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WillowOne's Positions

Sapiens

Overview

Subtitled A Brief History of Humankind. Harari tells the story of our species in three revolutions: the cognitive revolution around seventy thousand years ago, when language let humans cooperate in groups far larger than any other primate; the agricultural revolution, which he calls history's biggest fraud because it made the species more numerous and the individual worse off; and the scientific revolution, which began when Europeans admitted their ignorance and went looking. The thread through all of it is that large-scale human cooperation runs on shared fictions, money, nations, corporations, human rights and gods, which exist only because enough people believe in them, and which are no less powerful for that.

Notes

The idea of the "imagined order" is the reason this is here. Harari puts religion, money and the limited company in the same category, things that are real because they are believed, and I think that is exactly right and is the kindest accurate thing one can say about religion: it is a very effective coordination technology whose claims about the world happen to be false. The book is a synthesis rather than original research, the specialists in each period will tell you what he got wrong, and the later books tip over from history into prophecy. The first half of this one is a very good way to start thinking about where our institutions came from.

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