Yuval Harari
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Historian and author of Sapiens
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Claims by Yuval Harari (20 of 29)
Discovery of Ignorance Powered Science
Pre-modern cultures believed they already had all important answers in scripture, removing the incentive to seek new knowledge; the scientific revolution's most important discovery was ignorance—admitting that many important questions had no known answer—which created the incentive to seek new knowledge and enabled humans to solve problems like plagues and famine previously thought to be insoluble parts of the natural order.
Positive-Sum Growth Overturned Zero-Sum Thinking
For most of history people experienced the world as zero-sum, believing one person or kingdom could grow richer only by making another poorer, but Adam Smith and others introduced the revolutionary—simultaneously economic, ethical, and religious—idea that the whole pie can grow so everyone can profit at once; this insight has so far proven correct for humans even if not for other animals, yet remains very hard to grasp.
Luxuries Become Necessities Over Time
Throughout history luxuries tend to become necessities as people become convinced they cannot live without them, which is especially problematic because if everyone in China, India, and Africa attained the average American standard of living—big houses, SUVs, vacations abroad—global ecology would collapse under present technology, forcing a stark choice between billions remaining unhappy and destroying the planet.
History Lessons Cannot Be Simply Repeated
The common idea that we study history to repeat past good decisions and avoid bad ones never works, because the present and future are so different from anything that happened before that no useful generalizations or practical decisions can be reliably drawn from past patterns.
Animal Cooperation Is Genetically Rigid
Ants and bees cooperate but only rigidly, in a manner predetermined by their genetic code; they cannot reinvent their social systems overnight (e.g. execute the queen and establish a republic), whereas humans can change social systems within a year without any DNA change, simply by changing the stories they believe—as in the French and American Revolutions.
Cooperation Networks Beat Superior Numbers
Sapiens' decisive advantage over Neanderthals and megafauna was not superior tools (both used fire, spears, and stone tools) but the ability to cooperate in large networks of hundreds or thousands, evidenced by long-distance trade and elaborate chieftain burials from 30-40,000 years ago, whereas Neanderthals lived in small bands of 30-50.
Power Did Not Translate Into Wellbeing
Humans have an amazing capacity to acquire power but are poor at translating it into happiness and wellbeing; using objective measures like life expectancy and child mortality there was essentially no correlation between power and wellbeing until roughly the early 19th century, and even the modest correlation of the last 200 years is accompanied by problematic developments that prevent declaring the problem solved.
Science and Empire Were Two Sides of a Coin
For most of the last 500 years science and empire were two sides of the same coin—European empires could not have conquered the world without modern science, and modern science was developed largely thanks to imperial investment—sharing a mindset of exploring and conquering, studying things not merely to know but to control them, as exemplified by Darwin sailing on a Royal Navy military mapping expedition rather than a scientific one.
Capitalism Delivers Its Promises More Than Other Religions
Compared to most religions, which promise paradise only in an unverifiable afterlife, capitalism promises a paradise on earth and actually delivers many of its promises—helping overcome famine, plague, and even war—making it perhaps the most successful religion in history, believed in by Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Hindus alike, while also being responsible for terrible collective and individual harms like ecological destruction.
Agriculture Was a Trap for Individuals
Agriculture was a huge step forward for the collective (enabling cities and empires) but a trap for the average individual: peasants worked harder at bodily and mentally tougher tasks, ate a more monotonous and nutrient-poor diet, suffered more infectious diseases from domesticated animals and unhygienic villages, and lived under steep new social hierarchies of exploitation—making the average peasant's life worse than that of earlier hunter-gatherers.
Capitalism Reversed the Ethics of Desire
Where societies historically assumed individuals must be disciplined to settle for what they have in order to maintain social harmony, capitalism's ethical revolution reversed this by encouraging people to want more and more—holding that greed and wealth are good and that egoism is altruism—because the greatest threat to the system is people settling for what they have, which would stop the growth the system requires.
Fiction Enables Large-Scale Human Cooperation
Humankind controls the world primarily due to its ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers, and the basis of all large-scale human cooperation is fiction, mythology, and storytelling—since no other animal can be convinced to act on a shared imagined story like heaven, only humans build cathedrals or go on Crusades.
Cognitive Revolution Made Sapiens Significant
Until about 70,000 years ago humans were ecologically insignificant animals, but in East Africa Homo sapiens suddenly began cooperating in larger numbers and producing art, religion, and large-scale politics, then spread worldwide—reaching Australia ~50,000 years ago and the Americas ~15,000 years ago—within an evolutionarily short time.
Trade Requires Trust Built on Shared Fiction
Trade is not purely pragmatic because it requires trusting a stranger who could cheat or kill you; a shared religion, ideology, or invented common ancestor creates the basis for trust, which is why no animal but Sapiens trades and why all documented Sapiens trade networks rested on fictions—and modern money operates the same way.
All Money Is Made of Trust
Modern money has no intrinsic value—it can be gold, silver, paper, or electronic data—but functions because everyone trusts a shared authority like the Federal Reserve and the stories it tells; at the deepest level all money is made simply of trust, and over 90% of dollars exist only as electronic data.
Human Arrival Correlated With Megafauna Extinction
Beginning about 50,000 years ago there is a correlation between the arrival of Homo sapiens in a new region and the mass extinction of large animals—over 90% of Australia's big animals disappeared shortly after arrival ~50,000 years ago, and about 70% of America's large creatures vanished within 2-3,000 years of human arrival ~15,000 years ago, though this could be correlation rather than causation.
Sapiens Drove Other Human Species Extinct
Until roughly 60,000 years ago the world hosted many human species (like the Neanderthals in Europe), but as Homo sapiens spread from East Africa all other human species disappeared within a short time—probably the most thorough ethnic cleansing in history, accomplished with more or less violence.
Empires Bootstrapped Money via Taxation
European empires built trust in valueless paper money among colonized African populations by demanding that taxes be paid in that money and using violence against non-compliers, creating an initial need for the currency that established its acceptance.
Why Peasants Couldn't Return to Foraging
People did not abandon farming despite its hardships because agriculture supported far larger populations who would starve if they reverted, because coercive elites who now controlled society would not permit it, and because the skills needed to live as hunter-gatherers had been lost—so a peasant attempting to return to the forest would quickly die.
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