This has been quite a profound read for me, and very much changed how I look at politics and religion. I very much liked the metaphor of the monkey and the elephant to describe how people react intuitively to strongly emotive issues (the elephant) and then justify themselves post-hoc (the monkey). We aren’t the rational logical thinkers we like to think we are. Also excellent was the description of “moral foundations theory” that describes how humans have a cross-cultural set of moral categories and the differences between different cultures can be seen as different mixes of these; a set of how high the fader is set for each category. He also made a very good case for group selection and the evolution of culture and human hive like tendencies as a Darwinian process. Reading this alongside Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World, has very much changed, or enriched my views of human society, and made me more sympathetic to the conservative end of the political spectrum.