"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind"

I wasn't surprised to find that author Yuval Noah Harari is Israeli -- he fits my stereotype of Israelis who don't suffer fools or illusions gladly.

• Myth making allows human (Sapiens) to cooperate beyond 150 member bands, whose social glue is gossip. "UN condemns Libya for human rights violations" -- each noun in this sentence is a myth.
• The foragers are the original "Affluent Society.
• Humans are an ecological disaster throughout history. Megafauna extinction in Australia and the Americas all linked to human expansion into these areas. (Marine megafauna extinction almost there.)
• Agricultural revolution is a trap. More (unhappy) gene copies is a win for evolution. Population growth shut the trap, and humans can't go back to foraging.
• From the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future became a major player int he theatre of the human mind.
• Domestication cruelty: blinded pigs, camel calves with lips cut so that suckling becomes painful. <Faustian bargains everywhere>
• Mass cooperation rarely egalitarian or equitable. (Concentration camps is a form of that.)
• Objective/subjective/inter-subjective; imaginary order


• History is a level 2 chaotic system, which responds to predictions about it.
• Cultures are mental parasites developed accidentally.
• The state and the market are the father and mother of the individual, who can't survive outside a family without them.
• Contradictions are built into cultures, and cognitive dissonance is a feature, not a bug.
• Money is the apogee of open-mindedness. Religion asks us to believe in something; money askes us to believe that other people believe in something.