Spite

The Upside of Your Dark Side

De: Simon McCarthy-Jones

Narrado por: Chris Clarkson

Spite angers and enrages us, but it also keeps us honest. In this provocative account, a psychologist examines how petty vengeance explains human thriving.

Spite seems utterly useless. You don't gain anything by hurting yourself just so you can hurt someone else. So why hasn't evolution weeded out all the spiteful people?

As psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones argues, spite seems pointless because we're looking at it wrong. Spite isn't just what we feel when a car cuts us off or when a partner cheats. It's what we feel when we want to punish a bad act simply because it was bad. Spite is our fairness instinct, an innate resistance to exploitation, and it is one of the building blocks of human civilization. As McCarthy-Jones explains, some of history's most important developments - the rise of religions, governments, and even moral codes - were actually redirections of spiteful impulses.

Provocative and engaging, Spite shows that if you really want to understand what makes us human, you can't just look at noble ideas like altruism and cooperation. You need to understand our darker impulses as well.

©2021 Simon McCarthy-Jones (P)2021 Basic Books

An interesting book

Spite was a interesting book. There was a bit of political bias in my personal opinion that kind of took away from the overall story, but the author did try to focus on the scientific reasoning behind this writing. the performance was well done and a lot of the examples were easy to understand and put for front into one's mind. it was a really good story to listen to and went by pretty quickly. I'm not sure if I agree with every point that was made in this book but I do say that the perspective is very well put together.

If you know humans are social creatures, you don’t need this book.

I’m spiteful so I thought this book was going to be useful. Besides the stories of petty and severe spite, the reason why spite exists wasn’t surprising to me. That’s a big issue because the first quarter of the book spends considerable effort to spell this out when really it could be paraphrased as “spite exists because most human societies function on fairness.”