And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.6.
We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds.
In the Big Pond chapter, I talked about the fact that being on the outside, in a less elite and less privileged environment, can give you more freedom to pursue your own ideas and academic interests.
They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan’s Little Italy. Then they ventured west, eventually finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city near the town of Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy.
We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play – and by “we” I mean society – in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.
Hell, yeah, we’re going to ride,” the cussing preacher said and addressed his board. “Find you any kind of crack you can to hide in if you’re scared, but I’m walking downtown after this meeting and getting on the bus. I’m not going to look back to see who’s following me.
Gottman is far more selective. He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.
A certain property fundamentalism, having no connection to our tradition, now reigns in this culture.
In the end, the Impressionists made the right choice, which is one of the reasons that their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don’t choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse.
For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey.
The results from these experiments are, obviously, quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. But.
The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do.
Your unconscious, in the sense, was acting as a kind of mental valet. It was taking care of all the minor mental details in your life. It was keeping tabs on everything going on around you and making sure you were acting appropriately, while leaving you free to concentrate on the main problem at hand.
Even the most gifted of lawyers, equipped with the best of family lessons, cannot escape the limitations of their generation.
Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking that Blink is about. It involves make very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. That’s what makes it so compelling and – to be frank – terrifying.
This is the gift of training and expertise – the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.
How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.
But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that’s exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment.
The people at the top don’t just work harder. They work much, much harder.
You’ve got to let people work out the situation and work out what’s happening. The danger in calling is that they’ll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake. Plus you are diverting them. Now they are looking upward instead of downward. You’re preventing them from resolving the situation.