Sapiens: A brief history of humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens, Chapter 1

This chapter sort of introduces the concepts that will be talked about in the book but it also hits some very important points about history.

Cognitive revolution ~ 70k y/o

Agricultural revolution ~ 12k y/o

Scientific revolution ~ 500 y/o

Humans made their way onto the planes about 2.5m y/o but they were just another insignificant type of animal. Just like lions or dogs, humans, homo, belong to a family, of which there were many siblings until recently. Our closest non human genetic relative is the chimpanzee, who we parted ways with about 6m y/o. 

We all hail from East Africa about 2.5m y/o. We are a genus of ape called the Australopithecus, or Southern Ape. These peeps went on to try our North Africa, Europe and Asia about 2m y/o. 

Homo Neanderthalensis, man from Neander Valley

- Europe/Western Asia

- Bigger than Sapiens, good in the cold of Western Eurasia

- Extinct 30k y/o

Homo Erectus, upright man

- Eastern Asia

- Most long-lasting Homo there was or ever will be

Homo Soloensis, man from the Solo Valley

- Java, Indonesia

- Suited for the tropics

- Extinct 50k y/o

Homo Floresiensis, dwarves

- Flores, Indonesia

- Humans got here when sea level was low. As it rose, it trapped those that were there to the island. The big people on the island needed more food, so genes selectively adapted dwarfism to require less calories 

- Extinct 12k y/o

Homo Denisova

- Denisova Cave, Siberia

Homo Rudolfensis, man from Lake Rudolf

Homo Ergaster, working man

Homo Sapiens, wise man

These were all human beings, and its a common misconception to think of Sapiens hailing from any of their siblings. From 2m y/o to about 10k y/o, earth was home to many homo bros. 

Despite the specic differences, all homos had huge brains [2-3% of bodyweight and using 25% of calories]. This organ drained us, so we had to spend most of our time finding food and eating food. What likely made our brains this big was the harnessing of fire to cook.

Homos also all walked upright, which changed our anatomy further.

- We had less surface area exposed to the sun [hair still grows on head, but little elsewhere.

- We can scan the savannah from a heightened vantage. 

- Arms not used as much in locomotion are freed for signaling or weapon-wielding. 

- The more successful the hands, the more successful the homo, so genes selectively adapted for fine motor control and concentrated nerve development in the hands. 

- Language also started in the hands. Before we were verbal we used those fine tuned motor controls to create our first language. 

- Women’s center of gravity changed, so their hips had to narrow.

- Narrower hips meant childbirth was only possible before a fetus was done developing, and natural selection favored earlier births.

- More vulnerable offspring led to our development of social ability.

- We had to care for the young, and genes favored those capable of forming strong social ties.

- Bc the young are so malleable, they are able to be shaped into different people through education and socialization. 

So why did our brains grow? It is because with fire we could cook. We weren’t great predators, we were just great communicators. We were middle-food-chain scavengers for a long time. We jumped really fast once we harnessed fire, whereas other species who ruled the food chain got there gradually. These kings of the wild grew confident over their dominion, but because we didn’t get the same sort of checks and balances to keep us from wreaking too much havoc, the ecosystem couldn’t adjust.

We couldn’t adjust either. We’re so recently an underdog that we are still full of fears and anxieties from our old world. It’s what keeps us cruel and dangerous. 

So about 300k y/o we got fire. We may have used it to burn forests to better hunt game or harvest what we torched, but cooking was the real game changer here. It changed food’s chemistry and biology, heat not only releasing nutrients and making food more digestible but also killing bacteria and parasites. We cut down our eating time drastically because we didn’t have to chew as much. 

It also shortened our intestines by a lot. The brain and the gut are the biggest energy users, and as our brain grew and we learned to cook, we could afford shorter intestines because food was digested and nutrients were absorbed with a much shorter track. Our teeth also shrank.

Most animals are limited to what their bodies could do, and when we harnessed fire, we harnessed something beyond our bodily limitations. 

So 150k years ago we were still punks. Only a million of us on the planet. East Africa, 150k years ago, Sapiens was born.

70k y/o, the East African OGs spread to the Arabian peninsula and overran the Eurasian landmass. We either mated with the other homos or we took them out, either by genicide or just being better at getting their food.

Why we know we didn’t completely genocide them is because Sapiens DNA isn’t 100% Sapiens. 1-4% of unique DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA. 6% of unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA. 

Sapiens, Chapter 2

Once we wandered out of the East African Sahara, we went to the Levant, about 100k y/o. We didn’t do well out there.

We tried again, this time about 45k y/o to Europe and East Asia. We landed in Australia, where the first totem to a God was formed, Stedal, the Lion-Man. Between this period, from 70k y/o to 30k y/o, this is when we changed the world. We invented boats, oil lamps, bows, arrows, needles.

We also see the first evidence of social stratification, religion and commerce.

There are competing theories about what bootstrapped our species. It could be random. We know it wasn’t strict communication, since even insects can communicate complexly. 

It wasn’t even our ability to lie. The green monkey can lie. We know it wasn’t that commutation was made vocal. Parrots can repeat any human sound and more. It’s the fictions. Unlike lying, imagined reality is something everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. 

It was the ability to tell stories. A popularized theory is that we developed the language we did as a result of those narrow hips that required stronger social ties. We evolved to gossip and share social information. The Stedal Lion is one of the first examples of art and religion, exemplifying our ability to imagine things that don’t really exist.

Within a 50-person group, there are over 1200 1:1 relationships. Our groups could only be so big because we could only trust those who we knew, and we could only intimately know so many people, so when fictions developed, reliable information about who could be trusted let small groups evolve into big groups that could ally for common goals. Our defining feature is our ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. Lawyers call these legal fictions when they’re in the form of corporations. 

A monkey can lie and believe lies, but it will never understand or believe that if it gives you its banana it will have endless bananas in its afterlife. It will never be able to believe fictions. Fiction has enabled us to imagine things, but also to do so collectively. Ants and bees do this, but rigidly. Wolves and Chimps do this, but in small groups. We can corporate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers.

We think Chimps are ruled by the alpha male, and we think of that individual as the strongest, but alpha males actually earn and maintain their position be leading a large and stable coalition through socialization. 

Any large scale operation in humans is rooted in common myths that exist only in peoples collective imagination. There are no gods, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, no justice that exists outside of our imagination. 

We look down at the primitive ness of people who cement social order by believing in ghosts and spirits even though Abrahamic religions function on the exact same basis. Our sorcerers just dress business casual, and weave better tales. 

Catholics believe priests in certain clothes who say certain words can turn bread and wine into blood and flesh. 

We are successful not to the extent that we can come up with stories, but to the extent that we can convince people to believe them.

Because cooperation is based on myths, changing the myths can change the way we cooperate, and fast! We constantly revise our behavior to adapt to our changing needs. 

It’s why we have a separate biology and history as a species. Before we could tell stories, we were no different than any other animal and everything we did was a result of our environment and our genes. After we could tell stories, genes lost importance. That’s why it took us so long from being humans to being earth conquerors. Priests don’t pass down their genes, they pass down their stories. 

This is also how we could ultimately defeat the Neanderthals, who were by all means individually stronger than us. 

The evidence of trade is how we tend to measure when we started story-telling, since trading with strangers would not have been possible without trust through fictions. 

Sapiens, Chapter 3

Most evolutionary psychologists agree our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during pre-agricultural days.

This is where Yuval first introduces the Bari Indians who believed in collective fatherhood, in part due to their belief in an accumulation of sperm in a woman’s womb.

Though most HG tribes were communal, they still comprised of separate cells, each containing a jealous couple who claimed children they had in common. This is part of why we maintain nuclear families and monogamous relationships. 

We refer to this time as the Stone Age, even though most tools were made of wood. Wood breaks down easily, which is why discerning what went down during these times is largely an act of speculation.

We figure they didn’t have much stuff anyway, since they moved weekly or daily, whereas today we each have millions of artifacts in our lives. There’s pretty much nothing we do that doesn’t involve dozens of artifacts. Because it’s tough to look at what they used and how they acted, we look at modern foraging HG tribes. This isn’t super accurate, though, because these groups have at least partially been influenced by industrial and agricultural societies. Also, the ones who have survived are mainly in difficult terrain with inhospitable terrain. Places not well suited to agriculture. It just gives us a tiny sampling of types of HG tribes.

We call foragers the original affluent society because they spent maybe 40 hours a week hunting and foraging. It left a lot of time to socialize or compete with neighboring tribes. 

Sports likely grew out of this, in addition to the model of champion battle we see progress into sports like in the colosseum. 

We also saw dogs self-domesticate during this time.

Although they were leisurely, they weren’t quite domesticated because they didn’t really stay in one place that long. They moved with the seasons and migrations of animals. Maybe they stayed longer in places that had really rich resources (river-side locations, likely the impetus for agrarian societies later on). This is also when HG learned to fish, and boats and fishing date back to about 45k y/o. There were fishing settlements, but not yet agriculture. 

These foragers, while they didn’t know what modern man does in any one field, we’re kings of all trades, there minds and bodies honed in ways ours no longer need to be. It’s been argued brain size shrunk with agriculture because there was suddenly professions for imbeciles doing field work who would erroneously pass along his genes. 

These folks had less malnutrition than we did with their varied diet and lived just as long, the life expectancy only changing as a result of more children dying in infancy. 

Yuval discusses the Ache HG of Paraguay who lived until the 1960s, and how spartan they were. The killed little girls and buried them with men who’d recently died. They left the weak behind. Old women would be axed in the head. Other children were killed because they didn’t look right or were annoying. This seeming savagery makes more sense when you consider the  Ache were wiped out by farmers, and so they had to adapt to harsh and efficient environments. Outside that, they cared not for wealth but for social interactions and high-quality friendships. 

HG also, like the first men to dream up god, were animists. They gave objects and animals a theory of mind as they would themselves, and thereby gave them power. They can all communicate with each other. They are local and not universal gods. They were just spirits. Saying HG were animists is like saying pre-modern agrarians were theists (which covers a lot I.e., 18th century Jewish rabbis in Poland, witch burning puritans in 17th century Massachusetts, Aztec priests in 15th century Mexico, Sufi mystics in 12th century Iran, 10th century Viking warriors, 2nd century Roman legionaries and 1st century Chinese bureaucrats).

They measure this partially by looking at burials, and how for instance the Sungir mammoth hunters in 30k bc russia were adorned with beads, so many as to indicate the buried were sacralized. 

*Check out the Hands Cave in Argentina*

Sapiens, Chapter 4

This chapter was about the metaphorical flood. The thing meant to be the real version of Noah’s/utnapishtim’s/ziusarda’s ark. 

The idea is that humans inadvertently slaughtered a lot of fauna in all their exploring. The better they got at hunting, the worse off every other species was at everything. 

Prior to the cognitive revolution, humans of all species lived solely on the Afro-Asian landmass. Flores was only colonized 850k years ago. 

The big achievement from here by sapiens was the colonization of Australia about 45k years ago. Having migrated waterside because of the abundance of foraging, sapiens got good at fishing, which lead to the development of boats, and then ocean-going boats. This is how fishing towns thrived, and how we eventually traded. 

All other species had to physically evolve over long periods of time to be able to transcend the oceans, but not us. Much like when we learned to operate in larger groups, we skipped the genetic gauntlets. 

The reason our move to Australia was considered so significant was that we had invaded a place that never saw our species. The outback had large animals, animals that were slow and produced less offspring for how long it took to inoculate and raise them. We ran them extinct because they were the easy game when we had numbers at our back. This affected what those animals ate and fucked up the whole food chain ecosystem. 

Another reason the large animals went fast is because we’d already harnessed fire, something we’d use to clear large areas to hunt in. 

Our move to America was a different story, Sapiens were the first and only humans to reach the Western Hemisphere landmass around 16k y/o. 

The first Americans arrived on foot, not on boat, because at the time sea levels were so low a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska was made usable. 

Sapiens knew that game was good up north. Big animals provided lots of fat and fur to feed and warm themselves. Those Russian Sungir testisfy through their burial rituals that people thrived in mammoth hunting areas.

People crossing over were first stopped in Alaska by the glaciers, but as the earth started to warm, the glaciers melted, flooding the road bridge and opening passage to western canada and North America. This was 12k years ago. 

Descendants of Siberia settled in the thick forests of the Eastern US, the swamps of the Mississippi delta, the deserts of Mexico and the jungles of Central America. By 10k bc we had inhabited most of the Americas, all the way to the southern tip, the Tierra del Fuego. We can tell by the age of bones and feces when people arrived in certain areas, and the most recent was the Caribbean islands in 5k bc. 

We drove all these species into extinction by the time the agricultural revolution started. 

Madagascar went about 1500bc 

These waves of extinction followed the revolutions, the first coming with the spread of foragers, the second coming with the spread of farmers, and the third coming with the spread of industrial activity. 

Sapiens, Chapter 5

This is the chapter where we start to get into the wheat. Cutting the wheat from the chaff. 

Humans may have spread throughout the world, but up until 8kbc, they were still hunting and gathering. The argument is we didn’t really need to do anything else because we had a lifestyle which fed us and supported social structures, religious beliefs and political dynamics. 

The transition began in Turkey, Iran and the Levant about 9500bc. We started devoting all our time to manipulating the lives of a few plants and animals. 

We cultivated lentils, olive trees, horses, grapevines, and some animals and plants later, but pretty much all the things we domesticated by 3500 bc is what we still domesticate today (90% of our calories come from a handful of the plants and animals domesticated between 9500 and 3500bc... wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, millet, barley. 

Those evolutionary psychologists who talk about our minds being stuck in hunter-gatherer times often leave out that our cuisine is still that of the ancient farmers. 

Peoples back then all discovered farming independently, and farmed different things. By the first century AD most people in the world were agriculturalists. 

The reason we did this in certain areas and not others was because most animals and plants couldn’t be domesticated. Those that were resided in particular places, and those places are where we settled. 

The lie of this revolution was that it increased our brain size and power because of food abundance, but that is a lie. Instead of improving our lives, it left us with more difficult and less satisfying lives. 

The food explosion only lent itself to population explosions and pampered elites, and those plants domesticated us. Wheat used to grow nowhere, but now there is more than a million square miles of it across the earth, and it is demanding. It needs fertile earth to grow. It doesn’t like to compete. It needs a lot of water and sun. It needs protection from animals and pests. 

Our knees, necks and backs paid the price of this by working long days in positions our bodies weren’t designed for, resulting in slipped discs, arthritis, and hernias. 

Wheat demanded so much time that we had to stay next to it to tend to it. Sure, it provided more food, and that let us multiply, but all that meant was that we could produce more people which needed more wheat. The evolutionary success of a species is how many times it could copy its DNA. This is the essence of the agricultural revolution: keep more people alive under worse conditions. 

Why wheat let us breed more is also an evolutionary glitch. Hunter gatherers and sapiens overall have hormonal and genetic mechanisms that control procreation during times of hardship (puberty is later and fertility decreases). Normally nomads spaced children 3-4 years apart. Women did this by nursing longer (suckling decreases chances of getting pregnant). 

The end of the ice age brought with it more rainfall, which helped wheat to grow in the Middle East. People eating more of it meant they inadvertently spread its growth. 

The fires people set to hunt also let wheat monopolize sun water and nutrients. 

As people figured out how to better harvest wheat, there was less time to hunt. People started having more babies bc women weaned children off earlier as they could be fed on porridge and gruel. 

this, in combination with hot bed mass communities and kids competing for their food, led to more child mortality. 

Every generation continued what their parents taught them, and no one knew how to leave the cycle. 

These things they thought were luxuries became commonplace, and none of it save us time as we used what we freed up to do 10 other things. Luxury kept us anxious.

The other theory is that we switched to wheat in another order. Rather than sew wheat and build a town and temple around it, we may have built temples first, to wheat, then sewed it, then built the town. 

When we started using animals to do our bidding, generations of culling the aggressive and curious gave us our first slave labor. Pastoralistic herding. 

Whereas before animals were fewer, they lived longer and more fulfilling lives. Now they only live as long as it takes them to grow to full size. Why feed them after that.

Some shepard tribes killed offspring, ate its flesh and stuffed it, masking its dead scent with urine to get its mother to produce more milk. It’s no surprise that kings and prophets styled themselves as Shepards and likened the way they and the gods cared for their people to a Shepard’s care for his flock. 

Sapiens, Chapter 6

This bad boy was about the building of legends, or pyramids. The agricultural revolution had taken our population and blown it up. It also changed the idea of home. H/G had territories spread across many hundreds of square kilometers, whereas agriculturists, especially lower caste, spent their time working in a small field and their lives centered on a cramped structure of wood/stone/mud - the house. 

The idea of attachment and the self-centered human came with this revolution as “my house” 

The earth is 510m square km, of which 155 is land. Farmers were on just 11m square km of earth, just 2%. This is where almost all of history unfolded. Until recently, 90% of humans were peasants, with history being written by the few elite. 

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. 

The problem with this separation revealed itself in large numbers. We evolved for millions of years in small bands. The appearance of cities over such a short amount of time did not give us enough time to evolve us an instinct for mass cooperation. 

The myths that had sustained small groups, those of spirits or tribal totems, were strong enough for just a group, but the larger the groups became, the larger the gods needed to be. 

The human imagination saved us by outpacing our physical evolution. The stories held us together. 

Sargon formed the first great empire Akkadia in 2250 BC. The strong social order let him collect taxes to stand up an army. 

In 221BC The Qin dynasty United China, and Rome came soon after, collecting taxes from 100 million people, allowing it the worlds largest army and the road network that still exists today.

The great imagined orders that allowed this, pre-modern and modern, were Hammurabi’s Code and the Declaration of Independence. 1776BC and 1776AD. 

Hammurabi was the King of Babylon Empire, and he collected rules of order, decreed, he said, by their gods, Enlil, Marduk and Anu (leading gods of the Mesopotamian Pantheon). The code asserts that Babylonian social order is rooted in universal and eternal principles of justice dictated by the gods. It defined people into 3 classes, superior, commoner and slave, of which breaking rules relating to these classes netted different consequences. 

The 13 British colonies had a similar ambition. The Code and the Declaration imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice (equality/hierarchy) even though the only place these exist is within our imagination, and in the myths we tell to one another. 

Our declaration is flawed because the idea of equality is tied to the idea of creation, a Christian myth. We are not all created equal. We do not have immutable rights. 

Birds do not fly because they have a right to, but because they have wings.

The declaration should maybe instead be written like this: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

We believe in these social orders not because they are objectively true, but because believing in them enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are the only way we’ve survived in our current numbers. 

There is no god, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night. 

These subjective imagined orders are constantly at risk of collapse, because the myths they’re propped up on vanish when people stop believing in them. 

People need to believe in a common cause, and always have an enemy. A single priest can do the work of hundreds of soldiers far more cheaply and effectively. 

The way to sustain these imagined orders is by first never admitting that they’re imagined. You also indoctrinate. Everything. Fairy tales, dramas, paintings, songs, etiquette, political propaganda, architecture, recipes, fashion. (Rich kids wear jeans fashionably to demonstrate equality, since jeans are working class attire). These are the three main factors that prevent people from realizing their imagined order exists only in their minds.

1. The imagined order is embedded in the material world. 

- We believe we are individuals. That is imaginary, but it leaps into the brick and mortar world 

- houses are separated by rooms. Children have their own room which typically requires parental permission to enter. Someone growing up in a space like this cant help but imagine themselves a unique individual. 

- Medieval noblemen didn’t believe in individualism. They were told worth was determined by their place in the social hierarchy. They slept in common areas and were told to hold their reputation near and dear over all else. 

- The imagined order shapes our desires.

- Listen to your heart... even though that expression was implanted in our minds by romantic and consumerist myths. 

- Romanticism tells us in order to be fulfilled we must have as many different experiences as we can.

- Consumerism tells us in order to be happy we must buy as many products and services as we can.

- The marriage of the two has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences.’ On which the modern tourism industry is founded.

- The imagined order is inter-subjective.

- Not objective, like radioactivity, or subjective, like the belief of a single individual, but in between, something that lives on in the subjective consciousness of the masses. 

Sapiens, Chapter 7

This chapter was on memory overload, and how as a species were not meant to remember more than what’s already in our head. How we don’t come preprogrammed with most of the things we know, so an external system was needed.

Our imagined social order, for instance, has rules we only know by passing them down socially. They’re not genetic. The brain is limited by:

1. It’s capacity.

2. Once we die, so do our brains.

3. The brain’s adapted to store and process only certain types of information (like where the berries are, what type of shit is poisonous or not, H/G shit).

Because this was a pretty universal limitation, even the agricultural revolution could make us explode only so much. The Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia were the first to figure it out. They did so with the first written signs, which were numbers of a 6- and 10-digit base, and others for representation of physical things. 

At this point the only thing the written language was for was record keeping. It wasn’t invented in order to copy spoken language, but to do things spoken language couldn’t. 

Quipis were used in South America to count by tying various styles of knots into various lengths of rope. This helped amass an empire of 12m in ancient Inca.

When Sumer finally transitioned from a partial script into a full script, the language was called cuneiform. And that was only about 4-5k y/o. This is when we wrote down the Hebrew bible, the Iliad, the Hindu Mahabharata and Buddhist Tripitaka, which had all before then been oral tales. 

What set Sumer apart from other cultures developing written languages simultaneously was that they developed good techniques to archive, catalogue and retrieve those written records. 

They also invested in schools for scribes, clerks, librarians and accountants. 

Language really didn’t take a universal turn until the 9th century AD, when we finally came up with the characters 0-9.

They’re known as Arabic numerals even though they originated in India from the Hindus. The Arabs were just the ones to spread it to the Middle East and Europe once they invaded India. 

Today, our computers have trouble understanding how humans talk, feel and dream, so we teach humans to think feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers. It’s all 1s and 0s until the cubit comes around, then in random. 

Sapiens, Chapter 8

This chapter is about post-agrarian cultural evolutions favoring people it shouldn’t have. Our imagined orders and devised scripts in the face of large populations created hierarchies and make-believe groups.

Aristotle said slaves have a slavish nature, and free people have a free nature.

The rich richly deserve every perk they enjoy is the way privileged people feel. 

Hindus believed gods fashioned the world out of a large primordial being. The sun from its eye, the moon from its brain, the Brahim priests from its mouth, the warriors from its arms and servants from its legs.

The Chinese thought Nu Wa made humans from earth, aristocrats from clean yellow soil and commoners from brown mud.

It’s crazy to think that all castes were created by laws and norms invented in northern India 3k y/o, when today westerners scoff at the idea of racial hierarchy while favoring class hierarchy, not recognizing them for being one in the same.

Hierarchies, however, serve an important function. They provide us with cultural chunking, allowing us to enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted

Talent remains latent in those where it isn’t fostered.

Hierarchy originated as a result of accidental historical circumstances that were then perpetuated and refined over many different generations.

So why did this happen in the first place? Invaders established a stratefied society where they held leading positions. They feared losing their status so they divided the population into castes. 

These few number of castes invited more and more castes, in which, once you were assigned, could only work in and cavort with that caste. 

The Americans know casting very well. The 16th-18th centuries saw us import millions of slaves to work in mines and plantations. We only chose blacks as slaves because Africa was closer, the Middle East already had established a slave trade with them, and because blacks were durable. They’d developed immunity to malaria and yellow fever. Genetic superiority translated to social inferiority!

Once we had black slaves, we went quickly to work justifying why they were inferior. Biologists argued they were less intelligent. Doctors argued they were filthy with disease. Theologians said they descended from ham, son of Noah, and were cursed to have slavish children. 

This struck a chord with idiot us, and after slavery was abolished, the myths that justified it stuck around. People who think slavery is dead see it as a thing that took place during one time, but that’s not true. Two centuries after the 13th and 14th amendments, most black families were far poorer and less educated than white folks. And their children were born that way too. 

Blacks who bootstrapped themselves were thought to be cheaters. everyone knew blacks were stupid and violent, so if they became better off than their white counterparts, they must have taken it from someone else. A black man couldn’t get a job as a teller, so then when all the tellers were later white, white people could say, see, what did we tell you, black people are lazy!

In 1958 Clennon King was sent to a mental asylum for applying for the university of Mississippi. Any black person who thought they could do that must be insane.

American aesthetic culture was then built around white standards of beauty. 

In terms of gender discrimination, culture tends to argue it forbids only the unnatural. The thing is, this idea isn’t drawn from “nature.” It’s drawn from Christian theology, in accordance with the intentions of god who created nature. 

What is something’s natural purpose, even by religious standards. The mouth was meant for eating, but a man can use it to kiss his wife and that is natural. 

Bugs didn’t develop wings to fly, but to increase surface area as a way to collect solar energy. 

Yuval then looks at why men are more powerful. It’s not because of strength, since all military leaders in history have been weak fighters who could build strong social coalitions. 

You do not waste good iron to make nails. 

Men rule because women have wombs, and nature favored aggressive males who could protect and provide for mothers nursing the young. Similarly, nature favored women who were nurturing and submissive. The combination made genes last generations. 

Sapiens, Chapter 9 

This chapter focused on the “arrow of history” and how a lot of societies grew in a similar way. He uses the example of how in medevial Europe we got really good at marrying chivalry with Christianity. People would go to church and nod their heads to treating people well and turning the other cheek, while then boozing after and reinforcing that if anyone were ever to shame you, you should die trying to right the situation.

It’s what fueled the inquisition, the crusades, the knights Templar, and any other way where the savage nature of people could be justified through the guise of missionary acts.

Another example of history’s arrow is the modern political order, which seems to value both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. But they contradict one another. 

“Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those are better off, and guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality.”

In American politics, democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund the poor, infirm and elderly, even if it means infringing on ones freedom to spend their money as they wish. Republicans, want to maximize individual freedom, even if it means the income gap between rich and poor grow wider and the people who’d otherwise be offered assisted healthcare would then not be able to afford it.

This inability to square the two, Yuval argues, is important to successful society. This discord, this dissonance in our thoughts, it causes ideals and values to manifest. It forces our creativity and our ability to re evaluate and critique. 

Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

The consistency we’ve attempted throughout history has caused splintering. Look at what Christianity has done, converting hundreds of millions in a short two thousand years, causing so many splintered sects to rise up. 

Today, we sort of all have come to arrive at the same order. We all recognize our territories as countries and states, we all use the same economic capitalist market forces to shape the globe, the same legality of human rights exists everywhere theoretically, and the same science exists everywhere. 

We have this hang up about authentic culture, even though every piece of what we consider authentic today comes from other places we don’t attribute. Tomatoes in Italy et cetera.

Sapiens, Chapter 10

This chapter is about how money evolved from large cultures. Barter was no longer sustainable for trade between groups who didn’t know each other. It would be impossible for every group to know the value of everything worth bartering, all while keeping the exchange rate in mind. 

Gold and silver were popular to use, not only as currency, but also embossed and stamped with the god or ruler of the people who conquered others. 

Imagine you have these densely populated areas, specialization starts to be more and more prevalent. The rise of cities and kingdoms also gave rise to carpenters, priests, soldiers and lawyers. Each place was also ideal for certain things. Think wine. Why would wine be fermented in a place where it wasn’t great when you could trade your great local wheat for the best wine in its natural conditions a couple towns over. 

Specialization was great, and inevitable, but it also contributed to the need to have something that represented a common value. Enter money, which isn’t coins and banknotes.

Money is anything people are willing to use to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods/services. 

In the us, for instance, we only have $60t in the world, even though we only have $6t in coin. 90% of the worlds value exists only on computer servers. 

With money, people could get anything, just as 15th century prostitutes did when they slept with men for money, something they then went and used to buy indulgences from the catholic church. Motherfucker quit trying to capitalize the church its not recognized here!

People are willing to trade a thing without inherent value when the trust in it exists in our collective imaginations. That’s why money is the most universal and efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. What’s important, though, is that its not just us that believe in the thing, us being you and me and our neighbors. It’s also believed in by our rulers, something we know because their faces and gods name are stamped on each note. 

It makes sense then, since we tie our trust of money to our trust of god or king, why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social, and ideological systems. The signature on the money of a political authority guarantees its value.  

The first known money was barley, measured in the common Sila, which was a weight, which is why in Mesopotamia and in hammerabis code, all crimes were measured in shekels of silver, another measure of weight in grams (8.33 grams). 

As money grew in popularity, the common trust laid the foundation for the unity of the Afro-Asian monetary zone, all into a single economic and political sphere. The gold and silver used by conquistadors to purchase silk porelcain and spice moved the wheels of economic growth in europe and East Asia. 

Sapiens, Chapter 11

Imperialism! The Roman were used to being defeated. They could lose a lot but still win because they were YUGE. 

There were some, though, who they had a tough time with. One was a small mountain town known as Numantia, inhabited by the native Celts. To this day they are considered paragons of heroism and patriotism to all of Spain, to young people mostly. They write comics about Numantian heroes instead of superheroes. These same loyalists tend to also be Roman Catholics, which is funny, because that’s a church whose lead still sits in Rome, whose god prefers to be addressed in Latin. Nothing is really left of Numantian except ruins. Even its story has reached us thanks only to the writings of Roman historians. 

The romans were an empire, and the point of this chapter is to talk about how empires swallow culture, and that’s not necessarily bad.

The British state today has clear borders that cannot be exceeded without altering the fundamental structure and identity of the state. A century ago almost any part of it could have become part of its empire.

An empire is a political order with two main characteristics: you have to rule over a number of distinct peoples, and you have to have flexible borders and a large appetite.

You don’t need a dictator for an empire. Britains empire, the largest in history, was ruled by a democracy. If really doesn’t matter how big it is either, as long as it follows these characteristics. Athens had over 100 formerly independent city states. The Aztecs ruled over 370 tribes. 

Empires are one of the main reasons for reduction in human diversity. It’s been the worlds most common form of political organization for 2500 years because its extremely stable and can easily put down rebellions. 

Empires are better about digesting cultures than they are at directly conquering them. The Numantians, their language, their gods, their myths and legends, eventually though, spoke and worshipped as romans. 

The Middle East has been the world’s hot potato for the last 3000 years, exchanging so many imperial hands. The Jews, Armenians and Georgians are really all that’s left, though not without scars. The political, economic and social practices of modern jews owe more to empires under which they lived the last 2000 years than they do the ancient kingdom of Judaea. 

King David would be utterly bewildered to walk into present-day Jeruselam

- an ultra-orthodox synagogue

- people dressed in Eastern European clothes

- speaking in a German dialect (Yiddish)

- endlessly arguing about the meaning of the Babylonian text (the Talmud)

None of which existed in ancient Judaea.

Why Empires aren’t necessarily evil is because Imperial Elites used the profits of conquest not just to finance armies, but to finance a renaissance. Empires gave us philosophy, art, justice, charity. 

The great historian Tacitus is credited with a great speech of prosperity, something we now suspect was a subtle mouthpiece for what he and other upper class romans thought about their own country. 

Most East Asians speak and dream in the language of the Han empire. 

From the Alaskan Barrow Peninsula to the Straits of Magellan, there are 4 imperial languages: Spanish, English, French and Portuguese. 

About 10m Zulus in South Africa hark back to the Zulu age of glory in the 1800s, even though most of them descend from tribes who fought against the Zulu empire, and were incorporated into it only through bloody military campaign. 

“We’re doing this for your own good!” This was the plea of imperialists. 

The most innovative way of culling a population into submission was the JEWS! The Persian king Cyrus commanded the Jewish exiles in Babylonia be allowed to return to their Judaean homeland and rebuild their temple, even offering financial assistance. 

This new imperial vision would be used by Alexander the Great, who would lose it to the Hellenistic kings, then to the Roman emporers, the Muslim caliphs, the Indian dynasts, the soviet premiers and eventually the American presidents. “We’re doing this for your own good!”

Beyond even this scope, imperialism is viewed through the lens of culture. The Chinese saw times of fragmentation as chaos, times of imperialism as harmonious.

Standardization was key to empires. We all have this idea that over government is serving a mission, to bring third world countries into the wonders of f democracy and human rights. 

Imperialists are adaptive, easily taking ideas norms and traditions from those conquered. The imperial culture of Rome was as Greek as it was Roman. 

In America, a president of Kenyon blood can eat Italian pizza while watching Lawrence of Arabia, a British epic about the Arab rebellion against the Turks. 

Indians learned this lesson by the british too, but learned that adopting to the conquerors got you nothing. Just ask Gandhi, the lawyer.

Empires are so strong that even when they fall, the people still, thousands of years later, speak its language, believe in its Christian god it had adopted from one of its Levantine provinces, and live by the empires laws. 

Many anti-colonial struggles were waged under the banners of self-determination, socialism, human rights, all of which are western legacies. These same people want to purge us of imperialism, which is a naive ideology which serves as disingenuous window-dressing for crude nationalism and bigotry. 

Think about India, whose British occupation murdered millions of its citizens and made slaves into hundreds of millions more. Do you think today the Indians would vote to divest themselves of democracy, English, the railway network, the legal system, cricket and tea on the grounds that they are simply imperial legacies. 

And if they did, wouldn’t the very act of calling for a vote to decide the issue demonstrate their debt to their former overlords. It’s a trap! 

Even if we want to be retards and disavow the evil empire to replace areas with authentic cultures once again, we will be doing nothing but defending the legacy of an older and no less brutal empire. 

Sapiens, Chapter 12

Finally, we make it to the religion chapter. Religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement, and disunion, yet is the 3rd great unifier alongside money and empires. The role of religion has always been to give superhuman legitimacy to the fragile social structures we’ve put in place to maintain societies. Religions are just systems of human norms and values founded on a belief in a superhuman order.

Firstly, they have to have a universal superhuman order true always and everywhere. Second, they must insist on spreading the message. Aka it must be universal and missionary. These religions only began to appear in 1st millennium bc. One of the most important revolutions in history. 

Animists may have forbidden the hunting of a certain fox in a certain area. They are local in that they don’t try to proselytize this practice to another area. What causes the religious revolution was the agricultural revolution, because before farming, people never saw themselves as distinct or even less than animals. 

Farmers, on the other hand, owned and manipulated plants/animals, and could hardly spiritually negotiate with things they considered their possessions. That was the first effect of the religious revolution. 

Taking ownership of plants and animals essentially took away their ability to speak, or rather, for our answer-seeking brains to muzzle them. Instead, fertility, sky and medicine gods cropped up, their role as a mediator between humans and the mute plants/animals. Much of ancient mythology is indeed a legal contract where humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants/animals (first chapters of genesis). Why else would we sacrifice animals, wine and crackers to gods in exchange for harvests and fecund flocks. 

Once we started trading we needed to access entities whose power could encompass a whole empire. These religions were controlled by a group of gods (fertility, rain, war) and we could sacrifice to them in exchange for victory. Polytheism, however, didn’t dampen how integral fairies and spirits were to religion. The king may sacrifice a dozen rams to the war god, while the peasant can still pray to a fig fairy for her son’s health. 

Whereas animists saw everyone as equals, polytheists saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans. Our prayers and sacrifices determined the fate of the entire ecosystem. The funadamental insight of polytheism is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests/biases. Thus the gods that the gods answered up to were not ones that humans prayed to, with the exception of maybe the Sadhu Hindus. 

The gods we deal with are partial gods, with partial powers, and so they are biased to human devotion. Since the power is small, there must be many that possess it, which is how you get people on board with their being many gods. The nice thing about believing in a high god while working mostly with the low gods is that devotees of one have a better time accepting devotees of another.

When Rome conquered, it expected subjects to respect their gods, but not discount their own. The only god they refused to tolerate was the monotheistic and evangelizing god of Christians. When the Christians refused to pay respect to other gods, the Romans fucking crushed them. Romans killed only a few thousand Christians for being retards, whereas Christians are over the course of the next 1500 years responsible for killing millions of their own. 

Protestants and Catholics are a good example. The pope held celebrations after 10k Protestants had been slaughtered in their homes. More Christians were killed by other Christians in 24 hours than all of who Rome killed of them in its entire existence. 

The first monotheistic religion prayed to Aten in Egypt. The jews thought their high power had biases and cared for this dingy little shithole on the Middle East. For this reason of exclusivity, Judaism has not been a missionary religion. 

Christianity was monotheism’s breakthrough. If god was made flesh in Jesus and died to save people of their sins, then the whole world needed to know! In this crazy twist this dumb little shanty sect took over the Roman Empire. It was a model for another monotheism to arise in the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century. Islam. Monotheists, then, inherently discredit all other faiths as they believe they have the one answer. 

The first century saw barely any of them, and by 1000 it had half the world. What’s funny is that as animism survived in polytheism, polytheism survived in monotheism. Christianity just calls their pantheon by a different name. They have patron saints. They don’t merely resemble polytheistic gods, they often the same ones in disguise. 

Polytheism bred not just monotheism but also pared down into dualism. People like dualism because it answers the question of why the world has evil. Christians like to say god allows the devil and temptation as a way to give free will, but if he knew a person would use their free will to choose evil, and that as a result they would be punished, why create them at all.

How can monotheists accept the dualistic devil when its not mentioned anywhere in the old Testament. You either believe in one omnipotent god, or two opposing powers, neither of which can be omnipotent. Abrahamics even say god needs our help to vanquish the devil. Aka jihads and crusades. 

Belief in heaven and hell was also absent from the Old Testament. It never claimed ‘souls’ lived on after death. The average Christian believed in a monotheistic god, a dualist devil, a polytheist saint, and an animist ghost. This combination gives a better term to what most religious people are. Syncretism. 

natural religions were different because their figures were human, not gods, like Buddha. I person who doesn’t crave cannot suffer (nirvana). 

- monotheism: god exists: what does he want from me?

- buddhism: suffering exists: how do I escape it?

Some still worshipped their gods. Several developed their own pantheons, not of gods, but of those who could achieve enlightenment. 

The modern age has witnessed a rise in new natural law religions like Liberalism and communism. Theist religions focus on the worship of gods. Humanist religions focus on the worship of our species. The most important sect today is liberal humanism. It’s funny because the legacy of liberal belief in free and sacred nature of humans is a Christian belief. 

All humans are equal = all souls are equal 

Sapiens, Chapter 13

This is a really short chapter wrapping up the religious revolution. About how commerce, empires and god brought us into the global world, but that that might not have necessarily been a great thing for people.

What’s clear is that it was at least inevitable. The why is what isn’t as clear, as in why did the Roman emperor Constantine decide to abandon the Roman pantheon in favor of Christianity. 

People, historians less so, seem to be very deterministic with a hindsight fallacy about why we got to where we got. Determinism is that easy answer our minds are always seeking. To acknowledge a lack of determinism is really saying that we accept the coincidence of history, which people dislike.

Yuval calls history a chaotic system. Specifically, he says history is a level two chaotic system.

- Level 1: Chaos that doesn’t react to predictions (like weather).

- Level 2: Chaos that responds to predictions of chaos, which makes it impossible to predict accurately. Like stocks or the market.

People mistakenly think we study history to know the future, but that’s false. We study it to widen our horizons. To understand our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. 

Yuval argues there’s absolutely no proof human well-being improves as history rolls along (Steven Pinker would disagree). 

He argues that ideologies and cultures are parasites, because they live in our minds across time. An idea can compel a person to devote their life spreading that idea, even at the price of death. They’re mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and therefore take advantage of the people infected by them. 

This is called memetics: Cultural evolution is based on the replication of cultural information aka memes, and successful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human costs.

Sapiens, Chapter 14

In this chapter Yuval discusses the discovery of ignorance. He starts off with some stats. How there are 7 billion people on earth today producing 60t worth of goods and services, compared to 250b 500 years ago. We consumed 1500 trillion calories a day, whereas 500 years ago it was only 13t. 

Part of this changed in 1522 when Magellan circled the globe.

It was only in 1674 when a human eye first saw a microorganism. Anton van Leeuwenhoek was startled to learn about a whole other world of creatures. 

In 1945, we detonated the first atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The whole of human existence has always been to preserve existing capabilities rathe than acquiring new ones, so it was weird for government and wealthy patrons to allocate funds to education and scholarship. It became a positive feedback loop, however, when we could research, produce knowledge that could construct nuclear power stations, which could provide cheap electricity to American industries, who could then pay taxes to the US government for those cheap utilities, and the government could use those taxes to finance further research into nuclear physics. 

The whole chapter is pretty much an argument that the scientific revolution was really an ignorance revolution, because for the first time in human history we were able to admit that we didn’t have all the answers. Knowing this allowed us to start asking the right questions, which inevitably led us to answer some of those questions we couldn’t have otherwise answered. 

What this admission does, though, is extend to the shared myths that enable millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. Science itself has to rely on religious and ideological beliefs to justify and finance its research. One thing that’s made it possible for modern social orders to hold together is the spread of an almost religious belief in technology and in the methods of scientific research, which have replaced, to some extent, the belief in absolute truths.

Earlier theories usually formatted their theories in terms of stories, whereas modern science used mathematics. People who don’t know science wouldn’t prophecize scientific things. 

In 1687 Isaac Newton published the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. He showed the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. 

In 1744, two Presbyterian clergymen in Scotland set up a life insurance fund for clergy widows. They had to be able to predict how many clergymen would die each year, something they didn’t answer through prayer, but through solicitation of a mathematician, and namely through use of the recently formulated law of large numbers. Today their fund is one of the largest in the world. 

They were the foundation not just for actuarial science, but also the science of demography, which is the cornerstone on which Darwin built his theory of evolution. While there aren’t equations to predict what kind of organism will evolve under a specific set of conditions, geneticists use probability calculation to compute the likelihood that a particular mutation will spread in a given population. Probabilistic models have become central to economics, sociology, psychology, political science and other studies. 

The real test of knowledge is not in whether something is true, but whether it empowers us. Truth is then a poor test of knowledge. The real test is utility. 

We often misinterpret the inter connectivity of things, like the military industrial complex and scientific research and technological production. 

Knowledge by itself, like when china invented gunpowder as a theoretical way to extend life, isn’t worth much. It needs proper utility, as when 600 years after its invention it was finally used to fire projectiles from canons. 

Jesus thought he was above poor people. “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. Buy you will not always have me.” He thought poverty was an unchangeable fact, even though now we know that’s not true. 

Technology may soon enable us to become a-mortal (undying in the absence of physical trauma)

The main thing that leads innovation is money. Galileo, Columbus and Darwin could never do as much as those who donate to causes can now. Most scientific things are funded because the benefactors believe what they’re doing can lead to some upper hand somewhere else. Science only explains how things work, not how they should be in the future. Science is unable to set its own priorities, which might be the flip side to the ignorance coin. Research can only flourish in alliance with some religion/ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influence the scientific agenda and determined what to do with the discoveries. 

These are things we need to account for. Ideological, political and economic forces shape physics, biology and sociology, pushing them in certain directions while neglecting others. 

The feedback loop between science, empire, and capital has arguably been history’s chief engine for the past half millennium. 

Sapiens, Chapter 15

This chapter is about marrying science and empire. About how some simple trigonometry was all it took to figure out how close to the sun we were. Scientists were dispatched to most corners of the world to figure it out. It was an expedition placed under the command of Captain James Cook. 

During the time when their ships left, it was expected that about half the crew wouldn’t return due to scurvy. Between the 16th-18th centuries, its estimated to have taken out 2 million sailors. A British physician James Lind, figured out that citrus could fix this, since a sailors main diet was beef jerky. Cook had his crew eat fruits and vegetables whenever they landed and they didn’t lose a single man.

This discovery contributed to the British control of the world’s oceans and send armies to the other end of the world. Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand. All bye-bye. Their peoples either wiped out or assimilated. The tasmanians were made literate and proselytized. After being mainly killed, their skulls were put on display in a museum. 

Cook went where he went protected by a fleet. The scientific revolution and modern imperialism were often one in the same thing, but the question becomes, why was it europe?

Not long before cooks expedition, europe was still in the backwaters of the Mediterranean world. Little happened there. Even Rome derived most of its wealth from its North African, Balkan, and Middle Eastern provinces. 

Northern Europe only escaped being conquered because it was considered desolate and not useful. 

It only gained momentum as a result of its ability to travel safer over water, and between 1500 and 1750 it became master of the outer world (two American continents and oceans).

They only took power recently, in between 1750 and 1850, when they humiliated Asian powers and conquered their peoples. By 1900 they controlled most of the worlds economy and territory. In 1950 Europe and the US accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China’s has been reduced to 5%. 

Today, even though we might not want to admit it, most of the world acted, dressed and thought as they did as a result of the Europeans. They all view politics, medicine, war and economics through European eyes, listen to music written in European modes with words in European languages. Even China, which has reestablished itself, is built on a European model of production and finance. 

They exploded more than anyone else as also a result of their exploding infrastructure. They opened the worlds first commercial railroad in 1830 and in 1850 they had 40k kilometers of railroads, whereas the combined total of Asian, Africa and South America was 4K kilometers. In 1880 the Chinese empire did not operate a single railroad, and so they were behind. 

It’s not like they lacked the know how to do it, they lacked the values and myths and judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the west. These things could not be copies and internationalized quickly. 

Things spread though, and just as Islam began as an Arab monopoly but taken over by the Turks and Persians, so too modern science began as a European specialty but has become a multi-ethic enterprise. 

A short aside about the first space mission tells of a Native American wishing to give a message to the moon god. Once back at nasa, the astronauts ask what the man was trying to have them say: Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.

Columbus didn’t believe he’d reached America. He called the people he found in the Bahamas “Indians,” thinking he’d reached the East Indies in the Indonesian archipelago. He was a medival man, believing the world can’t change. Between 1502 and 1504, Amerigo Vespucci, the first modern man, published two papers saying the lands Columbus discovered were new lands, so a few years later, a mapmaker named Martin Waldseemuller published an updated map with Amerigo’s named on it. There’s poetic justice that a quarter of the world, and two of its seven continents, are named after a little-known Italian simply because he had the courage to say, “I don’t know. 

The reason the british empire was able to conquer so much was because other places were simply not interested in conquering. They thought they knew what the whole world was. Once they got to the ancient empires, they were wiped out by the diseases the Europeans brought. Because they were gone, the Spanish colonists began importing African slaves to fill the vacuum. 

The Aztecs allowed, under false pretense, Cortez to meet the emporer Montezuma, whereby he then killed his guards, made him his puppet for months, then executed him and destroyed the empire. Spaniards kept arriving to Mexico and Cuba. When the locals realized what was happening, it was too late, and a 100 years later the native popuations of the americas shrunk by 90%.

It’s funny that no conquest was ever sent over from the Islamic world, china, or India. The first non-European country to try it was Japan in 1942, and we know how that turned out. 

For 300 years Europeans enjoyed undisputed mastery in America and Oceania, in the Atlantic and the Pacific. 

The difference between these conquerers is that when the Muslims conquered India, they didn’t study Indian history or culture or soils or their fauna. When the british conquered India, the did all of it. 

Through their studies, they discovered ancients scripts from when the Muslims did invade, and they were able to decipher them through the help of Rawlinson. Without him we would not have known much about the fate of the ancient Middle Eastern empires. 

Linguistics always received enthusiastic imperial support. The European empires thought that to govern effectively they must know the languages and cultures of their subjects.

It’s easy to see that empires could be argued to be evil and that they could also be argued to be benefactors to nations behind the times. 

These empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be labeled good or evil. They created the whole world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them. 

On the flip side, their biologists, anthropologists and linguists provided scientific proof Europeans were superior to all other races, and therefore have the right to rule over them. 

Jones, the Sanskrit scholar, noticed that the earliest speaker who had invaded India more than 3k y/o called themselves Arya. 

- Speakers of the earliest Persian language called themselves Airiia. 

It made scholars think that the people who spoke the primordial language gave birth to Persian and Sanskrit must’ve called themselves Aryans. 

Next, these scholars wedded the linguistic theory with Darwin’s theory of natural selection saying aryans were not just a linguistic group but a biological entity. They laid the foundations for the world. The argument was that those who conquered India and Persia intermarried and watered down their genes, while those in Europe did not. 

- this is why Europeans had managed to conquer the world, why they deserved to rule, and why they shouldn’t mix with other races. 

People continue to deal with this battle of racism, not realizing it’s been replaced in imperial ideology with ‘culturism.’

The French, the Dutch, the Austrians, all have groups that say western culture is shaped by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas the Muslim culture is nothing like that, with hierarchical politics, fanaticism, and misogyny. Since they’re so different, they shouldn’t be allowed to enter our country or theirs. 

Sapiens, Chapter 16

This chapter is about the capitalist creed. Yuval talks about how the only thing you need to understand economics is the concept of growth, and how the modern economy has been growing exponentially recently. It’s significant because for most of history the economy stayed the same size. Sure, it increased with population growth and settlement of new lands, but beyond that it didn’t. It didn’t because we didn’t have credit.

It’s the idea that trust is why we have a growing economy, the idea that something given now will be able to repaid with interest in the future because the future is always better than the present. Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, meaning 90% of all money is not covered by coins or notes. Trust is the sole backing of most of the world’s money. 

Before trust, money could only represent and convert things in the present, which limited growth and hampered anyone’s ability to finance new enterprises. This imaginary trust we began to use to represent goods in the future was a type of money called credit. 

Of course, credit arrangements have existed in one form or another since Sumer, but no one knew how to use it.

Wealth has historically been tied to sin. If one bakery does well, it means it does so at the expense of another bakery, which is bad. You could cut the pie many different ways, but the pie never grew any bigger. The idea of progress, on the other hand, is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. In economic terms, it meant that inventions and discoveries and developments could increase production. Over the last 500 years, with the scientific revolution and the admission that we don’t know everything, we began to put more trust in the future. This trust created credit. This credit brought real economic growth. This growth strengthened the trust in the future and opened the way for more credit. A cycle.

This in parts stems from Adam Smith’s manifesto on economics, the wealth of nations, wherein he said an entrepreneur who has profits should commit those profits to hire more employees, which would increase production, which would give him more profits to hire more assistants and so on. The idea is that the increase in profits of private entrepreneurs is the basis for the collective increase in wealth and prosperity. 

It’s one of the most revolutionary ideas in history, because he’s saying greed is good, by getting richer i benefit everyone. Egoism is altruism. If i am poor, you will too be poor because i cannot buy your goods/services. If i am rich, you too will be rich since now you can sell me something. a crucial part of this new capitalist economy was the emergence of this ethic: profits reinvested into production. The profits of production must be reinvested into production.

That’s why its called ‘capitalism.’ Capital consists of money, good and resources that are invested in production, where as wealth is buried in the backyard or wasted on unproductive activities. People used to believe production was stagnant so it wouldn’t make sense to reinvest profits in production if it would stay the same. 

Capitalism was so fervently adopted because it gave an account of how money worked and promoted the idea that reinvesting profits into production leads to fast economic growth, and justice, freedom and happiness are all said to depend on this growth. 

Ask a capitalist how to bring justice and freedom to Zimbabwe or Afghanistan and you’ll be lectured on how economic affluence and a thriving middle class are essential for stable democratic institutions, and about the need to inculcate tribesman in the values of free enterprise, thrift and self-reliance. 

Now this growth depends largely on research. Capitalism happens in the lab.

From its roots, though, capitalist credit rose from the European empire. It was secondary in china, India and the Muslim world. These merchants and bankers may have thought along capitalist lines, but the kings and generals tended to despise mercantile thinking. In europe though it was adopted by the kings until the merchants became the ruling elite. 

Columbus tried to get financing for a fleet in 1484 to find a new trade route to east Asia. He was rejected time and time again, until he caught the attention fo Isabella and Ferdinand, rulers of Spain. Their financing of his trip is why Spain conquered America first, because of the magic of imperial capitalism:

- credit financed new discoveries

- discoveries led to colonies

- colonies provided profits

- profits built trust

- trust translated into more credit.

This is why europe thrived and the rest of the world fell behind. 

When the risk seemed to high to give credit, potential investors turned to limited liability joint-stock companies, who collected money from a lot of investors, each risking only a small amount of his capital, and having no cap placed on the profits they might receive.

This allowed them to raise large amounts of credit on short notice and put it at the disposal of private entrepreneurs and governments. It financed explorations and conquests better than any kingdom or empire. 

In the 1500s, Spain was the most powerful state in Europe, also ruling chunks or north and South America, the Philippine islands, and a strings of bases along the coasts of Africa and Asia. In 1568, the Protestant Dutch began to revolt against the Catholic Spanish. The Dutch bughers, who didn’t like land combat so they hired mercenary armies to fight for them. Financiers extended the Dutch enough credit for armies and fleets, giving them control of world trade routes which yielded handsome profits. Amsterdam was becoming the continents financial Mecca. They were able to get financing because they had a good history of loan repayment, and they had an independent judicial system that protected private rights. 

Capital tends to trickle away from dictatorial states that fail to defend individaul rights. People would smuggle their wealth out of Spain to reinvest in the Netherlands for this reason, shifting the power and Spain’s ability to finance its war.

They financed conquest by getting loans, and also selling shares in their companies that entitled their holders to receive a portion of the company’s profits. If you thought a company would make a big profit you could instead buy some from the people who owned the at a premium. If you bought them and the company was doing bad, you could to unload them at a lower cost.

The resulting trade led to the estlishment in most major European cities of stock exchanges. One big one in Dutch was VOC, and VOC as a joint stock company financed the conquest of Indonesia. It’s thousands of islands were all ruled by independent parties, so VOC went and armed its merchant ships with canons and mercenaries and even built forts. They eventually became a VOC colony over which they ruled for 200 years.

While they ruled the Indian Ocean, the Dutch West Indies Company, plied the Atlantic. In order to control trade on the Hudson River, WIC built a settlement called new Amsterdam, which was constantly attacked by Indians and the british, who would capture it in 1664. The british changed its name to New York. 

The remains of the wall built by the WIC are today paved over by the world’s most famous street. Wall Street. 

As the 1600s wound down, France and Britain were at odds, and the French behavior was notorious, as is outlined in the Mississippi bubble. In 1717 the Mississippi valley offered few attractions, but the company spread tales of it having riches and boundless opportunities. People fell for it and the share prices skyrocketed. Once people caught on and it began to drop, the Bank of France came in to stabilize prices, but it too ran out of money. Then France authorized money to be printed to buy additional shares. Many investors who didn’t escape committed suicide.

The way the Mississippi Company used its political clout to manipulate share prices and fuel the buying frenzy caused the public to lose faith in the French banking system and the financial know-how of the French king. France could therefore not secure loans, had to pay high interest on the ones it could, and in order to finance its current debts fell into another cycle. The solution came in part in the form of the French Revolution. 

The nationalization of Indonesia by the Dutch crown and India by the British crown was not the end of the relationship between capitalism and empire. 

The British East India Company made people fortunes by exporting heroin to china, addicting millions of citizens, which fucked the country economically. In the 1830s the government issued a ban on drug trafficking, but Britain ignored it. China started dumping supply lines, and in 1840 Britain declared war on china in the name of free trade. With their superior military they wiped the floor with china, and china surrendered, letting Britain continue to pump opium in, and gained control of Hong Kong as their base of operations all the way until 1997. In the late 1800s, 40m Chinese 10% of its pop were opium addicts. 

All this is why today a country’s credit rating is more important that its natural resources. An oil-rich dictatorship has a much lower rating than a country without natural resources that has a free government, which is why dictatorships stay poor and free countries grow rich. 

Capitalists argue that capital should be free to influence politics but not the other way around (i.e., a government can impose heavy taxes on industrialists and use the money to give lavish unemployment benefits) It would be better, capitalists argue, that industrialists should be taxed less so that they can open new factories with extra profit and hire the unemployed. 

Private investors will invest their money where it will make the most money, whereas governments will tax the people making money. This sounds like a good idea until you realize industrialists fucking suck. For example, the rising of European capitalism went hand in hand with the Atlantic slave trade.

There was much plantation and mining to be had in America, but to pay laborers to do it wouldn’t water down profits. From 16th-19th centuries, 10mm African slaves were imported, 70% working on sugar plantations. Millions more died during wars waged to capture them.

Middle class Europeans looking for an investment bought shares of slave-trading companies. relying on this money, they would buy ships, sail to Africa, capture Africans, and transport them to America, selling them to slave owners, then using the proceeds to purchase sugar and cotton and cocoa which then could sell back to the european people for a good price. Throughout the 18th century this was an annualized 6% return for investors. 

Religions kill millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism kills millions out of cold indifference and greed.

King Leopold II of Belgium bought the Congo under the guise of a humanitarian, then enslaved all their people, costing the lives of 6m people even in the 20th century. Capitalist greed was only curtailed by the fear of communism, but even still those conquered worked more for less than they did 500 years prior. 

Now, capitalism has created a world that nobody but a capitalist is capable of running. We hate it, but cannot live without it. 

Sapiens, Chapter 17

The wheels of industry is about making finite resources infinite. In the 1700s the global vehicle industry relied on wood and iron, until it found all these other materials for manufacture it didn’t know about before. 

A similar revolution grew out of the imperial revolution and trade: The industrial revolution. 

People knew how to make use of a variety of energy sources. They could burn wood to smelt or heat or bake. They could use the wind to move around or grind stone by capturing it in a mill, the same with water. But the resources weren’t always around, and more than that, the resources didn’t convert. Heat wasn’t used to grind stone and wind wasn’t used to smelt. The only thing capable of converting energy were living beings. 

We all pretty much relied on the sun. Since the sun gave the plants energy, and we used the plants to feed ourselves and our animals. Solar power => muscle energy was our prime fuel throughout history. 

So human growth was dependent on the cycle of plants and the cycle of the sun. When it was cold, wheat didn’t grow, so graineries were empty. Because graineries were empty, tax collectors were idol. Because tax collectors were idol, kings had trouble funding their campaigns and soldiers were listless. 

The piston in the coal mine changed that, once we realized water heat could produce movement. This was moved from the mines to revolutionize textile production, so at the same time we needed an infrastructure to transport our surplus of cheap textiles, they also moved the steam piston to the iron rail. In 1825 we made the first train. It wasn’t much longer before physicists learned immense energy was stored in atoms. 

We learned to discover there was no limit to the amount of energy at our disposal. Rather, the only limit we have is our own ignorance. 

The suns energy, in fact, gives us a lot more than we or plants use (3m exojoules compared to 3k exojoules in use by plants and humans today).

Learning how to harness and convert energy effectively solved the other problem that slows economic growth - the scarcity of raw materials. For decades, aluminum was more valuable that gold, until we devised a way to separate aluminum from its ore. 

A Jewish scientist in Germany figured out a way to produce ammonia just using the air in order to aid in making explosives. This was in 1908. Some believe if not for his discovery, Germany would have been forced to surrender long before 1918, and yet Huber won a Nobel prize in chemistry. 

The progression of all of this industry is the mechanization of animals. The length and quality of farm animals existence today is determined by the profits and losses of business corporations. The cow is thought of as just the middle that takes in raw materials and produces a commodity. 

Just as the Atlantic slave trade didn’t stem from hatred toward Africans, the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity. 

The basic lesson of evolutionary psychology is that a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction. The great tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care to tend to objective needs of animals whole neglecting their subjective needs. 50b farm animals are slaughtered annually, and now for the first time in human history, supply is beginning to outstrip demand. A new problem was born: Who is going to buy all this stuff. Enter consumerism.

Consumerism sees products and services as a positive thing, encouraging people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves by slowly over consuming. Frugality is the disease to be cured. 

Manufacturers deliberately design short term goods and invent new and unnecessary models of perfectly satisfactory products that we must purchase in order to stay ‘in.’

Shopping is a pastime and consumer goods have become essential mediators in relations between family and friends. 

Christmas is now a shopping festival. Memorial Day is a way to have people buy sales to virtue signal that they support the troops. 

Each year the us population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world, and obesity is a double victory. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products, getting the double dip. 

The rich used to spend while the poor were frugal, though now the model is flipped on its head. The rich save and invest while the poor spend and go into debt. Capitalism and consumerism are two side of the same coin. It’s the first religion people can actually follow the rules of, and we know we’ll be rewarded with heaven because we see others living it on TV.

Sapiens, Chapters 18, 19 and 20

Chapter 18 is about a permanent revolution, making a distinction between what many call the destruction of nature. Something that is really just change, since nature cant be destroyed. Ex: 65m y/o an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but opened the way for mammals. 

Even in our specic timeline, the industrial revolution turned the timetable and the assembly line into a template for almost all human activities. After factories adopted them, the time frames on human behavior was mapped onto schools, hospitals, governments and grocery stores.

It spread because of public transportation. The trains needed to get people to where they needed to be at an exact, specific time. It was a difference since back then in Britain each city had its own local time, until 1847 when train companies but their heads together. In 1880 the British government finally made everyone conform to the same timeline in Greenwich. It was the first time in history a population was to live according to an artificial clock rather than the one provided by the sun.

Today, a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country. 

This social upheaval was dwarfed by the collapse of the family and the local community by the state and the market. Whereas before, people got their resources from those they knew, the state and market said “become an individual” and we couldn’t refuse.

- marry whoever you want without parental consent!

- take whatever job suits you even if your elders frown on it!

- live wherever you want even if you can’t always make it to family dinner!

You are no longer dependent on your family. We will provide you with food, shelter, education, health, welfare, employment, pension, insurance, protection. 

The state and the market have replaced the function of the mother and the father. This is only possible through the original idea the book talked about, the idea that we are the dominant species due to our ability to our ability to share collective fictions. The nation is the imagined community of the state. the consumer tribe is the imagined community of the market. 

The Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, and Iraqi nation borders were drawn in the sand, decided by British and french diplomats. 

We all define ourselves by what imagined communities we’re a part of.

We change so much and we see more war than ever but we’re in fact in one of the most peaceful times in human history. After 9/11, more people would commit suicide than be killed by others. 

It was kingdoms and empires strengthening that reined in communities and decreased levels of violence. Since 1945, no independent country recognized by the UN has been conquered and wiped off the map. 

Chapter 19 is about living happily ever after. About how our societies determine our happiness.

- Nationalists: political self-determination is essential for out happiness.

- Communists: everyone would be blissful under the dictatorship of the proletariat. 

- Capitalists: only the free market can ensure happiness.

our progressions do not necessarily equate to happiness. Farming made us work harder for a less diverse diet. Granted, we did reduce family, war, and international violence.

Today, if we accept what animal rights activists say, we’re responsible for the greatest crime in history. 

The generally accepted definition of happiness is subjective well-being. 

Illness decreases happiness in the short term if it doesn’t involve ongoing, debilitating pain. 

Family and community seem to impact happiness more than money and health, marriage particularly. Really, happiness just depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective experiences, which is bad, because when things improve, expectations balloon and consequently eve dramatic improvements in objective conditions can leave us dissatisfied. 

It’s age-old to understand that that being happy with what you already have is more important than getting more of what you already want. We’re bad at recognizing the happiness of those who came before us because we cant help but putting ourselves in their shoes. 

Happiness is hard with mommy and daddy being the state and the market because where before the standard of beauty was set by the handful of people who lived next door, today the media and the fashion industry expose us to unrealistic standards. The most gorgeous people are found and paraded before our eyes. No wonder no one is happy with the way they look.

When we break happiness down to the chemical level we see that we’re just interested in is more pleasure and less pain. We’re not built to be happy or miserable, they only play a role in evolution to the extent that they encourage or discourage survival and reproduction. 

Evolution provided pleasant rewards for males who spread their genes. Otherwise why would we bother. 

Daniel kahneman saw that people viewed happiness not as how they felt in the moment but in seeing their life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile. 

“If you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how.”

Happiness might better be defined as being able to synchronize personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. Like liberalism sanctifying the subjective feelings of individuals. We’re raised on slogans of do what feels good and believe happiness is a subjective feeling and each individual knows best whether they are happy or miserable. This is a view unique to liberalism. 

Buddhism says instead that good or bad feelings are equally fleeting and our suffering is derived from being stuck on either.