Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

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

Throughout history, and in almost all societies, concepts of pollution and purity have played a leading role in enforcing social and political divisions and have been exploited by numerous ruling classes to maintain their privileges.

Some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system that collected products from specialist growers and manufacturers and distributed them to those who needed them. 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’.

It is particularly important to stress that possibilities which seem very unlikely to contemporaries often get realised.