How did it come to this? Scholars think there were at least two causes. One, we now had belongings to fight over, starting with land. And two, settled life made us more distrustful of strangers. Foraging nomads had a fairly laid-back membership policy: you crossed paths with new people all the time and could easily join up with another group.25 Vil

a Swiss novelist once quipped, that ‘News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.’30

When the conquistadors marched into the city in 1519 and entered its largest temple they were stunned to see huge racks and towers piled high with thousands of human skulls.

Rather than a struggle for survival, it was a snuggle for survival, in which we kept each other warm.21

An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil – angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good – peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a mome

As media scientist George Gerbner summed up: ‘[He] who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour.’28

‘One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip. […] Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.’9

When a seventeenth-century missionary warned a member of the Innu tribe (in what is now Canada) about the dangers of infidelity, he replied, ‘Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.’15

It’s time we told a different kind of story.