Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

Consider Tasmania, a medium-sized island south of Australia. It was cut off from the Australian mainland in about 10,000 BC as the end of the Ice Age caused the sea level to rise. A few thousand hunter-gatherers were left on the island, and had no contact with any other humans until the arrival of the Europeans in the nineteenth century. For 12,000 years, nobody else knew the Tasmanians were there, and they didn’t know that there was anyone else in the world.

It should be stressed that an empire is defined solely by its cultural diversity and flexible borders, rather than by its origins, its form of government, its territorial extent, or the size of its population. An empire need not emerge from military conquest.

Building and maintaining an empire usually required the vicious slaughter of large populations and the brutal oppression of every-one who was left. The standard imperial toolkit included wars, enslavement, deportation and genocide.

Today most of us speak, think and dream in imperial languages that were forced upon our ancestors by the sword.

There are schools of thought and political movements that seek to purge human culture of imperialism, leaving behind what they claim is a pure, authentic civilisation, untainted by sin. These ideologies are at best naïve; at worst they serve as disingenuous window-dressing for crude nationalism and bigotry.

Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. A religion that recognises the legitimacy of other faiths implies either that its god is not the supreme power of the universe, or that it received from God just part of the universal truth. Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition.

The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,

The story of the Tower of Babel, the story of Icarus, the story of the Golem and countless other myths taught people that any attempt to go beyond human limitations would inevitably lead to disappointment and disaster.

Modern Europeans came to believe that acquiring new knowledge was always good.

That’s why capitalism is called ‘capitalism’. 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.