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cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite,
the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion.
The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance.
Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known.
The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic,
almost religious belief in technology and in the methods of scientific research, which have replaced to some extent the belief in absolute truths.
Mere observations, however, are not knowledge. In order to understand the universe, we need to connect observations into comprehensive theories.
A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.
the relationship between science and technology is a very recent phenomenon. Prior to 1500, science and technology were totally separate fields.
in many societies more people are in danger of dying from obesity than from starvation.
Our best minds are not wasting their time trying to give meaning to death.
science is not an enterprise that takes place on some superior moral or spiritual plane above the rest of human activity. Like all other parts of our culture, it is shaped by economic, political and religious interests.
rarely do scientists dictate the scientific agenda.
Even if we wanted to finance pure science unaffected by political, economic or religious interests, it would probably be impossible.
Science is unable to set its own priorities.
These guerrilla forces showed that even superpowers could be defeated if a local struggle became a global cause.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fewer than 5,000 British officials, about 40,000–70,000 British soldiers, and perhaps another 100,000 British business people, hangers-on,
wives and children were sufficient to conquer and rule up to 300 million Indians.
science gave the empires ideological justification.
You think that these empires were evil monstrosities that spread death, oppression and injustice around the world? You could easily fill an encyclopedia with their crimes. You want to argue that they in fact improved the conditions of their subjects with new medicines, better economic conditions and greater security? You could fill another encyclopedia with their achievements.
They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.
‘culturism’.
We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’
What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future.
a new system based on trust in the future.
Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future.
Credit is the difference between today’s pie and tomorrow’s
What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.
depends, however, on the rich using their profits to open new factories and hire new employees, rather than wasting them on non-productive activities.
‘The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.’
Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill.
While VOC operated in the Indian Ocean, the Dutch West Indies Company, or WIC, plied the Atlantic. In order to control trade on the important Hudson River, WIC built a settlement called New Amsterdam on an island at the river’s mouth. The colony was threatened by Indians and repeatedly attacked by the British, who eventually captured it in 1664. The British changed its name to New York. The remains of the wall built by WIC to defend its colony against Indians and British are today paved over by the world’s most famous street – Wall Street.
In the late nineteenth century, about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country’s population, were opium addicts.3
today a country’s credit rating is far more important to its economic well-being than are its natural resources.
bounty. A country devoid of natural resources, but which enjoys peace, a fair judicial system and a free government is likely to receive a high credit rating. As such, it may be able to raise enough cheap capital to support a good education system and foster a flourishing high-tech industry.
its extreme form, belief in the free market is as naïve as belief in Santa Claus.
Markets by themselves offer no protection against fraud, theft and violence.
Adam Smith
Much like the Agricultural Revolution, so too the growth of the modern economy might turn out to be a colossal fraud.
we may not like capitalism, but we cannot live without it.
if we just wait a little longer and allow the pie to grow a little bigger, everybody will receive a fatter slice.
the standard of living of the average human in 2014 is significantly higher than it was in 1914, despite the exponential growth in the number of humans.
All human activities and industries put together consume about 500 exajoules annually, equivalent to the amount of energy earth receives from the sun in just ninety minutes.
The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs.
Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.
The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’
But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed.
Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals.
imagined communities to fill in the emotional vacuum.
imagined communities are the nation and the consumer tribe.
