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"Consider the cascade of collective cognitive pathologies produced in our intellectual coalitions by ingroup tribalism, self-interest, prestige-seeking, and moral one-upsmanship: It seems intuitive to expect that being smarter would lead people to have more accurate models of reality. On this view, intellectual elites therefore ought to have better beliefs, and should guide their societies with superior knowledge. Indeed, the enterprise of science is—as an ideal—specifically devoted to improving the accuracy of beliefs. We can pinpoint where this analysis goes awry, however, when we consider the multiple functions of holding beliefs. We take for granted that the function of a belief is to be coordinated with reality, so that when actions are based on that belief, they succeed. The more often beliefs are tested against reality, the more often accurate beliefs displace inaccurate ones (e.g., through feedback from experiments, engineering tests, markets, natural selection). However, there is a second kind of function to holding a belief that affects whether people consciously or unconsciously come to embrace it—the social payoffs from being coordinated or discoordinated with others' beliefs (Socrates' execution for 'failing to acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges'). The mind is designed to balance these two functions: coordinating with reality, and coordinating with others." John Tooby   "The growing insularity of elites means, among other things, that political ideologies lose touch with the concerns of ordinary citizens. Since political debate is restricted, most of the time, to the 'talking classes,' as they have been aptly characterized, it becomes increasingly ingrown and formulaic. Ideas circulate and recirculate in the form of buzzwords and conditioned reflex. The old dispute between left and right has exhausted its capacity to clarify issues and to provide a reliable map of reality. In some quarters the very idea of reality has come into question, perhaps because the talking classes inhabit an artificial world in which simulations of reality replace the thing itself." Christopher Lasch   "No matter how much has been done to realize the great ambition of totalitarianism—the total possession and control of human memory—the goal is unattainable. This is not only because human memory is highly intractable. Nor is it because the human being is an ontological reality: to be sure, human beings can be immobilized by coercion, but they will always strive to regain their rights at the first opportunity. Even in the best of conditions the massive process of forgery cannot be completed: it requires a large number of forgers who must understand the distinction between what is genuine and what is faked (the crudest example would be an officer in a military office of cartography, who must have unfalsified maps at his disposal in order to falsify the maps). The power of words over reality cannot be unlimited since, fortunately, reality imposes its own unalterable conditions." Leszek Kolakowski   "The derogation of assertiveness as 'machismo' has achieved such currency that one imagines several million women too delicate to deal with a man more overtly sexual than, say, David Cassidy. Just as one had gotten the unintended but inescapable suggestion, when told about the 'terror and revulsion' experienced by women in the vicinity of construction sites, of creatures too 'tender' for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets, so now one was getting, in the later literature of the movement, the impression of women too 'sensitive' for the difficulties and ambiguities of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at the movement as a rationale for denying that reality. The transient stab of dread and loss which accompanies menstruation simply never happens: we only thought it happened, because a male-chauvinist psychiatrist told us so. No woman need have bad dreams after an abortion: she has only been told she should. The power of sex is just an oppressive myth, no longer to be feared, because what the sexual connection really amounts to, we learn in one woman's account of a postmarital affair presented as liberated and liberating, is 'wisecracking and laughing' and 'lying together and then leaping up to play and sing the entire Sesame Street Songbook.'" Joan Didion   "It is not possible to preserve one's identity by adjusting for any length of time to a frame of reference that is in itself destructive to it. It is very hard indeed for a human being to sustain such an 'inner' split—conforming outwardly to one reality, while trying to maintain inwardly the values it denies. The comfortable concentration camp that American women have walked into, or have been talked into by others, is just such a reality, a frame of reference that denies woman's adult human identity. By adjusting to it, a woman stunts her intelligence to become childlike, turns away from individual identity to become an anonymous biological robot in a docile mass. She becomes less than human, preyed upon by outside pressures, and herself preying upon her husband and children. And the longer she conforms, the less she feels as if she really exists." Betty Friedan   "Can the mentality that caused the loss of an Islamic state that existed in reality, in the Taliban's Afghanistan—can this mentality be expected to establish an Islamic state in Iraq—in reality, and not on the internet? And have the Islamic peoples become guinea pigs upon whom bin Laden and al-Zawahiri try out their pastime and sport of killing en masse?" Sayyid Imam al-Sharif   "In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality." Karl Popper   "Where moralists had long urged that necessity knows no law, the economic analysts who pursued price back to demand had discovered a lawfulness in necessity, and in doing so they had come upon a possibility and a reality. The reality was that individuals making decisions about their own persons and property were the determiners of price in the market. The possibility was that the economic rationalism of market participants could supply the order to the economy formerly secured through authority." Joyce Appleby   "Think of the training sequences in martial-arts movies, the battles in Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, the artist's struggling years in the garret, the entrepreneur's office cot and diet of ramen noodles. Behind-the-scenes reality shows like Project Runway or The Rachel Zoe Project are essentially romances about the creation of glamorous moments, dramatizing the effort behind the effortless appearance of a runway show or red-carpet look. Romance does idealize reality—it omits the tedious, meaningless, and boring—but it heightens the glory of success by showing the struggle that produces it." Virginia Postrel   "It is somehow satisfying to our will to power to think that 'we' make the world, that reality itself is but a social construct, alterable at will and subject to future changes as 'we' see fit. Equally, it seems offensive that there should be an independent reality of brute facts—blind, uncomprehending, indifferent, and utterly unaffected by our concerns." John Searle   "Writers are, in a way, very powerful indeed. They write the script for the reality film. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levi's to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. Now if writers could get together into a real tight union, we'd have the world right by the words. We could write our own universes, and they would all be as real as a coffee bar or a pair of Levi's or a prom in the Jazz Age. Writers could take over the reality studio. So they must not be allowed to find out that they can make it happen." William Burroughs   "What rather appals me (I'm writing in a hurry, and can't spell, and don't please take my words altogether literally) is the terrific conventionality of the workers. That's why—if you want explanations—I don't think they will be poets or novelists for another hundred years or so. If they can't face the fact that Lilian smokes a pipe and reads detective novels, and can't be told that they weigh on an average 12 stone—which is largely because they scrub so hard and have so many children—and are shocked by the word 'impure' how can you say that they face 'reality'? (I never know what 'reality' means: but Lilian smoking a pipe to me is real, and Lilian merely coffee coloured and discreet is not nearly so real). What depresses me is that the workers seem to have taken on all the middle class respectabilities which we—at any rate if we are any good at writing or painting—have faced and thrown out." Virginia Woolf   "Most of us prefer to surround ourselves with opinions that validate what we already believe. You notice the people who you think are smart are the people who agree with you. Funny how that works. But democracy demands that we're able also to get inside the reality of people who are different than us so we can understand their point of view. Maybe we can change their minds, but maybe they'll change ours. And you can't do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponents have to say from the start. And you can't do it if you insist that those who aren't like you—because they're white, or because they're male—that somehow there's no way they can understand what I'm feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters." Barack Obama   "The Argentine, unlike the Americans of the North and almost all Europeans, does not identify with the State. This is attributable to the circumstance that the governments in this country tend to be awful, or to the general fact that the State is an inconceivable abstraction. One thing is certain: the Argentine is an individual, not a citizen. Aphorisms such as Hegel's 'the State is the reality of a moral idea' strike him as sinister jokes. The State is impersonal; the Argentine can only conceive of personal relations. Therefore, to him, robbing public funds is not a crime. I am noting a fact; I am not justifying or excusing it." Jorge Luis Borges   "Muslims are being called terrorists, as the cause of the destruction of world peace; but it is not the reality; Muslims are fighting the war of their survival. Muslims are not terrorists; they are the lovers of peace and preachers of peace. And all the troubles that exist around the world are because of the Jews. When the Jews are wiped out, then the world would be purified and the sun of peace would begin to rise on the entire world." Raza Saqib Mustafai   "In Wilde the artist revolted not against society but against life. Instead of having passions the artist had sensations, but even these in an abstracted, contemplative way. Whistler, in many things Wilde's mentor, had said that to ask the artist to paint life was like telling the player to sit on the piano. Wilde went a step further; to ask a man to live life was also an impertinence. No, 'the first duty in life is to assume a pose; what the second is no one yet has found out.' The pose is that manner which takes one furthest away from the passion and brutality of life. 'Create yourself; be yourself your poem.' 'I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.' No doubt the attitude was an overstatement, but it was a systematic one, with deep roots in the life of a man who went to court to prove that his conventional pose of respectability was true even though he knew it was not." Richard Ellmann   "Only through the fluctuations of competition, and consequently of commodity prices, does the law of value of commodity production assert itself and the determination of the value of the commodity by the socially necessary labour time become a reality. That thereby the form of manifestation of value, the price, as a rule looks somewhat different from the value which it manifests, is a fate which value shares with most social relations. A king usually looks quite different from the monarchy which he represents. To desire, in a society of producers who exchange their commodities, to establish the determination of value by labour time, by forbidding competition to establish this determination of value through pressure on prices in the only way it can be established, is therefore merely to prove that, at least in this sphere, one has adopted the usual utopian disdain of economic laws." Friedrich Engels   "Today it seems almost comic to read of an East German communist cultural bureaucrat saying, 'If you look at Goethe's work, you can see that he always worked toward dialectical materialism, without realizing it.' It did not seem comic then. This was a society in which everything had to yield before the state's definition of reality. 'We need support by our satirical press in the republic,' a member of the German Central Committee explained when the government shut down a mild humor magazine." Christopher Caldwell   "The truth, of course, about all the great writers of the Edwardian era was that they could use language of great violence, they could call for revolutionary changes, because they had no expectation that anything would actually happen. Thus Shaw could preach his theory of absolute equalitarianism, Wells call aloud for fantastically inhuman planning, Chesterton plunge into the Marconi Case at the first with all the high spirits with which he would have plunged into an argument in his school debating society, and be shocked when he found the whole controversy had grown so serious that his brother was threatened with prison. Stevenson could ask with childish impatience, 'Are we never to shed blood again?' And in the same way Belloc could call for violent controversy and the spirit of the Revolution because he never seriously guessed—and no one in the first decade of this century could have guessed—the awful reality of violence that was so close at hand for us." Christopher Hollis   "The proponents of preferential policies must acknowledge the injuries done to innocent individuals. They must confront the consequences flowing daily from the system of preferences in awarding contracts, jobs, promotions, and other opportunities. Supporters of the status quo attempt to hide the reality of preferences beneath a facade of 'plus factors,' 'goals and timetables,' and other measures that are said merely to 'open up access' to opportunities. Behind all these semantic games, individual Americans are denied opportunities by government simply because they are of the wrong color or sex." Charles Canaday