In his bestselling The Moral Animal, Robert Wright applied the principles of evolutionary biology to the study of the human mind. Now Wright attempts something even more ambitious: explaining the direction of evolution and human history--and discerning where history will lead us next.In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright asserts that, ever since the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern. Organisms and human societies alike have grown more complex by mastering the challenges of internal cooperation. Wright's narrative ranges from fossilized bacteria to vampire bats, from stone-age villages to the World Trade Organization, uncovering such surprises as the benefits of barbarian hordes and the useful stability of feudalism.…
"Nonzero is a book that everybody should read. It is a big book – not a quick read. The Logic of Human Destiny – that’s a pretty big subject. What it essentially does is tell the story of steadily increasing complexity, of increasingly complex human interactions, from cave societies to current Shanghai. Wright sees human interactions as a Nonzero sum. While primitive systems might have run on dog-eat-dog or an-eye-for-an-eye zero-sum interactions, where I win means you lose, the story of human society is a story of people coming together and discovering it doesn’t have to be zero sum. Human interaction can be positive sum. We can cooperate in ways so that everybody wins. What Wright does is trace that logic through human history, and that logic is enormously important for understanding the complex systems we live in. Absolutely. Secretary Clinton is way ahead of the curve. She has embraced government-to-society diplomacy and society-to-society diplomacy, which basically means connecting governments with people and connecting people with people. That is a far more complex challenge because there are billions of people. When you start focusing on people rather than states you start focusing on all the complexities of their interactions, you think about how to build networks and you think about how to relate to different segments of society, like women and young people and entrepreneurs and scientists. It’s really a different vision of diplomacy. Nonzero is essentially a foundational text for the other four books I cited and for thinking about foreign policy and more simply 21st century life. It doesn’t specifically address foreign policy but Nonzero conveys the idea that positive sum cooperation is indeed the direction of history."
