More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world,
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations.
The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah.
The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.
Just as foragers exhibited a wide array of religions and social structures, so, too, did they probably demonstrate a variety of violence rates.
If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.
The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.
This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship,
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can.
A person who wishes to influence the decisions of governments, organisations and companies must therefore learn to speak in numbers.
Discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
Homo sapiens evolved to think of people as divided into us and them. ‘Us’ was the group immediately around you, whoever you were, and ‘them’ was everyone else.
money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures.
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.
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.
What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future.
Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future.
Ingenious German physicists found a way to determine the weather conditions in London based on tiny differences in the tone of the broadcast ding-dongs.
As long as China and the USA are at peace, the Chinese can prosper by selling products to the USA, trading in Wall Street and receiving US investments.
Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health.
They consequently spend their life avoiding some kinds of feelings and pursuing others. They never realise that they are not their feelings, and that the relentless pursuit of particular feelings just traps them in misery.
