The Naive Adult
The human animal is fundamentally tribal. We are born with a deep, evolutionary mandate to seek out the warmth of the hearth, to find a community where we can belong, and to surround ourselves with people who will care for us when we are weak. This desire is so overwhelming that it frequently gives birth to a dangerous, comforting illusion: the assumption that others harbor the same good intentions toward us that we harbor toward them. But human beings are fiercely complex. Beneath the veneer of polite society, people are often driven by raw self-interest, quiet dishonesty, and calculated spite. Intentions are not etched onto foreheads nor written on the backs of palms. They are fiercely guarded in the darkest, most inaccessible vaults of the human heart, hidden away from the public gaze. To navigate the world unaware of this is to pay the devastating cost of naiveté. The naive individual operates much like Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Myshkin is undeniably good, but...