More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.
eventually our own species, which we’ve immodestly named Homo sapiens, ‘Wise Man’.
Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving.
Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.
Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. 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.
Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.
The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2
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.
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’.
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.
money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
In the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III of France commissioned aluminium cutlery to be laid out for his most distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with the gold knives and forks.
The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’
The tectonic plates of history are moving at a frantic pace, but the volcanoes are mostly silent.
Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
