ABSTRACT
Humans are not isolated individual minds inside chemical/mechanical bodies, but social animals whose interaction with each other define who we are as a species. Earliest ideas of a happy and healthy life are social. Many descriptions of the earliest humans are positive, even idyllic, like life in the Garden of Eden. Though some of this is most likely fantasy, it can serve as a somewhat sentimental account of a desirable social/relational healthy life that disappeared with the coming of agriculture. The status and authority of kings, the nobility and clerics were sanctioned by god as well as the state. The Great Chain of Being described an essentially hierarchical world. The shift to thinking that everyone could have a good and a happy life before an afterlife was one indication of the beginnings of modernity evident in seventeenth century thinkers like John Locke.
