21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

Alas, even if it remains impossible to wage successful wars in the twenty-first century, that would not give us an absolute guarantee of peace. We should never underestimate human stupidity. Both on the personal and on the collective level, humans are prone to engage in self-destructive activities.

One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National, religious, and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, my religion, and my culture are the most important in the world—and therefore my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as a whole. How can we make nations, religions, and cultures a bit more realistic and modest about their true place in the world?

The central value of education in Jewish culture was one of the main reasons for the extraordinary success of Jewish scientists. Other factors included the desire of a persecuted minority to prove its worth, and the barriers that prevented talented Jews from advancement in more anti-Semitic institutions such as the army and the state administration.

Many religions praise the value of humility but then imagine themselves to be the most important thing in the universe. They mix calls for personal meekness with blatant collective arrogance. Humans of all creeds would do well to take humility more seriously. 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.

Morality doesn’t mean “following divine commands.” It means “reducing suffering.” Therefore in order to act morally, you don’t need to believe in any myth or story. You just need to develop a deep appreciation of suffering. If you really understand how an action causes unnecessary suffering to yourself or to others, you will naturally abstain from it.

Not visiting any temples and not believing in any god is also a viable option. As the last few centuries have proved, we don’t need to invoke God’s name in order to live a moral life. Secularism can provide us with all the values we need.

Secularists strive not to confuse truth with belief.

In addition, secularists do not sanctify any group, person, or book as if it and it alone has sole custody of the truth.

The other chief commitment of secular people is to compassion. Secular ethics relies not on obeying the edicts of this or that god, but rather on a deep appreciation of suffering.

Suffering is suffering, no matter who experiences it, and knowledge is knowledge, no matter who discovers it. Privileging the experiences or the discoveries of a particular nation, class, or gender is likely to make us both callous and ignorant. Secular people are certainly proud of the uniqueness of their particular nation, country, and culture—but they don’t confuse uniqueness with superiority. Therefore, though they acknowledge their special duties toward their nation and their country, secular people don’t think these duties are exclusive, and they simultaneously acknowledge their duties toward humanity as a whole.

It takes a lot of courage to fight biases and oppressive regimes, but it takes even greater courage to admit ignorance and venture into the unknown. Secular education teaches us that if we don’t know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of acknowledging our ignorance and looking for new evidence. Even if we think we know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of doubting our opinions and checking ourselves again. Many people are afraid of the unknown and want clear-cut answers for every question. Fear of the unknown can paralyze us more than any tyrant. People throughout history worried that unless we put all our faith in some set of absolute answers, human society would crumble. In fact, modern history has demonstrated that a society of courageous people willing to admit ignorance and raise difficult questions is usually not just more prosperous but also more peaceful than societies in which everyone must unquestioningly accept a single answer. People afraid of losing their truth tend to be more violent than people who are used to looking at the world from several different viewpoints. Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

Finally, secular people cherish responsibility.

secular education does not mean a negative indoctrination that teaches kids not to believe in God and not to take part in any religious ceremonies. 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.

It is a mistake, however, to put so much trust in the rational individual. Postcolonial and feminist thinkers have pointed out that this “rational individual” may well be a chauvinistic Western fantasy, glorifying the autonomy and power of upper-class white men. As noted earlier, behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than on rational analysis, and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with life in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate in the Silicon Age.

What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.1

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently, some people who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. 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 Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views due to group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that ...

Yet if you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, explore dead ends, make space for doubts and boredom, and allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.

The problem is not one of values. Whether secular or religious, citizens of the twenty-first century have plenty of values. The problem is with implementing these values in a complex global world. It’s all the fault of numbers. The foragers’ sense of justice was structured to cope with dilemmas relating to the lives of hundreds of people living in close proximity. When we try to comprehend relationships between millions of people across entire continents, our moral sense is overwhelmed.

Justice demands not just a set of abstract values, but also an understanding of concrete cause-and-effect relations. If you collected a basket of mushrooms to feed your children with and I now take that basket from you by force, so that all your work has been for naught and your children will go to sleep hungry, that is unfair. It’s easy to grasp this, because it’s easy to see the cause-and-effect relation. Unfortunately, an inherent feature of our modern global world is that its causal relations are highly ramified and complex. I can live at home peacefully, never raising a finger to harm anyone, and yet according to left-wing activists, I am a full partner to the wrongs inflicted by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank. According to the socialists, my comfortable life is based on child labor in dismal Third World sweatshops. Animal-welfare advocates remind me that my life is interwoven with one of the most appalling crimes in history—the subjugation of billions of farm animals to a brutal regime of exploitation.

The system is structured in such a way that those who make no effort to know can remain in blissful ignorance, and those who do make an effort will find it very difficult to discover the truth.

Most of the injustices in the contemporary world result from large-scale structural biases rather than from individual prejudices, and our hunter-gatherer brains did not evolve to detect structural biases. We are all complicit in at least some such biases, and we just don’t have the time and energy to discover them all. Writing this book brought the lesson home to me on a personal level. When discussing global issues, I am always in danger of privileging the viewpoint of the global elite over that of various disadvantaged groups. The global elite commands the conversation, so it is impossible to miss its views. Disadvantaged groups, in contrast, are routinely silenced, so it is easy to forget about them—not out of deliberate malice, but out of sheer ignorance.

Even if we truly want to, most of us are no longer capable of understanding the major moral problems of the world.

In trying to comprehend and judge moral dilemmas of this scale, people often resort to one of four methods. The first is to downsize the issue.

The second method is to focus on a touching human story that ostensibly stands for the whole conflict.

The third method of dealing with large-scale moral dilemmas is to weave conspiracy theories.

The fourth and ultimate method is to create a dogma, put our trust in some allegedly all-knowing theory, institution, or chief, and follow it wherever it leads us.

As noted earlier, secular movements have not been exempt from this danger. Even if you start with a rejection of all religious dogma and with a firm commitment to scientific truth, sooner or later the complexity of reality becomes so vexing that you might be driven to fashion a doctrine that shouldn’t be questioned. While such doctrines provide people with intellectual comfort and moral certainty, it is debatable whether they provide justice.

The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo sapiens.

In practice, the power of human cooperation depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction.

If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you.

Blurring the line between fiction and reality can be done for many purposes, starting with “having fun” and going all the way to “survival.” You cannot play games or read novels unless you suspend disbelief at least for a little while. To really enjoy soccer, you have to accept the rules of the game and forget for at least ninety minutes that they are merely human inventions. If you don’t, you will think it utterly ridiculous for twenty-two people to go running after a ball. Soccer might begin with just having fun, but it can become far more serious stuff, as any English soccer hooligan or Argentinian soccer nationalist will attest. Soccer can help formulate personal identities, it can cement large-scale communities, and it can even provide reasons for violence. The conflicts between nations and religions are something like the rivalries between soccer fans.

Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.

As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it—and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it. Therefore, if you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens. Better to try your luck with chimps.

Silence isn’t neutrality; it is supporting the status quo.

Humans control the world because they can cooperate better than any other animal, and they can cooperate so well because they believe in fictions.

Most science-fiction movies actually tell a very old story: the victory of mind over matter. Thirty thousand years ago, the story went like this: “Mind imagines a stone knife; hand creates a knife; human kills mammoth.” But the truth is that humans gained control of the world not so much by inventing knives and killing mammoths as by manipulating human minds. The mind is not the subject that freely shapes historical actions and biological realities; the mind is an object that is being shaped by history and biology. Even our most cherished ideals—freedom, love, creativity—are like a stone knife that somebody else shaped in order to kill some mammoth. According to the best scientific theories and the most up-to-date technological tools, the mind is never free of manipulation. There is no authentic self waiting to be liberated from the manipulative shell.

We like the idea of shaping stone knives, but we don’t like the idea of being stone knives ourselves. So the matrix variation of the old mammoth story goes something like this: “Mind imagines a robot; hand creates a robot; robot kills terrorists but also tries to control the mind; mind kills robot.” Yet this story is false. The problem is not that the mind will not be able to kill the robot. The problem is that the mind that imagined the robot in the first place was already the product of much earlier manipulations. Therefore killing the robot will not free us.

Huxley’s genius consists in showing that you can control people far more securely through love and pleasure than through fear and violence.

Escaping the narrow definition of self might well become a necessary survival skill in the twenty-first century.

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 More broadly, they believe, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. 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.

Reconnecting neurons and rewiring synapses is hard work.5 But in the twenty-first century, you can’t afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job, or worldview, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whoosh.

The voice we hear inside our heads is never trustworthy, because it always reflects state propaganda, ideological brainwashing, and commercial advertisements, not to mention biochemical bugs.

To succeed at such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard at getting to know your operating system better—to know what you are and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself.

People who doubt that some kind of soul or spirit really survives their death therefore strive to leave behind something a bit more tangible. That “something tangible” could take one of two forms: cultural or biological. I might leave behind a poem, say, or some of my precious genes. My life has meaning because people will still read my poem a hundred years from now, or because my kids and grandchildren will still be around. And what is the meaning of their lives? Well, that’s their problem, not mine. The meaning of life is thus a bit like playing with a live hand grenade. Once you pass it on to somebody else, you are safe.

In history, the roof is sometimes more important than the foundations.

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.

all the stories on the supermarket shelves are fakes. The meaning of life isn’t a ready-made product. There is no divine script, and nothing outside me can give meaning to my life. It is I who imbue everything with meaning through my free choices and through my own feelings.

We hope to find meaning by fitting ourselves into some ready-made story about the universe, but according to the liberal interpretation of the world, the truth is exactly the opposite. The universe does not give me meaning. I give meaning to the universe. This is my cosmic vocation.

In practical terms, those who believe in the liberal story live by the light of two commandments: create, and fight for liberty. Creativity can manifest itself in writing a poem, exploring your sexuality, inventing a new app, or discovering a previously unknown chemical. Fighting for liberty includes anything that frees people from social, biological, or physical constraints, be it demonstrating against brutal dictators, teaching girls to read, finding a cure for cancer, or building a spaceship. The liberal pantheon of heroes houses Rosa Parks and Pablo Picasso alongside Louis Pasteur and the Wright brothers.

This sounds extremely exciting and profound in theory. Unfortunately, human freedom and human creativity are not what the liberal story imagines them to be. To the best of our scientific understanding, there is no magic behind our choices and creations. They are the product of billions of neurons exchanging biochemical signals, and even if you liberate humans from the yoke of the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union, their choices will still be dictated by biochemical algorithms as ruthless as the Inquisition and the KGB.