The stronger the civilization, the greater the need for using up natural resources while expanding to conquer other places and peoples. Those apart from civilization were seen as less human and treated as such. And within powerful civilizations, the disparity between wealth and freedom grew between the powerful and the powerless. At the end of the book, Ryan discusses the Fermi paradox, an enigma outlining that the universe should be full of aliens due to its size making it impossible notto have other planets like ours.

Ryan posits that civilization has given rise to competitive institutions thriving on ever-expanding commerce, displacing the sense of meaning and happiness that humans experienced during 99% of our existence on this planet. This decline is due to the stratification of communities into hierarchical divisions — between owner and worker, man and woman, wealthy and poor — that accompanied the development of agriculture.And a proper "Peer Network" genuinely isn't possible on the network structure we have today. We'd need a whole new internet, a revolution in our networking and computing paradigms; hierarchy is literally built into the operating system. Ryan gave a TED talk [4] titled Are we designed to be sexual omnivores? in February 2013, contributes to Psychology Today [5] and hosts a popular podcast called Tangentially Speaking with Dr. Christopher Ryan. [6] p. 139, American parents are less happy than parents in other countries, and thus ... civilization is bad. Agricultural societies may have developed independently from each other, thousands of years ago, due to extremes in climate. As the hoarding of resources began, complex social hierarchies did as well. These hierarchies may have led to more conflict among groups, artistic creation, nuanced relationships with the dead, ritualistic practices, warfare, and enslavement.

For hunter-gatherer tribes, an individual is prized for their intelligence, hunting skills, and so on. When they exceed their skills through arrogance, selfishness, pride, or an unequal amount of power, they are laughed at, socially exiled or eventually killed. As long as they provide social benefit to the group, they are mutually benefited themselves. In agricultural societies, however, there is a conflict regarding the messages of promoting generosity and support and sharing, competition and survival and private ownership. Large populations with complex civilizations are prone to conflicting value systems. If work is unnecessary why do we continue to behave as if the key to a good life is to spend most of it doing something we'd rather not.”

I don’t believe some governments somewhere ever declared “let’s make people miserable for our own sake”. Psychologist Darcia Narvaez, who studies the moral development of children, has identified six characteristics of child rearing that she believes to be essentially human: The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live: how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die.

Ordinary men and women having the opportunity of a happy life will become more kindly unless persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion.We live in a world created by and for institutions that thrive on commerce, not human beings that thrive on community, laughter and leisure”. Civilization doesn’t necessarily imply progress. Hunter-gatherers are not inherently miserable. One must ask always when speaking of progress, “progress for whom?” I not only accept this author's premise, but fully embrace it. This book articulated something I have been feeling for a long time, and has been touched on in other books I've read, actually - that modern society and civilization in general, as a result of it's ignorance to our human origins, has done and will continue to do, a great deal of harm to our species, physically and mentally.

I've been waiting for this since 2014 when I first read Sex at Dawn. Chris has been talking about this book on the podcast since then. If you're a fan of the podcast, much of the material here will be familiar. many of the same references, stories and points are repeated. In his quest to demonize "society" (which has its big flaws, nobody is denying that), he completely disregards any positive aspect of our lives, or completely dismisses it as something we don't really need and we could do as well with out. Illogical and random at times, it makes compelling arguments regarding the madness of our society I certainly won’t deny – although mostly American since his focus is on the USA.The take home, as is usually the take home in my beloved unga bunga bullshit books, is that the more civilized we became, the further we got from ourselves, which is why the modern world is such a seething morass of anxiety and rage. Ryan draws from the left-field guesses about our origins that constitute anthropology along with modern studies of hunter-gatherer tribes to conclude that we probably enjoyed life a lot more when it was simple and we were living in accordance with the animal drives embedded with us over the millions of years it took for us to turn into hairless apes. This conclusion is air dropped out of nowhere. The book simply doesn’t build up to it. It’s as if he got to the end of the allotted word count, decided he needed to land the book and wrote a conclusion. The book is a great example of a non-sequitur. Modern civilization is seen as necessary for “progress.” With every breakthrough in technology, science, medicine, and so on, with every new comfort and convenience, advancement and novelty, what is the cost? Thanks to opioids that only treat “superficial symptoms rather than underlying structural problems in how we live our lives”, now more Americans die every year (just due to overdose deaths) than soldiers died during the entire Vietnam War.