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The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.
Koyaanisqatsi
A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun.
The luxury trap
In evolutionary terms, cattle represent one of the most successful animal species ever to exist. At the same time, they are some of the most miserable animals on the planet.
This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.
This was the turning point, they say, where Sapiens cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation.
Agricultural Revolution = downfall of man
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’.
A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.
Religion is myth
Bees don’t need lawyers, because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive constitution. The queen does not cheat the cleaner bees of their food, and they never go on strike demanding higher wages. But humans do such things all the time. Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny.
Hammurabi deliberately had to instruct his sons in the laws of his empire, and his sons and grandsons had to do the same.
We imagine society yet we fail to create a society that works for all. Why?
The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.
The Ring of the Nibelungen,
A person who wishes to influence the decisions of governments, organisations and companies must therefore learn to speak in numbers.
Entire fields of knowledge, such as physics and engineering, have already lost almost all touch with the spoken human language, and are maintained solely by mathematical script.
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.
Software engineering -
learning to talk to the machine
how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks?
humans created imagined orders and devised scripts.
inequality caused by wealthy parents passing their money and businesses on to their children.
Estate tax
Modern Westerners are taught to scoff at the idea of racial hierarchy. They are shocked by laws prohibiting blacks to live in white neighbourhoods, or to study in white schools, or to be treated in white hospitals. But the hierarchy of rich and poor – which mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighbourhoods, study in separate and more prestigious schools, and receive medical treatment in separate and better-equipped facilities – seems perfectly sensible to many Americans and Europeans.
Interesting point about old race segregaion vs modern wealth segregation
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.
Interesting yet depressing fact id like to look into. I wonder what Bill Gatesor the Zuck thought when they read this chapter
Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities.
Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority:
In regards to africans having a stronger immunity to malaria
However, two centuries of slavery meant that most black families were far poorer and far less educated than most white families.
‘If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife’ (Deuteronomy 22:28–9).
Disgusting
‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’
from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural.
Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.
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.
If God knew in advance that a particular person would use her free will to choose evil, and that as a result she would be punished for this by eternal tortures in hell, why did God create her?
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.
suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind.
‘What am I experiencing now?’ rather than on ‘What would I rather be experiencing?’
A person who does not crave cannot suffer.
suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.
This law, known as dharma or dhamma, is seen by Buddhists as a universal law of nature.
The first principle of monotheist religions is ‘God exists. What does He want from me?’ The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it?’
Islam, Buddhism and Communism are all religions, because all are systems of human norms and values that are founded on belief in a superhuman order. (Note the difference between ‘superhuman’ and ‘supernatural’. The Buddhist law of nature and the Marxist laws of history are superhuman, since they were not legislated by humans. Yet they are not supernatural.)
Socialists believe that ‘humanity’ is collective rather than individualistic. They hold as sacred not the inner voice of each individual, but the species Homo sapiens as a whole.
when the rich are privileged over the poor, it means that we value money more than the universal essence of all humans, which is the same for rich and poor alike.
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.
A cultural idea – such as belief in Christian heaven above the clouds or Communist paradise here on earth – can compel a human to dedicate his or her life to spreading that idea, even at the price of death. The human dies, but the idea spreads. According to this approach, cultures are not conspiracies concocted by some people in order to take advantage of others (as Marxists tend to think). Rather, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.
‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’
In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion.1 The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today’s dollars.2 Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion.3
