Sapiens
According to Tim Ferriss, who has interviewed hundreds of successful people for his podcast and his books, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is one of the books that pops up most frequently when he asks which books have they gifted most to others.
The idea behind this book is to look at the whole of human history and to account for things such as the rise of religion, or capitalism, and to in general explain how we got to where we are.
It’s a fascinating read and will almost certainly teach you things that you don’t know.
I definitely learned a lot. The most interesting thing to me was the fact that he pointed out that much of the current political divide can be traced to a fundamental tension in American values. The line that most famously sums up American values is from the Declaration of Independence and we all (who grew up in America) have had it memorized for forever: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ” To me the phrases “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness” are more or less synonymous and could also be called “freedom.” So basically, you have three values here: equality, life, and liberty. Yuval’s astute observation is that equality and liberty are inherently in conflict. If you give the people liberty, you will have inequality. The only way to get equality is to force it, and that means taking away liberty. He says that the Democrats and the political left have seized on “equality” and are willing to sacrifice large amounts of liberty for equality, and the Republicans and the political right have seized on the phrase “liberty” and are willing to pursue it at the expense of equality. My thought is that the one exception to this seems to be the issue of abortion, where the Democrats usually appeal to liberty for the mother (and sometimes equality as well), and the Republicans make an appeal to the phrase “life” to advocate on behalf of the unborn.
Looking at it this way, it can help you be more empathetic to those on the other side. You understand their values and visions for what government should do. This knowledge can also help you broker compromise as the first step to seeking a win-win situation is knowing what the other side wants.
While there was a lot I learned, there was a lot I disagreed with, but I was happy about that. One big example of a disagreement is that he doesn’t seem to believe in God whereas I do, but it’s good to read books with people who disagree with you.
Here are my notes:
- He says that there have been 3 major revolutions in human history: the cognitive revolution which took place 70,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago, and the scientific revolution 500 years ago.
- Humans have exceptionally large brains. Mammals weighing 130 lbs have an average brain size of 12 square inches, the earliest men and women had 36 square inch brains and modern man has on average 73-865 square inch brains.
- “A jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body.”
- The brain is 2-3&% of total body weight but consumes 25% of the body’s energy when the body is at rest.
- Human beings began to ascend to primacy, not just because of intelligence, but also because of language.
- He theorizes that fiction is a huge reason why we were able to build cities and empires. We only have the ability to have a community of about 150 people, but we can rally as a larger group around a cause, which is usually a myth.
- The first permanent settlements were fishing villages.
- “We didn’t domesticate wheat, it domesticated us.” He says that the word “domesticated” literally means “living in a home.” Wheat caused us to move from foraging to settling in a permanent home.
- “One of history’s iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can;t live without it.” In relation to this quote, he cites the example of email. We thought we were saving time with email, but our life isn’t more relaxed now, it’s actually more frenetic. Now we get tons of email each day and we have to work much harder to manage it all.
- He says that both the code of Hammurabi and the Declaration of Independence are myths. They both appeal to universal principles of justice that only exist in the imagination of people.
- He translates the famous line from the declaration of independence this way: “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.”
- He freely admits that from his perspective, human rights are a myth
- “Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural, but from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is, by definition, also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would require no prohibition.”
- “In truth, our concepts of natural and unnatural are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology.”
- He sees the current political climate as being about equality versus freedom. Democrats want equality at the expense of freedom, Republicans want freedom at the expense of equality.
- He says that all human cultures need to hold contradictory beliefs. He doesn’t look at cognitive dissonance as a human failing.
- He says that the further you zoom out, the more clear it is that the trend of human history is toward unity, toward massive cultures being built up.
- “Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”
- The three great unifiers of humankind: money, kingdoms, and religion.
- “People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it.”
- He says that they key insight of Buddhism is that mankind is not just plagued by war, famine, and pestilence, but that we all experience a chronic unhappiness stemming from unfulfilled desires. Both unpleasant and pleasant activities cause thing longing. We want the pain to stop and the pleasure to continue/intensify. The idea is that suffering comes from craving. You need to free yourself from craving by training your mind to see reality as it is. The thought is that you should avoid any activity that fans the flames of desire and craving.
- He calls capitalism, communism, liberalism, etc “religions” instead of “ideologies.”
- “To channel limited resources, we must answer questions such as ‘what is important?”‘ and ‘what is good?’ and these are not scientific questions. Science can explain what exists in the world, how things work, and what might be in the future. By definition, it has no pretensions of knowing what should be in the future, only religions and ideologies seek to answer such questions.”
- “Science is unable to set it’s own priorities. It is also incapable of determining what to do with its discoveries.”
- How the concept of credit jumpstarted explosive, exponential economic growth: Imagine that Sam Greedy starts a bank. The successful contractor Mr. Stone deposits $1 million. Mrs. McDonut sees that there are no good bakeries in her neighborhood and decides to start one. She goes to Mr. Greedy’s bank and he loans her $1 million to start her business. She pays all of it to Mr Stone to build her a shop and he deposits it in the bank. His account now has $2 million in it despite the fact that there is only $1 Million in the bank. By law they can repeat this same cycle several more times until the amount of money the bank actually has on hand falls to a tenth of total net deposits. Our faith that the future will be better than the present is what makes the whole thing work. Mr. Greedy trusts Mrs. Mcdonut that her bakery will be successful, and Mr. Stone trusts the banks solvency. People agree to represent goods that don’t exist yet with a currency called credit. Credit has been around for forever, but before the modern period people were reluctant to extend credit because they did not believe the future would be better than the present (in fact, they thought things had actually gotten worse compares to some idyllic past). Because credit was limited, people had trouble financing new business ventures. Because there were few new businesses, the economy did not grow. Because the economy dd not grow, people assumed it never would, making those with capital less likely to extend credit.
- He says the science and capitalism have been inextricably linked. Capitalism funds science, and science instills a faith in progress and breakthroughs in production.
- “There are indeed some positive signs, at least when we use purely material criteria such as life expectancy, child mortality, and calorie intake, the standard of living of the average human in 2014 is significantly higher than it was in 1914 despite the exponential growth in the number of humans.”
- In 2000, wars caused the death of 310,000 individuals, and violent crime killed another 520,000 (he makes the good qualifying point that “each and every victim is a world destroyed”). These 830,000 victims comprised only 1.5% of the 56 million people that died in 2000. That year 1.26 million people died of car accidents (2.25% of total mortality) and 815,000 committed suicide (1.45%). In 2002, 57 million people died, 172,000 in war, 569,000 died of violent crime. 873,000 people committed suicide that year.
- “For real peace is not the absence of war, real peace is the implausibility of war.”
- The price of war has surged while the profit of war has greatly diminished.The atomic bomb makes a war between superpowers a collective suicide. When wealth mostly consisted of material things like fields, gold, and cattle, it was easy to loot. Today, wealth consists mainly of human capital and organizational know-how. This is much harder to steal by force.
- Money does buy happiness, but only up to a point, then it has diminishing returns. Imagine a single mother making $12k/year winning $500k versus an executive making $1 million/year having his salary double to $2 million/year. The single mother will experience a lasting increase in happiness. The executive will experience a surge in happiness that will quickly wear off. A really, really, really expensive house isn’t all that much better than a really, really, expensive house.
- People who experience chronic illness get less happy initially, but return to a baseline level of happiness if they don’t worsen.
- “Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health.”
- “Repeated studies have found that there is a very close correlation between good marriages and high subjective well-being, and between bad marriages and misery. This holds true irrespective of economic or even physical conditions.”
- Increased individuality means we are becoming more lonely as we are less likely to commit.
- “But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of wealth, health, or even community. Rather it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.”
- This is why you can’t just imagine yourself in someone’s situation and know if they are unhappy. You post your own expectations which they might not share.
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A very unique perspective that is definitely worth a read
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