Sapiens and Homo Deus: The E-book Collection: A Brief History of Humankind and A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

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.

Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. Within this network, fictions such as Peugeot not only exist, but also accumulate immense power. The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’, or ‘imagined realities’.

The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’.

The theories of scholars who claim to know what the foragers felt shed much more light on the prejudices of their authors than on Stone Age religions.

Scholars tend to ask only those questions that they can reasonably expect to answer.

The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.

We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.

Our personal desires thereby become the imagined order’s most important defences.

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.

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.

In a barter economy, every day the shoemaker and the apple grower will have to learn anew the relative prices of dozens of commodities.

In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind.

The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures.

a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.