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Death is just a technical problem
There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to.
The authorities were completely helpless in the face of the calamity. Except for organising mass prayers and processions, they had no idea how to stop the spread of the epidemic – let alone cure it.
Schools were founded to produce skilful and obedient citizens who would serve the nation loyally.
It’s important to note, however, that the American Declaration of Independence guaranteed the right to the pursuit of happiness, not the right to happiness itself.
This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.
People are taken aback by dreams of immortality and divinity not because they sound so foreign and unlikely, but because it is uncommon to be so blunt.
The gods safeguarded and multiplied farm production, and in exchange humans had to share the produce with the gods. This deal served both parties, at the expense of the rest of the ecosystem.
Throughout history, disciplined armies easily routed disorganised hordes, and unified elites dominated the disorderly masses.
‘you can trust me, I believe in the same story as you’.
Written language may have been conceived as a modest way of describing reality, but it gradually became a powerful way to reshape reality.
It’s ironic that they swear to tell the truth on a book brimming with so many fictions, myths and errors.
Human cooperative networks usually judge themselves by yardsticks of their own invention and, not surprisingly, they often give themselves high marks.
The cause of war is fictional, but the suffering is 100 per cent real.
‘How many Vietnam vets does it take to change a light bulb?’ ‘You wouldn’t know, you weren’t there.’6
In the future, however, we may see real gaps in physical and cognitive abilities opening between an upgraded upper class and the rest of society.
Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.
We on the other hand fail to appreciate that we are living on a tiny island of consciousness within a perhaps limitless ocean of alien mental states.
Love? And not even some platonic cosmic love, but the carnal attraction between two mammals? Do you really think that an all-knowing super-computer or aliens who contrived to conquer the entire galaxy would be dumbfounded by a hormonal rush?’
Ideas change the world only when they change our behaviour.
Dataism thereby threatens to do to Homo sapiens what Homo sapiens has done to all other animals.
