Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens
There is no way I could possibly do this book justice in 300 words. I have a report of this on my website around 30,000 words and that still doesn’t feel like enough. This book tells dozens of capital T truths, but I'll just share one.
World-renowned Historian Yuval Noah Harari explores our roots. We harness fire, changing caloric chemistry, affording our greedy guts to shorten and conserve energy for the hungry pre-frontral cortex. Bipedalism narrows the female hips which necessitates earlier births which necessitates prolonged rearing which necessitates genes favoring those capable of forming strong social ties because the malleable young can be shaped through socialization. Luckily, pre-vocal language is encouraged by the strong haptic language our nerve dense hands had time to develop while standing on two feet. Language develops from hand to mouth as more a means of norm-establishing gossip and story-telling than it's original function as a way to signal danger.
Here in 2021 it’s more evident than ever that the brain didn’t develop to scrutinize fact. It developed to follow any who spoke with conviction. This is such a pitiful review but what’s been popularized out of Harari’s holy writ is the understanding that myth, made possible by some of what I just described, is what's allowed our species to take over (if briefly) the world. It’s ironic. We dominated this planet because we’re the only species who can believe in things that don’t exist.
Our imagined realities are what’s enabled mankind to transcend small group cohesion to large group cohesion. A monkey may use its hands to launch poop at some spf-stained suburbanite susan, and although it can both lie and believe in lies, it can never be made to believe that if it sacrifices a gifted banana now, it’ll be granted endless bananas in some heavenly primate paradise. Only humans are built to believe not only fictions, but collective ones.
Review: 100%. Species Prognosis: Deific delusions that are unfortunately necessary, often benign, and to be removed ONLY when inflamed, like the impotent appendix. Delusions got us here. If we're not careful they'll also get us all to the nonexistent hereafter too.