More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 15, 2018 - January 29, 2019
This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.
Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids.
It follows that in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.
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.
humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.
Raping a woman who did not belong to any man was not considered a crime at all, just as picking up a lost coin on a busy street is not considered theft.
A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology
No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.
Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal.
The most common theory points to the fact that men are stronger than women, and that they have used their greater physical power to force women into submission.
there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans.
Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes.
In times of war, men’s control of the armed forces has made them the masters of civilian society, too. They then used their control of civilian society to fight more and more wars, and the greater the number of wars, the greater men’s control of society. This feedback loop explains both the ubiquity of war and the ubiquity of patriarchy.
If there’s any truth in these stereotypes, then women should have made excellent politicians and empire-builders, leaving the dirty work on the battlefields to testosterone-charged but simple-minded machos. Popular myths notwithstanding, this rarely happened in the real world. It is not at all clear why not.
As time went by, the masculine genes that made it to the next generation were those belonging to the most ambitious, aggressive and competitive men.
As time went by, the feminine genes that made it to the next generation belonged to women who were submissive caretakers. Women who spent too much time fighting for power did not leave any of those powerful genes for future generations.
How did it happen that in the one species whose success depends above all on cooperation, individuals who are supposedly less cooperative (men) control individuals who are supposedly more cooperative (women)?
If, as is being demonstrated today so clearly, the patriarchal system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts for the universality and stability of this system?
Unlike the laws of physics, which are free of inconsistencies, every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions.
Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.
We would do better to adopt instead the viewpoint of a cosmic spy satellite, which scans millennia rather than centuries. From such a vantage point it becomes crystal clear that history is moving relentlessly towards unity. The sectioning of Christianity and the collapse of the Mongol Empire are just speed bumps on history’s highway.
The best way to appreciate the general direction of history is to count the number of separate human worlds that coexisted at any given moment on planet Earth.
but if by ‘authentic’ we mean something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local traditions free of external influences, then there are no authentic cultures left on earth.
We begin with the story of the greatest conqueror in history, a conqueror possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability, thereby turning people into ardent disciples. This conqueror is money.
But barter is effective only when exchanging a limited range of products. It cannot form the basis for a complex economy.
most societies found a more easy way to connect large numbers of experts – they developed money.
Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.
Everyone always wants money because everyone else also always wants money, which means you can exchange money for whatever you want or need.
Money is thus a universal medium of exchange that enables people to convert almost everything into almost anything else. Brawn
Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.
The real breakthrough in monetary history occurred when people gained trust in money that lacked inherent value, but was easier to store and transport. Such money appeared in ancient Mesopotamia in the middle of the third millennium BC. This was the silver shekel.
Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.
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.
The victory of Rome over Numantia was so complete that the victors co-opted the very memory of the vanquished.
Cultural diversity and territorial flexibility give empires not only their unique character,
Empires were one of the main reasons for the drastic reduction in human diversity. The imperial steamroller gradually obliterated the unique characteristics of numerous peoples (such as the Numantians), forging out of them new and much larger groups.
hundreds of other forgotten peoples whom the Romans conquered centuries earlier did not emerge from the empire’s eviscerated carcass like Jonah from the belly of the great fish.
All human cultures are at least in part the legacy of empires and imperial civilisations, and no academic or political surgery can cut out the imperial legacies without killing the patient.
Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.
Religions hold that there is a superhuman order, which is not the product of human whims or agreements.
religion establishes norms and values that it considers binding.
must be universal and missionary.
over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
