Fire and Knowledge

There is nothing really “extreme” about extreme sports. Nothing that boarders do in a half-pipe is even remotely as dangerous as playing football. Extreme sports are just sports for people who don’t want to be mistaken for jocks. Once the jocks start doing them, the distinction will be lost, and so it will be time to move on to something new.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 132

If everyone joins the counterculture, then the counterculture simply becomes the culture. Then the rebel has to invent a new counterculture, in order to reestablish distinction…. Thus the counterculture must constantly reinvent itself. This is why rebels adopt and discard styles as quickly as fashionistas move through brands.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 129

The placebo response is about far more than the pills – it is about the cultural meaning of a treatment, our expectation, and more. So we know that four sugar pills a day will clear up ulcers quicker than two sugar pills, we know that a saltwater injection is a more effective treatment for pain than a sugar pill, we know that green sugar pills are more effective for anxiety than red, and we know that brand packaging on painkillers increases pain relief.

–Ben Goldacre, “The end of homeopathy?“

We have become a society of wimps and complainers … because we are genuinely unhappy. The fact that our external conditions of life have improved immeasurably is irrelevant. Unhappiness is produced by internal, not external, conditions.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 46

In a sense, early legal codes had to be extremely violent simply because people were so psychologically uninhibited. Unless they were quite literally terrified of the consequences of certain actions, they could not be kept under control. Modern man, on the other hand, is so guilt-ridden and repressed that public disembowelments are no longer necessary to maintain order; the threat of spending the night in jail is enough to deter most crime.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 45-6

Unlike religion, which promised paradise after death, advertising promised paradise right around the next corner: through purchase of a new car, a suburban home or a labor-saving appliance. Consumer goods had become the new opiate of the people.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 27

When you write down your thoughts, your chances of having the flash of insight you need in order to come up with a solution are significantly impaired – just as describing the face of your waitress made you unable to pick her out of a police lineup…. With a logic problem, asking people to explain themselves doesn’t impair their ability to come up with the answers. In some cases, in fact, it may help. But problems that require a flash of insight operate by different rules.

–Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (2005), p. 121

If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way – who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites – it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires you to change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort.

–Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (2005), p. 97