Sapiens is the kind of I never knew I wanted to read. I accidently purchased this book and was not sure what to expect from it. I thought it would be a boring read like it was back in school during history class. But No!! This book was one of the most interesting I have ever read. The author style of explaining as well as the ideas that are explained are very Interesting. The book is around 500 pages thick but it was so interesting that before I knew I had completed reading the book.
Ok, So what to expect if you are reading this book? Well the book is about the evolution of man in terms of knowledge. Thinking capacity of early humans to bring themselves to be the hunter instead of being hunted in the wild. This books gives perspective on a lot of things below I have listed few of my learnings from this book.
Beliefs
We were alone in the start with our Intelligence we made beliefs. with beliefs we brought people together. We gave hope to ourselves not only alive but also hope of life after death which got us to act a certain way and do certain things. You see we often see people teaching other people about how they should give their belongings to others to get higher places after their death I always felt this was weird. This belief is very different from any other animals.
You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
Yuval Noah Harari
Money
Money is a man made concept and it is very powerful. You see money holds no value on its own and needs a very complex mechanism in place for the money to work the way it works. But early men were able to devise such complex techniques for exchanging values and also to store values to utilize it as per needed in future. Our early ancestors were only concerned about surviving for the day. Few of us got more efficient and were able to do more than just survive they were able to achieve much more such that their next few generations can survive without even lifting a finger and all these possible just because of money.
Religion
Early humans were not so cooperative. It was not easy to convince people to work on a single idea or project as a group. You can’t just ask people to do somethings for you because you want something. For this we needed a people to have a common set of beliefs. This is how Gods came into existence. We created Gods for our own benefits to bring people close to work on a common goals. Because of believing in Similar set of gods it was easy to convince someone who never met each other only because their goals were shared by their belief in Gods.
Similarly we created Companies. Companies are not alive and real But they appear very real to the employees, stakeholders, consumers and the government. Only because they believe that the company exist and the company has a goal and values. If people didn’t had such beliefs in a single supreme of a collective group. Humans would have failed to survive.
Ignorance
We created a lot of destructive materials as well and things got very serious with the discovery of atomic bombs. This was the first time the potential of human was realized. From here the humankind had the capability to not just change the course of history, but to end it.
