The Myth of Normal 99

benign to disastrous. When we reify—set in stone, mentally speaking—the particular way human behavior shows up in a certain place and time, we commit the fallacy of conflating how we’re being with who we are. This error can keep us from considering other possibilities, even if our current way of operating isn’t good for us. We then replicate conditions that are unfit for our well-being, and the sad saga continues. This is why, in seeking a vision of a healthier world, we had best disabuse ourselves of any fixed, limiting beliefs about what we’re all about, and instead ask, What circumstances evoke which sorts of outcomes? Encoded in our biology are some basic needs and potentials. How our nature unfolds depends on how well these needs are met, how these potentials are encouraged or frustrated. This is true throughout the lifespan, but at no time is it more consequential than during the process of development. Chronologically we can trace development’s arc from conception through adolescence, although of course in many ways we never stop growing, changing, adapting, and developing—if we’re lucky, for the healthier and wiser. More than any other factor, it is the environment—the conditions under which development takes place, which either do or don’t meet our multiple needs—that determines which potentials will or will not manifest. This is as true for us as for any other life-form. Consider the acorn. It is in the nature of an acorn, we might say, to become an oak tree—but only if the climate and soil are right, and provided no enterprising squirrel squirrels it away for winter sustenance. Even if it roots and sprouts successfully, the size and healthy branching of the oak tree born of that acorn would depend on what nourishment the ground can provide, climatic conditions, sunlight and irrigation, its spacing from or proximity to its fellow flora, and so on. We, too, have needs the environment must satisfy if we are to flourish. Before exploring this dynamic, we need to once again dispense with the prevalent myth that genetic traits account for human behavior. They do not. While we have a certain biological makeup, we are not genetically programmed to feel or believe or act in any particular manner. As Robert Sapolsky put it when we spoke, “We are freer from genetics than any other