My Thoughts

While I think it was a good read — especially for someone like myself who doesn’t have a great understanding of historical events — it felt pretty surface-level in most chapters. There were a few chapters where I did feel that Yuval went a “layer” or two deeper on a topic and appreciated that. Again, while this is definitely a great book for the masses, I was slightly surprised to hear folks like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and more recommend this book so strongly. I assume the recommendations are based primarily on the clarity of Yuval’s writing and less so based on these folks learning something new or hearing a novel perspective.

Sapiens had a similar feel at some points to Enlightment Now by Steven Pinker, which isn’t too surprising. Both — Enlightment Now is definitely more empirical — mention how the world is improving in many regards, but then questions whether it matters because one’s happiness is still determined relatively.

Would I recommend this book? Probably. It was a good, fairly quick read, but I think I’d more strongly recommend this conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and Yuval Noah Harari where they discuss really challenging systems problems of today and the future. I think this is a perfect example of what I mean when I say “Sapiens isn’t ‘deep’”. In this conversation, topics on many occassions go two or three, maybe even four levels deep. I watched this interview when I was about 3/4 of the way through Sapiens and the interview made me “trust” Yuval and want to finish the book.

I think this book clearly describes many very challenging systems problems that don’t have simple solutions. This is what I appreciate most about Yuval’s thoughts. He is very much a systems thinker.

My Key Highlights

General History

  • Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms. (Location 152)
  • History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. (Location 3835)
  • history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system. (Location 3837)
  • Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately. (Location 3840)
  • Politics, too, is a second-order chaotic system. (Location 3845)

Aggricultural Revolution

  • war and violence began only with the Agricultural Revolution, when people started to accumulate private property. (Location 1039)
  • during pre-industrial warfare more than 90 percent of war dead were killed by starvation, cold and disease rather than by weapons. (Location 1054)
  • The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. (Location 1289)
  • humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. (Location 1363)
  • We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. (Location 1372)
  • The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers. (Location 1462)
  • why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? Partly because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently. (Location 1476)
  • There was no going back. The trap snapped shut. (Location 1479)
  • The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, (Location 1480) -> - It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. (Location 1481) -> - luxuries tend to become necessities (Location 1485)
  • They could not abandon their houses, fields and granaries without grave risk of loss. Furthermore, as time went on they accumulated more and more things – objects, not easily transportable, that tied them down. Ancient farmers might seem to us dirt poor, but a typical family possessed more artefacts than an entire forager tribe. (Location 1660) -> - Foragers discounted the future because they lived from hand to mouth (Location 1666)
  • from the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future became major players in the theatre of the human mind. (Location 1681)
  • Until the late modern era, more than 90 percent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. (Location 1694)
  • It was not food shortages that caused most of history’s wars and revolutions. The French Revolution was spearheaded by affluent lawyers, not by famished peasants. (Location 1704)

Language as a Differentiator

  • What was the Sapiens’ secret of success? (Location 398)
  • language. (Location 401)
  • The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. (Location 426)
  • What, then, is so special about our language? (Location 440)
  • communicate a prodigious amount of information (Location 442)
  • Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. (Location 447)
  • The new linguistic skills that modern Sapiens acquired about seventy millennia ago enabled them to gossip for hours on end. (Location 459)
  • Reliable information about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, (Location 460)
  • Even today the vast majority of human communication – whether in the form of emails, phone calls or newspaper columns – is gossip. (Location 463)
  • Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. (Location 469)
  • The alpha male usually wins his position not because he is physically stronger, but because he leads a large and stable coalition. (Location 496)
  • There are clear limits to the size of groups that can be formed and maintained in such a way. In order to function, all members of a group must know each other intimately. (Location 499)
  • In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. (Location 511)

Social Beings

  • Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years (Location 257)
  • This fact has contributed greatly both to humankind’s extraordinary social abilities and to its unique social problems. (Location 258)
  • It takes a tribe to raise a human. (Location 260)
  • Evolution thus favoured those capable of forming strong social ties. (Location 260)
  • For nearly the entire history of our species, Sapiens lived as foragers. (Location 734)
  • The flourishing field of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era. (Location 737)
  • Foragers moved house every month, every week, and sometimes even every day, toting whatever they had on their backs. (Location 789)
  • They consequently had to make do with only the most essential possessions. (Location 790)
  • The social norms that sustained them were based neither on ingrained instincts nor on personal acquaintances, but rather on belief in shared myths. (Location 1748)
  • Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted. (Location 2258)
  • social cues (Location 2261)
  • Throughout history, and in almost all societies, concepts of pollution and purity have played a leading role in enforcing social and political divisions and have been exploited by numerous ruling classes to maintain their privileges. (Location 2290)
  • If you want to keep any human group isolated – women, Jews, Roma, gays, blacks – the best way to do it is convince everyone that these people are a source of pollution. (Location 2294)
  • Groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were, literally, outcasts (Location 2304)
  • In modern India, matters of marriage and work are still heavily influenced by the caste system, (Location 2307)
  • Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again. (Location 2375)
  • Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both social equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. (Location 2647)

Collective Imagination, Beliefs and Trust

  • Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. (Location 525)
  • Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. (Location 532)
  • legal fictions called ‘limited liability companies’. The idea behind such companies is among humanity’s most ingenious inventions. (Location 558)
  • Such companies were legally independent of the people who set them up, or invested money in them, or managed them. (Location 569)
  • In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people. (Location 614)
  • ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behaviour quickly, transmitting new behaviours to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change. (Location 631)
  • while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two. (Location 640)
  • Trade cannot exist without trust, and it is very difficult to trust strangers. (Location 663)
  • were able to create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values. (Location 817)
  • We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. (Location 1846)
  • we do not want to hear that human rights are also a myth. If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn’t there a danger that our society will collapse? (Location 1853) -> - an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. (Location 1858)
  • Time and again people have created order in their societies by classifying the population into imagined categories, such as superiors, commoners and slaves; whites and blacks; patricians and plebeians; Brahmins and Shudras; or rich and poor. (Location 2255)

Culture (groups holding shared beliefs)

  • The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’. (Location 691)
  • Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation. (Location 1739) -> - ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ (Location 2430)
  • Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. (Location 2433)
  • Successful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human hosts. (Location 3882)

Religion

  • Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement and disunion. Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires. (Location 3354)
  • Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and indisputable authority. (Location 3356)
  • This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability. (Location 3357)
  • Polytheism does not necessarily dispute the existence of a single power or law governing the entire universe. In fact, most polytheist and even animist religions recognised such a supreme power that stands behind all the different gods, demons and holy rocks. (Location 3419)
  • The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans. (Location 3426)
  • Polytheism is inherently open-minded, (Location 3442)
  • when polytheists conquered huge empires, they did not try to convert their subjects. (Location 3443)
  • All those involved accepted Christ’s divinity and His gospel of compassion and love. However, they disagreed about the nature of this love. Protestants believed that the divine love is so great that God was incarnated in flesh and allowed Himself to be tortured and crucified, thereby redeeming the original sin and opening the gates of heaven to all those who professed faith in Him. Catholics maintained that faith, while essential, was not enough. To enter heaven, believers had to participate in church rituals and do good deeds. (Location 3460)
  • These theological disputes turned so violent that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the hundreds of thousands. (Location 3466)
  • Judaism, for example, argued that the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, yet His chief interest is in the tiny Jewish nation and in the obscure land of Israel. (Location 3483)
  • The big breakthrough came with Christianity. This faith began as an esoteric Jewish sect (Location 3485)
  • Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. (Location 3496)
  • The Christian saints did not merely resemble the old polytheistic gods. (Location 3523)
  • Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world. One well-known explanation is that this is God’s way of allowing for human free will. Were there no evil, humans could not choose between good and evil, and hence there would be no free will. (Location 3532)
  • monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. (Location 3546)
  • the Devil or Satan – who can act independently, fight against the good God, and wreak havoc without God’s permission. How can a monotheist adhere to such a dualistic belief (which, by the way, is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament)? (Location 3561)
  • The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. (Location 3577)
  • At the beginning of the fourth century AD, the Roman Empire faced a wide horizon of religious possibilities. It could have stuck to its traditional and variegated polytheism. But its emperor, Constantine, looking back on a fractious century of civil war, seems to have thought that a single religion with a clear doctrine could help unify his ethnically diverse realm. He could have chosen any of a number of contemporary cults to be his national faith – Manichaeism, Mithraism, the cults of Isis or Cybele, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and even Buddhism were all available options. Why did he opt for Jesus? (Location 3796)
  • When Constantine assumed the throne in 306, Christianity was little more than an esoteric Eastern sect. If you were to suggest then that it was about to become the Roman state religion, you’d have been laughed out of the room (Location 3821)
  • The Hebrew Bible, the Greek Iliad, the Hindu Mahabharata and the Buddhist Tipitika all began as oral works. (Location 2109)

Buddhism

  • The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being, Siddhartha Gautama. (Location 3590)
  • Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. (Location 3595)
  • Life is a pointless rat race. (Location 3598)
  • suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind. (Location 3603)
  • the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. (Location 3606)
  • simply understands things as they are, (Location 3617)
  • If you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you do not suffer from it. (Location 3618)
  • There can actually be richness in the sadness. (Location 3619)
  • If you experience joy without craving that the joy linger and intensify, you continue to feel joy without losing your peace of mind. (Location 3619)
  • But how do you get the mind to accept things as they are, without craving? To accept sadness as sadness, joy as joy, pain as pain? (Location 3620)
  • ‘What am I experiencing now?’ rather than on ‘What would I rather be experiencing?’ (Location 3622)
  • ‘suffering arises from craving’ (Location 3635)
  • The first principle of monotheist religions is ‘God exists. What does He want from me?’ The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it?’ (Location 3637)
  • Buddhism does not deny the existence of gods – they are described as powerful beings who can bring rains and victories – but they have no influence on the law that suffering arises from craving. (Location 3639)

The New Natural-law Religions

  • The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. (Location 3655)
  • Humanism has split into three rival sects that fight over the exact definition of ‘humanity’, just as rival Christian sects fought over the exact definition of God. Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, (Location 3692)
  • Socialists believe that ‘humanity’ is collective rather than individualistic. (Location 3709)
  • Whereas liberal humanism seeks as much freedom as possible for individual humans, (Location 3711)
  • The only humanist sect that has actually broken loose from traditional monotheism is evolutionary humanism, whose most famous representatives were the Nazis. (Location 3716)
  • The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. (Location 4329)

Scientific Revolution

  • modern science differs from all previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways: (Location 3979)
  • The willingness to admit ignorance. (Location 3980)
  • The centrality of observation and mathematics. (Location 3984)
  • The acquisition of new powers. (Location 3986) -> - The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. (Location 3988)
  • Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, (Location 3990)
  • All modern attempts to stabilise the sociopolitical order have had no choice but to rely on either of two unscientific methods: (Location 4029)
  • the dominant modern research method takes for granted the insufficiency of old knowledge. Instead of studying old traditions, emphasis is now placed on new observations and experiments. (Location 4047)
  • When present observation collides with past tradition, we give precedence to the observation. (Location 4048)
  • Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories. Modern science uses mathematics. (Location 4053)
  • Generally speaking, most premodern rulers and business people did not finance research about the nature of the universe in order to develop new technologies, and most thinkers did not try to translate their findings into technological gadgets. Rulers financed educational institutions whose mandate was to spread traditional knowledge for the purpose of buttressing the existing order. (Location 4141)
  • Today many Americans believe that the solution to terrorism is technological rather than political. (Location 4170)
  • Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress. They thought the golden age was in the past, and that the world was stagnant, if not deteriorating. (Location 4206)
  • Many cultures believed that lightning was the hammer of an angry god, used to punish sinners. (Location 4223)
  • Why did the billions start flowing from government and business coffers into labs and universities? In academic circles, many are naïve enough to believe in pure science. They believe that government and business altruistically give them money to pursue whatever research projects strike their fancy. But this hardly describes the realities of science funding. (Location 4348)
  • Most scientific studies are funded because somebody believes they can help attain some political, economic or religious goal. (Location 4351)
  • Even if we wanted to finance pure science unaffected by political, economic or religious interests, it would probably be impossible. (Location 4360)
  • Science is unable to set its own priorities. (Location 4379)
  • Two forces in particular deserve our attention: imperialism and capitalism. The feedback loop between science, empire and capital has arguably been history’s chief engine for the past 500 years. (Location 4388)
  • Was it so hard for Chinese or Ottomans to engineer steam engines, manufacture machine guns and lay down railroads? (Location 4497)
  • France and the United States quickly followed in Britain’s footsteps because the French and Americans already shared the most important British myths and social structures. The Chinese and Persians could not catch up as quickly because they thought and organised their societies differently. (Location 4508)
  • Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. (Location 4541)
  • unfamiliar areas were simply left out, or filled with imaginary monsters and wonders. These maps had no empty spaces. They gave the impression of a familiarity with the entire world. (Location 4578)
  • The empty maps were a psychological and ideological breakthrough, a clear admission that Europeans were ignorant of large parts of the world. (Location 4581)
  • Could the Bible have missed half the world? (Location 4591)
  • The first modern man was Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian sailor who took part in several expeditions to America in the years 1499–1504. (Location 4598)
  • Having drawn it, Waldseemüller had to give it a name. Erroneously believing that Amerigo Vespucci had been the person who discovered it, Waldseemüller named the continent in his honour – America. (Location 4603)
  • There is poetic justice in the fact that a quarter of the world, and two of its seven continents, are named after a little-known Italian whose sole claim to fame is that he had the courage to say, ‘We don’t know.’ (Location 4606)
  • favour present observations over past traditions, (Location 4608)

Industrial Revolution

  • At heart, the Industrial Revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion. (Location 5435)
  • It has demonstrated again and again that there is no limit to the amount of energy at our disposal. Or, more precisely, that the only limit is set by our ignorance. (Location 5436)
  • Every few decades we discover a new energy source, so that the sum total of energy at our disposal just keeps growing. (Location 5436)
  • plants and animals were mechanised. (Location 5486)
  • farm animals stopped being viewed as living creatures that could feel pain and distress, and instead came to be treated as machines. Today these animals are often mass-produced in factory-like facilities, their bodies shaped in accordance with industrial needs. (Location 5487)

Poverty and Progress

  • Many cultures have viewed poverty as an inescapable part of this imperfect world. According to the New Testament, shortly before the crucifixion a woman anointed Christ with precious oil worth 300 denarii. Jesus’ disciples scolded the woman for wasting such a huge sum of money instead of giving it to the poor, but Jesus defended her, saying that ‘The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me’ (Mark 14:7). (Location 4227)
  • two kinds of poverty: social poverty, which withholds from some people the opportunities available to others; and biological poverty, which puts the very lives of individuals at risk due to lack of food and shelter. Perhaps social poverty can never be eradicated, but in many countries around the world biological poverty is a thing of the past. (Location 4234)
  • When the gods created man, Gilgamesh had learned, they set death as man’s inevitable destiny, and man must learn to live with it. Disciples of progress do not share this defeatist attitude. For men of science, death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem. People die not because the gods decreed it, but due to various technical failures (Location 4255)
  • Death suffered its worst setbacks in the arena of child mortality. Until the twentieth century, between a quarter and a third of the children of agricultural societies never reached adulthood. (Location 4284)

Individualism

  • Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. (Location 388)
  • Most Westerners today believe in individualism. (Location 1899)
  • Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. (Location 1929)
  • Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. (Location 1937) -> - Even if by some superhuman effort I succeed in freeing my personal desires from the grip of the imagined order, I am just one person. (Location 1951)
  • Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations. (Location 1968)
  • These imagined orders are inter-subjective, so in order to change them we must simultaneously change the consciousness of billions of people, which is not easy. (Location 1975)
  • A change of such magnitude can be accomplished only with the help of a complex organisation, such as a political party, an ideological movement, or a religious cult. (Location 1976)
  • It follows that in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order. (Location 1979)
  • There is no way out of the imagined order. (Location 1983)
  • When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison. (Location 1983)

Desires Become “Needs”

  • Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. (Location 1486)
  • but do I live a more relaxed life? (Location 1491)
  • We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated. (Location 1496)
  • the luxury trap. (Location 1498)

Global Unification

  • global unification occurred in the last few centuries, (Location 2747)
  • The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. (Location 2768)
  • How did money succeed where gods and kings failed? (Location 2779)
  • obsession for gold (Location 2790)
  • useless yellow metal. (Location 2791)
  • As the Christians gradually gained the upper hand, they marked their victories not only by destroying mosques and building churches, but also by issuing new gold and silver coins bearing the sign of the cross and thanking God for His help in combating the infidels. (Location 2794)
  • ‘We are conquering you for your own benefit,’ said the Persians. Cyrus wanted the peoples he subjected to love him and to count themselves lucky to be Persian vassals. (Location 3153)
  • Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. (Location 3158)
  • Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s. (Location 3206)
  • It is unlikely that humankind can deal with these challenges without global cooperation. (Location 3333)

The Monetary Systems is Based on Shared Beliefs and Trust

  • An economy of favours and obligations doesn’t work when large numbers of strangers try to cooperate. It’s one thing to provide free assistance to a sister or a neighbour, a very different thing to take care of foreigners who might never reciprocate the favour. (Location 2821)
  • One can fall back on barter. But barter is effective only when exchanging a limited range of products. It cannot form the basis for a complex economy. (Location 2823)
  • In a barter economy, every day the shoemaker and the apple grower will have to learn anew the relative prices of dozens of commodities. (Location 2836)
  • More than 90 percent of all money – more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts – exists only on computer servers. (Location 2869)
  • As long as people are willing to trade goods and services in exchange for electronic data, (Location 2872)
  • dollars have value only in our common imagination. (Location 2897)
  • money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. (Location 2899)
  • Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. (Location 2902)
  • Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. (Location 2904)
  • As long as people trusted the power and integrity of the king, they trusted his coins. (Location 2952)
  • the fact that another person believes in cowry shells, or dollars, or electronic data, is enough to strengthen our own belief in them, (Location 2993)
  • religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something (Location 2996)
  • Money is based on two universal principles: (Location 3002)
  • Universal convertibility: (Location 3003)
  • Universal trust: (Location 3004)
  • it corrodes local traditions, intimate relations and human values, replacing them with the cold laws of supply and demand. (Location 3007)
  • Human communities and families have always been based on belief in ‘priceless’ things, such as honour, loyalty, morality and love. These things lie outside the domain of the market, and they shouldn’t be bought or sold for money. (Location 3008)

Credit, Capitalism and Trust in a Growing Future

  • Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, (Location 4914)
  • If all of the account holders at Barclays Bank suddenly demand their money, Barclays will promptly collapse (unless the government steps in to save it). (Location 4916)
  • What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. (Location 4919)
  • with interest. (Location 4924) -> - a new system based on trust in the future. (Location 4936)
  • Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future. (Location 4937)
  • The problem in previous eras was not that no one had the idea or knew how to use it. It was that people seldom wanted to extend much credit because they didn’t trust that the future would be better than the present. They generally believed that times past had been better than their own times and that the future would be worse, or at best much the same. (Location 4941)
  • A Growing Pie (Location 4965)
  • Smith taught people to think about the economy as a ‘win-win situation’, in which my profits are also your profits. (Location 4988)
  • All this depends, however, on the rich using their profits to open new factories and hire new employees, rather than wasting them on non-productive activities. (Location 4995)
  • profits ought to be reinvested in production. (Location 4998)
  • Capitalism distinguishes ‘capital’ from mere ‘wealth’. Capital consists of money, goods and resources that are invested in production. Wealth, on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities. (Location 5002)
  • capitalism gradually became far more than just an economic doctrine. It now encompasses an ethic – a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think. Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth. (Location 5029)
  • Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. (Location 5044)
  • Like a present-day start-up entrepreneur, Columbus did not give up. He pitched his idea to other potential investors in Italy, France, England, and again in Portugal. Each time he was rejected. He then tried his luck with Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers of newly united Spain. He took on some experienced lobbyists, and with their help he managed to convince Queen Isabella to invest. (Location 5069)
  • The king of Spain desperately needs more money to pay his army. He’s sure that your father has cash to spare. So he brings trumped-up treason charges against your brother. If he doesn’t come up with 20,000 gold coins forthwith, he’ll get cast into a dungeon and rot there until he dies. (Location 5130)
  • Euphoria swept the streets of Paris. People sold all their possessions and took huge loans in order to buy Mississippi shares. (Location 5179)
  • The big speculators emerged largely unscathed – they had sold in time. Small investors lost everything, and many committed suicide. (Location 5193)
  • The Mississippi Bubble was one of history’s most spectacular financial crashes. The royal French financial system never recuperated fully from the blow. (Location 5194)
  • But in its extreme form, belief in the free market is as naïve as belief in Santa Claus. There simply is no such thing as a market free of all political bias. (Location 5269)
  • Markets by themselves offer no protection against fraud, theft and violence. It is the job of political systems to ensure trust by legislating sanctions against cheats and to establish and support police forces, courts and jails which will enforce the law. (Location 5271)
  • In a completely free market, unsupervised by kings and priests, avaricious capitalists can establish monopolies or collude against their workforces. If there is a single corporation controlling all shoe factories in a country, or if all factory owners conspire to reduce wages simultaneously, then the labourers are no longer able to protect themselves by switching jobs. (Location 5283)
  • This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. (Location 5310)
  • Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed. The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hatred towards Africans. The individuals who bought the shares, the brokers who sold them, and the managers of the slave-trade companies rarely thought about the Africans. (Location 5313)
  • In recent decades, and especially after 1945, capitalist greed was somewhat reined in, not least due to the fear of Communism. Yet inequities are still rampant. The economic pie of 2014 is far larger than the pie of 1500, but it is distributed so unevenly that many African peasants and Indonesian labourers return home after a hard day’s work with less food than did their ancestors 500 years ago. (Location 5336)
  • The only serious attempt to manage the world differently – Communism – was so much worse in almost every conceivable way that nobody has the stomach to try again. (Location 5342)
  • THE MODERN ECONOMY GROWS THANKS to our trust in the future and to the willingness of capitalists to reinvest their profits in production. (Location 5355)
  • But the evidence provided by the past is that they are finite only in theory. Counter-intuitively, while humankind’s use of energy and raw materials has mushroomed in the last few centuries, the amounts available for our exploitation have actually increased. Whenever a shortage of either has threatened to slow economic growth, investments have flowed into scientific and technological research. These have invariably produced not only more efficient ways of exploiting existing resources, but also completely new types of energy and materials. (Location 5358)

Consumerism

  • Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products – contributing to economic growth twice over. (Location 5589)
  • As in previous eras, there is today a division of labour between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need. (Location 5592)
  • The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. (Location 5755)

Terrorism isn’t where we should focus

  • In the year 2000, wars caused the deaths of 310,000 individuals, and violent crime killed another 520,000. Each and every victim is a world destroyed, a family ruined, friends and relatives scarred for life. Yet from a macro perspective these 830,000 victims comprised only 1.5 per cent of the 56 million people who died in 2000. That year 1.26 million people died in car accidents (2.25 per cent of total mortality) and 815,000 people committed suicide (1.45 per cent). (Location 5878)

Peace

  • real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war. (Location 5955)

But are we happier?

  • But are we happier? (Location 6023)
  • Most current ideologies and political programmes are based on rather flimsy ideas concerning the real source of human happiness. Nationalists believe that political self-determination is essential for our happiness. Communists postulate that everyone would be blissful under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Capitalists maintain that only the free market can ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number, by creating economic growth and material abundance and by teaching people to be self-reliant and enterprising. (Location 6031)
  • The generally accepted definition of happiness is ‘subjective well-being’. (Location 6090)
  • money does indeed bring happiness. But only up to a point, and beyond that point it has little significance. (Location 6107)
  • illness decreases happiness in the short term, but is a source of long-term distress only if a person’s condition is constantly deteriorating or if the disease involves on-going and debilitating pain. People who are diagnosed with chronic illness such as diabetes are usually depressed for a while, but if the illness does not get worse they adjust to their new condition and rate their happiness as highly as healthy people do. (Location 6114)
  • Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health. (Location 6122)
  • the freedom we value so highly may be working against us. (Location 6130)
  • With the individual wielding unprecedented power to decide her own path in life, we find it ever harder to make commitments. (Location 6131) -> - happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. (Location 6133)
  • When things improve, expectations balloon, (Location 6136)
  • When things deteriorate, expectations shrink, and consequently even a severe illness might leave you pretty much as happy as you were before. (Location 6137)
  • In previous eras the standard of beauty was set by the handful of people who lived next door to you. Today the media and the fashion industry expose us to a totally unrealistic standard of beauty. They search out the most gorgeous people on the planet, and then parade them constantly before our eyes. (Location 6174)
  • our internal biochemical system seems to be programmed to keep happiness levels relatively constant. There’s no natural selection for happiness (Location 6192)
  • Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time – what could be wrong with that? (Location 6261)
  • Huxley’s disconcerting world is based on the biological assumption that happiness equals pleasure. (Location 6262)
  • He discovered what seems to be a paradox in most people’s view of their lives. Take the work involved in raising a child. Kahneman found that when counting moments of joy and moments of drudgery, bringing up a child turns out to be a rather unpleasant affair. (Location 6267)
  • Yet most parents declare that their children are their chief source of happiness. (Location 6270) -> - happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile. (Location 6272)
  • So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life (Location 6283)
  • any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. (Location 6287) -> - The scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade or building a new cathedral. (Location 6289) -> - So perhaps happiness is synchronising one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction. (Location 6292)
  • This is quite a depressing conclusion. Does happiness really depend on self-delusion? (Location 6295)
  • the above views share the assumption that happiness is some sort of subjective feeling (of either pleasure or meaning), (Location 6298)
  • Liberalism sanctifies the subjective feelings of individuals. It views these feelings as the supreme source of authority. (Location 6300)
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated this view most classically: ‘What I feel to be good – is good. What I feel to be bad – is bad.’ (Location 6306)
  • The idea that feelings are not to be trusted is not restricted to Christianity. (Location 6319)
  • According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. (Location 6339)
  • People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. (Location 6343) -> - the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. (Location 6344)
  • It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful! (Location 6349)
  • happiness is independent of external conditions. (Location 6357)
  • Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals. (Location 6678)
  • seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. (Location 6689)

Equality

  • Our late modern world prides itself on recognising, for the first time in history, the basic equality of all humans, yet it might be poised to create the most unequal of all societies. (Location 6608)
  • the future masters of the world will probably be more different from us than we are from Neanderthals. (Location 6620)

We Define the Future

  • The future is unknown, and it would be surprising if the forecasts of the last few pages were realised in full. History teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise due to unforeseen barriers, (Location 6642)
  • If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: what do we want to become? (Location 6653)
  • since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?’, but ‘What do we want to want?’ (Location 6671)
  • We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. (Location 6685)
  • Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want? (Location 6690)