Wisdom in fragments

If you just stand up for your own values in all the things you do, big and small, you create the conditions for the possibility of collective action.

Every organisation is actually a little bubble of utopia. It’s somebody’s idea of the proper power relations between human beings. It’s a work of political philosophy, whether the person was aware of it or not.

Who would you rather die than betray? If it’s just shareholders, don’t expect anybody else to trust you.

The amorality of investors is actually a gift. They’re not opposed to what we’re trying to do. They just don’t care. Show them it’s good for returns and you’ll generally get them there.

What it means to make a profit is to maximise human flourishing. It just means you left the world better off than you found it.

If you don’t get the governance right for an organisation, in the long run nothing else you do will matter, because you won’t be the one making the decisions.

We absolutely have to reclaim the word corruption to apply to any way of making money without creating value.”

The more golden the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher it. Success makes you a target. It makes you something worth capturing

Freedom of expression, the right to explore, the right to have the adventure of intellectual discovery is a deep personal right precisely because it is a deep personal pleasure.

The standard model of reason is the lone thinker — Rodin’s statue, head on fist. That is exactly the wrong model of reasoning. Reasoning evolved to be done in groups; it is a contested process. We think better in opposition with somebody we disagree with.

Difference is not something we need to solve. Difference is something we need to love. Difference is something we need to respect — because it is in the clash of difference that the great ideas emerge.

Conservatives and liberals are wandering around with different brains. They have different tools with which to apprehend the world, and therefore they are seeing different worlds — which inform the politics that emanate from that experience.

We assume that the person in front of us is essentially a broken version of us. When you realise that the person opposite you is not a broken version of you, but a very different kind of person, it forces you to take their perspective seriously.

There is no sense in which we are predestined to our opinions. But the fact that we are predisposed to them rather demands that we understand those predispositions — because otherwise we are, in a sense, victims of them.

Hot and humid climates tend to promote a kind of right-wing, slightly authoritarian politics — because hot and humid environments are also pathogen-rich, and over thousands of years, societies in those climates have developed what scientists call behavioural immunity.

Most studies today show that our political leaning is at least 50 per cent genetic in origin — genetics is as important, if not more important, to how you vote than your cultural context, your economic context, and all the evidence you engage with in the world.