Ideological Fixation Quotes

“Ideological fixation is the result of the ever-present tensions and conflicts between our normative wishes and interpretation of reality.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Ideologies, and hence ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations, are as old as civilization itself. During most of history, ideologies were mainly religious, whereas during modern times they have taken the form often described as" secular religions "or" religion substitutes ". They have always served to legitimize socioeconomic and political orders, or have projected alternatives to them.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Morality is a very real and extremely potent human postulate projected onto the world. It includes broadly shared common denominators, evolutionarily engraved in human nature by the logic and adaptive pressures of social life and social cooperation. It consists of a bundle of attitudes and precepts that serve this logic, which takes different and sometimes incommensurable forms between people and between different cultural traditions.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Rather than being" discovered "or" revealed ", morality is a historically developing human creation in the service of social needs.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Marx's projected emancipating socialist" Kingdom of Freedom "- freedom not only from coercion but from any sort of necessity- turned out to be totalitarian and among the most violently oppressive regimes ever.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“As the enthusiasm for the Soviet model waned, the idealistic and dissenting energies of intellectuals and the young embraced other cult figures and myths of salvation and purification: Mao, Fidel, Che, and even Pol Pot.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Furthermore, loyalty to the point of self-sacrifice to one's kin-culture group in a life-and-death conflict with other groups was part and parcel of morality in ancestral human societies, for obvious reasons, and it is still widely regarded as a virtue. For this reason, authorized killing for one's country in war is starkly distinguished morally from unathorized killing, known as murder.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“The cognitive aspect of ideology is rooted in the fact that knowledge and frameworks of interpretation are collective and cumulative human constructs.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“In addition to the emotive appeal of its eschatological promise, there was the tremendous attraction of Marxism as a cognitive framework for the interpretation of history and reality. With a largely justified reputation, Marxism functioned as a modern-day theology in the sense that it offered the best of minds a doctrine of very high level of intellectual sophistication with which to grapple, work, and identify.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“As members of the same species, human beings broadly share notions and precepts of morality, of what is socially regarded as a proper conduct. But again, there is no reason to think that these notions and precepts should fully converge and cohere between different people and different communities, or even in the minds of the individuals themselves.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“People can cooperate, compete peacefully, or use violence to achieve their objectives, depending on what they believe will serve them best in any given circumstance.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“As we have seen, the conceptual frameworks through which we comprehend reality are necessarily partial; and although not all propositions capture truth in equal measure, or are true at all, many of them may incorporate kernels of truth, offer suggestive perspectives, and illuminate reality from neglected angles.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“The history of ideologies should teach modesty, or at least warn against fixations and biases.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Reason --open-minded and self-critical-- remains the key to our species' tremendous success.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations are as old as civilization.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Humans employ simplified conceptual frameworks and normative cues to make sense of and cope with the infinite complexity of the natural and social world. This is the magical devise that has made our species' amazing trajectory possible, and it relies on our unique capacity for social learning.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Reason is still our signature tool for coping with a complex reality, yet it is easily subverted by overconfidence, cognitive closure, and biases.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“The claim that nations and nationalism are modern ideological constructs invented by intellectuals and spread by means of state authority and the state's apparatuses is a misleading half-truth that is itself a modernist (or postmodernist) ideological construct originating with intellectuals and requiring deconstruction.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Cooperation is dramatically more effective when cultural codes -above all language, but also customs, values and other patterns of thought and behavior- are shared. Culture, cultural diversity, and, hence, the facility of shared culture cooperation are unique to humans and differentiate them from other social animals. Hence the innate human tendency to prefer those who belong to their kin-culture community over strangers.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“The adoption of conceptual frames and grids put together by the collective efforts of others is the ingenious shortcut to knowledge that our species has carried far beyond anything known among other animals. The human world of ideas is a product of a division of intellectual labor over extended periods, whose fruits are socially shared and cumulative.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“The oldest and most enduring element of the religious phenomena is probably the existence of hidden, mysterious, and powerful forces and agencies in the world around us, which are feared, handled with care, and negotiated with.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Love, sex, and eroticism, with their hormone rush and idealized images, on the one hand, and deep frustrations, on the other, have been variably perceived as either a major source of transcedence or the nadir of the profane.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“People are naturally inclined to be far more attuned to the blame game of social bargaining than they are to the nuances and the balance of the facts, whether historical or contemporary.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“The quest to trascend life's pains would become far more central to the religious experience as human societies expanded dramatically, beyond the small-scale kin communities of prehistory, with the advent of agriculture, the rise of state societies, and the coming of modernity.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“The United States, the West, capitalism, liberalism, and democracy were collapsed into one and castigated in this sweeping discourse as the source of all evil or at least as no better than others. In some minds they still are.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“The current coronavirus pandemic is a (relatively mild) reminder of the decisive role that plagues played in human history.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars