Everything Is F*cked(71)
28. Basically, the more pain we experience, the larger the moral gap. And the larger the moral gap, the more we dehumanize ourselves and/or others. And the more we dehumanize ourselves and/or others, the more easily we justify causing suffering to ourselves or others.
29. The healthy response here would be (c), “some boys are shit,” but when we experience extreme pain, our Feeling Brains generate intense feelings about entire categories of experience and are not able to make those distinctions.
30. Obviously, there are a lot of variables at work here: the girl’s previously held values, her self-worth, the nature of the breakup, her ability to achieve intimacy, her age, ethnic and cultural values, and so on.
31. A 2016 computer model study found that there are six types of stories: rise (rags to riches), fall (riches to rags), rise and then fall (Icarus), fall and then rise (man in a hole), rise and then fall and then rise (Cinderella), fall and then rise and then fall (Oedipus). These are all essentially permutations of the same good/bad experience, plus good/bad deserving. See Adrienne LaFrance, “The Six Main Arcs in Storytelling, as Identified by an A.I.,” The Atlantic, July 12, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-six-main-arcs-in-storytelling-identified-by-a-computer/490733/.
32. The field of psychology is in the midst of a “replicability crisis,” that is, a large percentage of its major findings are failing to be replicated in further experiments. See Ed Yong, “Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses,” The Atlantic, November 18, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/.
33. Division of Violence Prevention, “The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study,” National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, May 2014, https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/index.html.
34. Real-life Newton was actually a raging, vindictive asshole. And yes, he was a loner, too. He apparently died a virgin. And records suggest that he was probably quite proud of that fact.
35. This is what Freud incorrectly identified as repression. He believed that we spend our lives repressing our painful childhood memories, and by bringing them back into consciousness, we liberate the negative emotions bundled up inside ourselves. In fact, it turns out that remembering past traumas doesn’t provide much benefit. Indeed, the most effective therapies today focus not so much on the past as on learning to manage future emotions.
36. People often mistake our core values for our personality, and vice versa. Personality is a fairly immutable thing. According to the “Big Five” personality model, one’s personality consists of five basic traits: extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness to new experience. Our core values are judgments made early in life, based partly on personality. For instance, I might be highly open to new experiences, which thus inspires me to value exploration and curiosity from an early age. This early value will then play out in later experiences and create values related to it. Core values are difficult to dig up and change. Personality cannot be changed much, if at all. For more on the “Big Five” personality model, see Thomas A. Widiger, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Five Factor Model (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
37. William Swann, Peter Rentfrow, and Jennifer Sellers, “Self-verification: The Search for Coherence,” Handbook of Self and Identity (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), pp. 367–83.
38. This is the law-of-attraction bullshit that’s been around in the self-help industry for ages. For a thorough takedown of this type of nonsense, see Mark Manson, “The Staggering Bullshit of ‘The Secret,’” MarkManson.net, February 26, 2015, https://markmanson.net/the-secret.
39. The ability to remember past experiences and project future experiences occurs only with the development of the prefrontal cortex (the neurological name for the Thinking Brain). See Y. Yang and A. Raine, “Prefrontal Structural and Functional Brain Imaging Findings in Antisocial, Violent, and Psychopathic Individuals: A Meta-analysis,” Psychiatry Research 174, no. 2 (November 2009): 81–88.
40. Jocko Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), pp. 4–6.
41. Martin Lea and Steve Duck, “A Model for the Role of Similarity of Values in Friendship Development,” British Journal of Social Psychology 21, no. 4 (November 1982): 301–10.
42. This metaphor essentially says that the more we value something, the more unwilling we are to question or change that value, and therefore the more painful it is when that value fails us. It’s like if you think about the different degrees of pain between the death of a parent versus the death of an acquaintance, or how emotional you get when someone insults or questions one of your favorite music groups from when you were a kid versus when you’re an adult.
43. Freud called this the “narcissism of the slight difference,” and observed that it is usually groups of people with the most in common who feel the most hatred for one another. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (1941; repr. New York: Penguin Books, 2002), pp. 50–51.
44. Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, pp. 85–93.
45. This idea is known as “cultural geography.” For a fascinating discussion, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997).