No two ways about it: We are making ourselves wretched. We are more affluent than ever, but riches—and power, the only point in having riches—do not make people happy. Ask a psychiatrist. Or take a look at the face of Vladimir Putin, who has, alas, the power of life and death over millions of people and is the owner of the most expensive toilet-paper dispenser in the world. No, affluent as we are, we are also more anxious, depressed, lonely, isolated, and lacking in purpose than ever. Why is this? I suggest it is because we no longer have the foggiest idea what human life is about. Indeed, there is a sense in which we no longer live in a world at all, but exist in a simulacrum of our own making.
Leaving nuance aside, and condensing three decades of research and a vast body of supporting evidence into a phrase: We are now mesmerized by the least intelligent part of the human brain. For reasons of survival, one hemisphere of the brain, the left, has evolved over millions of years to favor manipulation—grabbing, getting, and controlling—while the other, the right, has been tasked with understanding the whole picture. So conflicting are these goals that in humans the hemispheres are largely sequestered, one from the other. Our seeming ability these days to hear only what comes from the left hemisphere does not arise from the brain’s having changed radically in the last couple of centuries, though it is indeed always evolving. It’s more like this: You buy a radio set, and you soon find a couple of channels worth listening to. After a while, you find yourself listening to only one. It’s not the radio set that has changed; it’s you. In the case of the brain, it would not matter so much if we had settled on the intelligent channel—but we didn’t. We settled on the one whose value has nothing to do with truth, or with courage, magnanimity, or generosity, but only with greed, grabbing, and getting. Manipulation.
And no, the difference between the hemispheres is not a myth that has been debunked, as I have explained at length elsewhere. What does need to be debunked is the old pop-psychology myth wherein the left hemisphere “does” reason and language, and is dull but at least reliable, like a slightly boring accountant, whereas the right hemisphere “does” emotions and pictures and is apt to be flighty and frivolous. All of this is wrong. We now know that each hemisphere is involved in everything and that, for the record, the left hemisphere is less emotionally stable, as well as less intelligent—I mean cognitively, as well as emotionally and socially—than the right. The right hemisphere is a far superior guide to reality; delusions and hallucinations are much more frequent, grosser, and more persistent after damage to the right hemisphere than after damage to the left. Without the right hemisphere to rely on, the left hemisphere is at sea. It denies the most obvious facts, lies, and makes stuff up when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. And it is relentlessly, vacuously cheerful in the face of disaster.
Read it all.
