21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

While a good story must give me a role, and must extend beyond my horizons, it need not be true. A story can be pure fiction, and yet provide me with an identity and make me feel that my life has meaning. Indeed, to the best of our scientific understanding, none of the thousands of stories that different cultures, religions and tribes have invented throughout history is true. They are all just human inventions. If you ask for the true meaning of life and get a story in reply, know that this is the wrong answer. The exact details don’t really matter. Any story is wrong, simply for being a story.

The stories that provide us with meaning and identity are all fictional, but humans need to believe in them. So how to make the story feel real? It’s obvious why humans want to believe the story, but how do they actually believe? Already thousands of years ago priests and shamans discovered the answer: rituals. A ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real. The essence of ritual is the magical spell ‘Hocus pocus, X is Y!’5

Almost anything can be turned into a ritual, by giving mundane gestures like lighting candles, ringing bells or counting beads a deep religious meaning. The same is true of physical gesticulations, such as bowing the head, prostrating the whole body or bringing both palms together. Various forms of headgear, from the Sikh turban to the Muslim hijab, have been so laden with meaning that they have stirred passionate struggles for centuries.

Food too can be loaded with spiritual significance far beyond its nutritional value, be it Easter eggs that symbolise new life and Christ’s resurrection, or the bitter herbs and unleavened bread that Jews must eat at Passover to remember their slavery in Egypt and their miraculous escape. There is hardly a dish in the world that hasn’t been interpreted to symbolise something.

Whenever China was hit by some crisis, Confucian scholars were quick to blame it on the neglect of rites, like a sergeant major who blames military defeat on slack soldiers not shining their boots.

If you want to know the ultimate truth of life, rites and rituals are a huge obstacle. But if you are interested – like Confucius – in social stability and harmony, truth is often a liability, whereas rites and rituals are among your best allies.

The saffron colour denotes renunciation or disinterestedness. Our leaders must be indifferent to material gains and dedicate themselves to their work. The white in the centre is light, the path of truth to guide our conduct. The green shows our relation to the soil, our relation to the plant life here on which all other life depends. The Ashoka wheel in the centre of the white is the wheel of the law of dharma. Truth or Satya, dharma or virtue ought to be the controlling principles of all those who work under this flag.10 In 2017 India’s nationalist government hoisted one of the largest flags in the world at Attari on the Indo-Pakistani border, in a gesture calculated to inspire neither renunciation nor disinterestedness, but rather Pakistani envy. That particular Tiranga was 36 metres long and 24 metres wide, and was hoisted on a 110-metre-high flag post (what would Freud have said about that?). The flag could be seen as far as the Pakistani metropolis of Lahore. Unfortunately, strong winds kept tearing the flag, and national pride required that it be stitched together again and again, at great cost to Indian taxpayers.11 Why does the Indian government invest scarce resources in weaving enormous flags, instead of building sewage systems in Delhi’s slums? Because the flag makes India real in a way that sewage systems do not.

Of all rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because, of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real. You can never ignore it or doubt it. If you want to make people really believe in some fiction, entice them to make a sacrifice on its behalf. Once you suffer for a story, it is usually enough to convince you that the story is real.

This is of course a logical fallacy. If you suffer because of your belief in God or in the nation, that does not prove that your beliefs are true. Maybe you are just paying the price of your gullibility? However, most people don’t like to admit that they are fools. Consequently, the more they sacrifice for a particular belief, the stronger their faith becomes. This is the mysterious alchemy of sacrifice.

The sacrifice is not just a way to convince your lover that you are serious – it is also a way to convince yourself that you are really in love. Why do you think some women ask their lovers to bring them diamond rings? Once the lover makes such a huge financial sacrifice, he must convince himself that it was for a worthy cause.

When you inflict suffering on yourself in the name of some story, it gives you a choice: ‘Either the story is true, or I am a gullible fool.’ When you inflict suffering on others, you are also given a choice: ‘Either the story is true, or I am a cruel villain.’ And just as we don’t want to admit we are fools, we also don’t want to admit we are villains, so we prefer to believe that the story is true.

The problem with evil is that in real life, it is not necessarily ugly. It can look very beautiful.

In itself, the universe is only a meaningless hotchpotch of atoms. Nothing is beautiful, sacred or sexy – but human feelings make it so. It is only human feelings that make a red apple seductive and a turd disgusting. Take away human feelings, and you are left with a bunch of molecules.

the creation occurs every moment, and I am the creator. What, then, is the aim of my life? To create meaning by feeling, by thinking, by desiring and by inventing. Anything that limits the human liberty to feel, to think, to desire and to invent, limits the meaning of the universe. Hence liberty from such limitations is the supreme ideal.

The liberal story instructs me to seek freedom to express and realise myself. But both the ‘self’ and freedom are mythological chimeras borrowed from the fairy tales of ancient times. Liberalism has a particularly confused notion of ‘free will’. Humans obviously have a will, they have desires, and they are sometimes free to fulfil their desires. If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire – then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire – then no, humans have no free will.

A crucial step on this journey is to acknowledge that the ‘self’ is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update and rewrite.

The Buddha taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence and nothing is completely satisfying. You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind – but you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence and that completely satisfies you.

Suffering emerges because people fail to appreciate this. They believe that there is some eternal essence somewhere, and if they can only find it and connect to it, they will be completely satisfied. This eternal essence is sometimes called God, sometimes the nation, sometimes the soul, sometimes the authentic self and sometimes true love – and the more people are attached to it, the more disappointed and miserable they become due to the failure to find it. Worse yet, the greater the attachment, the greater the hatred such people develop towards any person, group or institution that seems to stand between them and their cherished goal.

According to the Buddha, then, life has no meaning, and people don’t need to create any meaning. They just need to realise that there is no meaning, and thus be liberated from the suffering caused by our attachments and our identification with empty phenomena. ‘What should I do?’ ask people, and the Buddha advises: ‘Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ The whole problem is that we constantly do something. Not necessarily on the physical level – we can sit immobile for hours with closed eyes – yet on the mental level we are extremely busy creating ...

The history of Buddhism provides a thousand examples of how people who believe in the transience and emptiness of all phenomena, and in the importance of having no attachments, can squabble and fight over the government of a country, the possession of a building, or even the meaning of a word. Fighting other people because you believe in the glory of an eternal God is unfortunate but understandable; fighting other people because you believe in the emptiness of all phenomena is truly bizarre – but so very human.

The body keeps changing every moment, the brain keeps changing every moment, the mind keeps changing every moment. The closer you observe yourself, the more obvious it becomes that nothing endures even from one moment to the next.

The technique of Vipassana is based on the insight that the flow of mind is closely interlinked with body sensations. Between me and the world there are always body sensations. I never react to events in the outside world; I always react to the sensations in my own body. When the sensation is unpleasant, I react with aversion. When the sensation is pleasant, I react with cravings for more.

the deepest source of my suffering is in the patterns of my own mind. When I want something and it doesn’t happen, my mind reacts by generating suffering. Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind. Learning this is the first step towards ceasing to generate more suffering.