Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

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.

A person who does not crave cannot suffer.

This is one of the distinguishing marks of history as an academic discipline – the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another.

It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.

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.

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

There is no proof that cultures that are beneficial to humans must inexorably succeed and spread, while less beneficial cultures disappear.

Rather, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.

There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens.

Mere observations, however, are not knowledge. In order to understand the universe, we need to connect observations into comprehensive theories.

The real test of ‘knowledge’ is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers

scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries.

First we’ll look at how the twin turbines of science and empire were latched to one another, and then learn how both were hitched up to the money pump of capitalism.

The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly.

Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost every important military expedition that left Europe for distant lands had on board scientists who set out not to fight but to make scientific discoveries.

Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future.

idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve.

it was the Dutch merchants – not the Dutch state – who built the Dutch Empire. The king of Spain kept on trying to finance and maintain his conquests by raising unpopular taxes from a disgruntled populace.

belief in the free market is as naïve as belief in Santa Claus. There simply is no such thing as a market free of all political bias.

The most important economic resource is trust in the future, and this resource is constantly threatened by thieves and charlatans.

It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. On the contrary, the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way.

Without the industrialisation of agriculture the urban Industrial Revolution could never have taken place – there would not have been enough hands and brains to staff factories and offices.

Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community.

This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination. Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They exist only in our collective imagination, yet their power is immense.

For real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war. There has never been real peace in the world.

A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.