The group illusion

Political, economic, or religious groups don't exist in the real world. They're a product of our minds.
Of course, even though these groups are not physically real, they are treated as such, and people identify as members of one or more of them. These individuals do exist—they are real—and as they declare their affiliation with a group, we are led to assume the reality of the group itself.
That's where the illusion starts, but it doesn't end there. We profile groups, and so end up with a fairly precise set of characteristics associated with each one. So we tend to attribute that set of characteristics to all the group members, as if they were not unique human beings but just repetitions of a certain pattern. A procedure that would appear unacceptable if it were applied to us is cheerfully used to simplify the rest of the world.
This might be fine under certain circumstances. However, we need to keep in mind that hardly any of those group members will be correctly described by that specific set of features. In fact, the majority of them might not fit any of those attributes at all.
This distinction is not just important; it is fundamental. The consequences of this mental trap can be socially disastrous.
Groups can be very useful as conceptual tools. Always be careful not to take them too seriously though.

The pathological disorder

I'll never understand what drives people who already have plenty of money and keep wanting to pile up more.
I think it's a pathological disorder, because it makes no rational or practical sense.
For me, money has one big advantage: you no longer have to worry about making it. You can finally devote yourself to everything else. That is, the beautiful part of life. 

P.S. I'll confirm all of this once I've finally crossed the poverty line.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Accepting chaos

People often struggle to accept the elusiveness of a reality that is extremely complex, globalized, and interconnected, where a seemingly minor event in some obscure corner of the globe can upend their comfortable lives thousands of miles away.
So they tend to prefer explanations that are both easy to grasp and fascinating to follow. A bit like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster, when the more fitting cinematic model would really be the existential dramas of arthouse cinema.

The most typical of these explanations involve monolithic mass-control plans, run by a small group of super-powerful individuals, all in agreement with each other, to screw over us billions of poor pawns.
Reality, of course, is much more like a chaotic tangle, where countless control schemes, power blocs, bureaucratic cliques, random events, opportunism, hunches, visions, mistakes, strokes of dumb luck, and power struggles all get woven together. It's basically what happens every day in our own small, insignificant lives, scaled up to the global level. We ourselves are tiny nodes in an extremely complex graph, and we see it firsthand every single day: how can we think the whole world could be boiled down to an anime storyline?

The more you can accept, understand, and handle chaos, the more you keep your feet planted on the ground and the better your chances of staying afloat. Follow the master-plan theories, on the other hand, and you get lost in a parallel virtual reality that can easily turn into a real madhouse.
My advice: stay out of it. Better confused than insane.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

What the dog saw - Malcolm Gladwell

If you enjoyed Gladwell’s bestsellers such as “The tipping point”, “Blink” and “Outliers”, this collection of articles is a must read for you.
Malcolm Gladwell has worked as a columnist for “The New Yorker” since the mid nineties. Many of the articles he’s published in that paper posed as groundwork for some of his most famous non fiction books. “What the dog saw” is a collection of the best of those articles.

David and Goliath - Malcolm Gladwell

The question and wonder that has become a metaphor: “How did David manage to achieve such an improbable feat as beating Goliath?”.

The answer, as Malcolm Gladwell suggests, can be found in another question: why do we suppose that David is the weaker party, the underdog, the likely loser?” Maybe we haven’t assessed the situation well enough.

Talking to strangers - Malcolm Gladwell

Why are we so bad at understanding whether a stranger is telling a lie? And why is misunderstanding or misinterpreting among humans so frequent? Why do we jump at hasty conclusions about others yet think of ourselves as complicated beings that deserve effort, empathy and lengthy analyses to be properly understood?

Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

“A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” That’s how Steven D. Levitt defines himself and his work. He’s one of the most famous economists in America and yet he admits knowing little or nothing about micro and macro economics, political economics, econometrics and all the other typical branches of the subject. What he’s good at and what he likes to do is asking any sort of interesting questions and using the best tools economics provide in order to find good answers to those questions.

Upheaval - Jared Diamond

Pandemic book list. 20th item.

In “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse” (see previous posts), Jared Diamond explains why civilisations respectively rise and fall. In “Upheaval”, on the other hand, he tries to understand how countries cope with momentous crises.

Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

Pandemic book list. 19th item.

The year is 2005. The location is Borders bookstore, Wheelock Place, Orchard Road, Singapore. A store that, for all I know, might not exist anymore. I’m leafing through a copy of Blink. I’ve just read a review which tickled my curiosity. After skimming through a couple of passages I close it and think: “Nice introduction! Interesting subject! I won’t buy it!” Just like that.

Collapse - Jared Diamond

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. I'm currently updating a list of the best books I’ve come across so far. Please see my home page for the previous entries.

Item no. 13. Jared Diamond, once again. If “Guns, germs and steel” (see my home page for a dedicated chapter) was about the buildup of human societies, this is about the opposite problem: societal collapses (or barely avoided ones).