Against Ourselves: The Cost of Being Human

Against Ourselves: The Cost of Being HumanWhy do intelligent people believe obvious falsehoods?Why do civilizations repeat the same mistakes?Why does progress solve old problems only to create new ones?And why, despite thousands of years of history, do human beings continue struggling against the very minds that built modern civilization?Against Ourselves is not a self-help book, a political manifesto, or a work of academic philosophy. It is an exploration of the human condition through psychology, evolution, history, neuroscience, culture, and philosophy.Beginning with the architecture of the individual mind and expanding outward through identity, memory, cooperation, civilization, technology, and meaning, M. J. Stokknes asks a deceptively simple question: What if humanity's greatest obstacle has never been nature-but ourselves?Rather than offering easy answers, this book challenges many of the assumptions we carry about certainty, progress, intelligence, morality, and consciousness itself.For readers who enjoyed: - Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman- The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt- The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker- The Beginning of Infinity by David DeutschAgainst Ourselves is an invitation to examine the one instrument through which every human experience is filtered: the mind. Author website: https: //mariusjohanstokknes.com/