Our Political Nature Quotes

“The Biology of Tribalism concerns pushes and pulls between populations, which primarily occur due to tradeoffs between inbreeding and outbreeding. Ethnocentrism and other tribalistic personality facets have evolved to influence mate choice and encourage “optimal outbreeding.” The book will explore these and other tribalistic political phenomena that impact the evolution of populations, including gender inequality, warfare, and genocide.

The Biology of Family Conflict (Parent-Offspring Conflict) is the field of evolutionary theory that explains why the interests of the most closely related individuals do not always align, and thus why different family disciplinary strategies exist. The two opposed disciplinary models are based on egalitarian and hierarchical moralities. These conflicts are linked to the variation in people's tolerance of inequality.

The Biology of Altruism and Self-Interest is the area of evolutionary theory that describes how and why people cooperate with and betray one another; this field sheds light on why some people perceive human nature so differently than others.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“This chapter has shown why it's evolutionarily adaptive for humans to have a distorted perception of reality, such that people believe themselves to be more altruistic than they actually are. Our “self-deceptive altruism” helps explain the substantial confusion over the nature of human nature. It also sheds light on why political scandals perpetually shock both the public and the perpetrators themselves. Finally, self-deception over self-interest explains the similarities in authoritarian governments on both extremes of the spectrum.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“From different perspectives, I will show how political orientations across space and time arise from three clusters of measurable personality traits. The three clusters entail opposing attitudes toward tribalism, inequality, and differing perceptions of human nature. Together, these traits are by far the most powerful cause of left-right voting, even leading people to regularly vote against their economic interests.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Because leftists are more likely to believe in the innate, inner quality of all people, they attribute the world's inequalities to outer, structural injustices. In particular, the left sees many power hierarchies as unmerited and exploitative. Leftist morality is rooted in the imperative to equalize, to various extents, discrepancies in power (especially through education). Compared with conservatives, leftists have a lower tolerance for inequality.
In this leftist worldview, evil comes primarily from undeserved inequalities in strength or power: from capitalists who exploit workers, unscrupulous corporations that deceive consumers, colonialists who leach off third-world countries, soldiers and police who abuse civilians, men who mistreat women, humans who disrespect the animals and plants in their environment, and so on.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“No society has ever been found in the history of our species where women have occupied a disproportionate number of elite political positions.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Across history, human societies have devised numerous ways to show that an individual has been punished for cheating rules. These signals range from scarlett letters, to shaved heads, to amputated fingers.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“What is guilt? People feel guilty when they think they have acted immorally or have hurt someone and worry that they may lose that person's favor. Guilt motivates a child to behave better toward a parent for fear of losing the parent's love. Like fear, guilt also has a maladaptive sibling, whose name is depression. Depression occurs when a person attributes guilt to him or herself and perceives it as a permanent condition, as opposed to being situational and absolvable.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“...the leftists sometimes assume that their moral beliefs about the way the world should be have a greater impact on reality than they actually do. For example, a secular leftist might oppose religion, and believe that the world would be a better place without it.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Disregarding the evil of the crime, nature rewards the rapists by multiplying their genes more than those of the nonrapists. Therefore, it's plausible that evolution has selected for a predisposition in some men to engage in this behavior under certain circumstances.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“The proportion of the brain occupied by the prefrontal cortex is larger in human than in any other species, reflecting our advanced ability to make long-term rational decisions. Unlike most regions of the brain, the prefrontal cortex continues to grow and develop well into the mid-twenties --and so do its cautionary functions.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“After leaving home, people become closer to who they really are.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“...politics isn't -just about money-, but also about who gains authority over a population's minds and bodies. Controlling education, healthcare, economic policies, and morally controversial laws can influence how people recombine and transmit DNA in various ways, at different rates, and to what consequence. The rise of power of political extremists greatly magnifies this control over both genetic and economic resources.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Leftist dictator's kin-selective self-interest supersedes egalitarian ideology.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“The extreme left promises egalitarian camaraderie for all peoples, regardless of ethnicity or religion. In practice, however, Communist governments have oppresed minority groups.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“According to Transparency International's 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index, Chavez's Bolivarian revolution created a country that ranked 164th out of the 178 nations surveyed -placing Venezuela below Haiti in perceptions of corruption. Unfairness in the Venezuelan public sector was at the level of Congo, Guinea, and Kyrgyzstan. Unfairness, of course, is the precise opposite of equality.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“In practice, self-deceptive altruism allows leftist dictators to extol the egalitarian virtues of their ideology, while systematically violating every egalitarian promise.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Left or right, people are not as cooperative as they believe themselves to be. Political candidates have huge incentives to be seen as superhuman altruists; these incentives magnify the potential for self-deception.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Most of the calories that men in these societies provision come from hunting or fishing. So in many hunter-gatherer groups it's not unusual for men to contribute up to 90 percent or more of the protein eaten by their families and band. These valuable nutrients and fat, however, come from vertebrate meat. And hunting requires many years of investment to master; even then, return rates are often low and quite variable. among contemporary foraging groups, vertebrate meat can range from anywhere between 30 percent and 80 percent of the diet. So women's work is extremely important since women extract more constant and predictable food resources, including roots, nuts, seeds, invertebrate meat, and plant fibers that require a large amount of effort to process. Therefore, both sexes depend very much on one another to divide their labor between the staples needed to survive and the high-value nutrients required to thrive.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“In many traditions, the next life promises reuniting with the entire tribe in the the next world. Some conceptions of heaven exclude members of out-groups.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Many religious disputes at the international level also concern how particular genes are replicating.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Global religious beliefs about abortion therefore clearly have evolutionary implications; having an anti-abortion attitude is associated with greater fitness.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“The religion's opposition to abortion stems from the centrl Christian narrative, which begins with the Virgin Birth. For Jesus to be born, God had to take control of Mary's body. If this divine act of reproduction had been interrupted by human choice, human salvation would not have been possible.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“The religion's opposition to abortion stems from the centrl Christian narrative, which begins with the Virgin Birth. For Jesus to be born, God had to tale control of Mary's body. If this divine act of reproduction had been interrupted by human choice, human salvation would not have been possible.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Religious beliefs influence how populations reproduce with one another and how many children they have; thus, religion has evolutionary consequences (in addition to its probable evolutionary origins).”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“What accounts for this great diversity running through our veins? The struggle for survival entails not only the competition for resources and mates but also the battle against pathogens. In this immunological arms race, the blood group antigens of human populations have coevolved with a microscopic world of enemies (as well as allies and neutral parties). Natural selection shapes the human immune system by favoring the configurations best adapted to a population's environment.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“...books about travel, cultural memorabilia (such as trinkets from vacations), travel tickets, and books about -ethnic matters-. The presence of international maps showing countries other than the United States, as well as world-music CDs, also had very significant correlations with left-of-center self-placements.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Some people describe themselves as -spiritual-. Spirituality usually entails a more xenophilic attraction to religious traditions of out-groups, with a simultaneous rejection of the limitations of one's own religion.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“...political orientations throughout time and space systematically and predictably reflect much deeper biological conflicts.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“...political orientations are natural dispositions that have been molded by evolutionary forces. Taken together, those deeply ingrained poitical orientations form what could be called "The Universal Political Animal".”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“...political orientations are natural dispositions that have been molded by evolutionary forces. Taken together, those deeply ingrained poitiacl orientations form what could be called "The Universal Political Animal".”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us