Averting Global Extinction

Humanity's self-destructive failure to give global and human survival top priority is complex, puzzling, and irrational. Berger conceptualizes it as analogous to manifestations of individuals' psychopathology. He devises a 'sociocultural therapy' patterned after an individual psychotherapy framework, the so-called analysis of defense and designed to supplement the standard approaches to global threats. The new and valuable principal contributions are: identifying our failures with societal pathology; focusing on the latter's defenses; conceptualizing a therapeutic analogue applicable at the social level; and constructing a prototypical example of that therapy.