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History’s Biggest Fraud

History’s Biggest Fraud

  • The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
  • Who was responsible? The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes.
  • The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets.
  • Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life.
  • We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

277

1.46K reads

MORE IDEAS ON THIS

A Race Of Cooks

A Race Of Cooks

  • The best thing fire did was cook.
  • Cooking killed germs and parasites that infested food.
  • The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines.
  • Whereas c...

264

2.73K reads

Ben Franklin Disarming The Gods

Ben Franklin Disarming The Gods

  • Many cultures believed that lightning was the hammer of an angry god, used to punish sinners.
  • In the middle of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a lightning storm to test the hypothesis that lightning is simply an electric current.
  • Franklins empiric...

253

811 reads

YUVAL NOAH HARARI

“I encourage all of us, whatever our beliefs, to question the basic narratives of our world, to connect past developments with present concerns and not to be afraid of controversial issues"

YUVAL NOAH HARARI

276

3.54K reads

Dual Reality

Dual Reality

  • Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality.
  • On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations.
  • When two strangers in a tribal society want t...

267

1.81K reads

Craving Is Suffering

Craving Is Suffering

  • Buddha’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction.
  • "Suffering arises from craving ; the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is."

273

899 reads

YUVAL NOAH HARARI

"Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace.

They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom.

This is why today we can educate our children to b...

YUVAL NOAH HARARI

259

964 reads

The Arrow Of Histroy

The Arrow Of Histroy

A Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effect...

268

1.2K reads

Capitalist Creed

Capitalist Creed

  • In the new capitalist creed, the first and most sacred commandment is: ‘The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.’

Napoleon made fun of the British, calling them a nation of shopkeepers. Yet these shopkeepers defeated Napoleon himself...

258

770 reads

Destruction Of Nature

Destruction Of Nature

  • Our children’s books and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000...

254

697 reads

Why we binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can find?

Why we binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can find?

  • In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply.
  • The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes.
  • Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerato...

265

1.56K reads

Law of Religion

Law of Religion

  • Religion can be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.
  • Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement and disunion.
  • Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier ...

256

978 reads

YUVAL NOAH HARARI

"Fire give us power

Farming made us hungry for more

Money gave us purpose

Science made us deadly"

YUVAL NOAH HARARI

266

754 reads

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

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

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

276

692 reads

Peace In Our Time

Peace In Our Time

  • In 1945 Britain ruled a quarter of the globe. Thirty years later it ruled just a few small islands.
  • International wars became rare only after 1945, largely thanks to the new threat of nuclear annihilation.
  • While war became less profitable, peace became more lucrative ...

254

670 reads

Counting Happiness

Counting Happiness

  • Money brings happiness.
  • Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health.
  • Happiness depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.
  • If you want a bullock-cart and get a bullock-cart, you ...

256

675 reads

Invest Or Buy

Invest Or Buy

  • In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny.
  • Today, the tables have turned.
  • The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well heeled go int...

266

713 reads

The Scent Of Money

The Scent Of Money

  • Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
  • Why do I believe in the gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my...

259

967 reads

Expectations Balloon

Expectations Balloon

  • When things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently even dramatic improvements in objective conditions can leave us dissatisfied.
  • It is all a matter of expectations. If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society–mass media and the advertising ind...

255

654 reads

Never Contented Sapiens

Never Contented Sapiens

People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race.

But how to escape it?

253

937 reads

The Discovery of Ignorance

The Discovery of Ignorance

  • But modern science differs from all previous traditions of knowledge: The willingness to admit ignorance. 
  • Even more critically, it accepts that the things that we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge.
  • The great discovery that launche...

257

855 reads

The Animal that Became a God

The Animal that Became a God

  • SEVENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, HOMO sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa.
  • In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem.
  • Today it stands on the verge of be...

257

657 reads

Building Pyramids

Building Pyramids

  • Henceforth, attachment to ‘my house’ and separation from the neighbours became the psychological hallmark of a much more self-centred creature.
  • People found it difficult to leave their artificial islands. They could not abandon their houses, fields and granaries without grave risk of...

253

1.34K reads

Social And Biological Poverty

Social And Biological Poverty

Throughout history, societies have suffered from two kinds of poverty:

  1. Social poverty, which withholds from some people the opportunities available to others.
  2. Biological poverty, which puts the very lives of individuals at risk due to lack of food and s...

256

789 reads

A Growing Pie

A Growing Pie

  • Today in the United States, only 2 per cent of the population makes a living from agriculture, yet this 2 per cent produces enough not only to feed the entire US population, but also to export surpluses to the rest of the world.
  • Humans now produce far more steel, manufacture much mor...

256

751 reads

Obesity Is A Double Victory

Obesity Is A Double Victory

  • In the affluent world of today one of the leading health problems is obesity, which strikes the poor even more severely than the rich.
  • 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.
  • Obesity...

259

696 reads

Change Of Nature

Change Of Nature

  • Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed.
  • Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals.
  • Today, humankind is driving man...

255

691 reads

The Collapse of the Family and the Community

The Collapse of the Family and the Community

The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said.

"Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer...

261

673 reads

Chemical Happiness

Chemical Happiness

  • Happiness is determined by a complex system of nerves, neurons, synapses and various biochemical substances such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.
  • People are made happy by one thing –pleasant sensations in their bodies.
  • If sex were not accompanied by such ...

255

644 reads

The Tree Of Knowledge

The Tree Of Knowledge

  • You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
  • But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting.
  • People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would...

277

2.41K reads

Imagined Communities

Imagined Communities

  • In the last two centuries, the intimate communities have withered, leaving imagined communities to fill in the emotional vacuum.
  • Consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that...

257

642 reads

How Does Money Work?

How Does Money Work?

  • Money is not coins and banknotes.
  • Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.
  • Money is thus a universal medium of exchange that enables people to convert almo...

271

1.1K reads

Know Thyself

Know Thyself

  • Happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.
  • A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal...

271

664 reads

The Luxury Trap

The Luxury Trap

One of history’s few 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.

272

1.39K reads

There is No Justice in History

There is No Justice in History

  • In organised crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him.
  • If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn’t there a da...

273

1.25K reads

And They Lived Happily Ever After

And They Lived Happily Ever After

  • Take the work involved in raising a child. Kahneman found that when counting moments of joy and moments of drudgery, bringing up a child turns out to be a rather unpleasant affair.
  • It consists largely of changing nappies, washing dishes and dealing with temper tantrums, which nobody ...

255

640 reads

An Imagined Order

An Imagined Order

  • Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
  • Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no l...

278

2.09K reads

Consumer Tribe

Consumer Tribe

  • Madonna fans, for example, constitute a consumer tribe.
  • They define themselves largely by shopping. They buy Madonna concert tickets, CDs, posters, shirts and ring tones, and thereby define who they are.
  • Manchester United fans, vegetarians and environmentalists are other exam...

254

670 reads

Natural Order Vs Imagined Order

Natural Order Vs Imagined Order

  • A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it.
  • In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them....

277

1.65K reads

The Age Of Shopping

The Age Of Shopping

  • Most people throughout history lived under conditions of scarcity.
  • Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (‘Just do it!’) to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.
  • It has succeeded. We are all good...

257

739 reads

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