The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era
The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era is a book by Steve Taylor PhD, a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University. Originally published in 2005 with a new edition that includes an afterword published later in 2018, it claims that "It is not natural for human beings to kill each other, for men to oppress women, for individuals to accumulate massive wealth and power, or to abuse nature", and that human nature changed after a period of aridification 5900 years ago. (The title of the book refers to the Biblical story of the fall of man; coincidence?) Some of the book's findings are now mainstream views. It is widely accepted by anthropologists that there was a long period of 'prehistoric peace.' For example, such is the view of the mainstream popular books Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, and Rutger Bregman's Humankind. It is also widely accepted that prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups - and contemporary hunter-gatherer groups who follow the same 'immediate return' lifestyle that our ancestors once did - were egalitarian, and more gender-neutral.
Fiction over fact Pseudohistory |
How it didn't happen |
v - t - e |
The science
Furthermore, The Fall's thesis also includes some climate science. As the name suggests, an aridification event occurred 5900 years ago- and it was one of the most severe events during the Holocene.
See also
- Golden age
- Noble savage
- Naturalistic fallacy
External links
- See the Wikipedia article on 5.9 kiloyear event.
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