A lot about our behaviour doesn’t make sense until we can take on board a basic idea about the way we humans are built: that our biology privileges survival over self-awareness. Place any new human in a terrible circumstance – let’s say, in a home with an abusive or alcoholic parent – and it won’t focus clearly on what has gone wrong, or mourn its condition. It will simply keep going.
Yet our excellence at survival doesn’t take away from the basic fact of our situation. We have the ingredients of madness inside us.
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