Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise Perry

A life without pain sounds wonderful. It would also be fatal. Pain feels bad because it has a job: measuring damage to your body and motivating you to protect it. Every other feeling has a job too, built by natural selection. Hunger measures your need for calories and motivates you to eat. Envy measures others’ success and motivates you to close the gap. Frustration measures the futility of your current approach and motivates you to try a new one.

In 'All the Feels', evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban explains the evolved function of our emotions and sensations, from anger to the urge to yawn. In today's episode we speak in particular about negative and unpleasant emotions, particularly anxiety and depression. Are they doing something useful for us? Or is evolutionary mismatch causing us to feel worse than we need to?

Rob Kurzban is an evolutionary psychologist who was a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania for over a decade. His new book is titled 'All the Feels: The Evolved Function of Every Human Emotion and Sensation.'
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In this bonus episode for paid subscribers, I spoke with Ed West about the nativist protests in Dover and Portsmouth, and how the British government might respond. Will there be moves to ban face coverings and crack down on protest movements? Or will the government give way to the Right, and put an end to the asylum crisis? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for at least 65,000 years, surviving as hunter gatherers. 250 years ago, the British arrived, bringing with them industrial modernity, as well as disease and – sometimes – violence. During most of this modern period, British settlers and their descendants adopted what has been called "the great Australian silence", paying little attention to the Aboriginal people they had displaced.

Since the 1960s there has been a transformation in how non-indigenous Australians think about indigenous culture and history. One of the key voices in this transformation has been that of the anthropologist and linguist Peter Sutton, who has a particular expertise in Aboriginal languages and has lived and worked with Aboriginal people all over Australia for more than half a century.

In 2011, Peter published a book titled 'The Politics of Suffering', in which he argued that decades of liberal policy in outback communities had worsened the suffering of Aboriginal people. Today we discuss what Australians get wrong about indigenous affairs.
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In this bonus episode for paid subscribers, I spoke with Nina Power about the power of communism as an ideology. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You may think that you don't care about status. You may tell yourself that since you're not bothered about material displays of wealth, that means that you are above petty disputes over where one stands in the social pecking order.

The author and journalist Will Storr says you're wrong. Everybody cares about status, he argues, even if we don't realise it. We are evolved to obsess over status, and to immediately recognise it. You don't identify a high status person (solely) through their expensive car or designer clothes. You also notice their more relaxed postures, their better health, the fact that other people interrupt them less often, the fact that they have more friends. Everyone wants to be high status, whether or not they'll admit it.

These status games aren't something we can avoid, but by better understanding them we can play them more judiciously. That's what Will Storr's book, The Status Game, is all about.
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