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‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently’.
Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings.
If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn’t there a danger that our society will collapse?
There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.
For millions of years people stored information in a single place – their brains. Unfortunately, the human brain is not a good storage device for empire-sized databases, for three main reasons.
first texts of history contain no philosophical insights, no poetry, legends, laws, or even royal triumphs. They are humdrum economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, the accumulation of debts and the ownership of property.
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.
Yet 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 simply because they were born into a poor family.
Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities.
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.
Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases, whereas Europeans were totally defenceless and died in droves.
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!
Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.
A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural.
Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.
effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.
Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality.
The largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably. ‘Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned out in practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and receive as much as they could grab’.
creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination.
More than 90 per cent of all money – more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts – exists only on computer servers.
Everyone always wants money because everyone else also always wants money, which means you can exchange money for whatever you
Money is thus a universal medium of exchange that enables people to convert almost everything into almost anything else.
Because money can convert, store and transport wealth easily and cheaply, it made a vital contribution to the appearance of complex commercial networks and dynamic markets.
money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
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.
Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.
It is difficult to rule an empire in which every little district has its own set of laws, its own form of writing, its own language and its own money. Standardisation was a boon to emperors.
Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s.
The global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. Much like the Late Roman Empire, it is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests. Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers and managers are called to join the empire. They must ponder whether to answer the imperial call or to remain loyal to their state and their people. More and more choose the empire.
religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires.
So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.
humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions.
The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.
Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion.
He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind.
Great gods can send us rain, social institutions can provide justice and good health care, and lucky coincidences can turn us into millionaires, but none of them can change our basic mental patterns.
once craving arises in a person’s mind, all the gods in the universe cannot save him from suffering.
These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.
Whereas Buddhists believe that the law of nature was discovered by Siddhartha Gautama, Communists believed that the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx,
how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?
History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic.
history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system.
Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about
Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately.
Revolutions are, by definition, unpredictable. A predictable revolution never erupts.
reason the revolution didn’t happen is because we predicted it,’
history’s choices are not made for the benefit of humans.
There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along.
There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans because we lack an objective scale on which to measure such benefit.
