21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

Humans vote with their feet. In my travels around the world I have

As mentioned in the previous chapter, scientific insights into the way our brains and bodies work suggest that our feelings are not some uniquely human spiritual quality, and they do not reflect any kind of “free will.” Rather, feelings are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to quickly calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings aren’t based on intuition, inspiration, or freedom—they are based on calculation.

For the last few decades, people all over the world were told that humankind is on the path to equality,

and that globalization and new technologies will help us get there sooner. In reality, the twenty-first century might create the most unequal societies in history.

By 2100, the richest 1 percent might own not merely most of the world’s wealth but also most of the world’s beauty, creativity, and health.

Maybe one of our biggest problems is that different human groups have completely different futures. Maybe in some parts of the world you should teach your kids to write computer code, while in others you had better teach them to draw fast and shoot straight.

Even if you don’t know how to cash in on the data today, it is worth having it because it might hold the key to controlling and shaping life in the future. I don’t know for certain that the data giants explicitly think about this in such terms, but their actions indicate that they value the accumulation of data in terms beyond those of mere dollars and cents.

in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets.

to prevent humankind from splitting into biological castes, the key question is: who owns the data? Does the data about my DNA, my brain, and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?

Once politicians can press our emotional buttons directly, generating anxiety, hatred, joy, and boredom at will, politics will become a mere emotional circus.

But we don’t have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task, because unlike land and machines, data is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of it as you want.

are Christianity (2.3 billion adherents), Islam (1.8 billion), and Judaism (15 million). Hinduism, with its 1 billion believers, and Buddhism, with its 500 million followers—not to mention the Shinto

religion (50 million) and the Sikh religion (25 million)—don’t

Religious populations

Scientists nowadays point out that morality in fact has deep evolutionary roots predating the appearance of humankind by millions of years. All social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins, and monkeys, have ethical codes, adapted by evolution to promote group cooperation.

We can only speculate what drove the gruff old leader to take care of the orphaned toddler, but apparently ape leaders developed the tendency to help the poor, the needy, and the fatherless millions of years before the Bible instructed ancient Israelites that they should not “mistreat any widow or fatherless child” (Exodus 22:21),

If biblical Judaism gave these laws any unique twist, it was by turning them from universal rulings applicable to all humans into tribal codes aimed primarily at the Jewish people.

as an exclusive, tribal affair, and has remained so to some extent to this day. The Old Testament, the Talmud, and many (though not all) rabbis maintained that the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a Gentile, which is why, for example, Jews are allowed to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save a Jew from death but are forbidden to do so merely in order to save a Gentile (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 84:2).10

Compare, for example, the attitude of Emperor Ashoka of India in the third century BCE to that of the Christian emperors of the late Roman Empire. Emperor Ashoka ruled an empire teeming with myriad religions, sects, and gurus.

In addition to such well-known names as Einstein and Freud, about 20 percent of all Nobel Prize laureates

in science have been Jews, though Jews constitute less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population.

Indeed, Jews began to make their remarkable contribution to science only once they had abandoned the yeshiva in favor of the laboratory.

The great change occurred only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when secularization and the Jewish Enlightenment caused many Jews to adopt

the worldview and lifestyle of their Gentile neighbors.

To summarize, although the Jewish emphasis on learning probably made an important contribution to the exceptional success of Jewish scientists, it was Gentile

thinkers who laid the groundwork for the achievements of Einstein, Haber, and Freud. The Scientific Revolution wasn’t a Jewish project, and Jews found their place in it only when they moved from the yeshivas to the universities.

why is it that between 1905 and 1933 ten secular German Jews won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics, but during the same period not a single ultra-Orthodox Jew or a single Bulgarian or Yemenite Jew won any Nobel Prize?

For many centuries Judaism was the humble religion of a small persecuted minority that preferred to read and contemplate rather than to conquer faraway countries and burn heretics at the stake.

And among all forms of humility, perhaps the most important is to have humility before God. Whenever they talk of God, humans all too often profess abject self-effacement, but then use the name of God to lord it over their brethren.

Rather, secular education teaches children to distinguish truth from belief, to develop compassion for all suffering beings, to appreciate the wisdom and experiences of all the earth’s denizens, to think freely without fearing the unknown, and to take responsibility for their actions and for the world as a whole.

How exactly did their “religion of love” allow itself to be distorted in such a way, and not once but numerous times? Protestants who try to blame it all on Catholic fanaticism are advised to read a book about the behavior of Protestant colonists in Ireland or in North America.

Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow and avoid the naive reassurance that “it cannot happen to us.”

As we come to make the most important decisions in the history of life, I personally would trust more in those who admit ignorance than in those who claim infallibility. If you want your religion, ideology, or worldview to lead the world, my first question to you is: “What was the biggest mistake your religion, ideology, or worldview committed? What did it get wrong?” If you cannot come up with something serious, I for one would not trust you.

We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.

People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming news feeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.3

The commandment not to steal was formulated in the days when stealing meant physically taking something with your own hand that did not belong to you. Yet today, the really important arguments about theft concern completely different scenarios. Suppose I invest $10,000 in shares of a big petrochemical corporation, which provides me with an annual 5 percent return on my investment. The corporation

is highly profitable because it does not pay for externalities. It dumps toxic waste into a nearby river without caring about the damage it causes to the regional water supply, to the public’s health, or to the local wildlife. It uses its wealth to enlist a legion of lawyers who protect it against any demand for compensation. It also retains lobbyists who block any attempt to legislate stronger environmental regulations.

Much of the Bible may be fictional, but it can still bring joy to billions and can still encourage humans to be

compassionate, courageous, and creative—just like other great works of fiction, such as Don Quixote, War and Peace, and the Harry Potter books.

It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information.

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what

is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs”—critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.3

In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again.

To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and learn to feel at home with the unknown.

So the best advice I can give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India, or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world. In the past, it was a

relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the twenty-first century is going to be different. Because of the increasing pace of change, you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias. So on what can you rely instead? Perhaps on technology? That’s an even riskier gamble. Technology can help you a lot, but if technology gains too much power over your life, you might become a hostage to its agenda.

you too. Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life. Especially as technology gets better at understanding humans, you might increasingly find yourself serving it, instead of it serving you.

If, however, you want to retain some control over your personal existence and the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do.

years—the current age of the universe. Planet Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and humans have existed for at least 2 million years. In contrast, the city of Jerusalem was established just 5,000

years ago and the Jewish people are at most 3,000 years old. This hardly qualifies as eternity.