More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction.
Great gods can send us rain, social institutions can provide justice and good health care, and lucky coincidences can turn us into millionaires, but none of them can change our basic mental patterns.
Those who have attained nirvana are fully liberated from all suffering. They experience reality with the utmost clarity, free of fantasies and delusions.
suffering arises from craving;
‘suffering arises from craving’
worship various gods, such as the Hindu gods in India, the Bon gods in Tibet, and the Shinto gods in
Japan.
exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.
According to socialists, inequality is the worst blasphemy against the sanctity of humanity, because it privileges peripheral qualities of humans over their universal essence.
This approach is sometimes called memetics.
It assumes that, just as organic evolution is based on the replication of organic information units called ‘genes’, so cultural evolution is based on the replication of cultural information units called ‘memes’.
Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria,
But the single most remarkable and defining moment of the past 500 years came at 05:29:45 on 16 July 1945. At that precise second, American scientists detonated the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico. From that point onward, humankind had the capability not only to change the course of history, but to end it.
In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory.
were but distant backwaters of the Mediterranean world. Little of importance ever happened there.
The early modern era was a golden age for the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean, the Safavid Empire in Persia, the Mughal Empire in India, and the Chinese Ming and Qing dynasties.
In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy.
The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly.
However, once a critical threshold is crossed, the wood and mud tower cannot stand the strain and collapses, whereas the steel and concrete tower grows storey by storey, as far as the eye can see.
There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism.
After several professional geologists refused his invitation, the captain offered the job to a twenty-two-year-old Cambridge graduate, Charles Darwin. Darwin had studied to become an Anglican parson but was far more interested in geology and natural sciences than in the Bible. He jumped at the opportunity, and the rest is history.
The man explained that the sentence they had memorised so carefully meant ‘Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.’
There is poetic justice in the fact that a quarter of the world, and two of its seven continents, are named after a little-known Italian whose sole claim to fame is that he had the courage to say, ‘We don’t know.’ 36.
What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer.
cuneiform
Rawlinson
impecunious
Yet Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective.
New Amsterdam on an island at the river’s mouth. The colony was threatened by Indians and repeatedly attacked by the British, who eventually captured it in 1664. The British changed its name to New York.
just do nothing.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the human energy market was almost completely dependent on plants. People lived alongside a green energy reservoir carrying 3,000 exajoules a year, and tried to pump as much of its energy as they could.
During the Industrial Revolution, we came to realise that we are actually living alongside an enormous ocean of energy, one holding billions upon billions of exajoules of potential power. All we need to do is invent better pumps.
The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs.
The conclusion was inescapable: monkeys must have psychological needs and desires that go beyond their material requirements, and if these are not fulfilled, they will suffer greatly.
Religious holidays such as Christmas have become shopping festivals. In
In the affluent world of today one of the leading health problems is obesity, which strikes the poor (who stuff themselves with hamburgers and pizzas) even more severely than the rich (who eat organic salads and fruit smoothies).
The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’
The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to.
In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions – and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do.
a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while
When the broadcast media – first radio, then television – made their debut, they entered a world of timetables and became its main enforcers and evangelists.
Village life involved many transactions but few payments.
Mum and Dad are about as likely to get off in the Freudian courtroom as were defendants in a Stalinist show trial.
Consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that we all have a common past, common interests and a common future.
This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination. Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities.
If I bake a cake from flour, oil and sugar, all of which have been sitting in my pantry for the past two months, it does not mean that the cake itself is two months old.
The main promise of premodern rulers was to safeguard the traditional order or even to go back to some lost golden age.
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’
Most people don’t appreciate just how peaceful an era we live in.
And as wars become more rare they attract more attention.
