Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers — creatures surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons. – Maria Popova
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The saccharine pleasure of self-righteousness is, upon even the most cursory reflection, incompatible with compassion — with the ability to consider another’s foibles and mistakes with the same generosity of interpretation, in the same breadth of context and character, one would consider one’s own.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Tolerance
The great tragedy of human society […] is that those in power are reluctant to hold stereotypes lightly and modify them gladly, because stereotypes are how they stake out their place in the world and maintain the world-order that is the source of their power.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Power, Prejudice and Stereotype
Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Power, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
Classification, [Elsie Clews] Parsons observes, is not just what we do with others but what we do with ourselves in our struggle for belonging and self-inclusion — a struggle that sometimes metastasizes into a tendency toward punitive exclusion directed at those we place outside the boundaries of our self-elected classifications.
Authors: Elsie Clews Parsons, Maria Popova | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.
Drawing on the pioneering psychologist William James […] Lippmann writes:
For the most part we do not first
Authors: Maria Popova, Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 4, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge
Our greatest obstacle to happiness, [Anne] Gilchrist intimates, are our illusions of finitude and fragmentation — a failure of imagination that becomes a self-imposed prison of smallness, from which we are liberated only when we learn to see the interconnected wholeness of the universe.
Author: Maria Popova | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement
Years before Walter Lippmann explored stereotypes and the psychology of prejudice, rooted in the disquieting fact that “we do not first see, and then define, [but] define first and then see,” and decades before Hannah Arendt observed that “society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed” before she … [ Read more ]
Authors: Elsie Clews Parsons, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (March 11, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Immigration, Life & Society, Power, Sociology | Anthropology
“To bother to engage with problematic culture, and problematic people within that culture, is an act of love,” wrote the poet Elizabeth Alexander in contemplating power and possibility. Krista Tippett calls such engagement generous listening. And yet so much of our communication today is defined by a rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.
The most perennially insightful and helpful remedy for … [ Read more ]
Authors: David Bohm, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 5, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Communication, Culture, Excerpts, Life & Society
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (October 23, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Insight, Wisdom
[Tim] Ferriss distinguishes between two kinds of secrets — those we keep because we fear fleeting mortification, like accounts of embarrassing things we’ve done in sub-optimal moments, and dark secrets that paralyze us with deep shame, “the shadows we keep covered for fear of unraveling our lives.”
[…]
“It’s easy to blow things out of proportion, to get lost in the story you tell yourself, and to … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Popova, Tim Ferriss | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 8, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
One might … say that moving minds — our own as well as those of others — is among the most effortful labor there is.
[…]
“When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to … [ Read more ]
Authors: Blaise Pascal, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (May 20, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Communication, Excerpts
To live with sincerity in our culture of cynicism is a difficult dance — one that comes easily only to the very young and the very old. The rest of us are left to tussle with two polarizing forces ripping the psyche asunder by beckoning to it from opposite directions — critical thinking and hope. Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (February 9, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
How the emergence of IQ tests contracted rather than expanding our understanding of intelligence and what we can do to transcend their perilous cultural legacy is what practicing physician, research scientist, and Pulitzer-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee explores throughout The Gene: An Intimate History — a rigorously researched, beautifully written detective story about the genetic components of what we experience as the self.
[…]
A crucial agent in … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Popova, Siddhartha Mukherjee | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 30, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Race Relations, Sociology | Anthropology
In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.
As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function … [ Read more ]
Authors: Hunter S. Thompson, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 4, 2013) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Career, Excerpts, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement
My question … was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?” Differently expressed,
Authors: Leo Tolstoy, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (June 3, 2014) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Meaning, Philosophy, Psychology | Behavior, Religion
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be
Authors: Bertrand Russell, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (September 21, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior
“Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?” This is among life’s most abiding questions and the history of human creativity — our art and our poetry and most empathically all of our philosophy — is the history of attempts to answer it.
There is no drearier, sorrier creature in nature than the man who has evaded his own
Authors: Friedrich Nietzsche, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (September 30, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Philosophy
It’s the oldest story ever told. The story of belief — of the basic, irresistible, universal human need to believe in something that gives life meaning, something that reaffirms our view of ourselves, the world, and our place in it… For our minds are built for stories. We crave them, and, when there aren’t ready ones available, we create them. Stories about our origins. Our … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Konnikova, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (January 12, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior, Trust
“The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.” – Simone Weil
Nowhere do we muddle these two notions more liberally than in our treatment of democracy and its foundational principle of equality — a basic right to be conferred … [ Read more ]
Authors: C.S. Lewis, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 29, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy