Sapiens

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari

Main Points:

  • Back 70,000 years ago, our ancestors homo sapiens who were living in East-Africa were unimportant animals. Their impact on the ecological system was irrelevant. But if you look at the world today we dominate this planet. Main question: how exactly did we go from there to here? 
  • Main answer: We are the only animal that managed to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.
  • Ants and bees: can cooperate in large numbers, but are not flexible. The bees are not going to reinvent their social system and execute the queen bee and establish a communist dictatorship of worker bees if the community faces difficulty. 
  • Chimpanzees: are flexible, but cannot cooperate in large numbers. A bunch of chimpanzees in the train station would be absolute chaos.
  • Put 1,000 humans vs. 1,000 chimpanzees, the humans would win because they can work together, but the chimpanzees cannot do so.
  • What enables humans to cooperate flexibly in large numbers?
    • Main answer: human imagination. Create fictional stories and spread them around.
    • As long as many people believe in the same story, then they will follow the same laws.
    • Imagination enables cooperation, this is not unique to the religious sphere- also found in legal settings and politics (human rights), economics (currency has value). 
    • Human rights is not a biological trait, you won't find human rights inside a human. 
    • Not everyone believes in human rights, not everyone believes in god, and not everyone believes in heaven and hell, but everyone believes in money. And ironically, the same money. A piece of paper has no objective value, but the master storytellers (bankers, Federal Reserve chairman, economists) tell us that this worthless green piece of paper has intrinsic value. 
    • Difficulty is in convincing everyone else to believe. 
  • Why do we fight?
    • Main answer: vast majority of wars and revolutions were about fictional stories (not about food or territory). 
    • Israeli-Palestinian conflict: no objective shortage of food and no objective shortage of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The main problem is that two groups cannot find a single story that they can live by.
  • Humans live in a dual reality, but chimpanzees and other animals live in an objective reality. 
  • Industrial Revolution of the 19th century
    • Humankind gained control of energy, steam engine, electricity, etc.
    • Result: social and political chaos. 
    • New class of people emerged the urban proletariat emerged and no one knew what to do with this group!
    • Reaction was to go back to the old stories and find security when there is change. Revolutions are accompanied by a wave of fundamentalism - finding a base that is eternal and secure against all changes. 
    • Examples: Couldn't solve the problems created by the Industrial Revolution.
      • Europe- Pope Pius IX said that all the answers are in the Bible and came up with a new term called 'papal infallibility'- that the pope is always right. This is fundamentalism accompanying Catholicism.
      • Middle East- Sudan have a movement of the Mahadeen (Messiah) and millions of people join them to fight the Egyptian and English armies (Charles Gordon) and setup a Muslim theocracy in Sudan using shariah law. 
      • India- Hindu revival movement say all the answers are in the Vedas and it is led by Deyananda Saraswathi. 
      • China- the biggest war of the 19th century is the Taiping Rebellion (when Hong Xiuquan was a local scholar and sees a revelation of God saying that he is the younger brother of Jesus Christ to setup Kingdom of Heavenly Peace). The destabilizing of the chinese dominance with the coming of European trade. Instead he leads these to the death of 20 million people. 
  • Communism- the first techno-religion
    • Marx, Trotsky, and Lenin found answers by studying the new realities of industrial societies. How a railroad network impact a society?
    • They once asked Lenin what is communism?
    • "Communism is power to workers' councils plus electrification to the whole country"- Lenin. There is no communism without electricity, trains, etc. 
  • Future
    • Upgrading humans into superhumans
    • Unprecedented gaps between rich and poor
    • New massive class of useless humans (no economic value). Several years down the line, 50% of the jobs will be taken over by artificial intelligence and computers.
Watch the lecture by Yuval Harari on his book Sapiens!

The Drake Equation

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