21 lessons for 21st century by Yuval Harari — Notes

Sohil Gupta

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Dec 23, 2020

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1. Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. During the twentieth century the global elites in New York, London, Berlin and Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world: the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story.
2. In 1938, humans were offered three global stories to choose from, Second World War knocked off Fascism. In 1968 just two, communism and liberalism, and in 1998 a single story, liberalism, seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero with Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. This has caused massive disillusionment.
3. The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?
4. In 20th century, masses feared exploitation. In 21st century, they fear irrelevance.
5. The Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital for the economy, but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power, but who feared that they were losing their economic worth.
6. Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any more.
7. It’s much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.
8. A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.
9. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month — that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years — that’s a religion.
10. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. —Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
11. false stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. If a big chief says ‘the sun rises in the east and sets in the west’, loyalty to the chief is not required in order to applaud him. But if the chief says ‘the sun rises in the west and sets in the east’, only true loyalists will clap their hands. Similarly, if all your neighbours believe the same outrageous tale, you can count on them to stand together in times of crisis. If they are willing to believe only accredited facts, what does that prove?
12. Nations and religions are football clubs on steroids.
13. Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate ways. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.
14. As a species, humans prefer power to truth.
15. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it — and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it.
16. if you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo Sapiens.

SCIENCE FICTION

The future is not what you see in the movies

1. Humans control the world because they can cooperate better than any other animal, and they can cooperate so well because they believe in fictions. Poets, painters and playwrights are therefore at least as important as soldiers and engineers.
2. The worst sin of present-day science fiction is that it tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness. It is overly concerned about a potential war between robots and humans, when in fact we need to fear a conflict between a small superhuman elite empowered by algorithms, and a vast underclass of disempowered Homo sapiens . In thinking about the future of AI, Karl Marx is still a better guide than Steven Spielberg.
3. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don’t realise that they are already trapped inside a box — their brain — which is locked within a bigger box — human society with its myriad fictions.
4. The mind is not the subject that freely shapes historical actions and biological realities — the mind is an object that is being shaped by history and biology.
5. Romantic comedies are to love as porn is to sex and Rambo is to war.
6. you could control people far more securely through love and pleasure than through fear and violence.
7. A story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them.
8. Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons.
9. nationalism enchants us with tales of heroism, moves us to tears by recounting past disasters, and ignites our fury by dwelling on the injustices our nation suffered. We get so absorbed in this national epic that we start evaluating everything that happens in the world by its impact on our nation, and hardly think of asking what makes our nation so important in the first place.
10. Legacy can be cultural (poem/book) or biological (genes/child)
11. By the time their intellect matures, they are so heavily invested in the story, that they are far more likely to use their intellect to rationalise the story than to doubt it.
12. Most stories are held together by the weight of their roof rather than by the strength of their foundations.
13. Once personal identities and entire social systems are built on top of a story, it becomes unthinkable to doubt it, not because of the evidence supporting it, but because its collapse will trigger a personal and social cataclysm. In history, the roof is sometimes more important than the foundations.
14. The stories that provide us with meaning and identity are all fictional, but humans need to believe in them.
15. A ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real.
16. Almost anything can be turned into a ritual, by giving mundane gestures like lighting candles, ringing bells or counting beads a deep religious meaning.
17. In social stability and harmony, truth is often a liability, whereas rites and rituals are among your best allies.
18. Of all rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real.
19. If you want to make people really believe in some fiction, entice them to make a sacrifice on its behalf.
20. Once you suffer for a story, it is usually enough to convince you that the story is real.
21. If you suffer because of your belief in God or in the nation, that does not prove that your beliefs are true.
22. Most people don’t like to admit that they are fools.
23. Consequently, the more they sacrifice for a particular belief, the stronger their faith becomes. This is the mysterious alchemy of sacrifice.
24. In order to bring us under his power, the sacrificing priest need not give us anything — neither rain, nor money, nor victory in war. Rather, he needs to take away something. Once he convinces us to make some painful sacrifice, we are trapped.
25. Why do you think women ask their lovers to bring them diamond rings? Once the lover makes such a huge financial sacrifice, he must convince himself that it was for a worthy cause.
26. Self-sacrifice is extremely persuasive not just for the martyrs themselves, but also for the bystanders. Few gods, nations or revolutions can sustain themselves without martyrs.