Healing The Unhappy Caveman
Why The Human Mind Was Not Designed For Happiness
And What YOU Can Do About It
by Chris Wilson (the original Enlightened Caveman)
"Of course, happiness is great. There's every reason to seek it. There's every reason for psychiatrists to try to instill it, and no reason for them to mold the kinds of people natural selection "wants." But therapists will be better equipped to make people happy once they understand what natural selection does "want," and how, with humans, it "tries" to get it. What burdensome mental appliances are we stuck with? How, if at all, can they be defused? And at what cost - to ourselves and to others?"
- Robert Wright The Moral Animal (Vintage Books, 1994)
Natural selection was the architect of our minds, and happiness was never part of the plans. As Robert Wright pointed out fourteen years ago, echoing the pioneers of a new science called evolutionary psychology, we have the minds of cavemen. Indeed, he was right. Our minds were built to survive, happiness or not, in a time that has long since disappeared, but now they're miserable. At least, a lot of them are, and it's not because they don't think positively. It's because they don't think properly. It is the contention of Chris Wilson that the fundamental source of frustration, depression, despair, and general unhappiness that pervades society is the clash between the caveman mind and the modern world. Far from hopeless, this is a manageable problem, but it requires a new approach to mental health. We must dispense with the platitudes of optimism that dominate the "happiness" market and set a course to understanding the caveman within us. Only then can we determine what it takes to make ourselves happy, regardless of our environment.
This is the first book founded on the idea that the human mind was not designed for happiness, and it is the first book to suggest that finding happiness entails learning how to use the mind in an entirely new way. Never before has the evolutionary history of the human mind been applied to finding happiness in a modern world.
The entertainingly organized, but tightly woven, presentation of these ideas amounts to a journey of intellectual rebirth. The result is The Enlightened Caveman.
© 2008 Caveman Enterprises - All Rights Reserved
Libertas Press is proud to announce the publication of an important new work by author Chris Wilson:
