David Brooks— The Social Animal: Introduction

This is the happiest story you've ever read. It's about two people who led wonderfully fulfilling lives...because they possessed what economists call noncognitive skills...hidden qualities that cant be easily counted or measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfillment.

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.

...we have become accustomed to a certain constricted way of describing our lives. Plato believed that reason was the civilized part of the brain, and we would be happy so long as reason subdued primitive passions. Rationalist thinkers believed that logic was the acme of intelligence, and mankind was liberated as reason conquered habit and superstition.

A reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature has led to multiple failures of politics and economic policy, nationally and globally.

The Greeks used to say suffer our way to wisdom. The essence of that wisdom is that below our awareness there are viewpoints and emotions that help guide us as we wander through our lives.

Your unconscious, that inner introvert, wants you to reach outward and connect. It wants you to achieve communion with work, friend, family, nation, and cause.