Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

The fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body.

The alpha male usually wins his position not because he is physically stronger, but because he leads a large and stable coalition.

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 global trade network of today is based on our trust in such fictional entities as the dollar, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the totemic trademarks of corporations.

The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.

It’s much the same dilemma that a future historian would face if he had to depict the social world of twenty-first-century teenagers solely on the basis of their surviving snail mail – since no records will remain of their phone conversations, emails, blogs and text messages.

How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. 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.

There was no sense in worrying about things that they could not influence.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

The French Revolution was spearheaded by affluent lawyers, not by famished peasants.

The famed Roman amphitheatres were often built by slaves so that wealthy and idle Romans could watch other slaves engage in vicious gladiatorial combat.

In fact, they are both wrong. Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.

Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings.

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.

an imagined order cannot be sustained by violence alone. It requires some true believers as well.

Of all human collective activities, the one most difficult to organise is violence.

Yet a cynic who believes in nothing is unlikely to be greedy. It does not take much to provide the objective biological needs of Homo sapiens. After those needs are met, more money can be spent on building pyramids, taking holidays around the world, financing election campaigns, funding your favourite terrorist organisation, or investing in the stock market and making yet more money – all of which are activities that a true cynic would find utterly meaningless.

an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population – and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces – truly believe in it.

People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism.

Nature, it was claimed, rewarded merit with wealth while penalising indolence.

Human laws and norms have turned some people into slaves and others into masters.

Yet 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.

most abilities have to be nurtured and developed. Even if somebody is born with a particular talent, that talent will usually remain latent if it is not fostered, honed and exercised. Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities. Whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society’s imagined hierarchy.

The economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings.

If you want to keep any human group isolated – women, Jews, Roma, gays, blacks – the best way to do it is convince everyone that these people are a source of pollution.

The justification for all of this was that blacks were foul, slothful and vicious, so whites had to be protected from them.

Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.

Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.

Males must prove their masculinity constantly, throughout their lives, from cradle to grave, in an endless series of rites and performances.

Many valuables cannot be stored – such as time or beauty.

Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.

The real breakthrough in monetary history occurred when people gained trust in money that lacked inherent value, but was easier to store and transport.

belief in ‘priceless’ things, such as honour, loyalty, morality and love. These things lie outside the domain of the market, and they shouldn’t be bought or sold for money.

If they run out of coins, we run out of trust.

the good God even needs our help in its struggle against the Devil, which inspired among other things the call for jihads and crusades.

suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind.

Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless.

People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it.

If you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you do not suffer from it.

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.

If the mind of a person is free of all craving, no god can make him miserable.

Buddhism told people that they should aim for the ultimate goal of complete liberation from suffering, rather than for stops along the way such as economic prosperity and political power.

Communists believed that the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Marx’s Das Kapital, which foretold that history would soon end with the inevitable victory of the proletariat.

In early modern Europe, murderers were thought to violate and destabilise the cosmic order. To bring the cosmos back to balance, it was necessary to torture and publicly execute the criminal, so that everyone could see the order re-established.

The main ambition of the Nazis was to protect humankind from degeneration and encourage its progressive evolution.

The Nazis explained that Homo sapiens itself appeared when one ‘superior’ population of ancient humans evolved, whereas ‘inferior’ populations such as the Neanderthals became extinct.

Those who have only a superficial knowledge of a certain period tend to focus only on the possibility that was eventually realised.