Kalkulus Rampage

“We require rules, standards, value -alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition.”

“How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other?... through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path.”

“... loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable.”

“It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe... They will fight to maintain the march between what they expect and how everyone is acting. It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone to live together peacefully, predictably and productively. It reduces uncertainty and the chaotic mix of intolerable emotions that uncertainty inevitably produces.”

“Shared beliefs simplify the world, because people can act together to tame the world.”

"... a deeper meaning was required. The nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness."

"... they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act... our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage -a drama- instead of a place of objects… the constituent elements of the world as a drama were order and chaos, and not material things."