Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Teach Us about Ourselves

by Frans de Waal

Unless, of course, we evolved to communicate inner states involuntarily. In that case, expression and communication are the same thing. We don’t fully control our faces because we don’t fully control our emotions. That this allows others to read our feelings is a bonus. Indeed, the tight link between what goes on inside and what we reveal on the outside may well be the whole reason why facial expressions evolved.

we tend to be kind and open to others unless something holds us back. I sometimes joke that this must be why Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist and would-be philosopher, needed such boring heavy tomes full of bloodless characters to make her case. Her main point was that we are unalloyed individualists, but she had to work hard to convince us, because deep down everyone knows that this is not who or what we are. Rather than a description of our species, Rand offered a counterintuitive ideological construct.

What feeds guilt and shame is a deep desire to belong, a survival issue for any social animal. The greatest underlying worry is rejection by the group.

emotions are like organs. They are all needed, and we share them all with other mammals.

Strutting like a male chimp on steroids, he turned the primary essentially into a hypermasculine body language contest.

on Trump

are. Large income disparities tear the social fabric apart by reducing mutual trust, stirring up social tensions, and creating anxieties that compromise the immune system of both the rich and the poor.