My contention is that humanity's great shortcoming is its defective emotional make-up. Historically the problem was born of received deficiency passed down the generations by perpetual frustration of needs (Maslow). The result is a form of mass mind damage which is genetically, chemically and culturally inherited.

In recent times many of the hitherto reasons for deficiency - poverty, starvation, insecurity, political and social instability etc - have been increasingly addressed in the western world but the psychological fall-out from bad heritage remains. As a consequence our sophisticated world with its great material advances, its evolved social systems and political and legal structures, its high levels of education, are all contained within an emotional framework that remains as primitive as it was tens of thousands of years ago before intellectual development had taken hold. That this is so goes largely unrecognised. It is the great elephant in the room.