Psychology
- Lafyva
- May 29, 2019
- 44 min read
Updated: Jul 27
Lafyva: Psychosis and Schizophrenia is DMT coming out when you're awake!
"Endogenous DMT was investigated in the 1960s and 1970s and it was proposed that DMT was involved in psychosis and schizophrenia."
Psychopaths are the most malicious that that human is capable of, from emotional shock!
Sociopaths Still have the filter between right and wrong!
Psychopaths have "no filter"; the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths is that sociopaths still have the filter between right and wrong
Psychotic symptoms include inability to cry or inappropriate crying
Positive stress, achieving a goal is how your mind grows.
5 ingrained feelings, your emotionas are intelligent
The brain filters the 5 feelings into your personality Grover said this is open mindedness, what open mindedness refered to is.
The subconscious provokes things in your mind from past life experiences
The 5 feelings: Love, Closeness, sex, anger, fear; the rest are thought processes
Intellect as distinct from Openness: differences revealed by FMRI of working memory.
There are at least five sets of goals, which we may call
basic needs. These are briefly physiological, safety, love,
esteem, and self-actualization. In addition, we are motivated
by the desire to achieve or maintain the various
conditions upon which these basic satisfactions rest and
by certain more intellectual desires.
Imagination is an essential part of intelligence.
The Big-Five Model (B5M) is a representation of the universe of personality traits in terms of five broad personality dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Intellect or Imagination.
In McNally's view, there's little danger that mental health professionals will forget the importance of environmental factors to the development of mental illness. "I think what's happening is not a battle between biological and non-biological approaches, but an increasingly nuanced and sophisticated appreciation for the multiple perspectives that can illuminate the etiology of these conditions," he says.
In the meantime, according to Insel and Kandel, patients themselves are clamoring for better biological descriptions of mental disorders. Describing mental illnesses as brain malfunctions helps minimize the shame often associated with them, Kandel says. "Schizophrenia is a disease like pneumonia. Seeing it as a brain disorder destigmatizes it immediately."
Certainly, Kandel adds, social and environmental factors are undeniably important to understanding mental health. "But they do not act in a vacuum," he says. "They act in the brain."
"It undoubtedly is a war" Lafyva says.
"Emotional Shock"
Significantly, the Dorland’s Medical Dictionary does not carry an entry on mental health, whereas the Campbell’s Dictionary of Psychiatry gives it two meanings: first, as a synonym of mental hygiene and second, as a state of psychological wellbeing. The Oxford English Dictionary defines mental hygiene as a set of measures to preserve mental health, and later refers to mental health as a state.
On the whole, mental health continues to be used both to designate a state, a dimension of health – an essential element in the definition of health – and to refer to the movement derived from the mental hygiene movement, corresponding to the application of psychiatry to groups, communities and societies, rather than on an individual basis, as is the case with clinical psychiatry.
The 5 feelings: Love, Closeness, sex, anger, fear; the rest are thought processes
Dreams prepare you for real life events, also get rid of unneeded information—Co-op
The brain filters the 5 feelings into your personality
Mental illness is created by trauma—Grover
Being outside your emotional tolerance level triggers your mental illness—Grover
There is always a trigger or stressor that triggers your mental illness—Grover
Drugs Mostly make you feel better
Narcissism is caused by repressed anger-Grover
Hate is love combined with anger---Grover
Schizophrenia is an anxiety based illness, by Grover, owner of the mental health co-op. and Dewey
Calming Your anxiety will calm your schizophrenia symptoms – Dewy my first co-op psychologist
Psychosis is when, what is going on internally is so powerful that you are unable to take outside information in. --- Dewey
Psychopaths have no filter; the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths is that sociopaths still have the filter between right and wrong
Borderline Personality Disorder comes from being spoiled, that is the only cause- Jeramiko, co-op
Serotonin is happy juice, what you’re on all day; dopamine is the serious reward center. – Jessica co-op
Anger and fear are polar – Grover
If your born after 1981 you’re not an adult- Grover
Both your conscious and subconscious are in your prefrontal cortex- Jeramiko
The healthiest people combine love sex and closeness- Grover
Power is the most prevalent thing fought about in relationships- Dewey
Psychotic symptoms include inability to cry or inappropriate crying
Autistics are unable to feel empathy
Relationships require mutuality- Jared
Positive stress, achieving a goal is how your mind grows.
Men are self centered in there thought. Women's thought is in relation to others. Generally. -Ben, Monarch
They are trying to put Autism and Schizophrenia in the same spectrum, autistic people are incapable of feeling empathy which makes them dissociative, most of the time schizophrenics hears voices of people they know telling them bad things, coming from their subconscious which makes them dissociative. <In order: Anxiety, Panic Disorder, Aspergers ("Autism"), Schizophrenia>
The role of sensory processing impairments as contributors to dif-ficulties in social cognition is also discussed in schizophrenia (Javitt &Freedman, 2015) – a disorder that shares genetic and behaviouralcharacteristics with ASD (Chisholm, Lin, Abu-Akel, & Wood, 2015;Owen & O'Donovan, 2017). In ASD and in schizophrenia, voice per-ception difficulties are related to altered pitch perception (Globersonet al., 2015; Gold et al., 2012; Jahshan, Wynn, & Green, 2013;Kantrowitz et al., 2013; Leitman et al., 2011; Leitman et al., 2010;Schelinski & von Kriegstein, 2019; but also see Chhabra, Badcock,Maybery, & Leung, 2012). In this context, it is interesting that inschizophrenia there are also first indications of reduced functioning ofthe IC (Gaebler et al., 2020). A transdiagnostic approach is important,since it holds the potential to further improve the characterisationand treatment of different forms of psychopathology (Kapur, Phil-lips, & Insel, 2012), an often challenging task in clinical practice.
Intellect as distinct from Openness: differences revealed by FMRI of working memory.
Yes, imagination is an essential part of intelligence. Imagination is a cognitive process that allows people to make connections and inferences using their knowledge and past experiences. It can also help people envision what could be, rather than just what is, and come up with new ideas. For example, imaginative people can envision new ways to use a product, or come up with ways to improve it.
Research suggests that more imaginative people, or those who daydream more, are more intelligent. For example, one study found that the "default network," which is associated with daydreaming, was more active in people with higher intelligence than in those with average intelligence.
Some say that imaginative people are always intelligent, but that the opposite isn't always true. For example, many intellectual geniuses, such as Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, and Beethoven, were also very imaginative.
Imagination can also help people develop empathy and understand the world around them. For example, imaginative play can help children learn critical thinking skills, social skills, and how to manage their emotions.
Generative AI is experimental.
(By Google AI)
Previous work has shown that observers can accurately assess aspects of personality based on unfamiliar, static faces with neutral expressions (Little & Perrett, 2007; Penton-Voak et al., 2006). Our main results, from Experiment 1, show further that internal features of the face, specifically the areas around the eyes, nose, and mouth, carry enough information to allow accurate judgements relating to physical health, and to four of the Big Five personality factors: agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, intellect/imagination (cf. openness).
1. Stagnation: low growth, low performance environments. For example, highly bureaucratic structures that inhibit creative thought and action.
2. Order: the most comfortable zone. “Knowing that what you do, or what is happening in your environment, leads to a predictable outcome.”
3. Complexity: the environment where growth really occurs. When order is changed, difficulty and opportunity for development is introduced.
4. Chaos: like the stagnation ring, these are low growth, low performance environments. Characterised by no predictability or control over inputs and outcomes.
Google AI:
Self-centered people can be preoccupied with their own thoughts and feelings, and may not be very attentive to the needs and perspectives of others. They may also have little consideration for others, and may actively pursue their own goals and desires at the expense of others.
Some research suggests that men and women may react differently to stress when it comes to self-centeredness:
Men
A study published in the journal Psychoneuroendicrinology found that men become more egocentric and less able to respond to social situations during times of stress. The study's authors hypothesized that stressed individuals tend to become more egocentric because taking a self-centered perspective reduces emotional and cognitive load.
Women
In contrast, the study found that women react in the opposite way, becoming more prosocial and able to relate to others during times of stress. Other research in social and behavioral sciences has also concluded that women are more socially-oriented (selfless) and men are more individually-oriented (selfish).
Generative AI is experimental.
(Google AI)
End Of Essentials
Their friendship, however, was doomed. Jung grew to understand that Freud's theory of the unconscious as a mere conglomeration of repressed desires and emotions was too negative and too simplistic. There was more to the unconscious than libido. Jung was a man of integrity and honesty and was not a man to follow blindly despite Freud's immense stature and reputation. He branched away from Freud with his own theories.
This newer ideology was found in the nineteenth century, and may be regarded as one which emphasized man’s freedom to indulge his more animal-like aspects: to obtain freedom, for his body, from disease, death, hunger, discomfort, and drudgery. This movement eventually gave us modern surgery and medical science, modern technology, mass production of food and other consumers’ goods, central heating, indoor plumbing, domestic lighting, air conditioning, and the plethora of so-called labor-saving devices. The outlook behind these achievements may be symbolized by Charles Darwin, whose writings came to stand for proof of the animal nature of man, and of Sigmund Freud, whose writings were taken to show that sex was the dominant, if not the sole, human motivation and that inhibitions were the great bane of human life. This latter point of view came to be accepted on the most pervasive level of human experience in the attacks on inhibitions and discipline which we call “progressive” education as represented in the outpourings of such semipopular thinkers as Rousseau in the earliest stage of the movement (in Emile) or John Dewey in the latest stage. We who enter the twentieth century must not assume, as earlier ages so often did, that our immediate predecessors were wrong and that we should seek a point of view which appears true largely because it is opposed to them. This mistaken method of human progress has led men in the past to oscillate over the centuries from one extreme point of view to its opposite, and then, a few generations later, back again. Thus, the humanism of the sixteenth century had reacted against the scholasticism of the medieval period and was reacted against in turn by the Puritanism of the seventeenth century, the materialism of the nineteenth century, and the reaction against this latest outlook by the “flight from freedom” and blind mass discipline of reactionary totalitarianism in the Fascist and Nazi aberrations.
Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (p. 851). GSG & Associates Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Goethe’s great work, Faust, was essential to Jung, who once said that “one cannot meditate enough about Faust.”4 Edinger also remarked that this work is of “major importance for the psychological understanding of modern man.”5 For Jung, Goethe was in the grip of a descent, an archetypal process, a process also alive and active within him as a living substance, the great dream of the mundus archetypus, the archetypal world. It was Goethe’s main business and essential to his goal of penetrating the dark secrets of the personality. In the opening of Faust, Goethe’s magnum opus, Faust reflects on the nigredo of “night”:
I’ve studied now, to my regret,
Philosophy, Law, Medicine,
and—what is worst—Theology.
from end to end with diligence.
Yet, here I am, a wretched fool
and still no wiser than before.
I’ve become master, and Doctor as well,
and for nearly ten years I have led
my young students a merry chase.
up, down, and every which way—
and find we can’t have certitude.
This is too much for heart to bear!
I well may know more than all those dullards,
those doctors, teachers, officials and priests,
be unbothered by scruples or doubts,
and fear neither hell nor its devils—
but I get no joy from anything either,
know nothing that I think worthwhile,
and don’t imagine that what I teach
could better mankind or make it godly . . .
No dog would want to linger on like this! . . .
Alas! I’m still confined to prison
Accursed, musty hole of stone
to which the sun’s fair light itself
dimly penetrates through the painted glass.
Restricted by this great mass of books
that worms consume, that dust has covered
and that up to the ceiling-vault
are interspersed with grimy papers . . .
And still you wonder why your heart
is anxious and your breast constricted,
why a pain you cannot account for
inhibits your vitality completely!
You are surrounded, not by the living world
in which God placed mankind,
but, amid smoke and mustiness,
only by bones of beasts and of the dead . . .
Observed history:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/01/recovery.aspx
https://www.apa.org/pi/mfp/psychology/recovery-to-practice/index.aspx
New science:
"Conclusion: We propose an alternative seven messages which are both empirically defensible and more helpful to mental health stakeholders: Recovery is best judged by the person living with the experience; Many people with mental health problems recover; If a person no longer meets criteria for a mental illness, they are not ill; Diagnosis is not a robust foundation; Treatment is one route among many to recovery; Some people choose not to use mental health services; and the impact of mental health problems is mixed."
"Message 3: If a person no longer meets criteria for amental illness, they are not ill:
An embedded assumption in the 2014 review, as in muchof mental health practice, is that having once been diag-nosed, no longer being diagnosable indicates the person is‘in remission’ rather than not ill. Whilst it may be true that a person who has had a particular diagnosis (e.g. depres-sion, schizophrenia) has a higher likelihood than the general public of being diagnosable again, the re-framing of ‘well’ in a dichotomous categorisation system as‘in remission’ is a reasoning bias.‘Well’ means well!"
"Mental illness is most often not‘permanent’in thesense that its effects are not consistent over time,though the pattern of impairment and functioningcan persist for many years"}
{ Almost 50% of patients have a full recovery
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30969677/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK539855/?report=reader }
http://www.cracked.com/article_19370_the-6-most-frequently-quoted-brain-facts-that-are-total-bs.html
Normal Nordics:
Essentialism
Yes, the neurotransmitter noradrenaline (NE) is converted to adrenaline (E) by the enzyme phenylethanolamine-N-methyltransferase (PNMT). This process is called transmethylation. [1, 2, 3]
Explanation [4]
Noradrenaline is released by neurons to signal organs to perform specific functions. [4]
Noradrenaline reaches the adrenal gland, which releases both noradrenaline and adrenaline into the bloodstream. [2]
The hormones travel through the blood to the heart, eyes, airways, and blood vessels. [2]
The hormones signal the organs and tissues to continue reacting until the danger has passed. [2]
Medical uses [5]
Norepinephrine
Used to increase blood pressure in situations like cardiac arrest, spinal anesthesia, and blood transfusions
Epinephrine
Used to treat low blood pressure from septic shock, allergic reactions, and to dilate pupils during eye surgery
Generative AI is experimental.
Not all images can be exported from Search.
Cortical white matter increases from childhood (~9 years) to adolescence (~14 years), most notably in the frontal and parietal cortices.[8] Cortical grey matter development peaks at ~12 years of age in the frontal and parietal cortices, and 17 years in the temporal lobes (with the superior temporal cortex being last to mature) for women and they have reached full maturity at age 16-17. For men, they become fully mature at age 18. In terms of grey matter loss, the sensory and motor regions mature first, followed by other cortical regions.[8] Human brain maturation continues to around 20[9]
034 Dreaming as Constructive Episodic Future Simulation
Learning cortical representations through perturbed and adversarial dreaming
Over time, the observations of the hallucinogenic phenomena
experienced following the administration of DMT have led
to speculation that endogenous DMT is possibly involved in
psychosis, normal attributes and experiences such as creativity,
imagination and dream states, maintenance of waking reality,
altered states of consciousness including religious and/or
spiritual phenomena, and NDEs. Even more far reaching and
“other worldly” hypotheses have also been offered, suggesting
that DMT, as well as other hallucinogens, may provide
actual proof of and/or philosophical insights into many of
our unanswered questions regarding extraordinary states of
consciousness.
The Core Of Equalitarians
Believe in equality as a fact of life or a desirable goal for society
Three Bad Ideas
CHAPTER 1 | The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker
CHAPTER 2 | The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings
CHAPTER 3 | The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People
Lukianoff, Greg. The Coddling of the American Mind (p. xiii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This brings us to the oracle’s first Great Untruth, the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. Of course, Nietzsche’s original aphorism—“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”—is not entirely correct if taken literally; some things that don’t kill you can still leave you permanently damaged and diminished. But teaching kids that failures, insults, and painful experiences will do lasting damage is harmful in and of itself. Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate. Lukianoff, Greg. The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 22). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. In August 2009, Max Haidt, age three, had his first day of preschool in Charlottesville, Virginia. But before he was allowed to take the first step on his eighteen-year journey to a college degree, his parents, Jon and Jayne, had to attend a mandatory orientation session where the rules and procedures were explained by Max’s teacher. The most important rule, judging by the time spent discussing it, was: no nuts. Because of the risk to children with peanut allergies, there was an absolute prohibition on bringing anything containing nuts into the building. Of course, peanuts are legumes, not nuts, but some kids have allergies to tree nuts, too, so along with peanuts and peanut butter, all nuts and nut products were banned. And to be extra safe, the school also banned anything produced in a factory that processes nuts, so many kinds of dried fruits and other snacks were prohibited, too. As the list of prohibited substances grew, and as the clock ticked on, Jon asked the assembled group of parents what he thought was a helpful question: “Does anyone here have a child with any kind of nut allergy? If we know about the kids’ actual allergies, I’m sure we’ll all do everything we can to avoid risk. But if there’s no kid in the class with such an allergy, then maybe we can lighten up a bit and instead of banning all those things, just ban peanuts?” The teacher was visibly annoyed by Jon’s question, and she moved rapidly to stop any parent from responding. Don’t put anyone on the spot, she said. Don’t make any parent feel uncomfortable. Regardless of whether anyone in the class is affected, these are the school’s rules. You can’t blame the school for being so cautious. Peanut allergies were rare among American children up until the mid-1990s, when one study found that only four out of a thousand children under the age of eight had such an allergy (meaning probably nobody in Max’s entire preschool of about one hundred kids).2 But by 2008, according to the same survey, using the same measures, the rate had more than tripled, to fourteen out of a thousand (meaning probably one or two kids in Max’s school). Nobody knew why American children were suddenly becoming more allergic to peanuts, but the logical and compassionate response was obvious: Kids are vulnerable. Protect them from peanuts, peanut products, and anything that has been in contact with nuts of any kind. Why not? What’s the harm, other than some inconvenience to parents preparing lunches? But it turns out that the harm was severe.3 It was later discovered that peanut allergies were surging precisely because parents and teachers had started protecting children from exposure to peanuts back in the 1990s.4 In February 2015, an authoritative study5 was published. The LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) study was based on the hypothesis that “regular eating of peanut-containing products, when started during infancy, will elicit a protective immune response instead of an allergic immune reaction.”6 The researchers recruited the parents of 640 infants (four to eleven months old) who were at high risk of developing a peanut allergy because they had severe eczema or had tested positive for another allergy. The researchers told half the parents to follow the standard advice for high-risk kids, which was to avoid all exposure to peanuts and peanut products. The other half were given a supply of a snack made from peanut butter and puffed corn and were told to give some to their child at least three times a week. The researchers followed all the families carefully, and when the children turned five years old, they were tested for an allergic reaction to peanuts. The results were stunning. Among the children who had been “protected” from peanuts, 17% had developed a peanut allergy. In the group that had been deliberately exposed to peanut products, only 3% had developed an allergy. As one of the researchers said in an interview, “For decades allergists have been recommending that young infants avoid consuming allergenic foods such as peanut to prevent food allergies. Our findings suggest that this advice was incorrect and may have contributed to the rise in the peanut and other food allergies.”7
Lukianoff, Greg. The Coddling of the American Mind (pp. 19-21). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
No one has done a better job of explaining the harm of avoiding stressors, risks, and small doses of pain than Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Lebanese-born statistician, stock trader, and polymath who is now a professor of risk engineering at New York University. In his 2007 best seller, The Black Swan, Taleb argued that most of us think about risk in the wrong way. In complex systems, it is virtually inevitable that unforeseen problems will arise, yet we persist in trying to calculate risk based on past experiences. Life has a way of creating completely unexpected events—events Taleb likens to the appearance of a black swan when, based on your past experience, you assumed that all swans were white. (Taleb was one of the few who predicted the global financial crisis of 2008, based on the financial system’s vulnerability to “black swan” events.) In his later book Antifragile, Taleb explains how systems and people can survive the inevitable black swans of life and, like the immune system, grow stronger in response. Taleb asks us to distinguish three kinds of things. Some, like china teacups, are fragile: they break easily and cannot heal themselves, so you must handle them gently and keep them away from toddlers. Other things are resilient: they can withstand shocks. Parents usually give their toddlers plastic cups precisely because plastic can survive repeated falls to the floor, although the cups do not benefit from such falls. But Taleb asks us to look beyond the overused word “resilience” and recognize that some things are antifragile. Many of the important systems in our economic and political life are like our immune systems: they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow. Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously. He notes that muscles, bones, and children are antifragile: Just as spending a month in bed . . . leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions . . . which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most [emphasis added].11 Taleb opens the book with a poetic image that should speak to all parents. He notes that wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. He advises us not to be like candles and not to turn our children into candles: “You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”12 The foolishness of overprotection is apparent as soon as you understand the concept of antifragility. Given that risks and stressors are natural, unavoidable parts of life, parents and teachers should be helping kids develop their innate abilities to grow and learn from such experiences. There’s an old saying: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” But these days, we seem to be doing precisely the opposite: we’re trying to clear away anything that might upset children, not realizing that in doing so, we’re repeating the peanut-allergy mistake. If we protect children from various classes of potentially upsetting experiences, we make it far more likely that those children will be unable to cope with such events when they leave our protective umbrella. The modern obsession with protecting young people from “feeling unsafe” is, we believe, one of the (several) causes of the rapid rise in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide, which we’ll explore in chapter 7.
Lukianoff, Greg. The Coddling of the American Mind (pp. 22-24). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The Moral Foundations of Politics Behind every act of altruism, heroism, and human decency you’ll find either selfishness or stupidity. That, at least, is the view long held by many social scientists who accepted the idea that Homo sapiens is really Homo economicus.1 “Economic man” is a simple creature who makes all of life’s choices like a shopper in a supermarket with plenty of time to compare jars of applesauce. If that’s your view of human nature, then it’s easy to create mathematical models of behavior because there’s really just one principle at work: self-interest. People do whatever gets them the most benefit for the lowest cost. To see how wrong this view is, answer the ten questions in figure 7.1. Homo economicus would put a price on sticking a needle into his own arm, and a lower price—perhaps zero—on the other nine actions, none of which hurts him directly or costs him anything. More important than the numbers you wrote are the comparisons between columns. Homo economicus would find the actions in column B no more aversive than those in column A. If you found any of the actions in column B worse than their counterparts in column A, then congratulations, you are a human being, not an economist’s fantasy. You have concerns beyond narrow self-interest. You have a working set of moral foundations. FIGURE 7.1. What’s your price? I wrote these five pairs of actions so that the B column would give you an intuitive flash from each foundation, like putting a grain of salt or sugar on your tongue. The five rows illustrate violations of Care (hurting a child), Fairness (profiting from someone else’s undeserved loss), Loyalty (criticizing your nation to outsiders), Authority (disrespecting your father), and Sanctity (acting in a degrading or disgusting way). In the rest of this chapter I’ll describe these foundations and how they became part of human nature. I’ll show that these foundations are used differently, and to different degrees, to support moral matrices on the political left and right. A NOTE ON INNATENESS It used to be risky for a scientist to assert that anything about human behavior was innate. To back up such claims, you had to show that the trait was hardwired, unchangeable by experience, and found in all cultures. With that definition, not much is innate, aside from a few infant reflexes such as that cute thing they do when you put one finger into their little hands. If you proposed that anything more complex than that was innate—particularly a sex difference—you’d be told that there was a tribe somewhere on Earth that didn’t show the trait, so therefore it’s not innate. We’ve advanced a lot since the 1970s in our understanding of the brain, and now we know that traits can be innate without being either hardwired or universal. As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains, “Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.”2 To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. Marcus’s analogy leads to the best definition of innateness I have ever seen: Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.… “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.”3 The list of five moral foundations was my first attempt to specify how the righteous mind was “organized in advance of experience.” But Moral Foundations Theory also tries to explain how that first draft gets revised during childhood to produce the diversity of moralities that we find across cultures—and across the political spectrum. 1. THE CARE/HARM FOUNDATION Reptiles get a bad rap for being cold—not just cold-blooded but coldhearted. Some reptile mothers do hang around after their babies hatch, to provide some protection, but in many species they don’t. So when the first mammals began suckling their young, they raised the cost of motherhood. No longer would females turn out dozens of babies and bet that a few would survive on their own. Mammals make fewer bets and invest a lot more in each one, so mammals face the challenge of caring for and nurturing their children for a long time. Primate moms place even fewer bets and invest still more in each one. And human babies, whose brains are so enormous that a child must be pushed out through the birth canal a year before he or she can walk, are bets so huge that a woman can’t even put her chips on the table by herself. She needs help in the last months of pregnancy, help to deliver the baby, and help to feed and care for the child for years after the birth. Given this big wager, there is an enormous adaptive challenge: to care for the vulnerable and expensive child, keep it safe, keep it alive, keep it from harm. It is just not conceivable that the chapter on mothering in the book of human nature is entirely blank, leaving it for mothers to learn everything by cultural instruction or trial and error. Mothers who were innately sensitive to signs of suffering, distress, or neediness improved their odds, relative to their less sensitive sisters. FIGURE 7.2. Baby Gogo, Max, and Gogo. And it’s not only mothers who need innate knowledge. Given the number of people who pool their resources to bet on each child, evolution favored women and (to a lesser extent) men who had an automatic reaction to signs of need or suffering, such as crying, from children in their midst (who, in ancient times, were likely to be kin).4 The suffering of your own children is the original trigger of one of the key modules of the Care foundation. (I’ll often refer to foundations using only the first of their two names—Care rather than Care/harm.) This module works with other related modules5 to meet the adaptive challenge of protecting and caring for children. This is not a just-so story. It is my retelling of the beginning of attachment theory, a well-supported theory that describes the system by which mothers and children regulate each other’s behavior so that the child gets a good mix of protection and opportunities for independent exploration.6 The set of current triggers for any module is often much larger than the set of original triggers. The photo in figure 7.2 illustrates this expansion in four ways. First, you might find it cute. If you do, it’s because your mind is automatically responsive to certain proportions and patterns that distinguish human children from adults. Cuteness primes us to care, nurture, protect, and interact.7 It gets the elephant leaning. Second, although this is not your child, you might still have an instant emotional response because the Care foundation can be triggered by any child. Third, you might find my son’s companions (Gogo and Baby Gogo) cute, even though they are not real children, because they were designed by a toy company to trigger your Care foundation. Fourth, Max loves Gogo; he screams when I accidentally sit on Gogo, and he often says, “I am Gogo’s mommy,” because his attachment system and Care foundation are developing normally. FIGURE 7.3. A current trigger for the Care/harm foundation. (photo credit 7.1) If your buttons can get pushed by a photo of a child sleeping with two stuffed monkeys, just imagine how you’d feel if you saw a child or a cute animal facing the threat of violence, as in figure 7.3. It makes no evolutionary sense for you to care about what happens to my son Max, or a hungry child in a faraway country, or a baby seal. But Darwin doesn’t have to explain why you shed any particular tear. He just has to explain why you have tear ducts in the first place, and why those ducts can sometimes be activated by suffering that is not your own.8 Darwin must explain the original triggers of each module. The current triggers can change rapidly. We care about violence toward many more classes of victims today than our grandparents did in their time.9 Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules. To get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations.10 For example, figure 7.4 shows two cars I photographed in Charlottesville. What can you guess about the drivers’ politics? Bumper stickers are often tribal badges; they advertise the teams we support, including sports teams, universities, and rock bands. The driver of the “Save Darfur” car is announcing that he or she is on the liberal team. You know that intuitively, but I can give a more formal reason: The moral matrix of liberals, in America and elsewhere, rests more heavily on the Care foundation than do the matrices of conservatives, and this driver has selected three bumper stickers urging people to protect innocent victims.11 The driver has no relationship to these victims. The driver is trying to get you to connect your thinking about Darfur and meat-eating to the intuitions generated by your Care foundation. It was harder to find bumper stickers related to compassion for conservatives, but the “wounded warrior” car is an example. This driver is also trying to get you to care, but conservative caring is somewhat different—it is aimed not at animals or at people in other countries but at those who’ve sacrificed for the group.12 It is not universalist; it is more local, and blended with loyalty. 2. THE FAIRNESS/CHEATING FOUNDATION Suppose a coworker offers to take on your workload for five days so that you can add a second week to your Caribbean vacation. How would you feel? Homo economicus would feel unalloyed pleasure, as though he had just been given a free bag of groceries. But the rest of us know that the bag isn’t free. It’s a big favor, and you can’t repay your coworker by bringing back a bottle of rum. If you accept her offer, you’re likely to do so while gushing forth expressions of gratitude, praise for her kindness, and a promise to do the same for her whenever she goes on vacation. FIGURE 7.4. Liberal and conservative caring. Evolutionary theorists often speak of genes as being “selfish,” meaning that they can only influence an animal to do things that will spread copies of that gene. But one of the most important insights into the origins of morality is that “selfish” genes can give rise to generous creatures, as long as those creatures are selective in their generosity. Altruism toward kin is not a puzzle at all. Altruism toward non-kin, on the other hand, has presented one of the longest-running puzzles in the history of evolutionary thinking.13 A big step toward its solution came in 1971 when Robert Trivers published his theory of reciprocal altruism.14 Trivers noted that evolution could create altruists in a species where individuals could remember their prior interactions with other individuals and then limit their current niceness to those who were likely to repay the favor. We humans are obviously just such a species. Trivers proposed that we evolved a set of moral emotions that make us play “tit for tat.” We’re usually nice to people when we first meet them. But after that we’re selective: we cooperate with those who have been nice to us, and we shun those who took advantage of us. Human life is a series of opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation. If we play our cards right, we can work with others to enlarge the pie that we ultimately share. Hunters work together to bring down large prey that nobody could catch alone. Neighbors watch each other’s houses and loan each other tools. Coworkers cover each other’s shifts. For millions of years, our ancestors faced the adaptive challenge of reaping these benefits without getting suckered. Those whose moral emotions compelled them to play “tit for tat” reaped more of these benefits than those who played any other strategy, such as “help anyone who needs it” (which invites exploitation), or “take but don’t give” (which can work just once with each person; pretty soon nobody’s willing to share pie with you).15 The original triggers of the Fairness modules are acts of cooperation or selfishness that people show toward us. We feel pleasure, liking, and friendship when people show signs that they can be trusted to reciprocate. We feel anger, contempt, and even sometimes disgust when people try to cheat us or take advantage of us.16 The current triggers of the Fairness modules include a great many things that have gotten linked, culturally and politically, to the dynamics of reciprocity and cheating. On the left, concerns about equality and social justice are based in part on the Fairness foundation—wealthy and powerful groups are accused of gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden. This is a major theme of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I visited in October 2011 (see figure 7.5).17 On the right, the Tea Party movement is also very concerned about fairness. They see Democrats as “socialists” who take money from hardworking Americans and give it to lazy people (including those who receive welfare or unemployment benefits) and to illegal immigrants (in the form of free health care and education).18 FIGURE 7.5. Fairness left and right. Top: Sign at Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, New York City. Bottom: Sign at Tea Party rally, Washington, DC (photo by Emily Ekins). Everyone believes that taxes should be “fair.” (photo credit 7.2) Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes. 3. THE LOYALTY/BETRAYAL FOUNDATION In the summer of 1954, Muzafar Sherif convinced twenty-two sets of working-class parents to let him take their twelve-year-old boys off their hands for three weeks. He brought the boys to a summer camp he had rented in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. There he conducted one of the most famous studies in social psychology, and one of the richest for understanding the foundations of morality. Sherif brought the boys to the camp in two groups of eleven, on two consecutive days, and housed them in different parts of the park. For the first five days, each group thought it was alone. Even still, they set about marking territory and creating tribal identities. One group called themselves the “Rattlers,” and the other group took the name “Eagles.” The Rattlers discovered a good swimming hole upstream from the main camp and, after an initial swim, they made a few improvements to the site, such as laying a rock path down to the water. They then claimed the site as their own, as their special hideout, which they visited each day. The Rattlers were disturbed one day to discover paper cups at the site (which in fact they themselves had left behind); they were angry that “outsiders” had used their swimming hole. A leader emerged in each group by consensus. When the boys were deciding what to do, they all suggested ideas. But when it came time to choose one of those ideas, the leader usually made the choice. Norms, songs, rituals, and distinctive identities began to form in each group (Rattlers are tough and never cry; Eagles never curse). Even though they were there to have fun, and even though they believed they were alone in the woods, each group ended up doing the sorts of things that would have been quite useful if they were about to face a rival group that claimed the same territory. Which they were. On day 6 of the study, Sherif let the Rattlers get close enough to the baseball field to hear that other boys—the Eagles—were using it, even though the Rattlers had claimed it as their field. The Rattlers begged the camp counselors to let them challenge the Eagles to a baseball game. As he had planned to do from the start, Sherif then arranged a weeklong tournament of sports competitions and camping skills. From that point forward, Sherif says, “performance in all activities which might now become competitive (tent pitching, baseball, etc.) was entered into with more zest and also with more efficiency.”19 Tribal behavior increased dramatically. Both sides created flags and hung them in contested territory. They destroyed each other’s flags, raided and vandalized each other’s bunks, called each other nasty names, made weapons (socks filled with rocks), and would often have come to blows had the counselors not intervened. We all recognize this portrait of boyhood. The male mind appears to be innately tribal—that is, structured in advance of experience so that boys and men enjoy doing the sorts of things that lead to group cohesion and success in conflicts between groups (including warfare).20 The virtue of loyalty matters a great deal to both sexes, though the objects of loyalty tend to be teams and coalitions for boys, in contrast to two-person relationships for girls.21 Despite some claims by anthropologists in the 1970s, human beings are not the only species that engages in war or kills its own kind. It now appears that chimpanzees guard their territory, raid the territory of rivals, and, if they can pull it off, kill the males of the neighboring group and take their territory and their females.22 And it now appears that warfare has been a constant feature of human life since long before agriculture and private property.23 For millions of years, therefore, our ancestors faced the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions that could fend off challenges and attacks from rival groups. We are the descendants of successful tribalists, not their more individualistic cousins. Many psychological systems contribute to effective tribalism and success in inter-group competition. The Loyalty/betrayal foundation is just a part of our innate preparation for meeting the adaptive challenge of forming cohesive coalitions. The original trigger for the Loyalty foundation is anything that tells you who is a team player and who is a traitor, particularly when your team is fighting with other teams. But because we love tribalism so much, we seek out ways to form groups and teams that can compete just for the fun of competing. Much of the psychology of sports is about expanding the current triggers of the Loyalty foundation so that people can have the pleasures of binding themselves together to pursue harmless trophies. (A trophy is evidence of victory. The urge to take trophies—including body parts from slain foes—is widespread in warfare, occurring even during modern times.)24 I can’t be certain that the owner of the car in figure 7.6 is a man, but I’m fairly confident that the owner is a Republican based on his or her choice to decorate the car using only the Loyalty foundation. The V with crossed swords is the symbol of the UVA sports teams (the Cavaliers) and the owner chose to pay an extra $20 every year to have a customized license plate honoring the American flag (“Old Glory”) and American unity (“United We Stand”). The love of loyal teammates is matched by a corresponding hatred of traitors, who are usually considered to be far worse than enemies. The Koran, for example, is full of warnings about the duplicity of out-group members, particularly Jews, yet the Koran does not command Muslims to kill Jews. Far worse than a Jew is an apostate—a Muslim who has betrayed or simply abandoned the faith. The Koran commands Muslims to kill apostates, and Allah himself promises that he “shall certainly roast them at a Fire; as often as their skins are wholly burned, We shall give them in exchange other skins, that they may taste the chastisement. Surely God is All-mighty, All-wise.”25 Similarly, in The Inferno, Dante reserves the innermost circle of hell—and the most excruciating suffering—for the crime of treachery. Far worse than lust, gluttony, violence, or even heresy is the betrayal of one’s family, team, or nation. FIGURE 7.6. A car decorated with emblems of loyalty, and a sign modified to reject one kind of loyalty. Given such strong links to love and hate, is it any wonder that the Loyalty foundation plays an important role in politics? The left tends toward universalism and away from nationalism,26 so it often has trouble connecting to voters who rely on the Loyalty foundation. Indeed, because of its strong reliance upon the Care foundation, American liberals are often hostile to American foreign policy. For example, during the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency, somebody vandalized a stop sign near my home (figure 7.6). I can’t be certain that the vandal rejects teams and groups of all sorts, but I can be confident that he or she is far to the left of the owner of “OGLORY.” The two photographs show opposing statements about the need for Americans to be team players at a time when America was fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Liberal activists often make it easy for conservatives to connect liberalism to the Loyalty foundation—and not in a good way. The title of Ann Coulter’s 2003 book says it all: Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.27 4. THE AUTHORITY/SUBVERSION FOUNDATION Soon after I returned from India I was talking with a taxi driver who told me that he had just become a father. I asked him if he planned on staying in the United States or returning to his native Jordan. I’ll never forget his response: “We will return to Jordan because I never want to hear my son say ‘fuck you’ to me.” Now, most American children will never say such an awful thing to their parents, but some will, and many more will say it indirectly. Cultures vary enormously in the degree to which they demand that respect be shown to parents, teachers, and others in positions of authority. The urge to respect hierarchical relationships is so deep that many languages encode it directly. In French, as in other romance languages, speakers are forced to choose whether they’ll address someone using the respectful form (vous) or the familiar form (tu). Even English, which doesn’t embed status into verb conjugations, embeds it elsewhere. Until recently, Americans addressed strangers and superiors using title plus last name (Mrs. Smith, Dr. Jones), whereas intimates and subordinates were called by first name. If you’ve ever felt a flash of distaste when a salesperson called you by first name without being invited to do so, or if you felt a pang of awkwardness when an older person you have long revered asked you to call him by first name, then you have experienced the activation of some of the modules that comprise the Authority/subversion foundation. The obvious way to begin thinking about the evolution of the Authority foundation is to consider the pecking orders and dominance hierarchies of chickens, dogs, chimpanzees, and so many other species that live in groups. The displays made by low-ranking individuals are often similar across species because their function is always the same—to appear submissive, which means small and nonthreatening. The failure to detect signs of dominance and then to respond accordingly often results in a beating. So far this doesn’t sound like a promising origin story for a “moral” foundation; it sounds like the origin of oppression of the weak by the powerful. But authority should not be confused with power.28 Even among chimpanzees, where dominance hierarchies are indeed about raw power and the ability to inflict violence, the alpha male performs some socially beneficial functions, such as taking on the “control role.”29 He resolves some disputes and suppresses much of the violent conflict that erupts when there is no clear alpha male. As the primatologist Frans de Waal puts it: “Without agreement on rank and a certain respect for authority there can be no great sensitivity to social rules, as anyone who has tried to teach simple house rules to a cat will agree.”30 This control role is quite visible in human tribes and early civilizations. Many of the earliest legal texts begin by grounding the king’s rule in divine choice, and then they dedicate the king’s authority to providing order and justice. The very first sentence of the Code of Hammurabi (eighteenth century BCE) includes this clause: “Then Anu and Bel [two gods] called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak.”31 Human authority, then, is not just raw power backed by the threat of force. Human authorities take on responsibility for maintaining order and justice. Of course, authorities often exploit their subordinates for their own benefit while believing they are perfectly just. But if we want to understand how human civilizations burst forth and covered the Earth in just a few thousand years, we’ll have to look closely at the role of authority in creating moral order. When I began graduate school I subscribed to the common liberal belief that hierarchy = power = exploitation = evil. But when I began to work with Alan Fiske, I discovered that I was wrong. Fiske’s theory of the four basic kinds of social relationships includes one called “Authority Ranking.” Drawing on his own fieldwork in Africa, Fiske showed that people who relate to each other in this way have mutual expectations that are more like those of a parent and child than those of a dictator and fearful underlings: In Authority Ranking, people have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy in which subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey, while superiors take precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates. Examples are military hierarchies … ancestor worship ([including] offerings of filial piety and expectations of protection and enforcement of norms), [and] monotheistic religious moralities … Authority Ranking relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries, not coercive power; they are not inherently exploitative.32 The Authority foundation, as I describe it, is borrowed directly from Fiske. It is more complex than the other foundations because its modules must look in two directions—up toward superiors and down toward subordinates. These modules work together to help individuals meet the adaptive challenge of forging beneficial relationships within hierarchies. We are the descendants of the individuals who were best able to play the game—to rise in status while cultivating the protection of superiors and the allegiance of subordinates.33 The original triggers of some of these modules include patterns of appearance and behavior that indicate higher versus lower rank. Like chimpanzees, people track and remember who is above whom.34 When people within a hierarchical order act in ways that negate or subvert that order, we feel it instantly, even if we ourselves have not been directly harmed. If authority is in part about protecting order and fending off chaos, then everyone has a stake in supporting the existing order and in holding people accountable for fulfilling the obligations of their station.35 The current triggers of the Authority/subversion foundation, therefore, include anything that is construed as an act of obedience, disobedience, respect, disrespect, submission, or rebellion, with regard to authorities perceived to be legitimate. Current triggers also include acts that are seen to subvert the traditions, institutions, or values that are perceived to provide stability. As with the Loyalty foundation, it is much easier for the political right to build on this foundation than it is for the left, which often defines itself in part by its opposition to hierarchy, inequality, and power. It should not be difficult for you to guess the politics of the magazine advertised in figure 7.7. Conversely, while Methodists are not necessarily conservative, the sign in front of their church tells you they ain’t no Unitarians. FIGURE 7.7. Two rather different valuations of the Authority/subversion foundation. Advertisement for the liberal magazine The Nation (top); church in Charlottesville, Virginia (bottom; photo by Sarah Estes Graham). (photo credit 7.3) 5. THE SANCTITY/DEGRADATION FOUNDATION In early 2001, Armin Meiwes, a German computer technician, posted an unusual advertisement on the Web: “Looking for a well-built 21-to-30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.” Hundreds of men responded by email, and Meiwes interviewed a few of them at his farmhouse. Bernd Brandes, a forty-three-year-old computer engineer, was the first respondent who didn’t change his mind when he realized that Meiwes was not engaging in mere fantasy. (Warning: Squeamish readers should skip the entire next paragraph.) On the evening of March 9, the two men made a video to prove that Brandes fully consented to what was about to happen. Brandes then took some sleeping pills and alcohol, but he was still alert when Meiwes cut off Brandes’s penis, after being unable to bite it off (as Brandes had requested). Meiwes then sautéed the penis in a frying pan with wine and garlic. Brandes took a bite of it, then went off to a bathtub to bleed to death. A few hours later Brandes was not yet dead, so Meiwes kissed him, stabbed him in the throat, and then hung the body on a meat hook to strip off the flesh. Meiwes stored the flesh in his freezer and ate it gradually over the next ten months. Meiwes was ultimately caught, arrested, and tried, but because Brandes’s participation was fully voluntary, Meiwes was convicted only of manslaughter, not murder, the first time the case went to trial.36 If your moral matrix is limited to the ethic of autonomy, you’re at high risk of being dumbfounded by this case. You surely find it disturbing, and the violence of it probably activates your Care/harm foundation. But any attempt to condemn Meiwes or Brandes runs smack into John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, which I introduced in chapter 5: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” The next line of the original quote is: “His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.” From within the ethic of autonomy, people have a right to live their lives as they please (as long as they harm nobody), and they have a right to end their lives how and when they please (as long as they leave no dependents unsupported). Brandes chose an extraordinarily revolting means of death, but as the Penn students in my dissertation research often said, just because something is disgusting, that doesn’t make it wrong. Yet most people feel that there was something terribly wrong here, and that it should be against the law for adults to engage in consensual activities such as this. Why? Imagine that Meiwes served his prison sentence and then returned to his home. (Assume that a team of psychiatrists established that he posed no threat to anyone who did not explicitly ask to be eaten.) Imagine that his home was one block away from your home. Would you find his return unsettling? If Meiwes was then forced by social pressure to move out of your town, might you feel some relief? And what about the house where this atrocity happened? How much would someone have to pay you to live in it for a week? Might you feel that the stain would be expunged only if the house was burned to the ground? These feelings—of stain, pollution, and purification—are irrational from a utilitarian point of view, but they make perfect sense in Shweder’s ethic of divinity. Meiwes and Brandes colluded to treat Brandes’s body as a piece of meat, to which they added the extra horror of a splash of sexuality. They behaved monstrously—as low as any humans can go on the vertical dimension of divinity that I discussed in chapter 5. Only worms and demons eat human flesh. But why do we care so much what other people choose to do with their bodies? Most animals are born knowing what to eat. A koala bear’s sensory systems are “structured in advance of experience” to guide it to eucalyptus leaves. Humans, however, must learn what to eat. Like rats and cockroaches, we’re omnivores. Being an omnivore has the enormous advantage of flexibility: You can wander into a new continent and be quite confident that you’ll find something to eat. But it also has the disadvantage that new foods can be toxic, infected with microbes, or riddled with parasitic worms. The “omnivore’s dilemma” (a term coined by Paul Rozin)37 is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as “openness to experience”), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what’s tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.38 The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore’s dilemma.39 Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins. But it’s not just food that posed a threat: when early hominids came down from the trees and began living in larger groups on the ground, they greatly increased their risk of infection from each other, and from each other’s waste products. The psychologist Mark Schaller has shown that disgust is part of what he calls the “behavioral immune system”—a set of cognitive modules that are triggered by signs of infection or disease in other people and that make you want to get away from those people.40 It’s a lot more effective to prevent infection by washing your food, casting out lepers, or simply avoiding dirty people than it is to let the microbes into your body and then hope that your biological immune system can kill every last one of them. The original adaptive challenge that drove the evolution of the Sanctity foundation, therefore, was the need to avoid pathogens, parasites, and other threats that spread by physical touch or proximity. The original triggers of the key modules that compose this foundation include smells, sights, or other sensory patterns that predict the presence of dangerous pathogens in objects or people. (Examples include human corpses, excrement, scavengers such as vultures, and people with visible lesions or sores.) The current triggers of the Sanctity foundation, however, are extraordinarily variable and expandable across cultures and eras. A common and direct expansion is to out-group members. Cultures differ in their attitudes toward immigrants, and there is some evidence that liberal and welcoming attitudes are more common in times and places where disease risks are lower.41 Plagues, epidemics, and new diseases are usually brought in by foreigners—as are many new ideas, goods, and technologies—so societies face an analogue of the omnivore’s dilemma, balancing xenophobia and xenophilia. As with the Authority foundation, Sanctity seems to be off to a poor start as a foundation of morality. Isn’t it just a primitive response to pathogens? And doesn’t this response lead to prejudice and discrimination? Now that we have antibiotics, we should reject this foundation entirely, right? Not so fast. The Sanctity foundation makes it easy for us to regard some things as “untouchable,” both in a bad way (because something is so dirty or polluted we want to stay away) and in a good way (because something is so hallowed, so sacred, that we want to protect it from desecration). If we had no sense of disgust, I believe we would also have no sense of the sacred. And if you think, as I do, that one of the greatest unsolved mysteries is how people ever came together to form large cooperative societies, then you might take a special interest in the psychology of sacredness. Why do people so readily treat objects (flags, crosses), places (Mecca, a battlefield related to the birth of your nation), people (saints, heroes), and principles (liberty, fraternity, equality) as though they were of infinite value? Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.42 When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive. To return, finally, to Meiwes and Brandes: They caused no harm to anyone in a direct, material, or utilitarian way.43 But they desecrated several of the bedrock moral principles of Western society, such as our shared beliefs that human life is supremely valuable, and that the human body is more than just a walking slab of meat. They trampled on these principles not out of necessity, and not in service to a higher goal, but out of carnal desire. If Mill’s harm principle prevents us from outlawing their actions, then Mill’s harm principle seems inadequate as the basis for a moral community. Whether or not God exists, people feel that some things, actions, and people are noble, pure, and elevated; others are base, polluted, and degraded. Does the Meiwes case tell us anything about politics? It’s too revolting a case to use in research; I’m confident that liberals and conservatives would all condemn Meiwes (although I’m not so sure about libertarians).44 But if we turn down the disgust a few notches, we see a vast difference between left and right over the use of concepts such as sanctity and purity. American conservatives are more likely to talk about “the sanctity of life” and “the sanctity of marriage.” Conservatives—particularly religious conservatives—are more likely to view the body as a temple, housing a soul within, rather than as a machine to be optimized, or as a playground to be used for fun. The two images in figure 7.8 show exactly the contrast that Shweder had described in his ethic of divinity. The image on top is from a fifteenth-century painting, The Allegory of Chastity.45 It shows the Virgin Mary raised and protected by an amethyst rock formation. From beneath her flows a stream (symbolizing her purity) guarded by two lions. The painting portrays chastity as a virtue, a treasure to be guarded. This idea is not just ancient history; it inspired a virginity pledge movement in the United States as recently as the 1990s. The group Silver Ring Thing asks its members to vow to remain celibate and pure until marriage. Those who make the vow are given a silver ring, to wear like a wedding ring, inscribed with the name of Bible verses such as “1 Thessalonians 4:3–4.” Those verses state: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from fornication; that each one of you know how to control your own body in holiness and honor.”46 On the left, however, the virtue of chastity is usually dismissed as outdated and sexist. Jeremy Bentham urged us to maximize our “hedons” (pleasures) and minimize our “dolors” (pains). If your morality focuses on individuals and their conscious experiences, then why on earth should anyone not use their body as a playground? Devout Christians are often lampooned by secular liberals as uptight, pleasure-fearing prudes. FIGURE 7.8. Two different views of the Sanctity/degradation foundation. The Allegory of Chastity, by Hans Memling (1475), and a bumper sticker on a car in Charlottesville, Virginia. Another sticker on the car (supporting Democratic Senator Jim Webb) confirmed that the owner leaned left. The Sanctity foundation is used most heavily by the religious right, but it is also used on the spiritual left. You can see the foundation’s original impurity-avoidance function in New Age grocery stores, where you’ll find a variety of products that promise to cleanse you of “toxins.” And you’ll find the Sanctity foundation underlying some of the moral passions of the environmental movement. Many environmentalists revile industrialism, capitalism, and automobiles not just for the physical pollution they create but also for a more symbolic kind of pollution—a degradation of nature, and of humanity’s original nature, before it was corrupted by industrial capitalism.47 The Sanctity foundation is crucial for understanding the American culture wars, particularly over biomedical issues. If you dismiss the Sanctity foundation entirely, then it’s hard to understand the fuss over most of today’s biomedical controversies. The only ethical question about abortion becomes: At what point can a fetus feel pain? Doctor-assisted suicide becomes an obviously good thing: People who are suffering should be allowed to end their lives, and should be given medical help to do it painlessly. Same for stem cell research: Why not take tissue from all those embryos living in suspended animation in fertility clinics? They can’t feel pain, but their tissues could help researchers develop cures that would spare sentient people from pain. The philosopher Leon Kass is among the foremost spokesmen for Shweder’s ethic of divinity, and for the Sanctity foundation on which it is based. Writing in 1997, the year after Dolly the sheep became the first cloned mammal, Kass lamented the way that technology often erases moral boundaries and brings people ever closer to the dangerous belief that they can do anything they want to do. In an essay titled “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Kass argued that our feelings of disgust can sometimes provide us with a valuable warning that we are going too far, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can’t justify those feelings by pointing to victims: Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.48 IN SUM I began this chapter by trying to trigger your intuitions about the five moral foundations that I introduced in chapter 6. I then defined innateness as “organized in advance of experience,” like the first draft of a book that gets revised as individuals grow up within diverse cultures. This definition allowed me to propose that the moral foundations are innate. Particular rules and virtues vary across cultures, so you’ll get fooled if you look for universality in the finished books. You won’t find a single paragraph that exists in identical form in every human culture. But if you look for links between evolutionary theory and anthropological observations, you can take some educated guesses about what was in the universal first draft of human nature. I tried to make (and justify) five such guesses: • The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering. • The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters. • The Loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust and reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or even kill those who betray us or our group. • The Authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position. • The Sanctity/degradation foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore’s dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values—both positive and negative—which are important for binding groups together.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind (pp. 150-179). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
