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Living Like Crazy
This book explores how our archetypal potential can be dangerously shaped by culture, inadvertently forcing us to live in crazy and destructive ways. Through a a wide ranging discussion of different aspects of human society, history and evolution, Gilbert demonstrates the costly psychological defenses that we use to cope with the reality of suffering and how cultivating compassion can enable us to hone balance, connection, health and the social good.
636 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 28, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 20, 2025
Baggy but brilliant, this is Paul Gilbert's magnum opus, outlining the various 'dark forces' that militate against humans cultivating the kind of world that most of us would 'like', but of which, thanks to the combined forces of education, the media, and political discourse, few of us believe we are collectively capable.
I think that scepticism is probably justified for all the reasons that Gilbert explores, i.e., first, the evolutionary pressures that have created brain-minds that feature a threat component that manifests in many and terrifying ways across the human fields of thought and action, and, second, the thousands of years of 'civilisation' that have painstakingly manufactured institutions that embody and prosecute this concern with the 'agonic' mode, not because we are evil, as a species, but because we are subject to fear (which diffuses into anxiety).
Gilbert examines how 'archetypal' thought patterns can be developed which are more or less sympathetic to sociality and mutuality, and how our shared future depends on our creating the conditions under which these patterns tend more towards the compassionate than has typically been the case. He provides practical guidance and hundreds of additional (re)sources from which to take a lead. With such networks and such players, hope remains, however fleeting it sometimes feels.
I think that scepticism is probably justified for all the reasons that Gilbert explores, i.e., first, the evolutionary pressures that have created brain-minds that feature a threat component that manifests in many and terrifying ways across the human fields of thought and action, and, second, the thousands of years of 'civilisation' that have painstakingly manufactured institutions that embody and prosecute this concern with the 'agonic' mode, not because we are evil, as a species, but because we are subject to fear (which diffuses into anxiety).
Gilbert examines how 'archetypal' thought patterns can be developed which are more or less sympathetic to sociality and mutuality, and how our shared future depends on our creating the conditions under which these patterns tend more towards the compassionate than has typically been the case. He provides practical guidance and hundreds of additional (re)sources from which to take a lead. With such networks and such players, hope remains, however fleeting it sometimes feels.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews