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September 6, 2021 - October 9, 2022
For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.
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.
Spanish
Many fear that this is only a temporary victory, and that some unknown cousin of the Black Death is waiting just around the corner. No one can guarantee that plagues won’t make a comeback, but there are good reasons to think that in the arms race between doctors and germs, doctors run faster. New infectious diseases appear mainly as a result of chance mutations in pathogen genomes. These mutations allow the pathogens to jump from animals to humans, to overcome the human immune system, or to resist medicines such as antibiotics.
Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened in the Middle East in the last decade. Islamic fundamentalists could never have toppled Saddam Hussein by themselves. Instead they enraged the USA by the 9/11 attacks, and the USA destroyed the Middle Eastern china shop for them. Now they flourish in the wreckage.
Acknowledging our past achievements sends a message of hope and responsibility, encouraging us to make even greater efforts in the future.
We mortals daily take chances with our lives, because we know they are going to end anyhow. So we go on treks in the Himalayas, swim in the sea, and do many other dangerous things like crossing the street or eating out. But if you believe you can live for ever, you would be crazy to gamble on infinity like that.
According to Epicurus, we are happy when we feel pleasant sensations and are free from unpleasant ones.
To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.
History is often shaped by exaggerated hopes.
This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance.
Instead of fearing asteroids, we should fear ourselves.
In practice, American lives are more valued. Far more money is invested in the education, health and safety of the average American than of the average Afghan.
Consciousness is the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes.
Similarly, consciousness may be a kind of mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It doesn’t do anything. It is just there. If this is true, it implies that all the pain and pleasure experienced by billions of creatures for millions of years is just mental pollution.
Perhaps I am dreaming, and everyone I meet is just a character in my dream? Perhaps I am trapped inside a virtual world, and all the beings I see are merely simulations?
Ceauşescu, who had ruled Romania since 1965, believed
Each round of mutual confirmation tightens the web of meaning further, until you have little choice but to believe what everyone else believes.
Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organise crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.
There are still many rivers in the world, and people are still motivated by their fears and wishes, but Jesus Christ, the French Republic and Apple Inc. have dammed and harnessed the rivers, and have learned to shape our deepest anxieties and yearnings.
We could of course argue that scientific theories are a new kind of myth, and that our belief in science
Ist das klar?!’
That’s what a human is – a good spiritual soul trapped inside an evil material body.
are happiness and misery mathematical entities that can be added or subtracted in the first place? Eating ice cream is enjoyable; finding true love is more enjoyable; do you think that if you just eat enough ice cream, the accumulated pleasure could ever equal the rapture of true love?
The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.
Things just happen, one after the other. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’.
Credit is the economic manifestation of trust.
Today when people hear of some deadly new epidemic, they reach for their mobile phones and call their brokers. For the stock exchange, even an epidemic is a business opportunity.
Modernity has turned ‘more stuff’ into a panacea applicable to almost all public and private problems, from religious fundamentalism, through Third World authoritarianism, down to a failed marriage.
The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.
The truth is very different. Despite all our achievements, we feel a constant pressure to do and produce even more.
We blame ourselves, our boss, the mortgage, the government, the school system. But it’s not really their fault. It’s the modern deal, that we all signed up for on the day we were born. In the premodern world, people were akin to lowly clerks in a socialist bureaucracy. They punched their cards and then waited for somebody else to do something. In the modern world we humans run the business, so we are under constant pressure day and night.
It wasn’t very hard to convince individuals to want more. Greed comes easily to humans. The big problem was to convince collective institutions such as states and churches to go along with the new ideal.
Capitalist thinkers repeatedly calm us: ‘Don’t worry, it will be okay. Provided the economy grows, the invisible hand of the market will take care of everything else.’
What, then, rescued modern society from collapse? Humankind was salvaged not by the law of supply and demand, but rather by the rise of a revolutionary new religion – humanism.
Today I love something with all my heart, tomorrow I am disgusted by it, and next week I am dead and buried.
If I am indeed the master of my thoughts and decisions, can I decide not to think about anything at all for the next sixty seconds?’
‘I lost my legs because I was stupid enough to believe self-serving politicians.’
Will elites and governments go on valuing every human being even when it pays no economic dividends?
Mixing godlike technology with megalomaniacal politics is a recipe for disaster.
