21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

The liberal story instructs me to seek freedom to express and realize 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 fulfill 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.

At first, we realize that we do not control the world outside us. I don’t decide when it rains. Then we realize that we do not control what’s happening inside our own body. I don’t control my blood pressure. Next, we understand that we don’t even govern our brain. I don’t tell the neurons when to fire. That’s more difficult. Ultimately we should realize that we do not control our desires.

Realizing this can make us less obsessive about our opinions and feelings—and more attentive to other people. It can also help us explore the truth about ourselves.

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. There is a storyteller in my mind that explains who I am, where I come from, where I am heading, and what is happening to me right now. Like the government spin doctors who explain the latest political upheavals, my inner narrator repeatedly gets things wrong but rarely admits it. And just as the government builds a national myth with flags, icons, and parades, so my inner propaganda machine creates a personal myth with prized memories and cherished traumas that often bear little resemblance to the truth. In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people spending countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.20 That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles, and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners, and smiling faces; 99 percent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self.

If you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions, and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from this or that direction and mess up your hair. And just as you are not the winds, so also you are not the jumble of thoughts, emotions, and desires you experience, and you are certainly not the sanitized story you tell about them with hindsight. You experience all of them, but you don’t control them, you don’t own them, and you are not them. People ask “Who am I?” and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself is that you are not a story.

There is very little chance that world peace and global harmony will arrive once seven billion human beings start meditating regularly. Observing the truth about yourself is just so difficult! Even if you somehow manage to get most humans to try it, many of us will quickly distort the truth we encounter into some story with heroes, villains, and enemies, and in that story find really good excuses to go to war.

The big question facing humans isn’t “what is the meaning of life?” but rather “how do we stop suffering?”

For years I had lived under the impression that I was the master of my life, the CEO of my own personal brand. But a few hours of meditation were enough to show me that I had hardly any control over myself. I was not the CEO; I was barely the gatekeeper. I was asked to stand at the gateway of my body—the nostrils—and just observe whatever comes in or goes out, yet after a few moments I lost my focus and abandoned my post.

The most important thing I realized was that 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 toward ceasing to generate more suffering.