Homo sapiens: An Endangered Species

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Abstract

Science has produced an enormous amount of empirical information about nature, perhaps leading some of us to believe that we are outside and above nature. This is not true, of course, because our behavior may be very much conditioned by our biology. For example, biology requires two things of us: our survival and the need to reproduce. This creates two often conflicting emotional needs in us: a need for power, or the need to dominate and control in order to survive, and a need for love and affection in order to reproduce. Men, because of their greater strength, have assigned themselves the role of survival, and thus the need for power. Women have, because of their biology, been assigned the role of reproduction, accompanied by the emotional need for love and affection. As we can observe historically, much of male behavior is conditioned by their need for power, including their traditional need to dominate women. Capitalism and oligarchy, with their ideologies of predatory individualism, are well-suited to the male need to survive, something which is accomplished through the accumulation of wealth. As Epicurus illustrated over 2000 years ago, efforts to create a more cooperative society, based upon the female attributes of love and friendship, have had to withdraw from larger society.

1. Cooperation

Our advances in knowledge have caused some humans to believe that we are outside and above nature. Yet, we human beings are biological creatures, which means we are mortal and have a limited time on the earth. Within that context, biology demands at least two things of us as living beings: survival and reproduction. Human beings have responded to these two needs in various ways over the years of their existence on earth. At first, they were simply responded to biologically, as with reproduction.

Thanks to science, we now know that most living things on the planet Earth have now established cooperation, and some form of communication to achieve cooperation and thus enhance survival.¹ Trees apparently communicate through their root systems; bees have dance routines, birds make musical sounds, and higher forms of life use gestures and sounds to communicate meanings necessary to their cooperative survival. Homo sapiens, starting with cave drawings which evolved into hieroglyphics and then letters, have created words that represented meanings that allowed the higher forms of communication that we live with today. All of this is part of the process of ensuring cooperation and survival.

2. Culture

In the meantime, as intelligent and emotional human beings we have, over time, created systems of thought and belief that help to promote and explain our biological behavior, and at the same time to accompany, justify, and legitimize our social behavior. This is what anthropologists call culture. Cultures vary enormously over the Earth, and are apparently closely related to the environmental conditions that surround the humans who create them.² Thus, there appeared two often conflicting human emotional needs to accomplish our biological needs for survival and reproduction: the need for power (domination and control) and the need for love (emotional security). Nature appears to have divided these needs more or less between the male and female members of the species, though, as with most things in both nature and society, this is not a black and white separation, as the history of behavior has shown.

Nor is culture something restricted to ‘primitive’, small scale societies, as anthropology might imply. All societies are accompanied by a culture. It is the subjective reality of society, accompanying its observable objective reality. It determines at all times how we as members of a culture behave, depending upon what we believe to be true and what false, what is good and what is evil, what is necessary and what superfluous, etc., evolving over time in size and complexity, as society itself has grown in size and complexity

As intelligent and emotional beings, in the meantime, along with our effort to satisfy our biological needs for survival and reproduction, we are necessarily aware of our mortality, which ultimately circumscribes our sense of survival. Because of the troubling awareness of death that goes along with cognitive and emotional intelligence, human cultures often use mythologies and ideologies that include an afterlife that would appear to offset mortality. Awareness of mortality is, at the same time, apparently less troubling for women, because they are largely responsible for reproduction, which may be the closest thing to immortality that is possible for human beings.³

Thus, human communities create rules and roles that allow them to live and work together in a cooperative way and therefore enhance survival. They create a subjective, as well as an intersubjective reality about which phenomenologists have informed us.⁴ These are moral systems that guide human behavior, and as stated above, are referred to as cultures by anthropologists and other social scientists. In small scale hunting and gathering communities these cultural rules were probably established more or less democratically, based upon the familiarity of all members of the community with each other, as well as upon a sufficient understanding of the environment, such that cooperation according to these rules would seem necessary for the survival of the community.

As perhaps an unintended outcome of this process of enculturation, human beings, and perhaps other species as well, have, as the overall population grew in size, created a world of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of in-groups and out-groups, with differing moral obligations to each side of this duality. Edward Banfield discovered this during a stay in Sicily, and coined the phrase ‘amoral familism’ to characterize this behavior, where the extended family was the in-group and everyone else, even in their own society at that time, were the out-group.⁵ The definition of in-group has, over time, been expanded to include members of one’s religion, one’s tribe, and then to members of one’s nation state, as the world population has grown in size. This usually has included all those who share the same language, sometimes with a period of adaptation when the language of minority groups was gradually replaced by that of the dominant majority.

In time our intelligence has allowed us to create institutions such as religion and science, in order to elaborate our culture. It has also sought various emotional means to neutralize the conflicting views of those defined as ‘others’. One of these, during the Middle Ages, was, unfortunately, the witch hunt, which defined ‘others’, as witches, who could be burned at the stake in order to cleanse the world of their influence. In the Middle Ages these witches were women who, as an extension of their biological ability to attract men in order to ensure reproduction, were believed to be responsible for catastrophic weather events. As science has gradually explained the natural causes of these catastrophic events, burning women defined as witches has, fortunately, gone out of style.

The witch hunt, however, as an emotional strategy, and as an important obstacle to cooperation is still very much with us today, though the definition of witch has changed. Also confronting witches has changed. Now witches, both male and female, may simply be assassinated symbolically, what is called ‘character assassination’. An example in Greece has been the character assassination of Yanis Varoufakis, whose actual strong opposition to the memorandum to further Greece’s indebtedness to the bankers in 2015 was totally distorted by the mass media in Greece. This has caused most Greeks, even today, to see him as an ‘evil witch’ who could not be trusted.

Thus, the witch hunt serves to neutralize politically and morally those people who are labelled witches, as the McCarthy witch hunt in 1953 in the USA also demonstrated. What resulted at that time was a loss of employment for dozens of writers and directors in Hollywood, and for others throughout American society. McCarthy’s witches were called ‘communists’, a label which is still very much in fashion today with the oligarchs in capitalist societies, also now followed by the term ‘terrorist’ as a favorite ‘witch’ of the day. This gives a strong emotional content in the fight against anyone who believes that society is not simply the product of individual behavior, but a separate system with its own laws and characteristics beyond the individuals who make it up, or even more that it is a system currently filled with corruption and unjustified inequality. This is in contrast to the belief propagated by Adam Smith that society was simply the sum of the individuals who made it up, with an ‘invisible hand’ to guarantee the best possible outcome of those individual efforts. The USA maintains over 800 military bases around the world as well as a branch of the CIA with the sole responsibility of ‘burning at the stake’ any of these communist or terrorist ‘witches’ who might appear on the international scene.

Stalin also, of course, had his own set of witches, being those who supported the feudal class that ruled Russia before the revolution in 1917, or who believed that individual innovations were better than orders given from on high. These ‘witches’ were exiled to Siberia where most did not survive. The leaders in Russia, China and other communist countries have, of course, succeeded in instituting a central planning system that ensures basic needs for all of the population in the meantime, at least to the degree possible, given the never ending economic, political and often military obstacles placed in their way by the capitalist countries. Central planning may, of course, inhibit personal initiative, especially if it is not created democratically, which suggests the need to find the proper balance between individual and collective needs. This is something which small scale communities probably succeeded in doing in the past when these needs, as well as the overall environment were seen as much simpler to confront.

All of these are obstacles to cooperation, not so apparent at the level of hunter-gatherer societies. But this is something which must be confronted as we seek to enhance our efforts to survive as a species. This is especially true when our knowledge and inventiveness as humans are outrunning our ability to incorporate them in our need for survival, often within the delusion that science and technology will solve all problems in any case.

Unfortunately, our success in resolving specific problems technologically at a local and specialized level has now created a problem of survival at a global scale. This is because our interference in the environment has reached global dimensions, but our efforts to solve the problem of survival cooperatively are only at a specialized or ‘local’ scale. In this sense we are an ‘endangered species’. More and more people are recognizing this contradiction, as have many philosophers in the recent past.⁶ What is missing from many critiques of the current political economic system, however, is an awareness of the role that culture plays in this process, especially the emotional need for power that drives the behavior of the (mostly) men who create this system.

3. Religion

One of the early efforts to confront global problems was religion. Religion sought to explain behavior in a largely emotional way, with metaphysical divine will being held responsible, not only for the workings of nature, but ultimately for the workings of society, as well. God was therefore responsible for whatever we could not understand. At the same time, however, Christianity, for example, became important because it also offered a sense of emotional security within a community of believers who could support each other at that time in a Roman world characterized by domination and exploitation, a circumstance which has not changed much during the intervening years up to today.⁷ Christianity also offered the hope of a messiah who would arrive shortly to eliminate the injustice and inequality characterizing the social world at that time. Ultimately, this is not unlike the belief that the unseen hand of the ‘free market system’ would offer the same guarantee to today’s exploited and dominated humans, although there is no longer any mention of a messiah in this non-religious ‘explanation’. Nevertheless, the offer of emotional security explains why religion is still an important force in modern society, especially in oppressive capitalist societies which largely distort our collective and emotional needs exclusively into the need for money and the associated need for power as an expression of the need for survival.

Christianity, as a religion, succeeded largely because of the efforts not of Jesus Christ, a rebellious Jew opposed to the Roman domination, but of Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew, but with Roman citizenship, from Tarsus (and not Jerusalem). Paul changed his name from Saul, perhaps to be more attractive to his potential ‘customers’. He also sought to attract new followers by extending his emotional ‘commodity’ to non-Jews, and by relieving these gentiles of the need to follow Jewish customs, such as circumcision, for example. Unfortunately, this served to alienate him from the majority Jewish community of which he was a part, leading to a permanent division between Orthodox Jews and the Jewish followers of Christ, as well as the more recent Gentiles, that has lasted up until today.⁸ He did succeed in creating an expanded size of the cooperative in-group, however, by helping to create a community of fellow human beings that could seemingly be trusted and would give a sense of security in a world populated by an ever-larger out-group of unknown and potentially hostile strangers.

This, however, has merely extended this existential dilemma onto a larger scale, as the thousand-year history of ever more deadly wars so clearly illustrates. This has also been accompanied by a general loss of moral accountability and hence cooperation with the ever-larger out-group. Religious leaders, seeking control and domination, have even attacked ‘in-group’ members of the same religion, if it served their perceived need for power. This is clearly illustrated by the history of wars among varying Protestant Christian groups in Northern Europe after the Reformation, or the conflict between Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians, represented by the Crusades, or the conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.⁹

4. Science

Religion was short on knowledge which in time gave rise to science. Science has sought to explain and justify nature and society in a largely non-emotional and mechanical way. This has made it quite unacceptable to religion, which explains, in part, the response to Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and other science advocates in the 17th century. Science has used empirical methodologies to vastly increase our understanding of both nature and society, but with little regard for our emotional being, considered to be an obstacle to true objective (scientific) understanding and action.

Some individuals have increasingly come to believe that science will allow us to surpass any restrictions that nature has placed upon us, causing them to scoff at Malthus, as well as at the arguments about the limits to growth offered more recently by the Club of Rome.¹⁰ Indeed, we have been able to extend the life of thousands of humans through the increase in food production, as well as the application of medical science, for example. But all of this has been compromised by the importance that human beings now place on money and power, inspired by the ideology of predatory individualism, thanks, largely, to economic ‘science’, which legitimizes this ideology.¹¹

In time, money was created as a system of symbols that helped create a form of cooperation that would reach into the ever-expanding economic realm, an evolution that has confused and complicated the meaning of in-group and out-group to no end. Is the large number of humans involved in systems of commerce an in-group, requiring moral responsibility towards them, or are they simply an out-group, cooperating economically, but available for exploitation morally? According to capitalist economic theory, it would appear to be the latter. Thus, all of human society and all of nature are open for exploitation in the search for never-ending growth, which is basic to the culture of economics and its belief system, or paradigm as Kuhn has labelled it.¹² Unlike in ancient Greek philosophy where ‘the human being was the measure of all things’, it has become money, and the associated power that it bestows, that is now ‘the measure of all things’.¹³

Thus, we have a worldwide system of coordination at a technical and material level, made possible in part by our growing scientific knowledge of nature and its workings, as well as an economic system that extends everywhere. But this system has also created an increasingly retarded emotional and moral intelligence, something which is largely ignored because emotions and morality are seen by the culture of science to inhibit the ‘objectivity’ necessary for technical knowledge. In other words, while our technical knowledge influences human beings worldwide, our emotional and moral responsibility extends only to those in our current ‘in-group’, and often not even at that level, as wars between members of the same religion mentioned above demonstrate. This has complicated the task of cooperation and survival to no end.

All of this is becoming more and more known worldwide, as a result of the technical improvements in communication. We also have growing scientific knowledge about the differences between the two hemispheres of the brain, which perceive and act in the world in quite different ways.¹⁴ The left hemisphere is more focused and specialized, lending itself to science and technology. It is also more common in the male brain, which has dominated history for quite a long time now. The right hemisphere is more holistic, able to see connections among diverse subjects that the left hemisphere is unlikely to see. The right hemisphere is more active in the female brain, which is smaller than the male brain, but with a greater number of synapses necessary for a more holistic understanding.¹⁵

Indeed, one can observe an enormous change in society, especially over the past 200 years or so, all brought about by the characteristic often male preferred left hemisphere’s ability to focus upon a single technical problem and to find a solution for it. The trouble is that each technical solution often demands a new cultural adjustment, often requiring a more holistic right hemisphere understanding than is common in the typical male brain. As culture is the product of a dialectical, not deterministic process, this is becoming more and more understood even by male intellectuals today, as indeed it had been in ancient Greece when male philosophers confronted this problem in their search for wisdom.

The exact opposite of cooperation is, of course, war. War, as a form of conflict resolution, was, at first, a battle in a restricted space only between warriors with swords and shields, or with whatever weapons were available during that period in history. War can no longer be described in that way. It now, thanks to the applications of science and technology, involves entire populations defined as enemies in the rhetoric of conflicting political leaders. It is now, in other words, a form of mass murder, very well demonstrated by the indiscriminate bombing on both sides during the two world wars in the 20th century, especially the use of atomic weapons in 1945 to murder over 200,000 mostly civilian Japanese citizens.¹⁶

The threat of Russian expansion into Asia was one of the reasons for the use of the atomic bombs to end the war with Japan. Russia, meanwhile, was the ally of the British and Americans during the Second World War, but had been their chosen enemy since the late 18th Century, as Thomas Paine revealed in the prologue to the French edition of his book, The Rights of Man. This choice of an enemy at that time was necessary for the very profitable English military-industrial complex, so that it could continue to receive government subsidies after the war between England and France ended in 1783. This Russian ‘enemy’ was chosen at that time, and had nothing to do with the philosophy of Karl Marx and the ‘threat’ of communism. In other words, a viable enemy serves to create a sense of fear in the domestic population, necessary, as Aristotle claimed 2000 years earlier, in order for them to be dominated and controlled.

Thus, instead of a world system based upon overall cooperation, we now live in a world system based upon partial technical (economic) coordination, but also accompanied by a good deal of emotional and moral alienation. This has resulted from the fact that this form of cooperation has come to exist based almost exclusively upon domination and control, as the long history of imperialism so clearly demonstrates. This is apparent in the evolution of the ‘free market’ system in the capitalist countries into a monopoly capitalist system, and a corresponding evolution of democracy into oligarchy in these countries.¹⁷

The former centrally planned Soviet Union has, meanwhile, also evolved into oligarchy in these former communist countries. The emotional and political conflict between Russia and the West remains, however, as a necessary prerequisite to the maintenance of the Western trillion-dollar military-industrial complex, as General and then President Eisenhower warned in his farewell speech in the early 1960s. Meanwhile, this subsidy is much embraced by mainstream economic theory, a stepchild (or perhaps parent) of the current neoliberal political ideology of predatory individualism. For example, should the manufacture of weapons of mass murder be included in GDP or GNP as a measure of progress in a given economy?

The question is: where does this leave us as an endangered species which is also slowly, apparently destroying the global natural environment that is our biological home?¹⁸ In other words, we have created a culture that allows a form of cooperation, necessary for our survival, to be achieved only through domination and control throughout much of the world. But at the same time, because of our advanced scientific knowledge, we are, ourselves, creating a natural environment plagued by an indifference to the effects on the ecosystem of this advanced technology. What should be done?

5. Psychology

We need to face the psychological reasons why certain people, especially men until now, and using primarily the left hemisphere of their brains, have an overwhelming need to dominate and control. This psychological characteristic is something, which, based upon archeological findings, Riane Eisler attributes to the descent of animal herders from the Steppes into the Middle East and Mediterranean around 4000 BCE. Before that time even agricultural societies were likely to have been characterized by what she labels as ‘partnership’. These animal herders, on the other hand, needed ‘domination and control’ to keep their ‘sheep’ inside the herd so they would not wander off on their own. These herders also apparently had a closer relationship with death, since they ended up slaughtering most of their animals at some point. Is it now, therefore, because of the fear and anxiety associated with the awareness of death, that lead today’s ‘herders’ to seek to dominate and control?

Epicurus believed so over 2000 years ago, when he required that those who wished to enter his garden devoted to happiness through love and friendship, must first confront the problem of death?¹⁹ This existential problem appears still to exist, something which is verified by the more current research of Ernest Becker and Sheldon Solomon and his associates in modern society.²⁰ If so, we need to investigate the origins of this psychopathic problem.

We know that an abusive environment surrounding an infant’s first moments of life within and outside the womb can be very damaging for its later psychological development, especially as related to the fear of death. In other words, the mother must live in a peaceful and supportive environment during and after pregnancy, if the infant is to develop in a healthy way. Does modern society recognize this need and provide such an environment? For the most part, apparently not, especially not in a culture where ‘money is the measure of all things’, and humanly induced poverty and insecurity are so common throughout the capitalist inspired world!

Many of us live in an American-influenced society in which median family income has not declined, primarily because many, if not most, women have entered the labor force. They add to the family income, so that male workers’ wages do not have to keep up with increases in prices. But now women have two fulltime occupations both within and outside the household, not a very peaceful environment for giving birth to and nurturing a newborn infant. Do economists and corporate executives, who largely define today’s cultural environment, appreciate this? Probably not. To achieve this will require significant changes in corporate and social policy, still defined largely by dominant males.²¹

6. Philosophy

All of this will require a profound change in the organization of knowledge, especially in the psychology of wealthy and powerful men who believe they have established their importance and perhaps immortality by dominating other men and nearly all women with their power and authority, something not readily understood in an intellectual world characterized by highly specialized and compartmentalized knowledge largely defined by men in the first place. This is accompanied by an emotional need for esteem and respect among men, as implied by Freud and then elaborated on by Maslow in his ‘hierarchy of needs’, but then profoundly modified by Margaret Mead, who argues that women are not plagued by this need, as their contribution to human reproduction insures their importance to society for all time.²²

Male specialization is not a deterministic situation. It has evolved quite naturally in a world society marked by increasing size and complexity over the past thousands of years. Scientific knowledge, especially in the social sciences, is now heavily influenced by a mechanistic Newtonian approach. Social scientists, for reasons of their own emotional security, want to copy the ontological and methodological assumptions of natural science. Thus, many social scientists dislike the obvious and apparently inescapable ambiguity of the social order. The same historical reality may be interpreted in many different ways by different intellectuals and different cultures, all of them partially true, without a neat black-and-white separation between these often-conflicting views.

Thus, while decrying the effects of predatory individualism that inspires mainstream economic theory, we should not reject the liberating effects on the individual of movement from the intellectually restricted small-scale village and farm society that has accompanied the move to the larger scale and more complex urban environment over the past several hundred years. Nor should we underestimate the role of individual initiative in the transformation from feudalism to mercantilism and then industrial society during that same period. Nor should we ignore the increased knowledge provided by specialization in the sciences as we decry its compartmentalization and fragmentation within a mechanistic worldview, and therefore the need for a more holistic understanding.

This is not a question of ‘Either-Or’, but a question of ‘Either-And’! At one time in ancient Greece, philosophy (‘the friend of wisdom’) was assigned the task of sorting out this ambiguity. But philosophy was replaced, first by the dogma of religion and then by a mechanistic science, so that it is now seen by many as simply an ‘interesting hobby’, not to be taken seriously, even in the academic world. One of the things that is largely ignored here generally, is Hegel’s insightful claim that many liberating ideas at one point in time may often turn into suffocating strait jackets at a later time. And this is because of the dialectical, not simply causal relationship between human beings and their social and physical environment.

In spite, or perhaps because, of this, there is now an apparently growing awareness among intellectuals, including scientists and engineers, concerning the inadequacy of modern technological society, based solely upon increases in specialized scientific knowledge, to ensure our survival. This awareness reached an apex in the 1960s during a worldwide cultural revolution opposed to the technological society.²³ As in many such moments in human history, this revolution was often excessively critical of that society, often ‘throwing out the baby with the bath water’! Indeed, we must incorporate science and technology in our understanding of modern society, giving it an assigned meaning in relation to our inescapable biological need for survival and reproduction.

However, as we have seen, we are not doing very well as a species in establishing a world-wide culture of cooperation in order to ensure our survival. Needless to say, we are now capable of destroying the natural environment which we inhabit on that scale. Our ‘family’ is thus all 8 billion of us and any ‘amoral familism’ must include all of us as the ‘family’. Can we extend our intellectual, as well as our emotional and moral awareness, to include all of us? This is the challenge that we face as a species.

Most people would like to see an ‘actual’ democracy used to define society and its culture. Overcoming the anxiety of death will be an important step in this direction. As we said above, Epicurus confronted this dilemma over 2000 years ago. At that time, he claimed that death was simply returning to where one was before birth. If this is true, then, according to him, we should seek to find a way of living that would give meaning and pleasure to our brief tenure on earth.

In this respect culture is very important in defining the nature of death. If one has spent a lifetime dominating and exploiting both nature and one’s fellow human beings, as modern economic ideology recommends, and as long as one can profit from this enterprise, death may seem like a form of punishment. If, on the other hand, one has given his or her life to helping others, live with nature and to live together with a more meaningful and pleasurable life, death may seem like a reward. Here, at least among those who age normally, this may be seen as a freeing of one from his or her decrepit body (and/or mind).

A life filled with dominance and control apparently does not succeed in qualifying one for this reward, as the emotional importance of anger and fear among most of the more wealthy and powerful would seem to indicate.²⁴ Love and friendship, on the other hand, do seem to be more successful in this respect, which explains the effort by several million ‘cultural creatives’ and other religious groups in the world to accomplish this by residing in small-scale communities dedicated to this goal.²⁵ Alongside this, as discussed above, is the need in Western culture to achieve ‘esteem’, as described by Maslow in his ‘hierarchy of needs’, but then clarified as largely a male need by Margaret Mead, who claimed that women, because they were in charge of reproduction, had no such lingering need for esteem. In any case, love and friendship are probably as much if not more important emotionally in all of this, as Epicurus argued over 2000 years ago.

This leaves the problem of how to change the larger society in this direction. Like all social change it will take a concerted effort by a growing number of people over a long period of time to accomplish this. Altering current culture, with its predatory economic ideology and its widespread inequality, could start by ensuring an early childhood free of emotional abuse for both mother and child, especially the widespread abuse caused by poverty and insecurity!

This would be very important, and should give a focus to efforts to change the larger society along the way. A more philosophical holistic approach to social science, as well as to knowledge in general, would also be very important here, as many efforts in this direction already indicate. This is the challenge that will have to be faced by today’s young people throughout the 21st century.

Notes

1. Athena Aktipis, “Malignant Cheaters: Cells Coexist by Cooperating. When Some Break the Rules, Cancers Result,” Scientific American 324, no. 1 (2021): 59–63; Raymond Noble and Denis Noble, Understanding Living Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
2. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (New York: Mentor Books, 1946); Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).
3. Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (New York: William Morrow, 1949).
4. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970); Alfred Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Maurice Natanson, The Problem of Social Reality: Collected Papers (Leiden, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Press, 1973).
5. Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: Free Press, 1958).
6. N. J. Hagens and D. J. White, The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century: Essays on Systems Synthesis of the Human Predicament (Independently published, 2019).
7. William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974).
8. Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, 179-203.
9. Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Penguin Books, 2010).
10. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798); Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1974).
11. F. William Engdahl, Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century (Palm Desert, CA: Progressive Press, 2011).
12. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
13. John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
14. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
15. Mark Gungor, Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage: Unlocking the Secrets to Life, Love, and Marriage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009).
16. Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (London: Pluto Press, 1985).
17. Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
18. Peter Critchley, The Coming Ecological Revolution: The Principles and Politics of a Social and Moral Ecology (Independently published, 2011).
19. Eugene O’Connor, The Essential Epicurus: Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Fragments (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993).
20. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973); Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (London: Penguin Books, 2015).
21. Daniel Cohen, The Infinite Desire for Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
22. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Hong Kong: Sublime Publishing, 2014).
23. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964); Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
24. Rachel Nuwer, “Money Talks—and Tweets,” Scientific American 313, no. 6 (2015): 17.
25. Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001).