Fascinating book, should be required reading for econ / world government courses. Recommended by my dad. Quotes:

• "The need to belong is a basic human motivation.’ That’s one of the most enduring conclusions of psychologists, strongly validated by decades of research. You don’t have to be an expert to know that. You feel it when you’re at a stadium supporting your team, when you walk into a party, and when you sit around the table with your childhood friends. The motivation to develop positive, emotionally supportive, and stable group relationships is so natural that we label anyone lacking it as a psychopath. The urge to belong is generally good for us and for society. But as with any fundamental need, the emotions and mental biases that drive our pursuit of it can betray us. One of the most common dysfunctions is undue favoritism toward members of our in-group, which can lead to prejudice toward members of the out-group. Many believe that favoritism and prejudice must be rooted in some kind of historical, economic, or social collective interest—and thus somehow "rational." But that’s not the case. Lab experiments show what happens when you divide people into random groups without even revealing who else is in those groups. The group to which people are assigned is totally artificial and doesn’t mean anything to them, but they’ll still assign more rewards to their own group and more penalties to the other. If those impulses are strong enough to arise in a contrived laboratory setting, imagine how much stronger they are when they involve deeply felt issues like cultural identity, economic well-being, and the national interest."

(tags: immigration culture prejudices government politics citizenship refugees identity migration )

Found via Kottke.org, probably should read "Paddling My Own Canoe" as well. Great book, made me want to learn to surf. Quotes:

• "But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around. Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else.
  Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your ad-versary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world. At thirteen, I had mostly stopped believing in God, but that was a new development, and it had left a hole in my world, a feeling that I’d been abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure. And yet you were expected, even as a kid, to take its measure every day. You were required-this was essential, a matter of survival-to know your limits, both physical and emotional. But how could you know your limits unless you tested them? And if you failed the test? You were also required to stay calm if things went wrong. Panic was the first step, everybody said, to drowning. As a kid, too, your abilities were assumed to be growing. What was unthinkable one year became thinkable, possibly, the next. My letters from Honolulu in 1966, kindly returned to me recently, are distinguished less by swaggering bullshit than by frank discussions of fear. "Don’t think I’ve suddenly gotten brave. I haven’t." But the frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, fitfully edging back for me."
• On a doctor (fellow surfer) he was writing a story about: ""I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface." Mark clawed at the air with his arms.
  What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.
  I asked Geoff Booth, an Australian journalist, surfer, and physician, for his professional opinion. "Mark definitely has the death wish in him," Booth said. "It’s some extreme driving force, which I really think only a handful of people in the world would understand. I’ve only met one other person who had it-Jose Angel." Jose Angel was a great Hawaiian big-wave surfer who disappeared while diving off Maui in 1976.
  Edwin’s theory was that Mark was driven to surf big waves by the rage and futility that he felt when his patients died. Mark said that was ridiculous."

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Probably will have to read it again. Too many quotes to write them all down but some that struck hard:

• "Sroufe also learned a great deal about resilience: the capacity to bounce back from adversity. By far the most important predictor of how well his subjects coped with life’s inevitable disappointments was the level of security established with their primary caregiver during the first two years of life. Sroufe informally told me that he thought that resilience in adulthood could be predicted by how lovable mothers rated their kids at age two."

(tags: psychology body mind brain therapy resilience trauma mental-health )