Book: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.

I just read Sapiens and I don’t think this book is so good as Sapiens is, that’s why I decided to go with 4 stars.

I like the way Yuval brings some topics to the discussion. This book made me think about many things I usually don’t think about. Religion is a topic I like to read/listen to from different angles, for example.

Here is my raw notes about the book:

  • The internet was a big change in society, and it was created by engineers. Have you voted for the internet? I don’t think so, and it’s here.
  • Perhaps in the 21st century, the revolt will not be with an economic elite that exploits people, but with an economic elite that doesn’t need them
  • People connect with Art because they find themselves in it
  • A Basic income program may actually work when we start losing our jobs to AI
  • Referendums don’t ask about what people think but what they feel
  • With enough data, an authoritarian regime may know you better than yourself and make you love them and hate their enemies
  • Instead of collective discrimination by race or gender, we may find individual discrimination by algorithm analysis of our profile
  • Conscious is related in some way to organic systems, and it would be impossible to recreate it in non-organic ones
  • Algorithms and data may distribute wealth in an unequal manner. In the future, poor people may not suffer from exploitation but from irrelevance
  • If treatments to extend life prove to be expensive, humanity may split into biological casts, where the rich live longer — 💭 altered carbon?
  • Nationalism, religion, and corporates divide humans into hostile camps and make it hard to cooperate at a global level
  • “It’s easy to talk to my cousin in Switzerland (through the internet), but it’s hard to talk to my husband during breakfast because is constantly looking at his cellphone
  • If you don’t feel at home in your body, you will not feel at home in the world. We’ve been losing the connection with our body and sensations in modern times.
  • Facebook tries to create tools to help people share their experiences with others, but what people might need is tools to connect to their own experiences. Currently, people share everything and wait for “likes”. What other people feel is part of people’s experience
  • The economy is everywhere. When the Islamic State takes a city, they destroy all Western cultural reference and religion, but they still use American dollars that contain American presidents and gods stamped on it
  • To solve global problems, we have to start thinking globally. Better global politics is necessary
  • Priests and scientists are good at coming up with arguments when things don’t go as well as expected, but scientists improve their craft (remedies, etc.) while priests get better excuses
  • If you are a tourist in a country and you know nothing about history, you still have to deal with the consequences of that history
  • Terrorists have no army, they inflict damage by doing a show and tricking the other side to overreact and try to protect every citizen in every place all the time
  • Sigmund Freud’s mother was really important for his growth, but we don’t study her. The same happens for Judaism and Christianism. Judaism influenced Christianism, but we don’t have to say study Judaism just because of that
  • That’s something wrong in people that avoid killing just because God said so. We should avoid killing because we don’t want to inflict pain on others
  • Seculars are in favor of things that do not inflict suffering to people
  • What made homo sapiens so successful is our ability to think together as large groups
  • It’s hard to blame people for all the atrocities happening (animals with a poor life on farms, child labor in other places, etc.) just because someone lives a certain way of life. The network of political and economic things is too big to draw conclusions.
  • How can we act morally if we don’t know all the facts? (e.g. investing in a company who pollutes a river and hire tens of lawyers to protect them)
  • When thousands of people believe in a false story for one month, we call it fake news. When millions of people believe in an unproven story for thousands of years, we call it a religion. We should not call it fake news to not hurt the feelings of faithful
  • A lie told once is just a lie. A lie told 1000 times to become the truth — 💭 marketing (Coca-Cola?), Religion?
  • When people see a dollar, they don’t feel weird just because it’s a human invention, they just trust it
  • To watch or play a soccer game, you have to accept the rules of the game and suspend your disbelief. If you don’t do that, the whole scene of 22 people running after a ball becomes really silly
  • Soccer can formulate human identities or even create violence, just like religion. Humans usually don’t think about focus, if we focus, we will see that many things are just fiction and exists just because we believe in it
  • Power and truth go ie different directions. If you want power, you have to start spreading fiction. If you want the truth, you have to forget the power
  • Do you control the technology or does the technology controls you? Are you one of those zombies walking through the streets looking into their smartphones?
  • If you want to just go with the flow, don’t worry, the algorithms will take care of you. If you want to be in control, you better run fast than the algorithms and know yourself better than them. To do that, don’t take much baggage with you, they are too heavy for this journey
  • The Bhagavad Gita talks about a warrior in doubt about his path. Krishna says that everyone has a role to fulfill in life and you will only feel joy when you find your role. The warrior then becomes kills their parents and relatives, leads his army to victory, and becomes the greatest warrior. “The Lion King” movie seems to tell a similar story about the circle of life and how Simba has to fulfill his role in it, but Mufasa plays the role of Krishna in this one. Simba wandered around using the Hakuna Matata mantra and not fulfilling his role, which brought a lot of doubt to him
  • People in Israel have to take care of the “eternal land” but this concept of “eternal land” is absurd when you consider the time of the universe, the whole history, and what physics tell us about the future
  • “hoc est corpus” (this is the body) in Latin may have become “hocus pocus” in the ears of the peasants who don’t speak Latin. It became the word when someone wants to transform something into something else. — 💭 😱
  • More sacrifice brings more believing. This is one of the reasons women were asking their future husbands for extensive rings. If it was worth expending that much money, it was something worth investing
  • Public transportation is banned during Saturdays in Israel because of the Sabbath. This is a big deal for the working class who don’t have cars because they can’t visit relatives or tourist attractions. The same doesn’t happen for the rich. It is a sacrifice for the religion.
  • Fascism word is being misused nowadays. People call everyone they don’t like a fascist.
  • Our inner narrator usually gets things wrong usually doesn’t admit it. It usually creates a personal myth with good memories that little resembles the truth. In social networks, you can observe it clearly because part of it was transferred to the computer. People spend a lot of time creating their perfect online version and becoming attached to it. That’s how a simple family trip with lots of traffic and tense silence becomes pictures of smiles and a nice landscape. 99% of what we experience never become part of the self
  • Our fantasy self is very visual, and our real self is sensorial. When you imagine/see a nice place you can’t feel what that moment brought. A picture smiling on the beach may also have sun burning the skin, mosquitos, bad food in the stomach, relationship problems, etc.
  • Now, with television, it became easy to delude people. Algorithms will help to fulfill this vision
  • Meditation helps to understand the mind and how little we know/control ourselves