Product Details
Simon & Schuster UK, April 2010
Trade Paperback, 400 pages
ISBN-10: 1847375715
ISBN-13: 9781847375711
Description
Ambitious and wide-ranging, The Selfish Society reveals the vital importance of understanding our early emotional lives, arguing that by focusing on the attention we give to our young children we can create a better society.
Open any newspaper, and what do you find?
Violence and crime, child abuse and neglect, expenses scandals, addiction, fraud and corruption, environmental melt-down
Is Britain indeed broken? How did modern society get to this point? Who is to blame? How can we change?
We have come to inhabit a culture of selfish individualism which has confused material well-being with happiness. As society became bigger and more competitive, working life was cut off from child-rearing and the new economics ignored people's emotional needs. We have lived with this culture so long that it is hard to imagine it being any different. Yet we are now at a turning point where the need for change is becoming urgent. If we are to build a more reflective and collaborative society, Gerhardt argues, we need to support the caring qualities that are learnt in early life and integrate them into our political and economic thinking.
Inspiring and thought-provoking, The Selfish Society sets out a roadmap to a more positive and compassionate future.
Open any newspaper, and what do you find?
Violence and crime, child abuse and neglect, expenses scandals, addiction, fraud and corruption, environmental melt-down
Is Britain indeed broken? How did modern society get to this point? Who is to blame? How can we change?
We have come to inhabit a culture of selfish individualism which has confused material well-being with happiness. As society became bigger and more competitive, working life was cut off from child-rearing and the new economics ignored people's emotional needs. We have lived with this culture so long that it is hard to imagine it being any different. Yet we are now at a turning point where the need for change is becoming urgent. If we are to build a more reflective and collaborative society, Gerhardt argues, we need to support the caring qualities that are learnt in early life and integrate them into our political and economic thinking.
Inspiring and thought-provoking, The Selfish Society sets out a roadmap to a more positive and compassionate future.
How did you come to write this book?
During the George W. Bush era, I became more and more appalled at the behaviour of people in public life - acting as if the law did not apply to them, combined with a belief in their own superiority- and I began to see the similarity with the behaviours common in 'personality disorders' and to think about these connections. Just as I was writing about this, the economy started to implode and new questions crowded in about how a psychological perspective could help us to understand what was happening in society more generally.
