I like writing book summaries for myself. A long time after I’ve read a book I wouldn’t even remember the gist. This happens most frequently with Thinking Fast and Slow, a book that I had read couple years ago and gets referenced in a ton of podcasts and books and articles. Sometimes I listen or read I wouldn’t have a clue of whether it was described in the book.
Choosing a format is important, it brings an organization. I’ve decided to put in three sections
- Summary
- Quotes|Important facts
- Takeaways.
Books are the most condensed form of knowledge one can find, anything else doesn’t even come close(well-written code maybe ). For the first half of 2017, I was completely invested in travel, I had plenty of time to read but it didn’t take priority. So, I put it off, getting back in was difficult. Books, like most things, have a certain activation energy which one has to invest to reap rewards, once that much is done, the rest is pure flow. I hadn’t read fiction in a long time, I am happy that I started it off.
Summary
This book is about is about 70k years of Human(Homo Sapien) history. The author Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, does a great job of concisely explaining how we ended up where we are. Evolving from apes to the information age, mankind has come a long way. What I love is that the author doesn’t have a narrative fallacy. Whilst seeing the past one can easily give reasons to why events occurred, but it’s almost impossible to guess things without hindsight ie there is a ton of randomness involved. For example, If I put you in 1800 could you have predicted what the forthcoming 200 years might have bought, it’s wildly beyond imagination.
The book talks about 3 revolutions Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific. The first in where we developed a marginally better brain by chance, we started off as and still are social animals. The second is where we were able to supply plenty of food to our brain and the third is how we unleashed our brain. It also talks about the unification of humanity between the second and 3rd revolutions.
Quotes| Facts
Cognitive Revolution
The fact is that jumbo brain is jumbo drain on the body. It makes up 2-3% of body weight but consumes 25% of energy.
Our skeletons were developed to walk on 4 legs for a long time, a bipedal adaptation came with costs. Due to upright gait, natural selection favored early births which makes human babies helpless, dependent for years.
Sapiens was the only species able to achieve large-scale cooperation, and this happened due to common myths that exist only in collective imagination. Gossiping played an important role in forming social circles. We are even able to bypass our genetic duties.
Even today our minds are adapted to a life of hunting and gathering. We have outpaced evolution ie moved much much faster than our brains and body could adapt.
Humans were quick to adapt to environments. Moving out of Africa we spread out fast and drove scores of species( many who were larger than us ) into extinction.
Agricultural Revolution
The body of humans wasn’t adapted to agriculture, paid the price by backaches. The agriculture revolution was a benefit to the species as a whole but ones who sowed suffered they taught more food meant happy tummies. They didn’t foresee the population explosion which would only lead to more tireless work.
One of history’s iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations
Building pyramids-imagined order
We made an imagined order that’s embedded in the material world and it shapes our desires. People spend a great deal of money on foreign vacations abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism.
In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in alternative imagined order.
There’s no way out of imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running towards more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison
There’s no justice in history
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural.Whatever is possible is by definition natural
Evolution doesn’t have a purpose
The unification of Humankind
Sex and Gender:- Communities built up cultural ideas and norms that have little to do with biology
“Everyone would work according to their abilities and receive according to their needs translated” turned out into “Everyone works as little as they can and receive as much as they can grab”
Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively
Dutch beat the Spanish due to good legal backing for shareholders.
The source of all suffering is craving
Religion is a system of human norms and values that are founded ion belief in a superhuman order.
History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic
The Scientific Revolution
The scientific revolution started off when mankind openly admitted ignorance and it took off as it was married to an empire
The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions, they lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West
What made European exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer.
Entrepreneurs didn’t have seed fund, economies remained frozen for thousands of years and then came credit.
In its extreme form, belief in the free market is as naive as belief in Santa Claus. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner.
The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hatred towards Africans
The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of the animals but not the subjective needs
Consumerism convinces people that indulgence is good, whereas frugality is self-oppression. The supreme commandment of the rich is invest, for the rest of us it’s buy
The most momentous social revolution of humankind is the collapse of family and the local community and their replacement by tthe state and the market.
Are we happy?
Money does bring in happiness but only up to a point, and beyond that point it has little significance
Family and community see to have more impact on our happiness than money and health
Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.
Evolution made sure the momentary rush of pleasant sensations are quickly subsided.
The meaning of life
Happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile
If you have a why to live, you can bear with any how
The real root of suffering is the never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness, and dissatisfaction
Buddha’s recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements but also the pursuit of inner feelings.
The end of Sapiens
Are we far off from being able to genetically engineer not only the individual abilities of humans but also their social structures?
A two-way. brain-computer interface and it’s implications
Takeaways
Sapiens is a book I thoroughly enjoyed reading. YNH developed history into the adventurous journey. There’s a lot I learned as you can see from the number of quotes I marked.
The most important thing to remember is to never stop being curious, China and India combined had ~50-60% share of world GDP, kings in India felt they had already seen the whole world. The Europeans were always eager to learn new things, explore( they did have the conquering mentality that was destructive ) and they reduced India’s and China’s share of GDP to 2%. Not having a curious attitude was devastating in the long run.
Not all cultures are equal, for example-some are really good at fostering innovation whilst some are not. Any discussion on Indian culture with my parents always starts out with ours is the best. This is wrong, one must try to inculcate the best parts of all cultures. The sum may be greater than its parts.
iamonlyhuman 