The Social Animal by David Brooks

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness. The unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind--where most of the decisions and many of the most impressive acts of thinking take place.

Is it possible that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work and that conscious will is just an illusion? The conscious mind merely confabulates stories that try to make sense of what the unconscious mind is doing of its own accord.

It the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception. If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bonds between people. If the outer mind hungers for status, money, and applause, the inner mind hungers for harmony and connection--those moments when self-consciousness fades away and a person is lost in a challenge, a cause, the love of another or the love of God.

The unconscious mind maintain no distance from the environment around them, but are immersed in it. It scurry about, interpenetrating other minds, landscapes, and ideas. If the conscious mind thinks in data and speaks in prose, the scouts crystallize with emotion, and their work is best expressed in stories, poetry, music, image, prayer, and myth.


The central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most. The central humanistic truth is that the conscious mind can influence the unconscious.  ---Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Brain research rarely creates new philosophies, but it does vindicate some old ones. The research being done today reminds us of the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, character over IQ, emergent, organic systems over linear, mechanistic ones, and the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self. If you want to put the philosophic implications in simple terms, the French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses; the British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiments, wins.

Modern society has created a giant apparatus for the cultivation of the hard skills, while failing to develop the moral and emotional faculties down below. We are good at talking about material incentives, but bad about talking about emotions and intuitions. We are good at teaching technical skills, but when it comes to the most important things, like character, we have almost nothing to say.

Many policies failed. The failures have been marked by a single feature: Reliance on a overly simplistic view of human nature. Many of these policies were based on the shallow social-science model of human behavior.

The Greeks used to say we suffer our way to wisdom.