"Most of the people who graduated in the 60's, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and educational systems. You are stuck with them. You can't get through to them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior."
"The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already for the last 25 years,...Most of it is done by Americans to Americans thanks to lack of moral standards,...exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it.... That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization."
"People with greater math and numerical reasoning skills actually skewed their results more than those with lesser abilities depending on what they felt the fake study was assessing. Being smarter about something made it more likely that you would allow your political beliefs to harm your objective reasoning skills."
"None of this is good — because it means that objective sets of facts, science and evidence are becoming increasingly less relevant in today's society, while the 'tribes' you belong to and their leaders may be vastly more important to what you think and how you act."
"Where it can become dangerous is when the leaders that you trust for road maps simply lie or deceive for their own purposes, because more and more, this research implies, there is a tendency to simply ignore an objective set of facts if it goes against your beliefs and what people you trust are telling you."
This sort of 'cultural cognition' model has profound implications for all sorts of things. In the Syrian situation, for instance, it may not matter whether Syria used chemical weapons against its own people. What may matter more to you is whether you believe Barack Obama when he presents that objective set of facts. Facts don't matter. Who describes them to you does."
"All [Ann Althouse] has to do, for me, is show the balls I used to give her credit for and openly and honestly engage her critics. Say sorry sometimes. I made a mistake. Whatever. It ain't asking for much."
"What makes you the high judge of who is sufficiently open and honest and who is not?"
"I really regret ever having them done in the first place. It was a huge mistake and over time I started to hate each and every one of them. Worse still, every time I got dressed or had a shower I could see them. I wanted rid of them and had no idea it was going to be so difficult, painful and expensive."
"After many years I have come to understand that, until I became willing to risk the derision of the crowd, I had no chance to discover the most important truths about myself or about life — to know my calling, to perceive my deepest value commitments, and to recognize the goals most worth striving toward."
