@book{harari2015sapiens,
title={Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind},
author={Harari, Y.N.},
isbn={9780062316103},
lccn={2014028418},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=FmyBAwAAQBAJ},
year={2015},
publisher={HarperCollins}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures. Only in the last 100000 years - with the rise of Homo sapiens - that man jumped to the top of the food chain.
Humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Humans themselves failed to adjust. We are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.
[The] ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most sincerely believe in the existence of gods and demons. Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability corporations. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights.
Trade cannot exists without trust, and it is very difficult to trust strangers. The global trade network of today is based on our trust in such fictional entities as the dollar, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the totemic trademarks of corporations.
The first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom.
Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying. [It] enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. It translated into population explosions and pampered elites.
Plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
In time, human violence was brought under control through the development of larger social frameworks – cities, kingdoms and states. But it took thousands of years.
Village life brought better protection against wild animals, rain and cold. It offered nothing for people as individuals. It enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially. The ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. It took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently. There was no going back.
A new kind of society also appeared in some places, based primarily on the exploitation of animals: tribes of pastoralist herders. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries. Their natural instincts and social ties had to be broken, their aggression and sexuality contained, and their freedom of movement curtailed.
Particularly strong defences were erected around the home. Armed with branches, swatters, shoes and poison sprays waged relentless war against the diligent ants, furtive roaches, adventurous spiders and misguided beetles that constantly infiltrate.
The vast majority of farmers clustered together in an area of just 2 per cent of the planet’s surface. Everywhere else was too cold, too hot, too dry, too wet, or otherwise unsuited for cultivation. They accumulated more and more things that tied them down.
The diligent peasants almost never achieved the future economic security. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasant’s surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.
These forfeited food surplusses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy.
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined orders? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You also educate people thoroughly, constantly remind them of the principles of the imagined order. They are incorporated into fairy tales, dramas, paintings, songs, etiquette, political propaganda, architecture, recipes and fashions.
Three main factors prevent people from realising that the order organising their lives exists only in their imagination:
a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world.
b. The imagined order shapes our desires.
c. The imagined order is inter-subjective, existing in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people.
In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.
Evolutionary pressures have adapted the human brain to store immense quantities of botanical, zoological, topographical and social information. A completely new type of information became vital – numbers. Script gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.
Every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable. The nierarchy of rich and poor seems perfectly sensible.