Read This Next - Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
Key Takeaways
“Read this next” is a new series that will briefly introduce the books that have had the most significant impact on my worldview, thought process, and daily habits.
They will be short posts that will include my 10 most significant themes and excerpts from each book.
My singular goal with Solokas Focus is to help you live a healthier and happier life. Discussing books is a change of pace from normal fitness and nutrition programming but holds true to my theme.
Taking advantage of the insights that outstanding pieces of literature have to offer can put you on the fast track to improving your emotional and physical health.
First up - Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, by Yuval Noah Harari.
Full Story
With Noah Harari promising the curious contradiction that is the “brief history” of the entirety of the human species, you may expect to trudge through the 400+ pages fighting the urge to nod off to sleep at each turn. On the contrary, the work reads more like a riveting novel than a history textbook, with the entire species of Homo Sapiens taking on the role of protagonist.
Yuval Noah Harari conveys the eye-opening and engaging story of human history without leaving any aspects untouched. Of note, he takes a deep dive into the evolution and impact of biology, agriculture, politics, and spirituality on our species. Here are my top ten takeaways with quotes from the book.
1. Humans are social creatures. Social connection is an essential component of optimal health.
“Evolution thus favored those capable of forming strong social ties” (10).
“Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised” (180).
“Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health. People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found (or never sought) a community to be part of. Marriage is particularly important. Repeated studies have found that there is a very close correlation between good marriages and high subjective well-being, and between bad marriages and misery” (382).
2. Modern agriculture may be the most sickening ethical crime against sentient beings in the history of the world.
“Ten thousand years ago, not more than a few million sheep, cattle, goats, boars and chicken 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…From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep.
Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was found on a series of brutal practices it only became crueler the passing of centuries” (93).
“This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution” (97).
“Around the time that Homo sapiens was elevated to divine status by humanist religions, farm animals stopped being viewed as living creatures that could feel pain and distress, and instead came to be treated as machines. Today these animals are often mass-produced in factory-like facilities, their bodies shaped in a accordance with industrial needs…Treating living creatures possessing complex emotional worlds as if they were machines is likely to cause them not only physical discomfort, but also much social stress and psychological frustration” (342). “This is the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction. The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs” (344).
“Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us from disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, dairy cows, and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture may well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans” (379).
3. There is enormous pressure from society to consume and to be “beautiful.”
“Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can.
Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible.
Romanticism, which encourages variety, matches perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite market of experiences on which the modern tourism industry was founded” (115).
“Like the elite of ancient Egypt most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an a with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place” (116).
“Each year the U.S. population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world” (348).
“Today courting is done at bars and cafés, and money passes from the hands of lovers to waitresses. Even more money is transferred to the bank accounts of fashion designers, gym managers, dietitians, cosmeticians and plastic surgeons, who help us arrive at the café looking as similar as possible to the market’s ideal of beauty” (361).
“If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society - mass media and the advertising industry - may unwittingly be depleting the globe's reservoirs of contentment. If you were an 18 year old youth in a small village 5000 years ago you’d probably think you were good-looking because there were only 50 other men in your village and most of them are either old, scarred and wrinkled, or still little kids. But if you are a teenager today you are a lot more likely to feel inadequate. Even if the other guys at school are an ugly lot, you don't measure yourself up against them but against the movie stars, athletes and supermodels you see all day on television, Facebook and giant billboards” (384).
4. The idea of a soul and the concept of free will are comforting, but lack scientific and logical support.
“Scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism have found no soul there. They increasingly argue that human behavior is determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than by free will - the same forces that determine the behavior of chimpanzees, wolves, and ants. Our judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient discoveries under the carpet. But in all frankness, how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?” (236).
5. Studying history is a helpful way to understand ourselves and plan for the future.
“Biology enables, culture forbids” (147).
“We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine” (241).
“A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely” (271).
6. Religion is an integral part of human history. Under close examination, many religious ideologies don’t make much sense.
“Religion can be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order. This involves two distinct criteria…1. Religions hold that there is a superhuman order, which is not the product of human whims or agreements…2. Based on this superhuman order, religion establishes norms and values that it considers binding” (210).
“How can a monotheist adhere to such a dualistic belief (which, by the way, is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament?) Logically, it is impossible. Either you believe in a single omnipotent God or you believe in two opposing Powers, neither which is omnipotent. Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions. So it should not come as a surprise that millions of pious Christians, Muslims and Jews manage to believe at one in the same time in an omnipotent God and an independent devil. That was Christians, Muslims and Jews have gone so far as to imagine that the good God even needs our help in the struggle against the devil, which inspired among other things to call for jihads and crusades” (222).
“But if Good and Evil battle for control of the world, who enforces the laws governing this cosmic war?…When Good and Evil fight, what common laws do they obey, and who decreed these laws?
So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is mystified by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe - and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.
The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the Dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts” (223).
“Science is unable to set its own priorities. It is also incapable of determining what to do with its discoveries…In short, scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries” (274).
7. One helpful religious theme, from Buddhism- “suffering is caused by the mind’s relationship with reality.”
“He saw that men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build house and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content…They are too haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accomplished vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it?"
“Rather, suffering is caused by the behavior patterns of one’s own mind.
“Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify” (225).
“Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is” (226).
8. Evolution does not select for happiness. It cares that we live long enough to reproduce. “Happiness” is a biochemical process.
“We moderns have an arsenal of tranquilizers and painkillers at our disposal, but our expectations of ease and pleasure, and our intolerance of inconvenience and discomfort, have increased to such an extent that we may well suffer from pain more than our ancestors ever did” (383).
“Biologists hold that our mental and emotional world is governed by biochemical mechanisms shaped by millions of years of evolution. Like all other mental states, our subjective well-being is not determined by external parameters such as salary, social relations, or political rights. Rather, it is determined by a complex system of nerves, neurons, synapses and various biochemical substances such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin…People are made happy by one thing and one thing only - pleasant sensations in their bodies.”
“Happiness and misery play a role in evolution only to the extent that they encourage or discourage survival and reproduction. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that evolution has moulded us to be neither too miserable nor too happy. It enables us to enjoy a momentary rush of pleasant sensations, but these never last forever” (386).
9. Happiness is complicated.
“Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold two contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture” (165).
“He saw that men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content...They are too haunted by careless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it?” (224).
“One interesting conclusion is that money does indeed bring happiness. But only up to a point, and beyond that point it has little significance” (381).
“But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health, or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations” (382).
“So perhaps happiness is synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction…This is quite a depressing conclusion. Does happiness really depend on self-delusion?” (392).
10. We, as a species, need to reflect on the consequences of our actions.
“It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league” (6).
“We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?” (416).
Wrap Up
Sapiens is a thick book and the weight of it in your hands may give you pause, but it’s well worth the read. Trust me. Like no other book I’ve read before, Sapiens drastically altered my perception of religion, relationships, money, food, and human nature. Essentially, it redefined my understanding of everything important in the world.
I hope you enjoyed the first installment of Read This Next. Next up, a less esoteric and easier to digest book full of helpful nutrition pearls - Genius Foods, by Max Lugavere.
