Let's Read: Sapiens (2011) by Yuval Noah Harari, Part 2

Part 2: The Agricultural Revolution

Chap. 5: History's Biggest Fraud

At Year 9000BC, humans started farming. The main farming creatures were under human control before 3500BC. 90% of modern human calories come from species domesticated during that time. Modern human diet is ancient.

Farmers were on average worse off: they got sick from backbreaking (literally) labor, they suffered malnutrition from the monotonic diet, they were far more vulnerable to famines, bad health from bad diet, diseases from crowdedness, violence from defending their farmlands against other farming communities (unlike hunter-gatherers, they couldn't just run away, since they need their land and granaries to live).

Humans started farming from a series of small "improvements" that end up trapping them into a worse life. A bit more productivity -> a bit more to eat -> a bit more people -> a bit less to eat -> etc. 

It's like how emails made people more anxious, and productivity gains made people work more. Perspective makes people never satisfied.

Farmers suffered, but farming communities gained power and conquered the world by sheer population density. 

Farm animals suffered even more greatly, even though after domestication, they spread all over the world and can be considered "successful", for most individuals, their domestication was a disaster. 

What makes a species successful can be completely unrelated to what makes an individual's life good.

Chap 6 Building Pyramids

Hunter-gatherers lived around a large territory shared with many other creatures. Farmers settle down and defend and customize their tiny homes. Most of human history happened in the 2% of the earth's surface where farming is profitable. 

Farmers suffered more stress from doing all the complicated farming they must juggle to stay alive. And in a sense their stress were in vain, since whatever surplus they made were quickly taken by more children, or the ruling class.

Americans are organized by the collective fiction of The Declaration of Independence (1776), Thomas Jefferson et al, is a myth and only exists in the minds of humans, not to mention having scientifically wrong assumptions:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...

There's no Creator, there's no equality, and there are no unalienable Rights. Birds don't fly because it's their Right, but because they can and they benefit from it, so by evolution birds tend to fly. It's not inalienable, since birds like ostriches lost their ability to fly later.

A scientifically more accurate version would be like:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure...

As such, the Declaration of Independence, as well as human rights, equality, etc, are useful fictions. But still many people think of them as just "true", as true as physical laws. This kind of dogmatic belief makes people stick to these useful fictions and ake make their societies stable and successful.

Personally, I think it's not necessary for most of the fiction to be followed while believing it to be true. It could be just that in a society, acting according to a certain fiction is just a Nash equilibrium, and even if nobody even knows that there's such a fiction, they still selfishly act just as if they are living according to the fiction.

An imagined order should have 3 properties:

1. Embedded into material. Western individualism is embedded in the Western homes, with private rooms. Compare with medieval homes, where nobody (except maybe the masters) could lock their rooms.
2. Controls value functions of people. Consumerism makes people desire things made by other people and sold for money. Romanticism makes people desire new things. Consumerism + Romanticism = endless vacations and variations and novelty = the wasteful Western culture.
3. "Inter-subjective": believed by many, not personally. Even if you don't believe in money's worth, money would still be worthwhile because many do.

The irony of history is that tearing down one fiction requires a collective effort (to kill off/convert the believers of the old fiction), which requires another fiction to organize the collective effort.

Chap 7 Memory Overload

Fictions are memes, not genes, and human brains aren't that great at preserving memes needed for running giant empires. But then Sumerians invented writing and that allowed them to do math and recordings and empire-building.

Bureaucracy and accounting and math were invented just to organize information so that they can be found later. But eventually those inventions are gaining a life of their own, like memes overpowering genes sometimes.

Chap 8 There is no Justice in History

Imagined orders, as memes, survive by making large groups of humans to cooperate. Whether it makes humans in the groups happy is irrelevant, and in fact a lot of humans suffered greatly from imagined orders, like slaves, blacks, women, farmers, etc...

All the above-mentioned distinctions – between free persons and slaves, between whites and blacks, between rich and poor – are rooted in fictions. Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable... the hierarchy of rich and poor... seems perfectly sensible to many Americans and Europeans. Yet it’s a proven fact that most rich people are rich for the simple reason that they were born into a rich family, while most poor people will remain poor throughout their lives simply because they were born into a poor family.

The title of the chapter is misleading, by the way. There is no justice, period. Justice is an imagined order.

Imagined social orders usually happened by accident and perpetuated by a self-perpetuating loop. Blacks were discriminated against because it justified slavery. They are still discriminated against because they underachieve, but they underachieved because they were discriminated against.

Gender in particular

Because sex is half of what human life is about (one half: keep yourself alive. second half: make sure offsprings are also alive), humans made a lot of memes out of sex. The two genders are bunches of memes that divides the social roles of the two sexes of humans.

A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids'. Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.

Arguments against women running for office, or homosexuality, or stuff, based on what is "natural", are bullshit, because

A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid ... negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other. 

Damn those homoattracting electrons!

After the agricultural revolution, most women were treated a lot worse than men were, and often were mere properties of some men (husband, father, brother, etc). Why this patriarchy? It's not because of muscle power -- successful rulers ruled by person skills, skills that many women have.

Men are by nature more aggressive and better suited for being professional killers (aka soldiers), but this was still not an explanation for the patriarchy, since the army is usually controlled by the generals and a civilian government.

Going by stereotypes, women are more manipulative, able to see things from others' perspective, etc. If such stereotypes were genuinely believed, it'd have been logical for people to let more women to be the leaders and diplomats, but no. Why?

Bonobos, elephants, hyenas, all have groups of females allying to keep themselves safe from aggressive males, so why didn't human females?

We don't know yet. It's an important problem still for scientists.