The Way We Are - Hardcover

Wheelis, Allen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393062147 ISBN 13: 9780393062144

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006

Synopsis

This brief book, containing a lifetime of wisdom and experience, challenges our cherished assumptions about human nature.

Allen Wheelis starts from the premise that human beings do not know themselves because deception―including self-deception―is not only a strategy for survival, it is the basis of the social contract whereby man trades his individual freedom for the security of a tribe or state. Are we really motivated by ideals such as freedom, equality, and justice? In fact these are only distractions useful to the state, which demands conscience of us but is itself above all moral constraints, seeking only power. Were we to understand or dwell on our individual mortality, we would not be willing to make the necessary sacrifices or participate in the bloody business of the group.

This unsparing map of the human condition is presented in hypnotic prose and illustrated by vivid fictional narratives. Unsparing as it is, the book finds its way to an episode of transcendent love, for this too is part of the way we are.

About this title

About the Author

Allen Wheelis is a celebrated psychoanalyst and philosopher whose books include How People Change and The Illusionless Man. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Reviews

Eminent psychoanalyst and philosopher Wheelis (How People Change) draws on his long life's central passions in this poetic meditation aimed at replacing our self-deception ("laid on from school and pulpit and lectern and TV and Internet") with self-knowledge regarding "the ways of power and the ways of the heart." He shows how distaste for our mortality informs every self-deceiving aspect of civilization. He further asserts that although civilization requires peaceful and orderly behavior from individuals, the primal human desire for power and destruction is transferred from the individual to state leaders. "[T]he will to power of nations, and the actions to which it leads them... bear no relation to any reasonable goal of human conscience," he writes. Wheelis goes on to examine the arbitrary nature of state morality: "States... behave as they see fit, and the way they see fit is then declared to be moral." Shifting to personal morality, Wheelis closes with a series of confessional reflections on sexual desire and its attendant moral choices, writing sensuously and with a novelist's sense of dramatic staging, before concluding with a series of terse ruminations on the nature of attachment, old age and love. Written with commanding force and fluency, Wheelis's sobering psychoanalytic brand of philosophy abounds with tautly argued ironies. (Aug.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393062147
• ISBN 13: 9780393062144
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144