Sapiens - A Graphic History by Yuval Noah Harari

I always had a problem with studying history. But I wanted to study history to learn about the past and the behavior of our humankind. But history has always been very boring to me. But when I heard about the graphic version of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, I picked it up to try it out, and I couldn't put it down. Best book on history I have ever read. Interesting, light, and insightful. If you don't like history and want to read anything in this field, I would highly recommend this book to everyone.

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Below are the highlights of parts one and two of the book Sapiens - A Graphic History by Yuval Noah Harari

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Part One

To the extinct, the lost and the forgotten. Everything that comes together is bound to be dissolved. - Yuval Noah Harari

• Humans are animals, and everything that has happened in history has obeyed the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.
  

Our planet was home to at least six different species of humans.

• Animals belong to the same species if they tend to mate naturally and produce fertile offspring.
  

• Closely related species that evolved from a common ancestor are bunched together under the heading “genus”
  

• All the distinctions that seem so important today - French and German, Christian and Muslim, Black and White - are very recent inventions, and they don’t have much influence on human evolution.
  

• All members of a particular family can trace their lineage back to a founding matriarch or a patriarch.
  

• Humans belong to a family too - the family of great apes.
  

• Adapting to an upright position was a challenge, especially when the back and neck had to support an extra-large head. That’s why people so often have backache or a stiff neck. Women paid extra. Walking upright required narrower hips, and that constricted the birth canal - just when babies heads kept getting bigger.
  

Compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely.

• It takes a tribe to raise a human. So, evolution favoured the ones who could form strong social ties. Periodically, the helplessness of human babies turned out to be a blessing. It meant humans had to develop their social skills.
  

• Humans came out of the womb like molten glass. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom.
  

Sapiens is more like some upstart dictator who’s always afraid of losing power.

• Our first tools were used to scavenge what was left by majestic lions and ferocious hyenas. And that really helps us understand our history and our psychology. It explains why we’re so stressed and always panicking about our position. Which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. A lot of historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological disasters, resulted from our sudden jump to the top.
  

• According to our specialist, Mrs. Ann Gibbons, cooking your food makes your teeth and your intestines smaller, and your brain bigger. Long intestines and big brains consume so much energy, it’s difficult to have both! By shortening the digestive tract and reducing its energy consumption, cooked food will give you a jumbo brain!
  

• The domestication of fire was a sign of things to come. It was the first important step on the way to the atom bomb.
  

• Scientists agree that by 150,000 years ago, sapiens in East Africa looked a lot like us.
  

Tolerance isn’t a sapiens trademark.

• Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestor wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.
  

• The first objects that we reliably call art or jewellery, and the first clear evidence for religion, trading and complex social order. An ivory figurine of a “lion-man” (or “lioness-woman”) found in a cave in Stadel, Germany. Approximately 32,000 years old.
  

Sapiens can cooperate in any number of ways with countless strangers! That’s why sapiens rule the world, while ants eat our leftovers and poor chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories…

• Communication is not unique to sapiens, even insects communicate with each other.
  

• First of all, our language is amazingly supple. We can connect a limited number of sounds and sign to produce an infinite number of sentences, each with a distinct meaning.
  

Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction.

• If you want to keep tabs on ever-changing relationships of even a few dozen people you need to obtain and process a staggering amount of information. In a group of 50 individuals, there re 1225 one-on-one relationships, and countless more complex social combination.
  

• Surely it’s wrong to talk about people behind their back? it’s a much-maligned activity, but it’s actually essential for cooperation in large numbers. Gossip comes so naturally to us it’s as if that’s what our language evolved for in the first place. Gossip usually focus on wrongdoings, so it helps enforce social norms and maintain cohesion. But there’s still a problem because even gossip has its limits. No matter how much you gossip, most people can’t be really close to more than 150 other people.
  

• 5 close friends, 500 acquaintances, 1500 people you would recognize in the street
  

Large numbers of total strangers can cooperative successfully if they believe in the same myths!

• We sapiens don’t use language only to describe things that we see around us - we can also use language to intent stuff. Fictions! A sapiens can say “look up there! there’s a god above the clouds and he’ll punish you if you don’t do as I say.”
  

• You could never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him unlimited bananas in ape heaven. No chimp would ever believe a story like that! Only sapiens might believe it. And that’s how we can cooperate with millions of strangers, whereas skeptical chimps can’t.
  

• None of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another.
  

• People were afraid to start new businesses and take risks like that. Failure could mean ruin for them and their whole family. That’s why people invented a really crazy story - limited liability companies! These companies were legally independent of the people who set them up, or invested money in them, or managed them.
  

Companies are created in the same way as gods - you tell stories and convince everyone to believe them.

• Telling effective stories isn’t easy. The problem isn’t telling stories, it’s convincing everyone else to believe them. Much of history revolves around one big question…How do you convince millions of people to believe a particular story about a god, a nation or a limited liability company. But when it works, it gives sapiens so much power because it helps millions of strangers to cooperate for the sake of common goals.
  

• Fictional stories can also cause a lot of trouble. Most wars in history were fought over fictions.
  

• Sapience should never forget that fictions are just tools! We dreamed them up to serve our needs! People mustn’t become slaves to their own tools!
  

How can we tell if the hero in a story is real or invented? Just ask yourself: can the hero suffer? A corporation can’t suffer, even if it goes bankrupt. It doesn’t have a mind, and can’t feel pain or sadness. And a nation can’t suffer, even if it loses war. But a human being wounded in conflict really suffers. Which is why we should be very careful not to make real people suffer for the sake of a fiction.

Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered very quickly by changing the myths - by telling different stories.

• Only we sapiens can change our social system so quickly.
  

• While the behaviour patterns of archaic humans stayed the same for tens of thousands of years, sapiens could transform their social structure, their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a couple of decades.
  

Trade can’t exist without trust, which is why sapiens is the only animal ever to use it.

• History begins with the cognitive revolution. Our primary means of explaining the development of homo sapiens from them on are historical narratives rather than biological theories.
  

• Corporations can tempt us with food full of sugar and fat right now because of tendencies we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These days obesity and diabetes kill more people than wars do. But liking sugar and fat was perfectly logical in the stone age, and it’s now hard-wired into our genes. Our DNA thinks we’re still on the Savanna…
  

• Any attempt to reconstruct the lives of ancient hunter-gatherers based on surviving artifacts is extremely problematic, particularly because, unlike their descendants, they used very few artifacts in the first place! Only when we move to a new apartment that we realize just how much stuff we have!
  

• Members within a band knew each other very intimately and were surrounded by friends and relatives all through their lives. Loneliness and privacy would have been rare.
  

• Ancient foragers enjoyed physical dexterity that people today cannot achieve even after years of practicing yoga or tai chi.
  

• Most of our infectious diseases - things like flu, smallpox and measles - came to us from animals like chickens, cows and pigs only after we domesticated them in the agricultural revolution.
  

• Some epidemics, like Covid-19 come from wild animals, but are spread by modern transport systems. Ancient foragers didn’t farm chickens or travel in airplanes, so they largely avoided epidemics.
  

• So, in a nutshell, what with this wholesome, varied diet, the relatively short working week and the low incidence of infectious diseases, many experts describe pre-agricultural forager societies as the original affluent societies.

• The things they valued most in life were good social interactions and high-quality friendships.
  

• The truth is that, like every human society, ache society has very complex. We shouldn’t rush to demonize or idealize them based on such limited knowledge or interaction. They weren’t angles or demons - just humans.
  

• It’s far more difficult for us to find out about their thoughts, beliefs and feelings - that’s inevitable!
  

When scholars claim they know what ancient foragers believed, it often tells us more about the scholars’ own preconceptions than about stone-age religion!

• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!
  

• It’s not about intelligence, it’s about experience! Iy was way easier to hunt the big guys in Australia than in Africa, because the Australian animals hadn’t learned of be scared of humans!
  

Learning to be afraid of new dangers takes time.

Part Two

• To this day, half of the calories that feed you voracious humans come from just three plants - wheat, rice and corn - and two animals - cows and pigs…all of them domesticated more than 9,000 years ago.

Wheat says: They think my side of the bargain is to spare them from hunger and disease…My gift to them instead is famine and chronic health issues! Rather than improved quality of life, this agricultural revolution of theirs produced a population explosion! If you have a good look at ancient skeletons, you can see the agricultural revolution spelled out in ruined joints and spines. With all these agricultural, tasks to do, people had less free time on hand. They could no longer roam around, and were tied to their villages and land. This utterly changed their way of life. And as a result of all this strife, they wondered exactly who domesticated whom. The moral of the story is: Wheat Domesticated You!

• Before the agricultural revolution, grains were just a small fraction of homo sapiens’ diet. Humans are omnivores; They feed on a wide variety of foodstuffs. A diet based on grains is low in vitamins and minerals. It’s also difficult to digest and it ruins your teeth and gums. Wheat didn’t actually provide sapiens a better diet. And it certainly didn’t give them economic security. Because of unpredictable weather conditions, life as a wheat farmer was less secure than as a hunter-gatherer.
  

• Agricultural not only resulted in more epidemics, but also more violence! Archaeological and and anthropological evidence suggests that in a lot of agricultural societies about 25% of all deaths were the result of violence. Large-scale warfare isn’t a universal human characteristic. It was invented in a number of primitive farming societies. Then it spread like the plague! Sadly, there’s no natural balance between war and peace. It takes two tribes to make peace, but it only takes one to start a war. The agricultural revolution seems like a wonderful idea to people living in prosperous modern societies.

The currency of evolution isn’t hunger or suffering, but genes!

• Like many mammals, humans have hormonal and genetic mechanisms that help control procreation. When food is scarce, puberty is delayed and fertility decreases. When food is abundant, girls reach puberty earlier and they have a higher chance of conceiving.
  

• Breastfeeding reduces the chances of getting pregnant again as well as helps babies grow strong and healthy.
  

• There’s something special about cereals like wheat. It’s hard work to gather and prepare them - but the grains can be stored for months, even years!
  

• When we started working so hard to control wheat and cultivate it, we had more food, but we also had a lot more children. Once you stopped going from camp to camp but settled in permanent villages, women could have a child every year instead of every four. And we could wean our babies younger because we could feed them porridge and gruel instead of mother’s milk. Once we domesticated some animals, we could also give them goat’s milk. The younger they were weaned, the more pregnancies we had. And you didn’t realize that switching from mother’s milk to goat’s milk and gruel weakened your children’s immune systems just when epidemics started to strike we wanted to create the perfect place for humans, but we accidentally created the perfect place for germs! Children started dying.
  

• They probably believed a story that made sense to them and seemed to justify all that hard work. You wouldn’t believe what people will believe! And you’d be surprised what beliefs can get humans to do…
  

• Building temples or feeding our kids, it’s all the same. When we domesticated those plants, we actually exposed ourselves to hunger, disease and violence.
  

• Some people seemed to be ok. What with all those ambitious projects to organize, like temples and irrigation canals, new leaders and priests started popping up everywhere. Well, they didn’t complain too much about being hungry or toiling in the fields, if you know what I mean…They were too busy telling us what to do! And they kept up their mantra: “More wheat! More children! More work! Paradise is just around the corner! One last big push! We’re all in this together!” And if anyone ever ventured to say we’d be better off working less, having fewer children producing and producing less wheat… The leaders and chiefs flew into a terrible rage.
  

The luxury trap is one of history’s few iron laws. People invent things they don’t really need, and these luxuries soon turn into necessities. We start taking our new luxuries for granted. Before you know it, we can’t live without them.

• The agricultural revolution teaches us an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life brought about huge changes that altered the world in ways no one had imagined or wanted. Nobody planned the agricultural revolution or invented to make humans dependent on cultivated grains. A series of small decisions intended to fill a few stomachs and ensure some security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient people to spend their days in endless drudgery.
  

• Today, the world had almost 5 billion cattle, sheep, pigs and goats, and more than 20 billion chickens. And they’re everywhere!
  

• Listen. anima; domestication is based on brutal practices that only grew crueler with each passing century. As bad as things were on ancient farms, they can be much worse nowadays.
  

• The whole of the dairy industry is built on breaking the most fundamental bond in mammals - the bond between a mother and her offspring. As a biologist, I find that terribly cruel.
  

• Today there are fewer than 6,000 black rhinoceroses left in the wild. But a rhinoceros that lives on the African savanna is probably far happier than any of the millions of calves raised on industrial meat farms. This discrepancy between evolutionary “success” and individual suffering may well be the most important lesson we can learn from the agricultural revolution.
  

The benefits shouldn’t be expressed in numbers, but in terms of happiness.

• No one owned any plants or animals. The idea that a human might own a fig tree or a herd of cattle was ridiculous. How could one being own another? Once humans began owning goats, they also got the idea they could own humans-as slaves and men got the idea they could own women by creating private property, sapiens increased their selfish tendencies… time changed too. With agriculture everybody was constantly worrying about the future. Farmers are always fretting that there won’t be enough rain or too much or any number of other calamities might happen… All that stress had far-reaching consequences. It was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems. Anxieties and worries are the building blocks of the state. Sadly, despite all their backbreaking work, peasants hardly ever achieved the economic security they craved.
  

History was made by very few people while everyone else plowed fields and carried water buckets.

• The big question of human politics isn’t “How to feed a million people” but rather “How to get a million people to agree on anything.”
  

• Thanks to the myths, humans are going to build mind-blowing networks of mass cooperation. It will take them just 12,000 years to get from tribes of maybe 1,000 people to a global trade network of 8 billion. Biologically, nothing will change. But when you guys start inventing stories about great gods and chosen peoples, you’ll be all set to create huge cities and empires…nation states…and even joint stock companies…
  

• Disclaimer: The Fantasy Trips corporation is not liable for any wars and/or genocides and/or mass exploitation in. its recommended destinations. Millions of humans may have been harmed during the making of this brochure.
  

• Cooperation may sound all fluffy and altruistic, but it’s not always voluntary…And it’s hardly ever egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks relied on oppression and exploitation.
  

• Babylonia…The Qin Empire…And this, the Roman Empire…They were all built on fictional stories. They were all “imagined orders”! The social norms that kept them going weren’t based on instincts…or on personal acquaintances…but on belief in shared myths.
  

A french writer called voltaire neatly summarised this problem. He said: “Perhaps god doesn’t exist, but don’t tell my servant or he might steal my things.”

• It’s constant work safeguarding an imagined order. And it often calls for violent measures. Armies, police forces, trials and prisons work round the clock forcing people to comply with imagined orders. So, ironically, even protecting human rights sometimes requires violence!
  

• Christianity wouldn’t have lasted 2,000 years unless at least some of its leaders honestly believed the christian myths… If bankers and investors didn’t have a deep faith in capitalism, our current economic system would have collapsed long ago.
  

First of all, you must never admit that a bunch of people invented it. You should insist that the order your society is based on is an objective reality… everyone concerned needs to believe that the imagines order is real-absolutely not imagines…created by great gods or laws of nature. Secondly, an imagined order takes constant teaching, from the cradle to the grave! The principles of an imagined order are instilled from a very early age. Like millions of other humans in her generation, Zoe here is taught to believe in the values of equality and liberty through fairy tales, TV shows, paintings, songs, etiquette and fashion…even through architecture…It’s super important to integrate the imagined order into the material world.

• All humans live inside the dreams of dead people. Humans are born into a world shaped by the myths of their ancestors…and none of them ever really break free.
  

• Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel something’s missing or not quite right, well, then we probably need to buy some product…or service. Every TV commercial is another little fairy tale convincing us that having a new product or service will make life better. Meanwhile romanticism is all about feelings, emotions and experiences. Romanticism tells us that to live life to the fullest, we need more feelings and more experiences. So romanticism and consumerism are perfect bedfellows. Romanticism wants experiences and consumerism is only too keen to provide them - for a fee. These two have a love child: The infinite “market of experiences” that underpins the modern tourism industry. This industry doesn’t sell airline tickets or hotel rooms, it sells experiences. And billions of people are happy to pay for them!
  

• An imagined order is not something subjective that exists in my personal imagination. It’s what’s called an intersubjective reality: It exists in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people.
  

• In contrast, something subjective depends on an individual’s consciousness and beliefs. It exists in just one person’s mind. If that person changes their beliefs, then that subjective thing alters or disappears…
  

• Laws, humans rights, gods, nations, corporations and money are intersubjective rather than objective things, yet they’ve been some of the most important forces shaping history.
  

• The only way to change an existing imagined order is to substitute it with another imagined order.
  

• There’s no way out of the imagined order. If you break down your prison walls and run toward freedom, you’re actually just running into a more spacious exercise yard in a bigger prison.
  

• The human brain isn’t a good storage device for empire-size databases! It has three serious drawbacks: 1. Its limited capacity 2. Information stored in a human brain doesn’t stick around forever…People end up dying and their memories die with them. 3. The human brain is selective. It easily stores some types of information, but can’t handle others. You see, it evolved to store and process information that was useful for survival on the ancient savanna.
  

• Foragers never needed to remember or process large amounts of mathematical data! You see, a forager didn’t need to remember exactly how many apples or nuts were on each tree in the forest. So the human brain was never adapted to storing and processing numbers. That’s why sapiens had real problems establishing big kingdoms and empires, even after the agricultural evolution. To achieve that, they had to find a system for recording and processing large amounts of mathematical data. Telling stories about gods was no longer enough. Sure, a good story could help convince millions of people to pay their taxes more or less honestly. But for the fiscal system to work, it needed to gather and process endless information about people’s incomes and assets, their payments , arrears, debts and fines, and their discounts and exemptions. If a state couldn’t store and process all those numbers, it couldn’t make the most of its resources, or even know what its resources were! And there’s one big problem with numbers-most people think they’re terribly boring! If you ask people to store, recall and process lots of numbers, most of them give up or their brains switch off altogether! Human mental limitations had a direct impact on the size and complexities of societies. When the number of people and accumulated assets went beyond a critical threshold, there was just too much information to remember. The limited human brain couldn’t cope with all the data so the system collapsed. That’s why human communities stayed relatively small and simple for thousands of years after the agricultural revolutions!
  

• The most important function of writing remained storing boring numbers.
  

• That’s still a mystery. We just know that the brain’s retrieval system is incredibly efficient.
  

• When societies started accumulating texts, they needed to invent efficient new ways of cataloging them and processing them. That was an even bigger challenge than inventing writing.
  

There are twin pillars to every large-scale human order - mythology and bureaucracy!

• Here’s the greatest impact that writing had on human history: it gradually changed the way humans saw the world and thought about it. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.
  

• What did imagine orders mostly did is give power and a truckload of privilege to the guys at the top of the heap! And dumped discrimination and oppression on the saps at the bottom!
  

• They didn’t see themselves as hypocrite. In their view, human rights had little to fo with black people. And they thought “freedom” meant that white people were free to own slaves, without the state telling them what to do with their “property.”
  

• Some Americans cling to the idea that the hierarchy of wealth was sanctified by god while others see it as an expression of the immutable laws of nature, as if corporate laws and tax exemptions are coded in human DNA. All the hierarchies between free people and slaves, white and black people, rich and poor, and men and women were rooted in fictions. But one of the few iron laws of history is that every imagined hierarchy disowns its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.
  

• Like all the myths, the story of the Purusha isn’t scientific, to put it mildly. We now know that, whereas the sun and the moon are about 4.5 billion years old…the differences between Hindu castes go back no more than 3,000 years. The caste hierarchy has nothing to do with divine creation or the laws of nature. It’s invented human laws that made some people masters and others servants.
  

• It’s impossible to quantify, probably in the billions of people throughout history have been killed or enslaved because of these stories.
  

• That a lot of these “Natural” differences in abilities that he’s so proud of are also rooted in fictional stories.
  

• They have the same genes but had different opportunities…And fictional stories determine who gets which opportunities. But one thing I don’t get. Why do culture come up with so many different ways to divide people? And exactly why does Indian civilisation divide people into castes while the ottoman empire classified them by religion and modern America by race? By chance, really. In most cases, hierarchies emerge thanks to all kinds of accidental historical circumstance, and then they’re perpetuated and refined over many generations…As various groups cultivate their own vested interest in the system.
  

• The caste system didn’t drop down from heaven fully formed. It evolved gradually. It’s difficult to get a clear picture because you can’t exactly see caste.
  

• The new elite wanted to be sure to keep their assets and their privileged status. They were especially keen for their children to be rich and powerful too. So, to stop their servants’ children competing with their own, the priests and warriors insisted that people always always did the same job as their parents.
  

• To play up the impression that servants and priest were completely different entities, they made each caste wear different clothes, live in different neighbourhoods and avoid doing things together…
  

• The gods clearly separated Brahmins from Sudras, just as they separated the sun from the moon and day from night. If people start mixing up the castes, it will destroy the order that the gods creates, and the whole universe will collapse into chaos. And that’s how the caste system became an integral part of religion, society and even romance.
  

• The guys who clambered to the top of the pyramid would never admit that their privileged status was the result of some random historical development, like a war. To keep the system stable and prevent different castes from mixing, a magical ingredient was added to the social recipe: The concept of purity and pollution. Pious Hindus were taught that close contact with someone of a different caste could pollute them personally. and genera; mixing of castes would make the whole society impure. The Hindus weren’t the only ones with these ideas. All over the world and all through the ages, notions of purity and pollution underpinned human hierarchies. Social theories about purity and pollution hijacked biological disgust mechanism that are essential for human survival.
  

• If you wanna isolate and oppress a group of humans, the best way to do it si to convince everyone else that they’re a source of pollution. I mean, it’s been said of Jews, Roma, Gays, Black People, Women…Sometimes these groups were said to carry actual diseases. More often, they were seen as a “Source of racial or religious impurity,” whatever that means…In India, the link between caste and purity became so deeply embedded that people believed in it for centuries.
  

• Over time, Hindus defined more and more castes, sub-castes and sub-sub-castes. Eventually, there were, like, 3000 of these groupings! These were called Jati, which, if you translate it literally, means “Birth.” But all that diversity didn’t change the main principle of the system. Every person was born into particular Jati, and breaching the rules of your Jati would pollute you and the whole of society. A person’s jati determined their job, what they could eat, where they lived and who they could marry…Just like lionman said, you could usually marry only someone in your own caste, and your kids inherited the same status. Every time a new job become a thing or a new group of people came on the scene, those people had to be recognised as a separate caste and given their place in society. If some group couldn’t get recognition as a caste, they were literally out-castes. They weren’t considered a part of society - not even on its lowest rung. They were utterly impure, and any contact with them polluted you. They were known as untouchables. They had to live separately from other people and to scarpe a humiliating living by doing things like sifting through garbage. Even people in the lowest castes shunned them.
  

Over time, a weird story with obscure origins became a rigid social hierarchy.

• How come Africans were used as slaves? I mean, why not Europeans or Asians? So there are three reasons: 1. First of all, Africa was closer - it was cheaper to import slaves from Senegal than, say, Vietnam. 2. Second, there was already a well-established slave trade in Africa, exporting slaves mainly to the middle east. Slavery was rape in Europe…And it was easier to buy slaves in an existing market than to start from scratch. 3. And third, plantations in places like Virginia, Jamaica and Brazil all had outbreaks of Malaria and Yellow Fever, which came originally from Africa. Over many generations Africans had built up partial immunity to these tropical diseases while defenceless Europeans died in the thousands. So you’re telling me Africans were, like , biologically superior, but that’s exactly why they ended up at the bottom of social ladder?! Exactly right… Africans were more adapted to tropical climates than europeans and that’s why they ended up as slaves to European masters!
  

• America’s white masters didn’t want anyone thinking that slavery was the outcome of brute military power and economic interests. People rarely admit their cruelty and selfishness. Which is why they used religious and scientific myths to help justify the new artificial division between black and white people.
  

• Well, it was never gonna be easy leveling the playing field between white and black people like nothing had happened, and thinking black people would suddenly have the same opportunities as whites. Just look, the inequality’s so clear. After centuries of slavery, the average black person was poorer and less educated that the average white. This black teenager born in Atalanta in 1865 had way less chance of getting a good education and finding well-paid work than a white boy the same age. A generation later, the black guy with the meager salary couldn’t afford to send his kids to a decent elementary school, while the white guy’s kids went all the way to college.
  

• The stigma of being labeled intrinsically lazy, less reliable and less intelligent always played against black applicants. You’d have thought people would gradually realize these labels were pure myths and black people could start proving they were just as competent, law-abiding and clean as white. But the exact opposite happened: The prejudices just kept getting worse. Because white people had all the best jobs, it was easy to believe black people were inferior. Black people were trapped in a vicious circle: They weren’t recruited into white-collar jobs because of this reputation for being stupid and unreliable. And if anyone wanted proof of their inferiority…Well, there were no black people in white-collar jobs. A vicious circle in all its glory…A random historical situation translated into a rigid social system, a terrible burden passed from generation to generation… The vicious circle didn’t stop there. As racist myths grew stronger, whites felt the need to create new rules to keep black people in their place and protect white society from the supposedly polluting effects of race mixture. Black people were banned from voting. Black children were banned from white schools. Black people were banned from white shops. Black people were banned from white restaurants. Black people were banned from white hotels. The justification was always the same. What god and nature made separate, people should keep separate. If you allow any mixing, civilization will collapse! And of course, these fears were substantiated by pseudoscientific studies that “proved” all this…Here’s confirmation that black people are indeed less educated…Diseases are more widespread among them, and the crime rate is far higher in their communities! These studies failed to acknowledge that sickness and crime were largly the result of social discrimination rather than innate biological tendencies…
  

• White supremacists in the Ku Klux Klan carried out a lot of killings like that… All in the name of preserving the purity of the white race. And don’t forget purity’s BFF - Beauty! With racist myths getting deeper and deeper into the american imagination, the entirety of aesthetics standards in the US were built on white standards of beauty. White people’s physical characteristics were presented as the go-to look while black people were kept out of the media on the spurious basis that black people wereless attractive. And these prejudies about looks took the imagines racial hierarchy deep into the human psyche.
  

• So to summarize, it all started with a chance historical event…→ which led to slavery → which resulted in racist myths and discriminatory laws → which trapped black people in poverty and denied them a good education → which fueled more prejudice and more discrimination → which led to slavery
  

• Money just makes more money and poverty more poverty. Education sets the scene for more education and ignorance for more ignorance… Like we didn’t already know that the privileged are the most likely to be privileged again and victims are the most likely to be victimized again.
  

• Humans have so many different kinds of hierarchies. If it were a biological mechanism, you’d expect the same hierarchy in all human societies - like with bee colonies where it’s always the same hierarchy.
  

• There’s one heirarchy that’s been very important in all human societies. And in this particular hierarchy, the relations between culture and nature are more complicated. I am, of course, talking about gender! All societies have divided people into Men and Women. And ever since the agricultural revolution, men have had the better deal everywhere.
  

• In many legal system, rape was regarded as a violation of property rights. In other words, the victim wasn’t the woman who’d been raped, but the man who owned her. So if a man raped an unmarried woman, the rapist just had to pay a bride price to the woman’s father or brother…And she then became the rapist’s legal property. Being a husband meant having complete control of your wife’s sexuality. Saying a man had “raped” his wife was as illogical as saying he’d stolen from his own money bag. This mindset doesn’t confined to the ancient middle east. Marital rape wasn’t recognised by law in Greece until 2006. To this day there are still countries such as Bahrain, Ethiopia, India and Iran where a husband can’t be prosecuted for raping his wife.
  

People sometimes stop believing in it, but just as often they come up with new nonsense…

• In the time of Socrates, Athenians thought homosexual relationships were pretty normal… In fact, some homosexuals were considered heroes and role models.
  

• Don’t you realize that no behaviour can ever be unnatural? If I don’t have any kids - nature’s fine with that. And if I decide to drop you and try a relationship with a woman - nature won’t object to that either! Everything that’s possible is natural - by definition! Things that break the laws of nature just don’t exist. If something does exist, then that means that it compiles with the laws of nature!
  

• The thing is, evolution has no master plan. The functions performed by organs are constantly changing and the way they evolve doesn’t follow any predetermined path.
  

• Most of the laws, norms, rights and obligations that define masculinity and femininity reflect cultural preferences more than biological necessities.
  

• Men’s and Women’s roles, rights and duties are defined by cultural stories rather than biology, so the meanings of “masculinity” and “femininity” have varied immensely from one society to another.
  

Being a woman or a man is far more complex than being female or male.

• Actually, with other type of physical strength like coping with famine, illness and exhaustion, women usually come off better than men.
  

• You get to be CEO by shaking hands and wining and dining people, not by beating them up! That’s why people in their sixties are usually more powerful than twenty-somethings.
  

• Another vicious circle! Wars make men more powerful, and powerful men make more wars. Recent studies of men’s and women’s hormonal and cognitive systems confirm that men generally have more violent tendencies. So they really are better equipped to serve as soldiers.
  

• The percentage of “high-born” frenchmen in the lower ranks was negligible.
  

• An aggressive brute is probably the worst choice to run a war. Better to have someone who can cooperate, appease, manipulate and appreciate different points of view. That’s what it takes to be an empire builder!
  

• It just doesn’t make sense! Our whole species owes its success to cooperation! But it’s men - who are supposedly less cooperative - who have power over women even though women should be the cooperation champions!!
  

• The truth is we are not sure why men have dominated women throughout most human societies since agricultural revolution. It’s one of the biggest gaps in our understanding of history. When scientists don’t know something, it’s better to admit ignorance than to invent an imagined version of history. But there’s one thing we do know for sure. Whatever made men dominate women, it wasn’t a law of nature. Patriarchy had something to do with fiction. More and more societies now give men and women equal legal status, equal political rights and equal economic opportunities…Which is kinda proves that patriarchies aren’t the inevitable outcome of our biology.
  

• The truth is that everything changes, people are never satisfied and all identities are fictional. What it means to be christian or spanish or even a man or woman depends on the stories people believe. It’s changed many times in the past, and will keep changing in the future. You won’t find the truth by killing people who disagree with you - you’ll just dink into ignorance.
  

• It’s super difficult to convince people to believe in a completely new story. If you want to change the world, you usually need to start with a story that society already believes. Then you rework it, tweaking it here and there. That’s why there are few really big stories in the world - but each one of these has lots of different and even contradictory versions.
  

• If people have faith in nothing, social order collapses, causing a lot of suffering. If people believe something too obsessively, that can also inflict terrible suffering. A big part of politics is about finding the right balance.
  

We should always ask, “is anyone suffering because of our story?” “If so who?” Then talk to them and listen to their story. Don’t shrik your responsibilities by claiming that the story is some eternal truth that can’t be changed. Stories are just tools we create to help people…if they do more harm than good, we can and should change them.

• Think about the feminist revolution…In the last hundred years, the feminist revolution has completely changed the big story about men, women and gender. After thousands of years of patriarchal societies, things have radically changed. Sure, we still don’t live in completely egalitarian societies. But if you think about everything that’s changed in the last century, it’s incredible. It’s one of the biggest revolutions in the history of manki-humankind. Which proves that we can change the world for the better, that we can do it quickly and can do it peacefully.
  

• I’m there to let you and other humans know this world isn’t inevitable. You can change the story. It’s up to you. It’s my job to travel the world blowing the cover off the stories that sapiens believe! And reminding people that every person has the power to change these stories. That is my humble superpower. The rest is up to you.

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Thank you so much for reading so for.

All the credit goes to the Author

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