Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

7FAMILY VALUESCome on, people now, smile on your brother! Everybody gettogether, try to love one another right now. This is the dawningof the Age of Aquarius: harmony and understanding, sympathyand trust abounding; no more falsehoods or derisions, golden livingdreams of visions, mystic crystal revelation, and the mind's true liberation.Imagine no possessions; I wonder if you can. No need for greed orhunger, a brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all theworld. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope somedayyou'll join us, and the world will be as one.Incredible as it may seem, many of us used to believe this treacle. Aleading idea of the 1960s and 70s was that mistrust, jealousy, competitiveness,greed, and manipulation were social institutions due for reform.Some people thought they were unnecessary evils, like slavery or thedenial of the vote to women. Others thought they were hidebound traditionswhose inefficiency had gone unnoticed, as with the genius who figuredout that toll bridges could charge a dollar to the traffic going oneway instead of fifty cents to the traffic going both ways.These sentiments came not just from rock musicians but from America'sdistinguished social critics. In his 1970 book The Greening ofAmerica, the Yale law professor Charles Reich heralded a nonviolent revolutionbeing led by the college-age generation. The youth of Americahad evolved a new consciousness, he said. It was less guilty and anxious,nonjudgmental, noncompetitive, nonmaterialistic, affectionate, honest,unmanipulative, unaggressive, communal, and unconcerned with status425