Andrew Kesterson

"Love God. Live Righteously. Die Well."
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# The Righteous Mind

2022-03-17 Books Leadership 308 words

Rating: 6/10
Amazon Link: click here
TL;DR An examination of the unconscious habits, biases and cultural norms that guide our subconscious actions, the moral matrices we form and how we interface with each other across those boundaries.

This was a good read, though not necessarily game-changing.

Depending on the reader’s current level of understanding of biases, environmental influence on character, and the morality of the tribe, it may or may not be significantly enlightening. Or it may just give you some useful new and helpful graphical metaphors for what you already knew intuitively. The work is ambitious in its claims, but it doesn’t really deliver any new solutions to the problem.

He does a good job of explaining how most people approach their morality from a place of trying to help society, just in different ways, according to different moral matrices built along six common axes, each weighted differently in different tribes; and he does a good job of explaining how our intuition acts first and our strategic reasoning actually creates arguments to serve our intuition. But he doesn’t really provide any new answers to getting the two sides to work together, other than “learn more about each other, make closer friendships, and try harder to find common ground”.

Well .. duh.

But the ideas of the elephant and the rider (or the horse and the rider for the cowboys among us), the moral brain being like a tongue with six taste buds, and the idea that we are 90% chimp (individualist) but 10% bee (hive mind) and that there is a “hive switch” in each of us that can be activated … Those are useful tools.

If you have time to kill, it’s a fine read, but I wouldn’t go out of your way unless you just enjoy this kind of stuff.

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