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If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product
The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences.
A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon.
Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids.
The imagined order is inter-subjective. Even if by some superhuman effort I succeed in freeing my personal desires from the grip of the imagined order, I am just one person. In order to change the imagined order I must convince millions
Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.
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.
They can nevertheless play the game with complete strangers because they have all learned an identical set of ideas about basketball.
Bees don’t need lawyers, because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive constitution.
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.
But when particularly complex societies began to appear in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution, a completely new type of information became vital – numbers.
The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.
clerks and accountants think in a non-human fashion. They think like filing cabinets. This is not their fault.
The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world.
the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East
A person who wishes to influence the decisions of governments, organisations and companies must therefore learn to speak in numbers.
how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts.
Hammurabi’s Code, for example, established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained.
Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.
Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans, they ended up as the slaves of European masters!
‘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.
