Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Christianity would not have lasted 2,000 years if the majority of bishops and priests failed to believe in Christ. American democracy would not have lasted 250 years if the majority of presidents and congressmen failed to believe in human rights. The modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism.

First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

Free markets are the best economic system, not because Adam Smith said so, but because these are the immutable laws of nature.

You also educate people thoroughly.

Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism.

An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example,

The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs. Many a child believes in the existence of an imaginary friend

The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. If a single individual changes his or her beliefs, or even dies, it is of little importance. However, if most individuals in the network die or change their beliefs, the inter-subjective phenomenon will mutate or disappear.

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.

When confronted with the need to memorise, recall and handle all these numbers, most human brains overdosed or fell asleep.

It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.1

They are humdrum economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, the accumulation of debts and the ownership of property.

As everyone from ancient times till today knows, clerks and accountants think in a non-human fashion.

The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have

given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.

Experts do their best to translate even ideas such as ‘poverty’, ‘happiness’ and ‘honesty’ into numbers (‘the poverty line’, ‘subjective well-being levels’, ‘credit rating’).

Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers.

an Untouchable, a Brahmin, a Catholic Irishman

Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority:

Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi.

The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist secret society, perpetrated many such killings. They could have taught the Hindu Brahmins a thing or two about purity laws.

Caste was a matter of life and death in medieval India, whereas in modern Europe it is practically non-existent.

Parents would occasionally abandon or murder newborn baby girls in order to have another shot at getting a boy.

Rape, in many legal systems, falls under property violation – in other words, the victim is not the woman who was raped but the male who owns her.

As of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife. Even in Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997 to create a legal category of marital rape.5

Societies associate a host of attributes with masculinity and femininity that, for the most part, lack a firm biological basis.

A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’

The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature’.

societies grew ever larger and more complex,

social, legal and political arrangements that ran as smoothly as the planets going around the sun. In this view, cultures left to their own devices did not change. They just kept going at the same pace and in the same direction. Only a force applied from outside could change them. Anthropologists, historians and politicians thus referred to ‘Samoan Culture’ or ‘Tasmanian Culture’ as if the same

Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

‘Because I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.

The largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably.

In fact, even today coins and banknotes are a rare form of money. In 2006, the sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes was less than $6 trillion.7 More than 90 per cent of all money – more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts – exists only on computer servers. Accordingly, most business transactions are executed by moving electronic data from one computer file to another, without any exchange of physical cash. Only a criminal buys a house, for example, by handing over a suitcase full of banknotes. As long as people are willing to trade goods and services in exchange for electronic data, it’s even better than shiny coins and crisp banknotes – lighter, less bulky, and easier to keep track of.

money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

Their value is purely cultural.

whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.

Every time an empire collapsed, the dominant political theory goaded the powers that be not to settle for paltry independent principalities, but to attempt reunification. Sooner or later these attempts always succeeded.

Unless, of course, we are willing to admit that we usually follow the lead of the bad guys.

Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world.

Zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good god Ahura Mazda and the evil god Angra Mainyu.

Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion.

A prime example is Buddhism, the most important of the ancient natural law religions, which remains one of the major faiths.

Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as viruses, live inside the body of their hosts. They multiply and spread from one host to the other, feeding off their hosts, weakening them, and sometimes even killing them. As long as the hosts live long enough to pass along the parasite, it cares little about the condition of its host. In just this fashion, cultural ideas live inside the minds of humans. They multiply and spread from one host to another, occasionally weakening the hosts and sometimes even killing them. A cultural idea – such as belief in Christian heaven above the clouds or Communist paradise here on earth – can compel a human to dedicate his or her life to spreading that idea, even at the price of death. The human dies, but the idea spreads.

The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power. In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion.1 The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today’s dollars.2 Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion.3 In 1500, humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day.4 (Take a second look at those figures – human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)

In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy.

The combined economies of India and China alone represented two-thirds of global production.

Today all humans are, to a much greater extent than they usually want to admit, European in dress, thought and taste.

So it is hardly coincidental that science and capitalism form the most important legacy that European imperialism has bequeathed the post-European world of the twenty-first century.

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.’