Throughout history, adultery has had few rivals as a cause of murder and human misery. The reason we tend to resemble our mates is that many of us are looking for someone who reminds us of our parent or sibling of the opposite sex, who in turn resembles us.
Interpretation
Adultery often leads to intense emotional and social turmoil, reflecting deeper psychological patterns in mate selection rooted in family resemblance.
Jared Diamond's quote delves into the complex interplay between human relationships and familial dynamics. It suggests that infidelity has historically been a significant contributor to violence and suffering, emphasizing how our romantic choices are often influenced by our subconscious search for partners who echo traits from our opposite-sex parent or sibling. This alignment can lead to conflicts and emotional distress when these relationships deviate from idealized norms, illustrating the deep psychological roots of attraction and the potential consequences of betrayal.
In practice
In a discussion about the impacts of infidelity during a relationship counseling session.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time.
I remember being a kid and praying in the hell of my house to have somebody love me and somebody that I could love.
In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.
Surround yourself with people whose definition of you is not based on your history, but your destiny.
Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.
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