26 Quotes by Christopher Ryan

Man is an animal suspended in a web of significance that he himself has spun. – Max Weber.

Monogamy is not found in any social, group-living primate except – if the standard narrative is to be believed – us.

Why is it so easy to believe that a mother’s love isn’t a zero-sum proposition, but that sexual love is a finite resource?

Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband-wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species – as ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor?

Before the war on drugs, the war on terror, or the war on cancer, there was the war on female sexual desire. It’s a war that has been raging far longer than any other, and its victims number well into the billions by now. Like the others, it’s a war that can never be won, as the declared enemy is a force of nature. We may as well declare war on the cycles of the moon.

Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it “normal,” and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called “human nature” was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes’s dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana.

Social forces that convince people to stretch their necks beyond the breaking point, schmush the heads of their infants, or sell their daughters into sacred prostitution are quite capable of reshaping or neutralizing sexual jealousy by rendering it silly and ridiculous. By rendering it abnormal.

Having no coercive power, leaders are simply those who are followed – individuals who have earned the respect of their companions. Such “leaders” do not – cannot – demand anyone’s obedience.