Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

Soon enough, however, females from one group cross no-chimp’s-land, and invite the strangers to make love instead of war.

Sapiens often use visual marks such as a turban, a beard or a business suit to signal ‘you can trust me, I believe in the same story as you’.

Religion is any all-encompassing story that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms and values. It legitimises human social structures by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws.

Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.

As long as we haven’t deciphered the mysteries of consciousness, we cannot develop a universal measurement for happiness and suffering, and we don’t know how to compare the happiness and suffering of different individuals, let alone different species.

Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’.

Ask yourself: what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of the twentieth century?