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An illusion will only make you happy if you’re fully under its spell, and blissfully unaware of it.

— Maarten Boudry What If False Beliefs Make You Happy? (2024)

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More quotes by Maarten Boudry

Although over the past decades leftists have been more creative in inventing ever more novel ways of denouncing Western civilisation, the efforts of the Right should not be discounted, either.

The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers (2025)

In a Western democracy, you can pat yourself on the back for courageously “speaking truth to power,” you can even complain about being silenced and censored, while the very fact that you are able to voice these complaints out loud proves them hollow.

The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers (2025)

There is also a rich tradition of right-wing thinkers in the West cozying up to foreign dictators, theocrats, and military strongmen, who are sworn enemies of western civilisation and its liberal values.

The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers (2025)

Moreover, in evolutionary accounts of religion there’s always a flipside to pro-sociality: being friendly to “us” also means being hostile and aggressive to “them”. There is a dark side to human pro-sociality that is often sanitized in popular accounts.

What If False Beliefs Make You Happy? (2024)

Is such a life of voluntary delusion really what you should want? Even if you don’t have any objections against untruthfulness per se, how can you foresee all of the consequences and ramifications of your false belief in an afterlife, or in any other comforting fiction?

What If False Beliefs Make You Happy? (2024)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Maarten Boudry (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.