Top Highlights

• 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin
• Many products are signals first and material objects second. Our vast social-primate brains evolved to pursue one central social goal: to look good in the eyes of others.
• Yet at the same time, each forgets that, stripped of romantic idealization, Cro-Magnon life was also ignorant, insular, violent, and unimaginably boring. I would not want to live without civilization’s key inventions—trade, currency, literacy, medicine, books, bicycles, films, duct tape, shipping containers, and computers.
• This paradigm shift seemed uniquely satisfying and complete—as if I had found my intellectual home once and for all, and nothing could ever blow my mind in the same way again.
• The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.