gatorlog’s Reviews > Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind > Status Update

Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers and managers are called to join the empire. They must ponder whether to answer the imperial call or to remain loyal to their state and their people. More and more people choose the empire.

All human cultures are at least in part the legacy of empires and imperial civilizations, and no academic or political surgery can cut out the imperial legacies without killing the patient.

제국에 의해 전파된 문화가 지배 엘리트들이 독자적으로 창조한 경우는 거의 없다. [...] In the imperial US, an American president of Kenyan blood can munch on Italian pizza while watching his favorite film, Lawrence of Arabia, a British epic about the Arab rebellion against the Turks.

Jews, for example, owe far more to the empires under which they lived during the past two millennia than to the traditions of the ancient kingdom of Judaea. If King David were to show up in un ultra-Orthodox synagogue in present-day Jerusalem, he would be utterly bewildered to find people dressed in East European clothes, speaking in a German dialect and having endless arguments about the meaning of a Babylonian text

We do not trust the strangers, or the next-door neighbor--we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust.

Counterfeiting is not just cheating--it's a breach of sovereignty. [...] the legal term is lese-majesty (violating majesty), and was typically punished by tortue an death.

We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury.

Money isn't a material reality--it's a psychological construct.

us vs. them을 초월하고자 했던 사람들은 merchants, conquerors and prophets. For the merchants, the entire world was a single market and all humans were potential customers.

us vs. them을 초월하고자 했던 사람들은 merchants, conquerors and prophets. For the merchants, the entire world was a single market and all humans were potential customers.