•we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans
•Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators.
•as first humans came from East Africa, their skin color was dark. Melatonin kept the skin from high UV.
•According to the Interbreeding Theory, when Sapiens spread into Neanderthal lands, they bred with Neanderthals until the two populations merged. If this is the case, today’s Eurasians are not pure Sapiens. Similarly, when Sapiens reached East Asia, they interbred with the local Erectus, so the Chinese and Koreans are a mixture of Sapiens and Erectus.
•Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language
•the people who drove the Neanderthals to extinction, settled Australia, and carved the Stadel lion-man were as intelligent, creative and sensitive as we are
•Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. It’s much more important for them to know who hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest.
•Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
•The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’
•The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution from about 15,000 years ago
•Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions.
•Agricultural Revolution happened 10,000 years ago. Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of animal and plant species
•The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for agricultural tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought slipped discs, arthritis and hernias.
•humans created technologies to accomplish their tasks easier, hoping to have more time for things which they like. However technologies didn’t make them happier, instead they brought more stress and higher pace of life
•Ten thousand years ago, not more than a few million sheep, cattle, goats, boars and chickens lived in restricted Afro-Asian niches. Today the world contains about a billion sheep, a billion pigs, more than a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens.
•In order to turn bulls, horses, donkeys and camels into obedient draught animals, their natural instincts and social ties had to be broken, their aggression and sexuality contained, and their freedom of movement curtailed.
•Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another? Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal? Are all humans equal to one another biologically?
•According to the science of biology, people were not created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’.
•more than a few readers squirmed in their chairs while reading the preceding paragraphs. Most of us are educated to react in such a way. It is easy to accept that Hammurabi’s Code was a myth, but we do not want to hear that human rights are also a myth
•Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights.
•A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.
•How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.
•today people believe in equality, so it’s fashionable for rich kids to wear jeans, which were originally working-class attire. In the Middle Ages people believed in class divisions, so no young nobleman would have worn a peasant’s smock.
•what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order
•Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. A chimpanzee would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt would never think of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism
•Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded.
•In many countries the hierarchy originated as the result of accidental historical circumstances and was then perpetuated over many generations (caste, race, religion)
•Since all the best jobs were held by whites, it became easier to believe that blacks really are inferior
•the goal of Ku Klux Klan was to promote white supremacy and racial discrimination
•With time, the racism spread to more cultural arenas. American aesthetic culture was built around white standards of beauty (light skin, straight hair) came to be identified as beautiful
•The first European country to explicitly criminalize marital rape was Denmark in 1965. Sweden followed suit in 1965. During the 1980s and 1990s, several European countries enacted laws to explicitly criminalize marital rape or reform existing laws to remove marital exemptions
•sex is a biological category, gender is a cultural (social) category
•Patriarchal societies educate men to think and act in a masculine way and women to think and act in a feminine way
•Throughout Elizabeth’s forty-five-year reign, all Members of Parliament were men, all officers in the Royal Navy and army were men, all judges and lawyers were men, all bishops and archbishops were men, all theologians and priests were men, all doctors and surgeons were men, all students and professors in all universities and colleges were men, all mayors and sheriffs were men
•even though women don’t have greater muscle power, they have been also excluded from jobs that require little physical effort (priesthood, law, politics), while engaging in hard manual labour in crafts and household
•human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labour
•Women are often stereotyped as better manipulators and appeasers than men, and are famed for their superior ability to see things from the perspective of others. If there’s any truth in these stereotypes, then women should have made excellent politicians and empire-builders, leaving the dirty work on the battlefields to testosterone-charged but simple-minded men. Popular myths notwithstanding, this rarely happened in the real world.
•the patriarchal system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts
•money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. Luxury goods also exist only in our imagination
•Merchants travelling between India and the Mediterranean would notice the difference in the value of gold. In order to make a profit, they would buy gold cheaply in India and sell it dearly in the Mediterranean. Consequently, the demand for gold in India would skyrocket, as would its value. At the same time the Mediterranean would experience an influx of gold, whose value would consequently drop. Within a short time the value of gold in India and the Mediterranean would be quite similar
•empires are characterised by flexible borders and a potentially unlimited appetite. An empire is defined solely by its cultural diversity and flexible borders, rather than by its origins, its form of government, its territorial extent, or the size of its population. The British Empire, the largest empire in history, was ruled by a democracy.
•empire has been the world’s most common and stable form of political organisation for the last 2,500 years. Most humans during these two and a half millennia have lived in empires.
•empires may not just exploit conquered populations but bring philosophy, art, justice and architecture
•before becoming a part of Arab empire, Egyptians spoke Coptic, Syrians spoke Aramaic
•Taj Mahal may look like a part of authentic Indian culture, although it’s heavily influenced by Muslim imperialism. The mausoleum was built in the name of Mumtaz Mahal, a wife or the emperor, with Persian roots
•polytheism is distinguished from monotheism in that it displays that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests, it is unconcerned with the human desires. It makes no difference whether a particular kingdom wins or loses.
•Whereas liberal humanism seeks as much freedom as possible for individual humans, socialist humanism seeks equality between all humans. When the rich are privileged over the poor, it means that we value money more than the universal essence of all humans, which is the same for rich and poor alike.
•The idea that all humans are equal is a revamped version of the monotheist conviction that all souls are equal before God.
•cultures spread like diseases, successful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their information from people to people
•in times of economic expansion and low inflation bank credit rates are lower. Borrowers with high credit scores also get more favorable credit rates. Low credit rate indicates that the bank assesses the possibility of a person prospering in given economic conditions as generally higher
•New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries
•credit financed new discoveries; discoveries led to colonies; colonies provided profits; profits built trust; and trust translated into more credit
•For decades, aluminium was much more expensive than gold. In the 1860S, Emperor Napoleon III of France commissioned aluminium cutlery to be laid out for his most distinguished guests.
•Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity.
•The Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Iraqi nations are the product of haphazard borders drawn in the sand by French and British diplomats who ignored local history, geography and economy.
•If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.
•People who are diagnosed with chronic illness such as diabetes are usually depressed for a while, but if the illness does not get worse they adjust to their new condition and rate their happiness as highly as healthy people do.
•In previous eras the standard of beauty was set by the handful of people who lived next door to you. Today the media and the fashion industry expose us to a totally unrealistic standard of beauty.
•It is true that married people are happier than singles and divorcees, but that does not necessarily mean that marriage produces happiness. It could be that happiness causes marriage. Or more correctly, that serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin bring about and maintain a marriage.
•Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.
•happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments, happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile
Ваша оценка
savchenko29921 августа 202339
karishatim27 июня 20238
DanilaGorbunov18 апреля 202322
willwerner8 апреля 202320
LozeScuffy17 марта 202314
imnastyful26 февраля 202316
benpb_bl16 января 202350
SamLivingMyDreams6 января 20236
egs371010 ноября 202214
koziymaxim29 сентября 202213
kummer11 сентября 202230