Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari Flashcards
Homo sapiens (wise man) long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes.
We are used to thinking about ourselves as the only humans, because for the last 10,000 years, our species has indeed been the only human species around. The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least 6 different species of man. Homo erectus (Upright man) survived for close to 2 million years, making it the most durable species ever.
Over the past 100,000 years we have become so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. This makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome (perfect example of) of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Any large-scale human cooperation - whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe - is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. None of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods or nations? When it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been living in a dual reality (with the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations).
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.
3 main factors prevent people from realising that the order organising their lives exists only in their imagination:
1/ The imagined order is embedded in the material world
2/ The imagined order shapes our desires
People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’ on which the modern tourism industry is founded. Few question the myths that cause us to desire certain products and services in the first place.
3/ The imagined order is inter-subjective. Inter-subjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignificant charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity, but their impact on the world may still be enormous. Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations. In other words, if I alone were to stop believing in human rights it wouldn’t much matter. It is an inter-subjective imagined order. To change it we would need to simultanously change the consciousness of billions of people.
It is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.
It’s a proven fact that most rich people are rich for the simple reason that they were born into a rich family, while most poor people will remain poor throughout their lives because they were born into a poor family.
Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis - they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths. That is one good reason to study history.
Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.
The Roman Catholic Church - a church whose leader still sits in Rome and whose God prefers to be addressed in Latin.
2 thousand years of monotheistic brainwashing have caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry.
The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans.
The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.
Over 1500 years Christians have slaughtered other Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
Judaism argues that the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, yet His chief interest is in the tiny Jewish nation and in the obscure land of Israel.
Christianity began as an esoteric Jewish sect that sought to convince Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was their long-awaited messiah. In one of history’s strangest twists this sect took over the mighty Roman Empire.
Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. Its theology tends to deny the existence of all gods except the supreme God, and to pour hellfire and brimstone over anyone who dares worship them.
Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world.
Monotheism is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints and in animist ghosts.
No matter what the mind expreriences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction.
When the flames are completely extinguished, craving is replaced by a state of perfect contentment and serenity, known as nirvana (the literal meaning of which is ‘extingusihing the fire’). Those who have attained nirvana are fully liberated from all suffering.
If the mind of a person is free of all craving, no god can make him miserable. Conversely, once craving arises in a person’s mind, all the gods in the universe cannot save him from suffering.
In contrast to other humanists, the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or degenerate into a subhuman.
Had the Byzantine army been able to repel the initial onslaught, Islam would probably have remained an obscure cult of which only a handful of people were aware. Scholars would then have a very easy job explaining why a faith based on a revelation to a middle-aged Meccan merchant could never have caught on.
So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we can imagine. There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along.
History has a very wide horizon of possibilities, and many are never realised. It is conceivable to imagine history going on for generations while bypassing the Scientific Revolution, just as it is conceivable to imagine history without Christianity, without a Roman Empire, and without gold coins.
For most of history, humans knew nothing about 99.99 per cent of the organisms on the planet - namely the microorganisms. Each of us bears billions of one-celled creatures within us, and not just as free-riders. Some of them digest our food and clean our guts, while others cause illnesses and epidemics. We’ve now harnessed microorganisms in the service of medicine and industry.
Modern science differs from all previous traditions of knowledge in 3 critical ways:
1/ The willingness to admit ignorance. No concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge.
This willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.
2/ The centrality of observation and mathematics
3/ The gathering of new powers
The Scientific Revolution has been a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched it was that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam and Christianity asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. Ordinary mortals gained knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions. It was inconceivable that the Bible or Koran were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe.
Of all mankind’s ostensibly insoluble problems, one has remained the most vexing, interesting and important: the problem of death itself. For men of science, death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem. Our best minds are not wasting their time trying to give meaning to death. They are instead trying to vanquish the Grim Reaper himself. The leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life.
From a purely scientific viewpoint it is unclear what we should do with our increasing understanding of genetics. Scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology which justifies the costs of the research.
Between 1500 and 1950 the Far East and Islamic World did not produce anything that comes close to Newtonian physics or Darwinian biology.
To understand modern economic history, you really need to understand just a single word. The word is growth. For better or worse, the modern economy has been growing like a hormone-soused teenager.
The entire economic enterprise is founded on trust in an imaginary future.
The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. This idea was soon translated into economic terms.
Adam Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits as the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history. Smith is saying that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.
Capitalism distinguishes ‘capital’ from mere ‘wealth’. Capital consists of money, goods and resources that are invested in production. Wealth, on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities.
Capitalism has become far more than just an economic doctrine. It now encompasses an ethic - a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think.
A basic lesson in evolutionary psychology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction.
Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppresion.
Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over.
Capitalism is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do.
Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. Prophets, poets and philosophers realised thousands of years ago that being satisifed with what you already have is far more important than getting more of what you want.
If happiness is determined by expectations, then 2 pillars of society - mass media and the advertising industry - may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment.
Like all other mental states, our subjective well-being is not determined by external parameters such as salary, social relations or political rights. Rather, it is determined by a complex system of nerves, neurons, synapses and various biochemical substances such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. People are made happy by one thing only - pleasant sensations in their bodies.
We tend to believe that if we could just change our workplace, get married, finish writing that novel, buy a new car or repay the mortgage, we would be on top of the world. Yet buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can startle it for a fleeting moment, but it’s soon back to its set point.
The keys to our happiness are in the hands of our biomechanical system.
Money, status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions - none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.
As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.
If medieval people believed the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may well have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people, who in the long term can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion.
As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. We are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan. If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence ANY meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion.
According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling or pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which cause us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction.
People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them.
The key to happiness is to know the truth about yourself - to understand who, or what, you really are. The basic raison d’etre of psychotherapy is that people don’t really know themselves and that they sometimes need professional help to free themselves of self-destructive behaviours.
