Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams … but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.

I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.