Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights.

Armies, police forces, courts and prisons are ceaselessly at work forcing people to act in accordance with the imagined order.

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.

Three main factors prevent people from realising that the order organising their lives exists only in their imagination:

The imagined order is embedded in the material world.

b. The imagined order shapes our desires.

For instance, the most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries.

Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.

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.

Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism.

c. The imagined order is inter-subjective.

An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs.

The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual.

The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.

Many of history’s most important

drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.

Similarly, the dollar, human rights and the United States of America exist in the shared imagination of billions, and no single individual can threaten their existence.

There is no way out of the imagined order.

Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A

The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.

By combining both types of signs the Sumerians were able to preserve far more data than any human brain

could remember or any DNA chain could encode.

The Mesopotamians eventually started to want to write down things other than monotonous mathematical data. Between 3000 BC and 2500 BC more and more signs were added to the Sumerian system, gradually transforming it into a full script that we today call cuneiform.

At roughly the same time, Egyptians developed another full script known as hieroglyphics.

The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed

the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.

Although this system of writing remains a partial script, it has become the world’s dominant language. Almost all states, companies, organisations and institutions – whether they speak Arabic, Hindi, English or Norwegian – use mathematical script to record and process data.

Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers.

scholars know of no large society that has been able to dispense with discrimination altogether.

Time and again people have created order in their societies by classifying the population into imagined categories, such as superiors, commoners and slaves; whites and blacks; patricians and plebeians; Brahmins and Shudras; or rich and poor. These categories have regulated relations between millions of humans by making some people legally,

politically or socially superio...

differences in natural abilities also play a role in the formation of social distinctions. But such diversities of aptitudes and character are usually mediated through imagined hierarchies.

most abilities have to be nurtured and developed.

Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities.

The economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings.

In most cases the hierarchy originated as the result of a set of accidental historical circumstances and was then perpetuated and refined over many generations as different groups developed vested interests in it.

The fear of pollution is not a complete fabrication of priests and princes, however. It probably has its roots in biological survival mechanisms that make humans feel an instinctive revulsion towards potential disease carriers, such as sick persons and dead bodies. If you want to keep any human group isolated

– women, Jews, Roma, gays, blacks – the best way to do it is convince everyone that these people are a source of pollution.

The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embe...

Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans, they ended up as the slaves of European masters!

two centuries of slavery meant that most black families were far poorer and far less educated than most white families. A black person born in Alabama in 1865 thus had much less chance of getting a good education and a well-paid job than did his white neighbours. His children, born in the 1880s and 1890s, started life with the same disadvantage – they, too, were born to an uneducated, poor family.

The stigma that labelled blacks as, by nature, unreliable, lazy and less intelligent conspired against him.

Since all the best jobs were held by whites, it became easier to believe that blacks really are inferior. ‘Look,’ said the average white citizen, ‘blacks have been free for generations, yet there are almost no black professors, lawyers, doctors or even bank tellers. Isn’t that proof that blacks are simply less intelligent and hard-working?’ Trapped in this vicious circle, blacks were not hired for white-collar jobs because they were deemed unintelligent, and the proof of their inferiority was the paucity of blacks in white-collar jobs.

These fears were substantiated by scientific studies that ‘proved’ that blacks were indeed less educated, that various diseases were more common among them, and that their crime rate was far higher (the studies ignored the fact that these ‘facts’ resulted from discrimination against blacks).

Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi.

With time, the racism spread to more and more cultural arenas. American aesthetic culture was built around white standards of beauty.

The Bible decrees that ‘If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife’ (Deuteronomy 22:28–9). The ancient Hebrews considered this a reasonable arrangement.

A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities.