I had to read it for myself.
Wow! Just finished, and I can't recommend it highly enough for any owner/operator of a human mind and/or conscience!
It's hard to explain how an empirically-based, research-oriented book could be well-written and take you on a tour of intellectual, social, and philosophical history and thought without somehow getting lost in the tall grass.
If you've caught yourself wondering how those "damn liberals/conservatives" could even think such things, take some time to find out why.
Make absolutely sure to get to the last couple of chapters.
