21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

In March 1839, in the Iranian city of Mashhad, a Jewish woman who suffered from some skin disease was told by a local quack that if she killed a dog and washed her hands in its blood, she would be cured. Mashhad is a holy Shiite city, and it so happened that the woman undertook the grisly therapy on the sacred day of Ashura. She was observed by some Shiites, who believed—or claimed to believe—that the woman killed the dog in mockery of the Karbala martyrdom. Word of this unthinkable sacrilege quickly spread through the streets of Mashhad. Egged on by the local imam, an angry mob stormed the Jewish quarter, torched the synagogue, and murdered thirty-six Jews on the spot. All the surviving Jews of Mashhad were then given a stark choice: convert to Islam immediately or be killed. The sordid episode did no harm to Mashhad’s reputation as “Iran’s spiritual capital.”13

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.

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.

the universe has no plot, so it is up to us humans to create a plot,

Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware. They might be trying to disguise and excuse real suffering by wrapping it up in big, incomprehensible words. Be particularly careful about the following four words: “sacrifice,” “eternity,” “purity,” “redemption.” If you hear any of these four, sound the alarm. And if you happen to live in a country whose leader routinely says things like “Their sacrifice will redeem the purity of our eternal nation,” know that you are in deep trouble. To preserve your sanity, always try to translate such hogwash into real terms: a soldier crying out in agony, a woman beaten and brutalized, a child shaking in fear.

When people ask the big questions of life, they usually have absolutely no interest in knowing when their breath is coming into their nostrils and when it is going out. Rather, they want to know things like what happens after you die. Yet the real enigma of life is not what happens after you die but what happens before you die. If you want to understand death, you need to understand life.

Though many religions have made extensive use of various meditation techniques, this doesn’t mean meditation is necessarily religious. Many religions have also made extensive use of books, yet that doesn’t mean reading books is a religious practice.

It is wrong to think that sex exists only for the purpose of procreation. It’s true that sex initially evolved for procreation, but like almost every evolving trait, things changed over time. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Feathers first appeared to keep ancient reptiles warm. Now birds use them to fly. Is that unnatural? Fingers appeared to help our ancestors climb trees. Now we use them to play the piano. Is that unnatural? Mouths appeared to enable organisms to take food into their bodies. Now we use them to speak and to kiss—is that unnatural?