Andreas Hofer - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Andreas Hofer

Our world is without doubt insane. However, it’s usually artists with songs like “Mad World” or “... more Our world is without doubt insane. However, it’s usually artists with songs like “Mad World” or “Crazy World” or books like 1984 and Brave New World rather than professionals who keep pointing this out to us. A teenager going to school nowadays is much more likely to get the message that they are crazy rather than the world. Nearly 20% of American adults experienced mental health problems in 2019, before the pandemic and the situation is worse among teens and has worsened since the pandemic.

Even so, in the wake of WWII it became painfully obvious that a society can be sick. That human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence that a whole society can be sick, is an assumption which was made very explicitly by Freud, most extensively in his Civilization and Its Discontent. Before Freud, Karl Marx's theory of alienation described the estrangement of people from aspects of their human nature as a consequence of the division of labour and living in a society of stratified social classes. The attack on the insanity of society has always come from the unpopular Marxist left. Erich Fromm wrote in The Sane Society (1955):

In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man’s nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become "Golems”; they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.

Today when we are talking about mental health problems we often use the word “functioning”. A kid with ADHD is not functioning in the classroom. We medicate them so that they become “functioning”. One kid with ADHD put it this way: you want me to take medication because it makes me “controllable”. So, it seems Fromm wasn’t too far off with his prediction.

For some reasons the neoliberal capitalist right never thinks that there is much wrong with society. What could possibly go wrong with a free market society in which people can freely choose whatever they like? Don’t get me wrong, I love liberty and self-choice as much as the next best person, but I have never believed that unbridled competition always brings about the best outcomes for humanity. I have never bought into this as many states have to sponsor high-quality TV programmes that would never be made otherwise. A capitalist may well argue that they shouldn’t be made with tax-payers’ money if there isn’t enough demand for them.

In The Code of the Extraordinary Mind: 10 Unconventional Laws to Redefine Your Life and Succeed on Your Own Terms (2016) Mindvalley founder Vishen Lakhiani gives the following self-help advice:

This goal freed me from having to depend on others for love or to require it from them. I love my kids and my wife, but I cannot demand that they love me back, and setting goals for myself that are largely dependent on someone else leaves me powerless. This is true for everyone. We should not be attached to receiving love from someone else.

The advice Lakhiani gives is to follow only yourself, never depend on other people, and transcend the limits of your culture and personal relationships. He tells his readers to bend the rules of reality in order to be successful, but he never questions our idea of success. In brief, it is an extreme kind of individualism. However, he misses the point that from an evolutionary point of view humans have always depended on each other for survival and reproduction. Love hurts precisely because humans depend and depended on each other. Love without attachment is not love and love requires trust. Humans were never meant to go it all alone. This is a recipe for us to become controllable robots, without feelings functioning in a society whose only rule is higher productivity.

There are many ways our society is insane, e.g. the US military spending budget is 11%, while it is a meagre 4% for education. However, from an evolutionary point of view reproduction is the most interesting one. One of the early findings of positive psychology was that people without children are happier than people with children. From an evolutionary point of view, a society which leaves people feeling that they lose out when they have offspring is sick or dysfunctional. I am not promoting higher fertility rates and overpopulation, however, the ultimate “goal” of evolution is to ensure survival and reproduction, so this is the best indicator that there is something seriously wrong with society. An analogy are animals in captivity that refuse to reproduce: it’s precisely because they don’t live in their natural environment.

What’s more, many people nowadays not only think they are better off without children, they also think they are better off without a partner. As of 2022, nearly 50% of US adults are single. That’s 126.9 million unmarried and unacknowledged people according to the U.S. Census Bureau statistics. Again, I think everyone should have the right to remain unpartnered and childless. However, for almost all of human history most people have always been happier when they had a partner and children, most of us wouldn’t be alive if it hadn't been like that.

Former Trump adviser Michael Flynn is at the centre of a new movement based on conspiracies and C... more Former Trump adviser Michael Flynn is at the centre of a new movement based on conspiracies and Christian nationalism. The retired lieutenant general, former national security adviser is now focused on his next task: building a movement centred on Christian nationalist ideas, where Christianity is at the centre of American life and institutions. His motto: One nation under one God. Desecularsation (anti-enlightenment) and depluralisation are not only extremely regressive, but they are also anti-American, aren’t they? One might assume that the descendants of people who fled religious intolerance might be a bit more tolerant towards diversity.

On the flip side, one might think that I am a bit paranoid seeing the danger of authoritarianism in the spread of Christian values. I don’t think so. Nor is this attitude so un-American as I used to think. Colin Woodard wirtes in American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2011):

While other colonies welcomed all comers, the Puritans forbade anyone to settle in their colony who failed to pass a test of religious conformity. Dissenters were banished. Quakers were disfigured for easy identification, their nostrils slit, their ears cut off, or their faces branded with the letter H for “heretic.” Puritans doled out death sentences for infractions such as adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, sodomy, and even teenage rebellion.

Certainly modern American conservatives would not regress this far, would they? That seems currently unlikely, however not impossible. In order to understand this conservative-regressive mindset we have to dig deep into our evolutionary history. Solomon Schwartz identified different universal values which he divided into four quadrants. I have assigned those values to different subsistence strategies: hunting-gathering, farming and pastoralism.

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and tru... more The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth."-Albert Einstein Recently I have been reading Einstein's The World As I see It (1934),The Code of the Extraordinary Mind (2016) by Vishen Lakhiani Transcend (2020) by Scott Barry Kaufman and I noticed that there is a common thread in all three of these books, one that goes back to Albertus Magnus and beyond to antiquity. The three typically acknowledged transcendentals are:

As someone from Central Europe for whom tertiary education was almost free, I have always been ba... more As someone from Central Europe for whom tertiary education was almost free, I have always been baffled about the costs of US colleges. I got to know several graduates from the US who had teaching jobs in Austria but couldn’t stay, because they had to look for “proper” jobs to pay back their student loans. College is just too expensive and ineffective - very much like the US healthcare system.
In How academia became corrupt a medium blogger Theo compares American colleges to the mediaeval Catholic Church in their development: an innovative and noble institution that eroded to a scandal-ridden rigid organisation. The writer argues that there were several factors that led to this corruption and that can also be found in US universities nowadays:
Three things allowed the Catholic Church to become corrupt: they were immune from criticism, they had unlimited money, and everyone had to play ball with them. And I’m afraid that all 3 of those conditions apply to the American university system today.
I think Theo’s comparison with the Catholic Church is more than just a metaphor or analogy, it reflects at least partially the very same social processes:
• Commercialization
• Bureaucratization
• Formalisation
• Specialisation
• Elitization
I am not an economist, but basic economic theory tells me that US universities that have high competition should be cheaper and more effective than state-run European universities. The opposite seems to be true. Could it actually be that competition drives the costs upwards?
Universities have two jobs: producing science and providing some form of income for the people who attend college. The latter has become disproportionately more important over the

Are you highly sensitive, smart, complex, creative, intense, curious and misunderstood? According... more Are you highly sensitive, smart, complex, creative, intense, curious and misunderstood? According to Paula Prober (Your Rainforest Mind, 2016), these are the typical signs of a rainforest mind. Prober is a former teacher of gifted children and has coined the term rainforest mind. I have to admit, after having read dozens of books on gifted and twice exceptional children, I found the book rather underwhelming. It is poorly structured, quite repetitive, leaves a lot unclear (e.g. if there is a difference between HSPs and RFMs-both concepts are based on overexcitabilities), and overuses anecdotal evidence. The author frequently tells her readers frequently just to read some of her main sources, such as Elaine Aaron, Susan Cain and watch a couple of TED-talks. Even the metaphor of the rainforest seems to work poorly: "Like the rain forest, are you intense, multilayered, colorful, creative, overwhelming, highly sensitive, complex, idealistic, and influential?" WTF? Nevertheless, the book is well worth reading as it offers some great insights into the struggles of gifted and 2e children and teens. Contrary to the mythology that "smart" people will be just fine without help, what often comes with smart is excessive doubt, anxiety, depression, shame, and loneliness. [...] Billy, 16, had been experiencing severe anxiety, missing several days of school. His mother described him as "hard on himself," a "perfectionist," and "very sensitive." He felt judged, misunderstood, and bullied by peers. Never identified in school as gifted, Billy assumed there was something seriously wrong with him. He knew he was different, but he did not know why.

There is certainly timeless beauty, elegance and truth to the yin-yang symbol. I learned about it... more There is certainly timeless beauty, elegance and truth to the yin-yang symbol. I learned about it in my history class in sixth grade and I found it a great metaphor for life but I found it hard to grasp the underlying principle. Are those cosmic (physical) forces? Biological forces (chi). Psychological principles? Or just an abstract philosophical idea? Were those just random opposites, as it often seemed to me, or was there much more to it?
Female (yin) and male (yang) are often used to explain the underlying principles and that does make sense to some extent. This principle has been used by David Kibbe among others to categorise body types from most feminne to more masculine (see above). However, as a teen I did find the female - male distinction more puzzling than explanatory. Why should the female yin be associated with darkness and night and not light, when it’s women who give birth and men who often destroy it. Why was yang order, when women tend to be more orderly than men? Why was the unknown associated with yin, when men venture out into the unknown more often than women? It’s not that the male-female idea seemed wrong, but only a part of a bigger story.

Whenever I was on a fun outing with my kids I would always have the very same reaction from my yo... more Whenever I was on a fun outing with my kids I would always have the very same reaction from my younger son at the end: "When can we do this again?" (but he would be happy to go home) and the very same reaction from my older daughter "What can we do now?" (and she wouldn't be happy to go home). Needless to say that my daughter provides a much more difficult challenge for both her parents. But why are children, or people in general so different? Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long start their book on dopamine, The Molecule of More (2018) with an interesting metaphor. Humans experience two worlds, the down world, when you look down and see what you have got, the world of actualities, and the up world when you look up and see the potentialities beyond your daily horizon. In your your brain the down world is managed by a handful of chemicals-neurotransmitters, they're called-that let you experience satisfaction and enjoy whatever you have in the here and now. But when you turn your attention to the world of up, your brain relies on a different chemical-a single molecule-that not only allows you to move beyond the realm of what's at your fingertips, but also motivates you to pursue, to control, and to possess the world beyond your immediate grasp. It drives you to seek out those things far away, both physical things and things you cannot see, such as knowledge, love, and power. Whether it's reaching across the table for the salt shaker, flying to the moon in a spaceship, or worshipping a god beyond space and time, this chemical gives us command over every distance, whether geographical or intellectual. Those down chemicals-call them the Here & Nows-allow you to experience what's in front of you. They enable you to savor and enjoy, or perhaps to fight or run away, right now. The up chemical is different. It makes you desire what you don't yet have, and drives you to seek new things. It rewards you when you obey it, and makes you suffer when you don't. It is the source of creativity and, further along the spectrum, madness;

I was a very religious child and despite my Catholic upbringing I always tended to see beauty in ... more I was a very religious child and despite my Catholic upbringing I always tended to see beauty in other religions as well and despite being an atheist now I am still fascinated by religions, most recently by Taoism and hunter-gatherer spirituality, which stresses the unity of humans and nature and which we can find nowadays in ecological sustainability thinking. One thing that all religions have in common is that they help their followers to find meaning in the world. Apart from that, they have sometimes precious little in common, some religions even lacking the notion of supernatural beings. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously described religion as a 'cultural system' composed of myths, rituals, symbols and beliefs created by humans as a way of giving our individual and collective lives a sense of meaning. Religions as cultural phenomena have incredible power to shape societies. Hinduism in India favours the caste system, had Buddhism prevailed in India it would long have ceased to exist. Buddhism is built on the belief that all men are created equal. This is why Buddhism rejects the caste system. The Buddha was a fervent believer in the qualities a human had to offer, and not their caste.This kind of fierce egalitarianism can otherwise only be found in hunter-gatherer societies and I have argued that many religious founders had huntergatherer genes or were hunter-gatherer types (including Jesus and Muhammad). The caste system, on the other hand, is part of Hinduism itself, which is an amalgam of a herder (Yamnaya) and local farmer religions.

We tend to think of honour cultures, like that one of the Samurai, as a thing of the past. Howeve... more We tend to think of honour cultures, like that one of the Samurai, as a thing of the past. However, they are still alive and might even be growing. While there are things about honour culture, like bravery and heroism, we admire, honour cultures certainly have their dark side too, including a propensity to violence and honour killings. In her book Rebel: My Escape from Saudi Arabia to Freedom (2022) Rahaf Mohammed describes her 2019 escape from Saudi Arabia where she thought she would have faced certain death as a lesbian who had brought shame over her family. The eighteen-year-old only made it as far as Bangkok where her passport was taken away and her father and brother caught up with her. She found herself trapped, barricaded in a hotel room. As men pounded on her door, the teenager decided to reach out to the world on Twitter-and the world answered. Her account gained forty-five thousand followers overnight and offered her a vital lifeline. She was taken under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and granted refugee status. Rahaf was lucky, she was granted asylum in Canada and lived to tell her tale, many girls aren't. Most people wouldn't consider filicide ethical, and perhaps not even honorable suicide. They are certainly not adaptive from an evolutionary point of view, which is why they should be given special attention. Mark Moritz writes in "A Critical Examination of Honour Cultures and Herding Societies in Africa (2008)": A feature of many honor cultures is that men are prepared to use violence and even die to defend their reputation as honorable men. Moreover, aggression in these specific contexts is institutionalized, regarded as legitimate and necessary by the society at large. Other features associated with many, but not all, honor cultures include a concern with the chastity of women, extreme vigilance about one's reputation and a sensitivity to insults, male autonomy, patrilineal kin groups, and assertive and often violent relations outside of the kin groups. Richard Nisbett was one of the first psychologists to establish a connection between pastoralism and the Southern US honour culture that was made up mostly of Irish and Scottish immigrants with a background in herding: Violence and the Culture of Honor: We believe that the most important explanation for southern violence is that much of the South has differed from the North in a very important economic respect and that this has carried with it profound cultural consequences. Thus the southern preference for violence stems from the fact that much of the South was a lawless, frontier region settled by people whose economy was originally based on herding. As we shall see, herding societies are typically characterized by having "cultures of honor" in which a threat to property or reputation is dealt with by violence. Anthropologists generally tended to disagree with Nesbitt's hypothesis. Nomadic pastoralists do share a belligerent culture that stems from livestock raiding with honour cultures, but honour killings and other features of honour cultures are absent. In fact, there is often considerably more freedom for women in pastoralist societies than in farming societies. Looking at a world map of honour killings, they typically occur in countries with a PAST history of dominant pastoralism (Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.), whereas honour killings are absent in countries like Mongolia.

Many people will be familiar with Jonathan Haidt’s five (or six) moral foundations and his key fi... more Many people will be familiar with Jonathan Haidt’s five (or six) moral foundations and his key finding that liberals tend to be sensitive mainly to care, fairness (and liberty), whereas conservatives tend to be equally sensitive to all foundations. Unfortunately, Haidt offers little insight regarding the origin of these moral foundations as his work was based on cultural research and he seems to assume that the moral foundations are a matter of culture, at least more so than genetics. However, I would argue that Haidt’s foundations are really instincts and that people have different sensitivities regardless of their cultural upbringing.
The following table (from : Russil Durrant Evolutionary Criminology) presents evolutionary selective pressures and selection processes for the different instincts:

I suppose most people have seen one of the online posts about “What face (or insert any other bo... more I suppose most people have seen one of the online posts about “What face (or insert any other body parts like hand or teeth - see above) shape reveals about your personality”. Most psychologists will immediately think about the dark times when phrenology was considered a science. Phrenology has long been debunked as pseudoscience and that is a good thing. However, ideas about morphology (shape of body parts) and personality or temperament date back at least three thousand years, e.g. in Indian Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and were until recently proposed by - otherwise respectable - scientists like William Sheldon. Are those ideas all just cases of unicorns - seeing patterns where there are none - or could there be some truth in them?

I have proposed one evolutionary scenario that could explain a correlation between morphology and psychology: our ancestral subsistence strategies: hunting, gathering, farming and herding. I have never seen systematic anthropological research comparing say the teeth of foragers, farmers and herders. However, there is research regarding the changes in the transition from foraging to farming. Hunter-gatherers had longer, narrower jaws while the farmers had shorter, wider jaws, for example. In the above example ancient farmers would most closely correspond to the phlegmatic type with less dominant central (softer food) and a rather conformist personality (I wouldn’t agree with all the traits as I am a melancholic who isn’t very organised). Rectangular teeth with more dominant centrals would likely correspond to hunter types. Hunters aren’t choleric people (on the contrary), but would become so if people started to command them as hunter-gatherers are completely self-directed without a command hierarchy.

In any case, subsistence strategies practised over a few thousand years should lead to slightly different adaptations in various morphological traits, e.g. feet (locomotion), teeth (different foods) and hand shape (e.g. different requirements for grip). In 2021 researchers found that brain shape and face shape are linked via genes:

An interdisciplinary team led by KU Leuven and Stanford has identified 76 overlapping genetic locations that shape both our face and our brain. What the researchers didn’t find is evidence that this genetic overlap also predicts someone’s behavioural-cognitive traits or risk of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. This means that the findings help to debunk several persistent pseudoscientific claims about what our face reveals about us.

I wouldn’t go so far to claim that the researchers’ negative findings regarding behavioural traits automatically debunk morpho-psychology. In August 2022 newspapers all over the world reported about a strange scientific finding: a team of researcher genetically tested doppelgangers from all over the world and found that they did not only share their physical traits but also similar genotypes:

Herein, we have characterized in detail a set of “look-alike” humans, defined by facial recognition algorithms, for their multiomics landscape. We report that these individuals share similar genotypes and differ in their DNA methylation and microbiome landscape. These results not only provide insights about the genetics that determine our face but also might have implications for the establishment of other human anthropometric properties and even personality characteristics.

The late Ronald Inhgelheart did for cultures what the inventors of the Big 5 personality inventor... more The late Ronald Inhgelheart did for cultures what the inventors of the Big 5 personality inventory did for psychology: identify the underlying dimensions. Inspired by Maslow's needs he came up with three: traditional-survival values, self-expression values and secular-rational values. The map above shows where the US is located on this map (which should really be a three-dimensional landscape). Reading Colin Woodard's 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America makes it clear, however, that such a representation is highly artificial, especially for a huge country like the US. Woodard identifies eleven different nations that merely have partially overlapping cultures and that were at times at odds with each other, which is highly relevant for understanding today's polarisation. Here are three very different cultures: Puritans While other colonies welcomed all comers, the Puritans forbade anyone to settle in their colony who failed to pass a test of religious conformity. Dissenters were banished. Quakers were disfigured for easy identification, their nostrils slit, their ears cut off, or their faces branded with the letter H for "heretic." Puritans doled out death sentences for infractions such as adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, sodomy, and even teenage rebellion.

The US is nicknamed the “Land of the Free”. However, its early history presents a very different ... more The US is nicknamed the “Land of the Free”. However, its early history presents a very different picture with different cultures differing in their degrees of freedom. I learned in school that the first American settlers came to seek freedom from the oppressive European regimes they fled. Of course, this is true to some extent, however, the US was also characterized by slavery, feudalism, high levels of conformism and authoritarianism and it took America a long time to become truely a land of the free and perhaps it’s not a overstatement to claim that the only truely free people in American had been the native foragers before the arrival of the Europeans.

Nowadays we see the US polarised to an extent that is reminiscent of the Civil War. However, seeing America as Red vs Blue States only is a gross oversimplification. Colin Woodard traces eleven different, often opposing, “nations” and cultures in his 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (see map above). The eleven cultures had very different origins to begin with:

While Tidewater was settled largely by young, unskilled male servants, New England’s colonists were skilled craftsmen, lawyers, doctors, and yeoman farmers; none of them was an indentured servant. Rather than having fled poverty in search of better lives, the early Yankees had traded a comfortable existence at home for the uncertainties of the wilderness. Seventy percent came as part of an established family, giving early Yankeedom far more typical gender and age ratios than those of the other nations.

While the culture of origin would be passed on into the next generations, I would go further and claim that the differences with the eleven nations weren’t merely cultural, but also partially genetic. Each culture is made up of people and geneticists in the past decade discovered that a population tends to be made up of three ancestral populations that had very distinct environmental and social adaptations: hunter-gatherer, farmers and herders.

People like me are often flabbergasted by people who deny science like Darwinian evolution when t... more People like me are often flabbergasted by people who deny science like Darwinian evolution when the evidence is basically all around us. There are lots of good books on science deniers and we have a fairly good picture about the psychology of science deniers, but we still know little about the evolutionary origins of this phenomenon. Science deniers tend to be low in openness, have a high need for cognitive closure, hate ambiguity and change and tend to rely on tradition and authority. A lot of researchers have pointed out that they fit the profile of politically and socially conservative people, also termed authoritarian personality.

From the point of view of evolutionary psychology we might assume that such people who are slow to update their view of reality may be evolutionarily disadvantaged as they should drop out in the evolutionary rat race. Actually, the opposite may be true for evolutionary reasons. Before we can resolve this paradox we have to take a look at Homo Sapiens as a cultural species. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich writes in The WEIRDest People in the World (2020):

[...] we do know something about cultural learning among Congo Basin hunter-gatherers and have explored the implications of different learning strategies for cumulative cultural evolution. The evidence suggests that aspiring hunters first learn from their fathers how to make arrow poisons. About a third of these foragers then update their fathers’ recipes with insights from others, probably from the most successful and prestigious hunters. When transmission patterns like these are placed into cultural evolutionary computer simulations, or carefully manipulated in experiments with real people trying to learn new things, the results reveal how cultural evolution can assemble highly adaptive and complex recipes, procedures, and tools over generations without anyone understanding how or why various elements are included.

Cultural transmission is an amazing thing that allows us to create smartphones even though no single person involved may understand how a smartphone works in all its details. We rely a lot on traditional knowledge, knowledge that has been handed down to us that we simply accept as true. We may question a lot about this knowledge (e.g. is the smartphone’s memory enough to guarantee a great user experience), but once we reach a certain level of complexity we can’t simply start questioning everything.

This brings us to the question of when learners should rely on cultural learning over their own experience, personal information, or instincts. The answer is straightforward: when problems are difficult, situations are ambiguous, or individual learning is costly, people should rely more heavily on learning from others. To put these ideas to the test, my favorite experiments manipulate both the difficulty of a task and the size of cash payoffs for correct responses. Participants, for example, might be paid different amounts of money for correctly identifying which of a set of curvy lines is the longest. They can rely on their own direct perception or on cultural learning—on the decisions of others. The harder the task is—i.e., the closer the curvy lines are in length—the more people rely on observing other people’s decisions and aggregating this information into their own judgments.

What Henrich writes about cultural complexity makes total sense from the point of view of evolutionary psychology. What we need now is to spot the relevant selective pressures in order to find out why some people rely more on tradition and authority than on individual learning. I argue that this happened with the transition from foraging (hunting and gathering) to food-production, in particular agriculture. Agricultural technology requires generations and generations to optimise and can never be achieved by a single individual who would rely on personal learning. People who would have relied more on personal learning (and would only have reinvented the wheel) were likely to have been disadvantaged than those who increasingly relied on cultural learning.

The conclusion is that people who have more ancestral farmer than forager heritage are more likely to rely on traditional knowledge and trust authority. Early farming communities would also have been more endogamous and more closely related to each other than foragers who are more exogamous and change bands frequently. Authorities, like a father, uncle or head of the community would therefore have been invested in the survival of its clan and following authority without questioning it too much would have had an evolutionary advantage.The trouble with this instinct is, that nowadays it can be hijacked by populist politicians who do not have a vested interest in the survival of the genes of their voters. People with more forager heritage would in contrast be more wary of authority and less conformist:

Mobile hunter-gatherers, who possess extensive (not intensive) kin-based institutions, are field independent. Consistent with this, anthropologists have long argued that, compared to farmers and herders who have more intensive kin-based institutions, hunter-gatherers emphasise values that focus on independence, achievement, and self-reliance while deemphasizing obedience, conformity, and deference to authority.

The Indian subcontinent with its rich cultural heritage has long fascinated people in the West. T... more The Indian subcontinent with its rich cultural heritage has long fascinated people in the West. This is especially true for Ayurveda with its holistic body-mind-food approach to health. Recently neuroscientists Frederick T. Travis and Robert Keith Wallace investigated the brain pattern underlying the different dosha types in Dosha braintypes: A neural model of individual differences. What they found was a high correspondence with the traditional dosha traits: Vata dosha, which is highly variable in behavior and in response to the environment, would be associated with a greater range of functioning of the brain and nervous system. Pitta dosha, which is characterized by dynamism, would be associated with fast, passionate responses of the brain and nervous system to challenges in the environment. Kapha dosha, which is characterized by steadiness, would be associated with stable activity patterns of the brain and nervous system.

People are generally familiar with the infamous Nazi ideology of a Germanic Aryan master race, ho... more People are generally familiar with the infamous Nazi ideology of a Germanic Aryan master race, however, few people will be familiar with a similar hypothesis regarding the African continent: the Hamitic hypothesis. It has a long, convoluted history and goes back to the bible. It developed into a racial theory based on Noah's three sons: Sem, Japheth and Ham, from whom the Semites (Asians), Japhites (Europeans) and Hamites (Africans) supposedly originated. C. G. Seligman wrote in Races of Africa (1930) Apart from relatively late Semitic influence... the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites, its history the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushman, whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider pastoralists as are represented at the present day by the Beja and Somali ...The incoming Hamites were pastoral 'Europeans'-arriving wave after wave-better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes. The Hamitic hypothesis has done a lot of harm during the colonial period and was also used as a pretext in the Rwandan genocide on both Tutsi (originally pastoralists) and Hutu (originally farmers). The word Hamitic has all but disappeared from scientific discourse and the linguistic group has been subsumed as Kushitic together with Semitic in the Afroasiatic language family. Recently Michael Robinson made fun of it in his TEDx talk: "A Theory You've Never Heard Of". However, rather than making fun of it, it would be more sensible to consider the part of the Hamitic hypothesis that is not based on any ideas of racist thinking, i.e. the spread of pastoralism from the Near East. Pontus Skoglund analyzed ancient DNA from the approximately thirty-one-hundred-year-old remains of an infant girl from Tanzania in equatorial East Africa, and an approximately twelve-hundred-year-old sample from the western Cape region of South Africa, both buried among artifacts and animal bones that identified them as being from herder populations. The

In The Code of the Extraordinary Mind: 10 Unconventional Laws to Redefine Your Life and Succeed on Your Own Terms (2016) Mindvalley founder Vishen Lakhiani gives the following self-help advice:

The People vs. Democracy (2018) by political analyst Yascha Mounk is a brilliant book about how l... more The People vs. Democracy (2018) by political analyst Yascha Mounk is a brilliant book about how liberalism has become separate from democracy. Liberals have become less democratic while illiberal politicians have. One example, mentioned in the book is the Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban, who started out as a liberal democrat and ended up as a right-wing populist/nationalist politician, who disregards or even disrespect liberal values and minorities. One thing you can't hold against Orban is that he is anti-democratic, as he has the full support of the majority of his people. And this is true for many populist politicians. They love referenda, being fully aware that the majority will vote in a right-wing spirit when it comes to issues such as immigration and refugees. Have no misconception, extreme right-wing leaders are NEVER democratic, they just can afford to be. You can't accuse them of being anti-democratic, because they often do have the majority of the population behind them in their xenophobia and anti-diversity attitude. However, it's not hard to accuse them of hypocrisy: while they promise to rid the people of politicians who work in the interest of their in-groups, they do the same, and their in-groups are often even narrower. In 2019 the Austrian far-right Freedom Party suffered a major setback in what has become known as Ibiza-gate. A video surfaced that showed clearly the massive amount of corruption within the party. More than right-wing politicians far-right-wing politicians have always prioritized their own interests over the people's, may their names be Trump, Berlusconi, or Liberals, on the other hand, are increasingly horrified to see how liberal values are quickly being eroded by the choices voters make and are becoming more and more divided. Some