Autocrats, holy wars, market crashes, and climate collapse, the author argues, are different symptoms of the same underlying cause.

the resonance of Life proposes a single framework, the CWL Hypothesis, for human motivation. The framework is tested against the full range of human experience: the pressures of evolution, the logic of market economics, the pervasive presence and diversity of religious traditions, and the roots of the world's mounting instability. It then puts the hypothesis to work tracing Robespierre's fall during the French Revolution, the Church's suppression of Galileo, and the fault lines running through today's debates over abortion, energy, and climate.

The result is an ambitious, wide-ranging attempt to answer: How do we, as humans, fit into the universe? And then, what might we do to reduce the friction between fellow humans and between us and the natural world?

For readers of Sapiens, Behave, and The Righteous Mind — anyone willing to sit with a big idea and follow it wherever it leads.