21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Harari.
Ref: Yuval Harari (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Random House.
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Summary
This book looks at the major forces that shape societies all over the world and that are likely to influence the future of our planet as a whole. It represents a selection of lessons that aim to stimulate further thinking and help readers participate in some of the major conversations of our time.
It is more important than ever to uncover our religious and political biases, our racial and gender privileges, and our unwitting complicity in institutional oppression.
It’s absolutely necessary to keep our fears under control and be a bit more humble about our views.
I can summarize the situation of humankind in the early twenty-first century in the following way: Things are better than ever. Things are still quite bad. Things can become much worse.
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1: Disillusionment; The End of History has been Postponed.
Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.
Three grand stories that claim to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world:
The Fascist story: Explains history as a struggle among different nations, and envisions a world dominated by one human group that violently subdues all others.
The Communist story: Explains history as a struggle among different classes, and envisions a world in which all groups are united by a centralized social system that ensures equality even at the price of freedom.
The liberal story: Explains history as a struggle between liberty and tyranny, and envisions a world in which all humans cooperate freely and peacefully, with minimum central control even at the price of some inequality.
The liberal story argues that all authority ultimately stems from the free will of individual humans, as expressed in their feelings, desires, and choices. In politics, liberalism believes that the voter knows best. It therefore upholds democratic elections. In economics, liberalism maintains that the customer is always right. It therefore hails free-market principles. In personal matters, liberalism encourages people to listen to themselves, be true to themselves, and follow their hearts—as long as they do not infringe on the liberties of others. This personal freedom is enshrined in human rights.
There are two dangerous stories: nostalgic fantasies and technological utopias.
Perhaps in the 21c populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.
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2: Work; When you Grow Up, You Might Not Have a Job.
The problem with many new jobs is that they will probably demand high levels of expertise. Consequently, despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new useless class. We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor.
In 2015 the USAF lacked sufficient trained humans to fill all requisite drone positions, and therefore faced an ironic crisis in manning its unmanned aircraft.
The future struggle may be against irrelevance rather than against exploitation.
Governments will have to step in, both by subsidizing a lifelong education sector and by providing a safety net for the inevitable periods of transition. Potential solutions:
Universal Basic Income (UBI): A government provided basic income to its citizens by which governments tax the billionaires and corporations controlling the algorithms and robots, and use that money to provide every person with a generous stipend covering his or her basic needs to cushion the poor against job loss and economic dislocation, while protecting the rich from populist rage.
Pay for Unrecognized Work: Widen the range of human activities that are considered to be “jobs.” At present, billions of parents take care of children, neighbors look after one another, and citizens organize communities, without any of these valuable activities being recognized as jobs. The question, of course, is who would evaluate and pay for these newly recognized jobs?
Universal Basic Services: Government provided subsidies for services (vice income). Instead of giving money to people, who then shop around for whatever they want, the government might subsidize free education, free healthcare, free transportation, and so forth (the utopian vision of communism).
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3: Liberty; Big Data is Watching You.
We no longer search for information. Instead, we google, and our ability to search for information by ourselves diminishes. Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of the Google search.
The price we pay for ignorance about ourselves will increase dramatically, because governments and corporations are now gaining unprecedented abilities to hack and manipulate human choice. And the easiest people to manipulate are those who believe in free will—because they refuse to acknowledge that they can be manipulated.
Biological knowledge x Computing power x Data = Ability to Hack Humans.
We will increasingly rely on algorithms to make decisions for us, but it is unlikely that the algorithms will start to consciously manipulate us. They won’t have any consciousness.
Intelligence: The ability to solve problems.
Consciousness: The ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger.
Referendums and elections are always about human feelings, not about human rationality. If democracy were a matter of rational decision-making, there would be absolutely no reason to give all people equal voting rights—or perhaps any voting rights at all. There is ample evidence that some people are far more knowledgeable and rational than others, certainly when it comes to specific economic and political questions.
Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound “free will,” that this “free will” is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free.
This reliance on the heart might prove to be the Achilles’ heel of liberal democracy.
Feelings are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to quickly calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings aren’t based on intuition, inspiration, or freedom—they are based on calculation. Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality—they embody evolutionary rationality. We erroneously believe that our fear of snakes, our choice of sexual mates, or our opinions about the European Union are the result of some mysterious “free will.”
In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it yourself, authority will shift to them.
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4: Equality; Those Who Own the Data Own the Future.
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5: Community; Humans Have Bodies.
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6: Civilization; There is Just One Civilization in the World.
The process of human unification has taken two distinct forms:
Establishing links between distinct groups.
Homogenizing practices across groups.
People still have different religions and national identities. But when it comes to the practical stuff—how to build a state, an economy, a hospital, or a bomb—almost all of us belong to the same civilization.
These arguments and conflicts over our identities are unlikely to isolate us from one another. Just the opposite. They will make us ever more interdependent.
No group rejecting the principles of global politics has so far gained any lasting control of any significant territory.
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7: Nationalism; Global Problems Need Global Answers.
It is a dangerous mistake to imagine that without nationalism we would all be living in a liberal paradise. More likely we would be living in tribal chaos.
Nationalism has two parts to it, one easy, the other very difficult.
Easy Part: Prefer people-like-us over foreigners, humans have been doing that for millions of years (Xenophobia is in our DNA).
Hard Part: Prefer strangers over friends and relatives.
The milder forms of patriotism have been among the most benevolent of human creations. Believing that my nation is unique, that it deserves my allegiance, and that I have special obligations toward its members inspires me to care about others and make sacrifices on their behalf.
The problem starts when benign patriotism morphs into chauvinistic ultranationalism.
Add the cost of externalities to the price of oil and gas, adopt stronger environmental regulations, cut subsidies to polluting industries, and incentivize the switch to renewable energy. To be effective, they must be done on a global level. When it comes to climate, countries are just not sovereign. They are at the mercy of actions taken by people on the other side of the planet.
If even a single country chooses to pursue a high-risk, high-gain technological path, other countries will be forced to do the same, because nobody can afford to remain behind. In order to avoid such a race to the bottom, humankind will probably need some kind of global identity and loyalty.
A common enemy is the best catalyst for forging a common identity, and humankind now has at least three such enemies—nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption.
The only real solution is to globalize politics.
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8: Religion; God Now Serves the Nation.
So far, modern ideologies, scientific experts, and national governments have failed to create a viable vision for the future of humanity.
Human power depends on mass cooperation, and mass cooperation depends on manufacturing mass identities- and all mass identities are based on fictional stories, not on scientific facts or even on economic necessities.
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9: Immigration; Some Cultures Might Be Better than Others.
Humans vote with their feet (via Immigration).
The immigration debate is a debate between two legitimate views, which can and should be decided through the normal democratic procedure. That’s what democracy is for.
It is helpful to view immigration as a deal with three basic terms:
TERM 1: The host country allows the immigrants in.
TERM 2: In return, the immigrants must embrace at least the core norms and values of the host country, even if that means giving up some of their traditional norms and values.
TERM 3: If the immigrants assimilate to a sufficient degree, over time they become equal and full members of the host country. “They” become “us.”
Anti-immigrationists tend to argue that the immigrants are not fulfilling term number 2. They are not making a sincere effort to assimilate, and too many of them stick to intolerant and bigoted worldviews. Therefore, the host country has no reason to fulfill term number 3 (to treat them as first-class citizens), and has every reason to reconsider term number 1 (to allow them in).
It’s important to allow immigrants as much freedom as possible to follow their own traditions, provided these do not harm the freedoms and rights of other people.
Two of the key issues of this debate are the disagreement about immigrant intolerance and the disagreement about European identity.
Do we enter the immigration debate with the assumption that all cultures are inherently equal, or do we think that some cultures might well be superior to others?
Cultural relativists argue that difference doesn’t imply hierarchy, and we should never prefer one culture over another. Humans may think and behave in various ways, but we should celebrate this diversity and give equal value to all beliefs and practices. Unfortunately, such broad-minded attitudes cannot stand the test of reality. Human diversity may be great when it comes to cuisine and poetry, but few would see witch-burning, infanticide, or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and Coca-Colonialism.
Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of “culturists,” which suffer three common flaws:
Culturists often confuse local superiority with objective superiority.
When you clearly define a yardstick, a time, and a place, culturist claims may well be empirically sound. But all too often people adopt very general culturist claims that make little sense. What is the benchmark?
Despite their statistical nature they are all too often used to prejudge individuals.
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10: Terrorism; Don’t Panic.
Terrorism: A military strategy that hopes to change the political situation by spreading fear rather than by causing material damage.
A successful counterterrorism struggle should be conducted on three fronts.
Defense: Governments should focus on clandestine actions against terrorist networks.
Media: The media should keep things in perspective and avoid hysteria.
Personal: We should not allow terrorists to hold our imagination captive and use it against us.
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11: War; Never Underestimate Human Stupidity.
Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it. Politicians, generals, and scholars treat the world as a great chess game, where every move follows careful rational calculation.
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12: Humility; You Are Not the Center of the World.
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13: God; Don’t Take the Name of God in Vain.
Does God exist? That depends on which God you have in mind: the cosmic mystery, or the worldly lawgiver?
Entire libraries have been written to explain in the minutest details exactly what God wants and what God dislikes. The most fundamental characteristic of this worldly lawgiver is that we can say extremely concrete things about Him. This is the God of the Crusaders and jihadists, of the inquisitors, misogynists, and homophobes.
The faithful quickly replace the cosmic mystery with the worldly lawgiver.
Religion began as stories invented by our ancestors in order to legitimize social norms and political structures. These laws were certainly very helpful in establishing and maintaining the social order for thousands of years.
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14: Secularism; Acknowledge your Shadow.
The secular world appears to be hollow, nihilistic, and amoral—an empty box waiting to be filled with something.
Secularism: Enshrines the values of truth, compassion, equality, freedom, courage, and responsibility. It forms the foundation of modern scientific and democratic institutions. The secular code is an ideal to aspire to rather than a social reality:
Truth: Think, Investigate, and Experiment in order to discover the truth and reduce suffering; based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Strive not to confuse truth with belief.
Compassion: Develop compassion and find solutions to misery in the world in order to reduce suffering; judge people on the basis of their behavior.
Equality: Strive not to confuse uniqueness with superiority.
Freedom: Cherish Freedom and refrain from investing supreme authority in any text, institution, or leader.
Responsibility: Take full responsibility for what you do- or don’t do.
Courage: Admit ignorance; check, double check, doubt, and re-check your opinion again and again.
History has demonstrated that a society of courageous people willing to admit ignorance and raise difficult questions is usually not just more prosperous but also more peaceful than societies in which everyone must unquestioningly accept a single answer. People afraid of losing their truth tend to be more violent than people who are used to looking at the world from several different viewpoints.
Since it is difficult to send soldiers into battle or impose radical economic reforms in the name of doubtful conjectures, secular movements repeatedly mutate into dogmatic creeds.
When confronted by the mess of brutal dictatorships and failed states, liberals often put their unquestioning faith in the awesome ritual of general elections. They fight wars and spend billions in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Congo in the firm belief that holding general elections will magically turn these places into sunnier versions of Denmark—this despite repeated failures, and despite the fact that even in places with an established tradition of general elections these rituals occasionally bring to power authoritarian populists and result in nothing grander than majority dictatorships.
Though it isn’t true that humans have a natural right to life or liberty, belief in this story curbed the power of authoritarian regimes, protected minorities from harm, and safeguarded billions from the worst consequences of poverty and violence. It thereby contributed to the happiness and welfare of humanity probably more than any other doctrine in history.
If you believe in an absolute truth revealed by a transcendent power, you cannot allow yourself to admit any error, for that would nullify your whole story. But if you believe in a quest for truth by fallible humans, admitting blunders is part of the game.
Trust more in those who admit ignorance than in those who claim infallibility.
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15: Ignorance; You Know Less than you Think.
It is a mistake to put so much trust in the rational individual.
Most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than on rational analysis.
The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently, some people who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map.
Almost all the people who think that climate change is a hoax are not experts on the subject. In contrast, almost all climate scientists agree that Earth’s climate is changing in ways that endanger the global ecological balance and the future of human civilization.
People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming news feeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.
Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views due to group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid.
The privilege of Wasting Time: You need to experiment with unproductive paths, explore dead ends, make space for doubts and boredom, and allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.
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16: Justice; Our Sense of Justice Might Be out of Date.
Morality by Consequence: Judge actions by their outcomes.
Morality by Intentions: Judge actions by their intentions.
How humans judge large scale moral dilemmas:
Downsize the issue.
Focus on a touching human story that ostensibly stands for the whole conflict.
Weave conspiracy theories.
Create a dogma, put your trust in some allegedly all-knowing theory, institution, or chief, and follow it wherever it leads us.
Beware the frying pan of individual ignorance placed on the fire of biased groupthink.
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17: Post-Truth; Some Fake News Lasts Forever.
We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.
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.
“A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”-Goebbels.
“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.”-Hitler, Mein Kampf.
If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you.
Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma: Do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments, be they Christian priests, Confucian mandarins, or Communist ideologues, all placed unity above truth.
A better model for the news: “high-quality news that costs you money but does not abuse your attention.” If you are willing to pay for high-quality food, clothes, and cars, why not pay for high-quality information?
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18: Science Fiction; The Future is Not What you See in the Movies.
When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix.
Your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.
People usually fear that machines will be cold and uncaring. But the problem might be exactly the opposite.
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19: Education; Change is the only Constant.
The last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.
Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs”—critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.
Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant—not just economically but above all socially—you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.
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20: Meaning; Life is Not a Story.
Homo sapiens is a storytelling animal that thinks in stories rather than in numbers or graphs, and believes that the universe itself works like a story, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy endings.
To give meaning to life, a story must satisfy two conditions:
Provide a role to play, endowing you with an identity in which to embed meaning.
Extend beyond your horizons, making it bigger than you.
Every now and then a fanatical creed comes along and insists that people should believe in only one story and have only one identity.
Nationalism teaches me that my nation is unique and that I have special obligations toward it, fascism says that my nation is supreme, and that I owe my nation exclusive obligations. I should never prefer the interests of any group or individual over the interests of my nation, no matter what the circumstances are.
Fighting for liberty includes anything that frees people from social, biological, or physical constraints, be it demonstrating against brutal dictators, teaching girls to read, finding a cure for cancer, or building a spaceship.
A crucial step is to acknowledge that the “self” is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite.
The first thing you need to know about yourself is that you are not a story.
Be particularly careful about the following four words: “sacrifice,” “eternity,” “purity,” “redemption.” If you hear any of these four, sound the alarm. And if you happen to live in a country whose leader routinely says things like “Their sacrifice will redeem the purity of our eternal nation,” know that you are in deep trouble.
The big question facing humans isn’t “what is the meaning of life?” but rather “how do we stop suffering?” The realest thing in the world is suffering.
If you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about your own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is.
If you want to know the ultimate truth of life, rites and rituals are a huge obstacle. But if you are interested in social stability and harmony, truth is often a liability, whereas rites and rituals are among your best allies.
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21: Medication; Just Observe.
The brain is a material network of neurons, synapses, and biochemicals. The mind is a flow of subjective experiences, such as pain, pleasure, anger, and love.
Meditation: Any method for the direct observation of one’s own mind.
Vipassana: Meditation based on the insight that the flow of mind is interlinked with sensations of the body.
Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind. Learning this is the first step toward ceasing to generate more suffering.
If you are seriously interested in getting answers, I would recommend committing to a practice of inner exploration, accepting that it usually takes years—rather than days and weeks—to start getting real answers. The practice can be meditation, but it can also be therapy, art, or even sports. Different practices work for different people. The only thing that never works for anybody is pure intellectual speculation. You will never get answers by just reading books, discussing theories, and contemplating thoughts.
Love is being connected. To love means to be liberated from the obsession with whatever thoughts, emotions, and desires pop into my own mind right now, and instead to listen to others and see what is happening with them. It starts with simple things, such as listening to somebody else. When you talk with someone and you care mainly about what you want to say, you can’t really hear that person.
To change the world, you need to act, and even more important, you need to organize.
If you really care about something, join a relevant organization.
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Philosophies
Buddha
There are 3 basic realities of the universe; suffering emerges because people fail to appreciate them:
Everything is constantly changing.
Nothing has any enduring essence.
Nothing is completely satisfying.
Life has no meaning, and people don’t need to create any meaning. They just need to realize that there is no meaning, and therefore be liberated from the suffering caused by our attachments and our identification with empty phenomena.
The Five basic moral commitments of every human being: abstain from killing, stealing, sexual abuse, deception, and intoxication.
Immanuel Kant: Judge Actions by Absolute Rules (Deontology).
John Stuart Mill: Judge Actions by Consequences.
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1931): Envisions a future society without wars, famines, and plagues, enjoying uninterrupted peace, prosperity, and health. It is a consumerist world that gives complete free rein to sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll and whose supreme value is happiness. The underlying assumption of the book is that humans are biochemical algorithms, science can hack the human algorithm, and technology can then be used to manipulate it.
Huxley highlights the notion that it’s far more secure to control people through love and pleasure than through fear and violence.
Bhagavad Gita (Hindu): Relates how in the midst of a murderous civil war, the great warrior prince Arjuna is consumed with doubt. Seeing his friends and relatives in the opposing army, he hesitates over whether to fight and kill them. He begins to wonder what good and evil are, who decides it, and what the purpose of human life is. The god Krishna then explains to him that within the great cosmic cycle each being possesses a unique “dharma,” the path you must follow and the duties you must fulfill. If you realize your dharma, no matter how hard the path may be, you enjoy peace of mind and liberation from doubt. If you refuse to follow your dharma and try to adopt somebody else’s path—or wander about with no path at all—you will disturb the cosmic balance and will never be able to find either peace or joy. It makes no difference what your particular path is, as long as you follow it. A washerwoman who devotedly follows the way of the washerwoman is far superior to a prince who strays off the way of the prince. Having understood the meaning of life, Arjuna duly proceeds to follow his dharma as a warrior. He kills his friends and relatives, leads his army to victory, and becomes one of the most esteemed and beloved heroes of the Hindu world.
The Lion King: In a Disney interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, Mufasa explains the great Circle of Life; the antelopes eat the grass, the lions eat the antelopes, and when the lions die their bodies decompose and feed the grass. This is how life continues from generation to generation, provided each animal plays its part in the drama. Everything is connected, and everyone depends on everyone else.
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Terminology
Consciousness: The ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger.
Fascism: Latin for “a bundle of rods.” A single rod is very weak, and you can easily snap it in two. However, once you bundle many rods together into a fascis, it becomes almost impossible to break them. This implies that the individual is a thing of no consequence, but as long as the collective sticks together, it is very powerful. Fascists therefore believe in privileging the interests of the collective over those of any individual,
Hocus-Pocus: Derived from the Latin “Hoc est corpus! (This is the Body!)” from Christian rituals on bread- body of Christ ritual.
Intelligence: The ability to solve problems.
Meditation: Any method for the direct observation of one’s own mind.
Ritual: A magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real. Almost anything can be turned into a ritual by imbuing deep religious meaning in mundane gestures such as lighting candles, ringing bells, or counting beads.
Of all rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real. You can never ignore it or doubt it. If you want to make people really believe in some fiction, entice them to make a sacrifice on its behalf. Once you suffer for a story, it is usually enough to convince you that the story is real. Consequently, the more one sacrifices for a particular belief, the stronger their faith becomes.
Vipassana: Meditation based on the insight that the flow of mind is closely interlinked with sensations of the body.
Sabbath: To stand still, to rest.
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Misc Quotes
“The principles of open markets and accountable governance, of democracy and human rights and international law…remain the firmest foundation for human progress in this century.”-Obama.
“It is a mark of illiberal regimes that they make free speech more difficult even outside their borders.”
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”-Abraham Lincoln.
Today close to 1.25M people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime, and terrorism combined). >90%of these accidents are caused by very human errors.
31% of fatal crashes in the United States involved alcohol abuse, 30% involved speeding, and 21% involved distracted drivers.-Natl Highway Traffic Safety Admin (NHTSA), 2012.
Expectations tend to adapt to conditions, including the conditions of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and so even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before.
“The vast majority of the British public, including myself, should never have been asked to vote in the (Brexit) referendum, because they lacked the necessary background in economics and political science.”-Richard Dawkins.
“The best we can do…is to acknowledge our own individual ignorance.”-Socrates.
“A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”-Goebbels.
“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.”-Hitler, Mein Kampf.
“I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven’t figured out is why the other people are here.”-Unk on the meaning of life.
On New Year’s Day Jews eat honey so that the coming year will be sweet, they eat fish heads so that they will be fruitful like fish and will move forward rather than back, and they eat pomegranates so that their good deeds will multiply like the many seeds of the pomegranate.
~20% of the Nazi gauleiters (regional party leaders) committed suicide, as did about 10% of the generals.
Part of the problem is that Silicon Valley is led by genius engineers who know mathematics and computer science very well but can be quite naive when it comes to history, philosophy, and politics.-Harari.
In romance, if you are with someone just because that person makes you feel good, sooner or later you will leave that person, because he or she is bound to say and do things that will make you feel very bad. If you are in a relationship just in order to have pleasant experiences for yourself, that relationship will not last for long.-Harari.
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Chronology
Mar, 2018: The Cambridge Analytica scandal; the personal data of ~87M people entrusted to Facebook was harvested by third parties and used to manipulate elections around the world.-21 Lessons by Harari.
Jan, 2018: The USG under Trump announces a 30% tariff on foreign-made solar panels and equipment, preferring to support US solar producers even at a cost of slowing the switch to renewable energy.-21 Lessons by Harari.
May, 2017: The Manchester Arena bombing kills 22 people.-21 Lessons by Harari.
Jan, 2017: Finland begins a 2-yr experiment, providing 2K unemployed Finns with 560 euros a month, irrespective of whether they found work or not.-21 Lessons by Harari.
Mar, 2016: The Brussels airport bombings kill 32 people.-21 Lessons by Harari.
2016: The Pizzagate “fake news” story details that Hillary Clinton heads a child-trafficking network that holds children as sex slaves in the basement of a popular pizzeria.-21 Lessons by Harari.
2015: ISIS Paris Attacks; 130 people are killed in separate attacks throughout Paris to take revenge for the French air force’s bombings of ISIS in Iraq and Syria; hoping that France would be deterred from carrying out such bombardments in the future.-21 Lessons by Harari.
Feb, 2014: Russia Annexes Crimea from Ukraine; Russian special units bearing no army insignia invade Ukraine and occupy key installations in the Crimea.-21 Lessons by Harari.
2013: The world’s first clean hamburger is grown from cells costing $330L. By 2017, R&D reduced the price to $11 per unit.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1997: IBM’s ‘Deep Blue’ Chess program defeats Grandmaster Garry Kasparov.-21 Lessons by Harari.
Jul, 1995: The Bosniak Massacre; Bosnian Serb troops kill >8K Muslim Bosniaks in Srebrenica.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1 May, 1992: “Can we all get along?” Rodney King voices his famous appeal years after being beaten nearly to death by four LA police officers.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1988: The bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland kill hundreds.-21 Lessons by Harari.
16 Mar, 1968: My Lai Massacre; a US Army Company massacres ~400 Vietnamese villagers.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1932-1933: The Great Ukrainian Famine.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1931: Brave New World is published by Aldous Huxley.-21 Lessons by Harari.
27 May- 6 Jun, 1918: The third Battle of the Aisne results in 250K casualties.-21 Lessons by Harari.
12 May- 8 Jun, 1917: The tenth Battle of the Isonzo results in 225K casualties.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1 Jul, 1916: The Battle of the Somme; 19K British soldiers are killed and 40K wounded in a single day. By the time the battle ended in Nov, both sides together suffer >1M casualties, including 300K KIA.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1882: The Battle of Teb el-Kebir; Britain invades and occupies Egypt, losing 57 soldiers.-21 Lessons by Harari.
Mar, 1839: The Jewish Massacre in the holy Shiite City of Mashhad, Iran after a Jewish woman who was suffering from a skin disease was told by a local quack that if she killed a dog and washed her hands in its blood, she would be cured. The woman undertook the therapy on the sacred day of Ashura and was observed by some Shiites, who believed that the woman killed the dog in mockery of the Karbala martyrdom. Word of this unthinkable sacrilege spread through the streets of Mashhad. Egged on by the local imam, an angry mob stormed the Jewish quarter, torched the synagogue, and murdered 36 Jews on the spot. All the surviving Jews of Mashhad were then given a stark choice: convert to Islam immediately or be killed.-21 Lessons by Harari.
May, 1831: The Battle of Ostrołęka; the Polish are defeated by the Russians.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1830: The Polish uprising is brutally crushed by the Russians.-21 Lessons by Harari.
7 Apr, 1767: The Burmese under King Hsinbyushin capture Siam following a long siege, killing, looting, raping, and burning much of the city, carrying off thousands of slaves and cartloads of gold and jewels.-21 Lessons by Harari.
23-24 Jun, 1314: Battle of Bannockburn; the Scots under Robert the Bruce defeat the English Army under King Edward II in the First War of Scottish Independence.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1290: The Jewish population of England is expelled.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1270: The Seventh Crusade, led by King Louis IX, hopes to conquer the Nile Valley and turn Egypt into a Christian bulwark. However, they are defeated at the Battle of Mansoura; most of the Crusaders are taken captive.
10 Oct, 680: The Day of Ashura; Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, along with a group of his followers, are massacred by soldiers of the evil usurper Yazid in Karbala, Iraq.-21 Lessons by Harari.
391: The Theodosian Decrees are issued by Roman Emperor Theodosius, effectively making all religions except Christianity and Judaism illegal (Judaism too was persecuted in numerous ways, but it remained legal to practice it). One could be executed even for worshipping Jupiter or Mithras in the privacy of one’s home. As part of their campaign to cleanse the empire of all infidel heritage, the Christian emperors also suppressed the Olympic Games. Having been celebrated for more than a thousand years, the last ancient Olympiad was held sometime in the late fourth or early fifth century.-21 Lessons by Harari.
1350 BCE: The first clear evidence for monotheism, from the religious revolution of Pharaoh Akhenaten.-21 Lessons by Harari.
7 Ma: Gorillas and Chimpanzees split into separate species.-21 Lessons by Harari.
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