This book, the second in a three-volume series, shows the destructive nature that symbolic thought has on civilization and the need for a transition to symptomatic thought and behavior. Ridley demonstrates how the experts in the cognitive sciences, including all fields of anthropology, misrepresent the way symbols affect the neurological processes of the human brain. The author shows that the traditional belief that symptoms are inferior to symbols is erroneous, and that this belief has caused unspeakable cruelty and conflict the world over. Ridley reaffirms his original thesis that man suffered a neurological misadventure in prehistory that caused the beginning of symbolic behavior. Symbolic thinking, a learned behavior, is not innate to the neurological processes of the brain, and must be eliminated. The author has combed through the literatures of the world to show the reader how James Frazer's Golden Bough and Cheikh Anta Diop's Civilization or Barbarism inform the discussion of human behavior from antiquity to modern man. Frazer illustrated how symbol systems caused humans to not only mythologize each other, but human history, in a way that the great Senegalese scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop, called 'the most monstrous falsification in the history of mankind.'
