I see a clear progression in your last four books with each more or less leading naturally to the next. Other authors have also questioned Pinker’s metrics on their own terms: Is society actually less violent than it was in Medieval or pre-historic times?

We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet.

As we awaken to the interconnectedness of all our systems, we see that we cannot change, for example, our energy technologies without changing the economic system that supports them. And, you know, like nobody knows nobody would know the Emily Dickinson name without Emily Dickinson, the poet who was going to destroy the Emily Dickinson name. What, how powerful would you be if you were able to ride those synchronicities, if you had mastered the technology of being at just the right place at just the right time meeting, just the right person, those people who are really successful in the world is that because they are so organized and so together, or is it maybe sometimes because they were in the right place at the right time playing out a story that was written in advance. When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.

In many cases, because of licensing requirements, building codes, and so forth, it is actually illegal to do things we once did for each other. Combating is one of these habits, these reaction templates that our society, and many of us individually, or are trapped in the quote that you read another way to put it is that when our habituated, our habitual reaction patterns are themselves, part of the problem, it is a necessary step to stop doing so that, so that we can do habituate from those reaction patterns and do something that isn’t contributing to the problem.

And I, as I became aware of the, the oppression, the suffering, the starvation the eco side, like all of these problems, it’s sort of the Buddha’s walk outside the palace. Like these things are all steeply on the rise, but there’s no, there’s no like, Oh my God, we’ve got to change our entire way of life to do something about this. For example, in The Ascent of Humanity there is a section titled “The War on Germs,” in which I located conventional medicine within larger paradigms of conquest and offered quite specific critique of certain medical practices. I never studied either deeply, but they suffused the cultural atmosphere and influenced me profoundly, particularly Taoism. So that what I said before, you give attention to the yearning, to live in that world and to, to, to be somebody who is aligned with that world.

If like me you're put off at first by the narrators voice I urge you to pay on and you will forget it was ever a issue. First, the chosen measures of well-being are loaded with the values and assumptions of the very culture (ours) that is assessing progress and naming itself as the most advanced.

Now I’m not saying that that the COVID virus is not related to this, to the sickness, but it’s, it’s interesting that, that there’s such a tremendous mobilization to do something about coronavirus, because we knew what to do. The situation on Earth today is too dire for us to act from habit—to reenact again and again the same kinds of solutions that brought us to our present extremity.