[Category:Books]
Read August / September, 2017
Highly recommended. Notable eurekas:
- Wheat domesticated humans as much as humans domesticated wheat. With agriculture, we work harder for less nutrition, and it could be argued that we don’t actually come out ahead over hunting and gathering. Wheat, on the other hand, has gone from being a highly-localized grass to being grown on huge tracts of land on many continents.
- The transition to agriculture took several generations, and by the time it was done, it was too late to go back. For one thing, no one alive remembered how things used to be. Secondly, the population had increased to a level that could be supported only by agriculture, not by hunting and gathering.
- Money, corporations, etc. are as fictional as spirits and talismans, but serve the same purpose: to explain and coordinate the actions of many humans at the same time. There is even a term we use: “legal fiction.”
- The objective is what can be shown to be happening regardless of anyone’s belief or opinion. The subjective is a belief, experience, or opinion of an individual human. The intersubjective is a shared belief or idea, which, while not objective, still has power due to the shared belief. Money, government, social mores, etc. are intersubjective.
- The great unifiers of civilization and empire are:
- money
- conquest
- religion
- With money, you don’t have to trust anyone, you only have to trust that they want something. In the same way, you don’t have to believe that gold/shells/banknotes have value, you only have to believe that someone else thinks they have value, and then suddenly the same thing has value to you too.
- Religion is a big pain in everyone’s behind right now, but in the past it brought people together at least as much as it tore them apart.
- On paper, domesticated cows/pigs/chickens seem to be incredibly successful, because of how many copies of their DNA are alive in the world. However, these animals suffer massively and have no point except to be factory-produced organisms that will be killed in the same industrial fashion. There are parallels to how human individuals and societies might appear to be massive successes or horrible failures depending on how one looks at them.
- Every culture has contradictory beliefs and cognitive dissonance. In America, those clashing ideals are freedom and equality. Rather than being a weakness in the belief system, these “problem areas” are what drives the culture forward as people think through the issues they raise and try to find a solution or answer a question. If you want to understand a culture, try to find the areas of cognitive dissonance.
- People don’t necessarily know what makes them happy, and science increasingly does have an idea of it. Is this a justification for less individual freedom and more government control? I guess we’ll find out.
- Homo sapiens as we know it now seems to be on the verge of being replaced as the dominant species, perhaps by AI, perhaps by genetically-engineered humans, perhaps by cyborgs (already happening?), or perhaps by another species after we accidentally kill ourselves.
The above is just what I can remember of the book off the top of my head. This book really blew my mind and I feel that it will have a lasting impact on how I see and think about the world. Highly recommended.