I talked with Paul Wachtel a few days before Thanksgiving in a rustic cabin in the woods. Far from his Greenwich Village milieu, he was in North Carolina to address a conference on economic growth — to argue, persuasively, that our unquenchable desire for more of everything has trivialized our lives.
A skilled psychologist and a keen observer of the American way of life, Wachtel brings his understanding of the human psyche to bear on a wide range of questions — such as why we’re destroying our environment; or why, in our pursuit of security, we’ve lost touch with basic human needs.
