Mindless Behavior Quotes

If you know how to be happy with the wonders of life that are already there for you to enjoy, you don't need to stress your mind and your body by striving harder and harder, and you don't need to stress this planet by purchasing more and more stuff. The Earth belongs to our children. We have already borrowed too much from it, from them; and the way things have been going, we're not sure we'll be able to give it back to them in decent shape. And who are our children, actually? They are us, because they are our own continuation. So we've been shortchanging our own selves. Much of our modern way of life is permeated by mindless overborrowing. The more we borrow, the more we loser. That's why it's critical that we wake up and see we don't need to do that anymore. What's already available in the here and now is plenty for us to be nourished, to be happy. Only that kind of insight will get us, each one of us, to stop engaging in the compulsive, self-sabotaging behaviors of our species. We need a collective awakening. One Buddha is not enough. All of us have to become Buddhas in order for our planet to have a chance. Fortunately, we have the power to wake up, to touch enlightenment from moment to moment, in our very own ordinary and, yes, busy lives. So let's start right now. Peace is your every breath.

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.

If you detect something mindless about American education, it's because the mind has been taken out of it. Only visible behavior counts.

Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space. There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime—love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives.

So now, not only did my best friend leave, but the cheerleaders and their mindless followers assumed I was personally responsible for the petition (which, yeah, I was) and started being openly rude to me - shutting doors in my face, leaving nasty notes on my desk and in my locker, making fun of me when I could obviously hear them. That's when I started keeping really quiet in class, and finding ways to show the other kids I wasn't afraid of them - like staring them straight in the eye when they looked at me, taking a step toward them when they talked to me, or walking right up to them and getting their personal space if I heard them say my name. Saying the meanest things I could think of whenever I had the chance - repeating rumors, embellishing them. I found out Kira Conroy had been arrested for shoplifting at the mall, and made sure everyone knew about it. The girl who burped in a boy's face during her first kiss, the girl who tripped and fell off the stage at the Miss Teen California pageant - I shared those stories the moment I heard them. All's fair in war, right? Suddenly I wasn't a nobody anymore. I was a somebody. Somebody everyone was afraid of.

thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play. For example: (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

Hearing "can't" dares a person to find a workaround. It's a basic psychological theory called reactance - telling someone "no" just makes them want it more.

It is quick to over punish and uninterested in rewarding good behavior. What would we say about an individual who had these characteristics? Mean? Cruel? Heartless? Mindless? Hypocritical? Stupid?

Even though I was appointed by the White House to be executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agency in charge of the 2010 United States Dietary Guidelines, and even though I am a past president of the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, I still don’t think most nutrition education is very effective. People know that an apple is better for them than a Snickers bar, but . . . they eat the Snickers bar anyway.

We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . . But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . . The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . . Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . . Our whole republic rests upon the notion of “obedience to the unenforceable,” upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . . Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . . Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything! Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent. Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of life and then watch the mindless scurrying to redesign human systems to make life pain-free and pleasure-filled. Take away regard for the divinity in one’s neighbor, and watch the drop in our regard for his property. Take away basic moral standards and observe how quickly tolerance changes into permissiveness. Take away the sacred sense of belonging to a family or community, and observe how quickly citizens cease to care for big cities. Those of us who are business-oriented are quick to look for the bottom line in our endeavors. In the case of a value-free society, the bottom line is clear—the costs are prohibitive! A value-free society eventually imprisons its inhabitants. It also ends up doing indirectly what most of its inhabitants would never have agreed to do directly—at least initially. Can we turn such trends around? There is still a wealth of wisdom in the people of this good land, even though such wisdom is often mute and in search of leadership. People can often feel in their bones the wrongness of things, long before pollsters pick up such attitudes or before such attitudes are expressed in the ballot box. But it will take leadership and articulate assertion of basic values in all places and in personal behavior to back up such assertions. Even then, time and the tides are against us, so that courage will be a key ingredient. It will take the same kind of spunk the Spartans displayed at Thermopylae when they tenaciously held a small mountain pass against overwhelming numbers of Persians. The Persians could not dislodge the Spartans and sent emissaries forward to threaten what would happen if the Spartans did not surrender. The Spartans were told that if they did not give up, the Persians had so many archers in their army that they would darken the skies with their arrows. The Spartans said simply: “So much the better, we will fight in the shade!

Atheism will appeal to psychology and sociology to explain human behavior, which is legitimate, but what explains human psychology? Atheism can only find explanatory power in evolution such that the mind is - paradoxically - a mindless organ that is forced to act according to its chemistry and cannot act otherwise. The fact that humans are capable of recognizing depravity in others, are offended by it, seek to reform it, feel guilt, and are capable of redemptive behavior all speak against this explanation. The fact that humans are capable of meta-cognition - thinking about thinking - and are therefore able to postulate their own mindlessness is counter-intuitive to say the least.

A bunch of people from one tribe boldly went into the land of another tribe looting, pillaging and raping and they brought back food, clothing and women as souvenirs of victory and they called this valor and patriotism. And the stories of these exploits would be passed on through generations as some sort of heroic saga. And nobody would question it, for questioning those stories would mean questioning the tribal traditions, which would be an act of treason. Now my question to you, the thinking human of a modern world is - this kind of behavior may have been accepted in those days as uncompromisable tradition when our ancestors were nothing more than mindless savages, but does such tribalism make any sense in a civilized abode such as ours!

In the language of economics, the group is said to display behavior that is dynamically inconsistent. Initially people prefer A to B, but they later choose B over A. We can see dynamic inconsistency in many places. On Saturday morning people might say that they prefer exercising to watching television, but once the afternoon comes, they are on the couch at home watching the football game. How can such behavior be understood? Two factors must be introduced in order to understand the cashew phenomenon: temptation and mindlessness. Human beings have been aware of the concept of temptation at least since the time of Adam and Eve, but for purposes of understanding the value of nudges, that concept needs elaboration. What does it mean for something to be “tempting”?

She gives just enough hints about him to make you wonder why he became so villainous. And if he dies, I’ll never learnt the answer.” Oliver eyes her closely. “Perhaps he was born villainous.” “No one is born villainous.” “Oh?” he said with raised eyebrow. “So we’re all born good?” “Neither. We start as animals, with an animal’s needs and desires. It takes parents and teachers and other good examples to show us how to restrain those needs and desires, when necessary, for the greater good. But it’s still our choice whether to heed that education or to do as we please.” “For a woman who loves murder and mayhem, you’re quite the philosopher.” “I like to understand how things work. Why people behave as they do.” He digested that for a moment. “I happen to think that some of us, like Rockton, are born with a wicked bent.” She chose her words carefully. “That certainly provides Rockton with a convenient excuse for his behavior.” His features turned stony. “What do you mean?” “Being moral and disciplined is hard work. Being wicked requires no effort at all-one merely indulges every desire and impulse, no matter how hurtful or immoral. By claiming to be born wicked, Rockton ensures that he doesn’t have to struggle to be god. He can just protest that he can’t help himself.” “Perhaps he can’t,” he clipped out. “Or maybe he’s simply unwilling to fight his impulses. And I want to know the reason for that. That’s why I keep reading Minerva’s books.” Did Oliver actually believe he’d been born irredeemably wicked? How tragic! It lent a hopelessness to his life that helped to explain his mindless pursuit of pleasure. “I can tell you the reason for Rockton’s villainy.” Oliver rose to round the desk. Propping his hip on the edge near her, he reached out to tuck a tendril of hair behind her ear. A sweet shudder swept over her. Why must he have this effect on her? It simply wasn’t fair. “Oh?” she managed. “Rockton knows he can’t have everything he wants,” he said hoarsely, his hand drifting to her cheek. “He can’t have the heroine, for example. She would never tolerate his…wicked impulses. Yet he still wants her. And his wanting consumes him.” Her breath lodged in her throat. It had been days since he’d touched her, and she hadn’t forgotten what it was like for one minute. To have him this near, saying such things… She fought for control over her volatile emotions. “His wanting consumes him precisely because he can’t have her. If he thought he could, he wouldn’t want her after all.” “Not true.” His voice deepening, he stroked the line of her jaw with a tenderness that roused an ache in her chest. “Even Rockton recognizes when a woman is unlike any other. Her very goodness in the face of his villainy bewitches him. He thinks if he can just possess that goodness, then the dark cloud lying on his soul will lift, and he’ll have something other than villainy to sustain him.” “Then he’s mistaken.” Her pulse trebled as his finger swept the hollow of her throat. “The only person who can lift the dark cloud on his soul is himself.” He paused in his caress. “So he’s doomed, then?” “No!” Her gaze flew to his. “No one is doomed, and certainly not Rockton. There’s still hope for him. There is always hope.” His eyes burned with a feverish light, and before she could look away, he bent to kiss her. It was soft, tender…delicious. Someone moaned, she wasn’t sure who. All she knew was that his mouth was on hers again, molding it, tasting it, making her hungry in the way that only he seemed able to do. “Maria…” he breathed. Seizing her by the arms, he drew her up into his embrace. “My God, I’ve thought of nothing but you since that day in the carriage.

It was the same as I remembered it,” she whispered, sounding defeated and puzzled and shattered. It was better than he remembered. Stronger, wilder…And the only reason she didn’t know it was because he hadn’t succumbed to temptation yet and kissed her once more. He had just rejected that idea as complete insanity when a male voice suddenly erupted behind them: “Good God! What’s going on here!” Elizabeth jerked free in mindless panic, her gaze flying to a middle-aged elderly man wearing a clerical collar who was dashing across the yard. Ian put a steadying hand on her waist, and she stood there rigid with shock. “I heart shooting-“ The gray-haired man gasped, sagging against a nearby tree, his hand over his heart, his chest heaving. “I heard it all the way up the valley, and I thought0” He broke off, his alert gaze moving from Elizabeth’s flushed face and tousled hair to Ian’s hand at her waist. “You thought what?” Ian asked in a voice that struck Elizabeth as being amazingly calm, considering they’d just been caught in a lustful embrace by nothing less daunting than a Scottish vicar. The thought had scarcely crossed her battered mind when the man’s expression hardened with understanding. “I thought,” he said ironically, straightening from the tree and coming forward, brushing pieces of bark from his black sleeve, “that you were trying to kill each other. Which,” he continued more mildly as he stopped in front of Elizabeth, “Miss Throckmorton-Jones seemed to think was a distinct possibility when she dispatched me here.” “Lucinda?” Elizabeth gasped, feeling as if the world was turning upside down. “Lucinda sent you here?” “Indeed,” said the vicar, bending a reproachful glance on Ian’s hand, which was resting on Elizabeth’s waist. Mortified to the very depths of her being by the realization she’d remained standing in this near-embrace, Elizabeth hastily shoved Ian’s hand away and stepped sideways. She braced herself for a richly deserved, thundering tirade on the sinfulness of their behavior, but the vicar continued to regard Ian with his bushy gray eyebrows lifted, waiting. Feeling as if she were going to break from the strain of the silence, Elizabeth cast a pleading look at Ian and found him regarding the vicar not with shame or apology, but with irritated amusement. “Well?” demanded the vicar at last, looking at Ian. “What do you have to say to me?” “Good afternoon?” Ian suggested drolly. And then he added, “I didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow, Uncle.” “Obviously,” retorted the vicar with unconcealed irony. “Uncle!” blurted Elizabeth, gaping incredulously at Ian Thornton, who’d been flagrantly defying rules of morality with his passionate kisses and seeking hands from the first night she met him. As if the vicar read her thoughts, he looked at her, his brown eyes amused. “Amazing, is it not, my dear? It quite convinces me that God has a sense of humor.

Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence... 'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; 'the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity.' Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ('...ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang...') which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naive general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like--all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power--as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred--and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.

It's not that we're dumb. On the contrary, many millions of people have exerted great intelligence and creativity in building the modern world. It's more that we're being swept into unknown and dangerous waters by accelerating economic growth. On just one single day of the days I have spent writing this book, as much world trade was carried out as in the whole of 1949; as much scientific research was published as in the whole of 1960; as many telephone calls were made as in all of 1983; as many e-mails were sent as in 1990.11 Our natural, human, and industrial systems, which evolve slowly, are struggling to adapt. Laws and institutions that we might expect to regulate these flows have not been able to keep up. A good example is what is inaccurately described as mindless sprawl in our physical environment. We deplore the relentless spread of low-density suburbs over millions of acres of formerly virgin land. We worry about its environmental impact, about the obesity in people that it fosters, and about the other social problems that come in its wake. But nobody seems to have designed urban sprawl, it just happens-or so it appears. On closer inspection, however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand-but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. "Out of control" is an ideology, not a fact.

Curiously, just as much if not more mindless behavior can creep into our most momentous closures and life transitions, including our own aging and our own dying. Here, too, mindfulness can have healing effects. We may be so defended against feeling the full impact of our emotional pain—whether it be grief, sadness, shame, disappointment, anger, or for that matter, even joy or satisfaction—that we unconsciously escape into a cloud of numbness in which we do not permit ourselves to feel anything at all or know what we are feeling.

Recall that it is hard to change behavior when it becomes ingrained and mindless. Also recall that “mere exposure” research shows that people will have positive reactions to anything familiar and negative reactions to anything unfamiliar. The longer a group has been together, the stronger these forces become. What happens inside the group becomes increasingly familiar to members, while what outsiders do seems less familiar or interesting. As time passes, motivation, experimentation, and learning may diminish so gradually that no one on the team realizes that these changes are actually taking place.22 To make matters worse, I’ve noticed that after a group of people have been together for a long time, they spend more and more time talking about things outside of work—their families, sports, hobbies, and so on—and less and less time talking about their work. After all, they don’t really think about the work; they have decided who in the group is good at what, and they don’t feel compelled to waste time talking with outsiders, so they have plenty of time to talk with their pals about other things!

Giants in Jeans Sonnet 31 Progress is a messy term, Which in theory means ascension. But in practice it means serving the wealthy, And to hell with the rest of the humans! When reckless monkeys start making rockets, They behave like some fancy junkie. When nuts and bolts hypnotize the apes, Equity, justice and honor feel secondary. Traditions have been ruling human behavior, Now technology has cast a spell on society. Just like mindless traditions are dangerous, Heartless technology is injurious to humanity. Traditions and technology both can be a boon, Yet as of today, they sustain a world of fools.

Being “normal” is a constant battle because it constantly puts the “obvious path” laid out in front of us in conflict with our authentic self.

They will skew. They will skim. They will downgrade. In the mindless pursuit of “hitting the numbers,” people will do anything that’s legal without the slightest remorse—even if it grossly violates the spirit of the mission—and they will find ways to look more favorably upon what’s illegal. All of us won’t stoop to this behavior all the time. But most of us will some of the time.

Traditions have been ruling human behavior, Now technology has cast a spell on society. Just like mindless traditions are dangerous, Heartless technology is injurious to humanity.

Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose. “But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. “Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell—but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there’s no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.

I have revealed and sent a top-secret letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and a copy to the Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, for the defense of our beloved country Pakistan. Later, after a few days, it was released to the Pakistani media, knowing that our media is not fair nor honest; it is the blackmailer, supporter of the enemies, and has mindless and reckless behavior. There was still no reaction from our media; we have enough resources to defend our country, and we do not rely on the dirty media that is corrupt. The letter is on Facebook with the hope that our brave people will read and share it to teach a lesson to all enemies.

Humanitarian Behaviorism (The Sonnet) Give me a drop of love, I'll shower you with monsoon. Hit me with loads of hate, I'll silently disappear soon. I don't approve of hate in return, I just walk away from wrong done to me. Wrong done to another is another matter, I am the bulldozer, if you are the bully. I am a biologist and behaviorist after all, I don't need to do harm to restrain harm. Weaknesses of the apes are my common knowledge, Where there is brain, there's no need for brawn. Brain used to lift the world, is the only human brain. All else is mindless protoplasm, ever-consumed with greed and gain.

Parents aspire for their children to excel academically and develop their talents, but mainstream celebrities often encourage them to prioritize drug consumption and mindless entertainment over educational pursuits. Parents hope for their daughters to maintain their purity and innocence, yet idols continuously promote looseness and self-objectification as virtuous behaviors. Parents also want their children to prioritize their health and to lead a wholesome lifestyle, yet modern music celebrities often glamorize drug use, portraying it as a masculine and cool pursuit. Alternatively, parents often aim to instill a growth mindset and a strong work ethic in their children. Yet, the musical icons often glorify hedonist pursuits and short-term gratification. In light of these toxic messages incessantly inundating the airwaves, it is hardly surprising to see so many individuals leading self-destructive lives or harboring toxic misconceptions about life’s true essence. They have unwittingly followed the wrong role models, heeded the wrong idols, and are now grappling with the consequences of such misguided influence.

The demolition of the wall of silence, against which the theme of child abuse constantly runs up, marks only the beginning of a long overdue development. It creates the conditions that make it possible to free the truth from the prison of misleading opinions and well-established lies. But for the full unfolding of the truth and its deployment in the service of life, more is required than a merely statistical grasp of the facts. Some people may, for instance, say, "Yes, I was often spanked as a child," while remaining, emotionally, miles from the truth—because they cannot feel. They lack the consciousness, the emotional knowledge, of what it means, as small, defenseless children, to be beaten and shoved around by incensed adults. They say the word "spanked" but thereby identify with the mindless, destructive behavior of the adult who violates, abuses, and destroys the child without the slightest knowledge of or concern for what he is doing and what it may result in. Even Adolf Hitler never denied that he had been beaten. What he denied was that these beatings were painful. And by totally falsifying his feelings, he would become a mass murderer. That would never have occurred had he been capable of feeling, and weeping about, his situation and had he not repressed his justifiable hatred of those responsible for his distress but consciously experienced and comprehended it. Instead he perverted this hatred into ideology. The same holds for Stalin, Ceausescu, and all the other beaten and humiliated children who later turn into tyrants and criminals.

In other words, the atheist bloodbath is the product of a hubristic modern ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. In rejecting God, man becomes scornful of the doctrine of human sinfulness and convinced of the perfectibility of his nature. Man now seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth. In order to achieve this, the atheist rulers establish total control of society. They invent a form of totalitarianism far more comprehensive than anything that previous rulers attempted: every aspect of life comes under political supervision. Of course if some people—the Jews, the landowners, the unfit, the handicapped, the religious dissidents, and so on—have to be relocated, incarcerated, or liquidated in order to achieve this utopia, this is a price the atheist tyrants have shown themselves quite willing to pay. The old moral codes do not apply, and ordinary atheist functionaries carry out behavior that would make a church inquisitor quake. The atheist regimes, by their actions, confirm the truth of Dostoevsky’s dictum: if God is not, everything is permitted. Whatever the cause for why atheist regimes do what they do, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in three thousand years not managed to kill anywhere near the number of people killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades. It’s time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the main source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the worst mass murders of history.

Mindful or Mindless? When we last met Harvard professor Ellen Langer, she was astonishing the psychology world by sending seventy-year-old men into a time capsule and bringing them out seemingly younger. But time travel isn’t applicable to everyday life. Having proved her point in spectacular fashion, Langer took up a larger cause: mindfulness. We’ve been using this term also, showing how being mindful reaches beyond the word’s old association with Eastern spiritual practices. Langer has totally Westernized mindfulness with the following definition: Mindfulness, she said before a medical school audience, is the process of actively noticing new things, relinquishing preconceived mindsets, and then acting on the new observations. Our goal here, of unfolding a healing lifestyle, includes the same things. Langer was very blunt—everyday behavior is mindless most of the time. One of her favorite examples, she said, comes from personal experience: “I once went to make a purchase and I gave [the cashier] my credit card, and she saw it wasn’t signed.” Langer dutifully signed the card, and the cashier ran it through the machine. She asked Langer to sign the receipt. “[The cashier] then compared the two signatures to make sure they were the same person,” Langer recalled. She paused, and it took a moment before the audience caught on and started to laugh. Why would two signatures need to be compared when you’ve just witnessed the same person signing both? Small instances of mindless behavior tie us to the past and block the possibility of being alive in the moment, alert to possibilities we will never see. In fact, Langer calls her pursuit of mindfulness “the psychology of possibility.

Your Mindless Margin. By making 100–200 calorie changes in your daily intake, you won’t feel deprived and backslide. • Mindless Better Eating. Focus on reengineering small behaviors that will move you from mindless overeating to mindless better eating. Five common places to look (diet danger zones) include meals, snacks, parties, restaurants, and your desk or dashboard. • Mindful Reengineering. To trim your mindless margin, you can use basic diet tips, but a more personalized approach is to use 1) food trade-offs, or 2) food policies. Both give you a chance to eat some of what you want without making it a belabored decision. • The Power of Three. Design three easy, do-able changes that you can mindlessly make without much sacrifice. • Mindless Margin Checklist. Use this daily checklist to help you move from mindless overeating to mindless better eating.

The banking business is no favorite of ours. When assets are twenty times equity - a common ratio in this industry - mistakes that involve only a small portion of assets can destroy a major portion of equity. And mistakes have been the rule rather than the exception at many major banks. Most have resulted from a managerial failing that we described last year when discussing the ‘institutional imperative:’ the tendency of executives to mindlessly imitate the behavior of their peers, no matter how foolish it may be to do so. In their lending, many bankers played follow-the-leader with lemming-like zeal; now they are experiencing a lemming-like fate.

You can also invert this principle and prime the environment to make bad behaviors difficult. If you find yourself watching too much television, for example, then unplug it after each use. Only plug it back in if you can say out loud the name of the show you want to watch. This setup creates just enough friction to prevent mindless viewing.

Why even smart people get bad results by Warren Buffett It' ego, greed, envy, fear…It's mindless imitation of other people. I mean, there are a variety of factors that cause that horsepower of the mind to get diminished dramatically before the output turns out. And I would say if Charlie and I have any advantage it's not because we're so smart, it's because we're rational and we very seldom let extraneous factors interfere with our thoughts. We don't let other people's opinion interfere with it…we try to get fearful when others are greedy. We try to get greedy when others are fearful. We try to avoid any kind of imitation of other people's behavior. And those are the factors that cause smart people to get average to bad results. I always look at IQ and talent as representing the horsepower of the motor, but in terms of output, the efficiency with which the motor works, depends on rationality. That's because a lot of people start out with 400-horsepower motor and get a hundred horsepower of output. So why do smart people do things that interfere with getting the output they're entitled to? It gets into the habits, and character and temperament, and it really gets into behaving in a rational manner. Not getting in your own way.

People exchange information about how to act in many ways. They observe each other and imitate what they see. When they imitate, they use their bodies to represent the bodies of others. But this imitation is not mindless, automatized mimicry. It is instead the ability to identify regularities or patterns in the behavior of other people, and then to imitate those patterns.

Zimbardo could not see the brutality himself because he was already too deep into his chosen role of Warden and lost his exterior view of his sociological “experiment”. He could not see clearly what was happening. More recently, Zimbardo has acted as a consultant to one of the arrested soldiers in the recent Abu Ghraib prison torture. He never denied the culpability of the individuals involved but was certain to bring up the lack of oversight and structure. In his recent book he states “Aberrant, illegal or immoral behavior by individuals in service professions, such as policemen, corrections officers, and soldiers, are typically labeled the misdeeds of “a few bad apples”. The implication is that they are a rare exception and must be set on one side of the impermeable line between evil and good, with the majority of good apples set on the other side. But who is making the distinction? Usually it is the guardians of the system, who want to isolate the problem in order to deflect attention and blame away from those at the top who may be responsible for creating untenable working conditions or for a lack of oversight or supervision. Again the bad-apple dispositional view ignores the apple barrel and its potentially corrupting situational impact on those within it. “A systems analysis focuses on the barrel makers, on those with the power to design the barrel.” Zimbardo isolated 7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil. I found myself in all of these seven steps, to a greater or lesser degree. They are: 1) Mindlessly taking the first step. 2) Dehumanization of others. 3) De-individualization of self (anonymity). 4) Diffusion of personal responsibility. 5) Blind obedience to authority. 6) Uncritical conformity to the group’s norms. 7) Passive tolerance of evil, through inaction, or indifference. In hindsight, I can see each one of these points were present in the apple barrel of Scientology that I lived through.   Acknowledgments                     There are numerous people I would like to acknowledge for their support and encouragement during the very difficult task of going back to some dark places in my past to get this book written. They do no want their names used, but they know who they are, and my appreciation is deep and well known to them. I would like to thank Jeferson Hawkins for both his Cover designs and other help along this road. I want to acknowledge Bernice Mennis, Ben Bashore for their personal help over the years. There is much I can say about Vermont College, but the simplest is that they gave me the environment, freedom and courage to study what I needed to write

Consumerism is not bad, but reckless and mindless consumerism is not just bad, but downright injurious to the health of not just the individual, but of the entire society.

Mindless Choosing The cashew problem is not only one of temptation. It also involves the type of mindless behavior we discussed in the context of inertia. In many situations, people put themselves into an “automatic pilot” mode, in which they are not actively paying attention to the task at hand. (The Automatic System is very comfortable that way.) On a Saturday morning when we set out to run an errand, we can easily find ourselves driving our usual route to work—until we realize we are headed in the opposite direction from our intended destination, the grocery store.