On a tangent, this Scott Bakker discussion is awesome.

There’s literally no escaping the conviction that we, and we alone, have somehow found our way past all the tomfoolery that so obviously afflicts everyone else on the planet.

The self that continually murders fact and memory in the name of convenience and hypocrisy.

the flattering—and false—self-portrait our brains manufacture for us

the vast bulk of the stories we tell are bent on strategic distortion

They tell us whom to lionize and, of course, whom to condemn.

Few things are quite so slippery as the “moral of the story.”

“Freedom” is just another name for bad memory.

When confronted by competing claims, one flattering, the other ugly, all things being equal, the ugly claim is likely more true.

It makes it easier to sell toothpaste, to hold the poor responsible for their poverty, and to congratulate the powerful for their conviction.