Vanity and Virtue: The Federalist Papers’ Insight into Human Nature
James Madison pinpointed the root cause of violent factionalism: the boundless desires and varying abilities of people to acquire, as Alexander Hamilton described in Federalist #12,
James Madison pinpointed the root cause of violent factionalism: the boundless desires and varying abilities of people to acquire, as Alexander Hamilton described in Federalist #12,
Our intense co-evolution for desire has led to our signature inclination for worship
cellphone users push start button below Monogamy Facts: Approximately 85-95% of birds and 3-5% of mammals are monogamous. Among primates, about 15% are monogamous (Díaz-Muñoz, 2013). Monogamous social systems began evolving in some primates around 16 million years ago, emerging from promiscuous mating systems similar to those of chimpanzees and bonobos (Opie, 2012). Monogamy typically …
Darwin: “. . . a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good . . . “
A byproduct of our species’ emergent desire for desirability (vanity).
An ongoing odyssey, an unfinished symphony, whose ultimate fate is the province of faith, prayer, and patience
How do normal bad feeling differ from mental illness?
Is mental illness a “chemical imbalance” or “All in the genes”
The Story of Our Social Emotions Our ability to connect, cooperate, and form societies didn’t just pop up overnight. It’s the result of millions of years of evolution, starting from our ape-like ancestors to the modern humans we are today. By tracing back the history of major mental illnesses, we can map out the journey …
We’ll explore the relationship between severe mental illnesses and our most basic, primal emotions that drive our social interactions.
Each layer can exert its own influenced if needed,
And is modulated into the layer below:
Psychologist Michael Tomasello, who studies comparatively the social behavior of developing children and apes, proposes that collective communication is uniquely human and that it was evolved for collaborative foraging, and so teamwork has been the crucial human advantage. The central facts about our ancestral human species, such as upright posture, large molar teeth, and later, …
the authority of truth, which had reigned supreme over six million years of collaboration within the countless tribes of our ancestral species, all in passionate deliberation as to which path would be the most righteous and correct way forward for all as a single creature.
In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity in which David Graeber and David Wengrow assemble a vast array of archeological evidence from prehistory, much of it recently discovered, and interpret it in a wholly original way. The book, published in 2022, offers an alternative to the widely accepted Rousseauian narrative that, about …
The known facts of human evolution are interpreted as evidence for theory that, for six million years, our ancestral human species lived within a collective mentality intrinsic to their sole adaptation of coordinating their divided labor, i.e., teamwork.
Undoubtedly, many individuals, both male and female, prefer Donald’s bright fluffy bangs to my bald head!
Humans are unique in that both sexes have both motivations simultaneously: all of us both desire beauty and desire to be desired for being, acting, or wearing something beautiful. We Homo sapiens compete with bonobos as the primate species that most desire one another.
Sensitize yourself to the gracefulness in their manner that relentlessly draws all of us together to make us vulnerable to this pestilence.
Leavened by fresh ideas, vivid clinical vignettes, and narratives of the emotional life of our ancient human ancestors
The same experiences of mental illness stigmatized through the ages become ancient beacons illuminating a fresh and uplifting vision of Who We Are.