I read 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari and reviewed it as part of my ongoing series.

Quick review: I thoroughly enjoyed 21 Lessons, more a collection of meditations than a single tome. The book follows Harari’s two bestsellers, Sapiens and Homo Deus, in which he as a historian and philosopher explores how mankind came to be and where humanity is going. Both great reads in their own right, neither of the previous two books explore the challenges we face in the present age. 21 Lessons is focused squarely on the major themes and current affairs of today and, unlike previous works, Harari intends this book to me more of a conversation with the aim to “stimulate further thinking, and help readers participate in some of the major conversations of [the] time.” He does so brilliantly, as I found myself pausing to think more reading this than I have in recent memory. Harari has organized the essays into 5 parts — the challenges of new technology, the potential responses to this tech, ways to better approach the issues plaguing the world like terrorism, real vs fake news and information and finally, the skills we need to develop to understand the meaning of life —a format which makes traversing back and forth in the book easy and seamless. I have been a fan of Harari’s since I read Sapiens and this book does not disappoint. Harari is one of the world’s foremost thinkers and I continue to enjoy engaging with his work.

Additional material to complement your reading:

Podcast: Yuval Harari and Dax Shepard on Armchair Expert

Youtube: Yuval Harari Talks at Google

Podcast: Yuval Harari and Sam Harris — The Edge of Humanity

Profile: Tech CEOs are in love with their principal doomsayer

Book Highlights:

Please note I’ve included the chapter headings in order to make consumption a bit easier.

Introduction

At the close of the twentieth century it appeared that the great ideological battles between fascism, communism and liberalism resulted in the overwhelming victory of liberalism. Democratic politics, human rights and free-market capitalism seemed destined to conquer the entire world. But as usual, history took an unexpected turn, and after fascism and communism collapsed, now liberalism is in a jam. So where are we heading?

Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation, but from something far worse — irrelevance.

Very soon somebody will have to decide how to use this power — based on some implicit or explicit story about the meaning of life. Philosophers are very patient people, but engineers are far less patient, and investors are the least patient of all. If you don’t know what to do with the power to engineer life, market forces will not wait a thousand years for you to come up with an answer. The invisible hand of the market will force upon you its own blind reply.

1. Disillusionment: The end of history has been postponed

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group and nation has its own tales and myths.

Both politicians and voters are barely able to comprehend the new technologies, let alone regulate their explosive potential.

To date, every major sector has been regulated — energy, finance, media and entertainment, food prep, water, air — and understandably so. What happens when things critical to society can no longer be regulated effectively?

As AI improves, we might soon reach a point when no human can make sense of finance any more. What will that do to the political process? Can you imagine a government that waits humbly for an algorithm to approve its budget or its new tax reform?

Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by.

In 1938 the condition of the common person in the USSR, Germany or the USA may have been grim, but he was constantly told that he was the most important thing in the world, and that he was the future (provided, of course, that he was an “ordinary person” rather than a Jew or an African). He looked at the propaganda posters — which typically depicted coal miners, steelworkers and housewives in heroic poses — and saw himself there: “I am in that poster! I am the hero of the future!” In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious words are bandied around excitedly in TED talks, government think tanks and hi-tech conferences — globalisation, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning — and common people may well suspect that none of these words are about them. The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?

In the end it was communism that collapsed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the Gulag. More importantly, the liberal story proved to be far more supple and dynamic than any of its opponents. It triumphed over imperialism, over fascism, and over communism by adopting some of their best ideas and practices. In particular, the liberal story learned from communism to expand the circle of empathy and to value equality alongside liberty.

When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or other that takes priority over boring stuff such as healthcare and pollution. If the nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has time to worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.

At the end of the day, humankind won’t abandon the liberal story, because it doesn’t have any alternative.

However, economic growth will not save the global ecosystem — just the opposite, it is the cause of the ecological crisis. And economic growth will not solve technological disruption — it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.

Just as the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution gave birth to the novel ideologies of the twentieth century, so the coming revolutions in biotechnology and information technology are likely to require fresh visions. The next decades might therefore be characterised by intense soul-searching and by formulating new social and political models.

2. Work: When you grow up, you might not have a job

We don’t know of any third field of activity beyond the physical and the cognitive — where humans will always retain a secure edge.

Are “cognitive” skills too broad? Do we need to split into more minutae

Two particularly important non-human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updateability.

Hence it would be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans — not jobs. Redundant drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.

If so, the job market of 2050 might well be characterised by human-AI cooperation rather than competition.

Can you guess how long it took AlphaZero to learn chess from scratch, prepare for the match against Stockfish, and develop its genius instincts? Four hours. That’s not a typo. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.

It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise). Both options have advantages and drawbacks. But no matter which paradise you choose, the real problem is in defining what “universal” and “basic” actually mean.

Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people.

3. Liberty: Big Data is watching you

This reliance on the heart might prove to be the Achilles heel of liberal democracy. For once somebody (whether in Beijing or in San Francisco) gains the technological ability to hack and manipulate the human heart, democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.

scientific insights into the way our brains and bodies work suggest that our feelings are not some uniquely human spiritual quality, and they do not reflect any kind of “free will”. Rather, feelings are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to quickly calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings aren’t based on intuition, inspiration or freedom — they are based on calculation.

If the feelings of some ancient ancestor made a mistake, the genes shaping these feelings did not pass on to the next generation. Feelings are thus not the opposite of rationality — they embody evolutionary rationality.

As scientists gain a deeper understanding of the way humans make decisions, the temptation to rely on algorithms is likely to increase. Hacking human decision-making will not only make Big Data algorithms more reliable, it will simultaneously make human feelings less reliable.

But once we decide on an ethical standard in the job market — that it is wrong to discriminate against black people or against women, for example — we can rely on machines to implement and maintain this standard better than humans.

The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century — the attempt to concentrate all information in one place — might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.

While science-fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we might be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.

In this, humans are similar to other domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk, but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximise the human potential. Indeed we have no idea what the full human potential is, because we know so little about the human mind. And yet we hardly invest much in exploring the human mind, and instead focus on increasing the speed of our Internet connections and the efficiency of our Big Data algorithms. If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.

All wealth and power might be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, while most people will suffer not from exploitation, but from something far worse — irrelevance.

4. Equality: Those who own the data own the future

Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.

It’s very dangerous to be redundant.

If we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, the key is to regulate the ownership of data. In ancient times land was the most important asset in the world, politics was a struggle to control land, and if too much land became concentrated in too few hands –society split into aristocrats and commoners. In the modern era machines and factories became more important than land, and political struggles focused on controlling these vital means of production.

how do you regulate the ownership of data?

5. Community: Humans have bodies

humans might be upgraded into gods, as of 2018 we are still Stone Age animals.

In recent years Facebook has had astonishing success, and it currently has more than 2 billion active users online. Yet in order to implement its new vision it will have to bridge the chasm between online and offline. A community may begin as an online gathering, but in order to truly flourish it will have to strike roots in the offline world too. If one day some dictator bars Facebook from his country, or completely pulls the plug on the Internet, will the communities evaporate, or will they regroup and fight back? Will they be able to organise a demonstration without online communication?

If something exciting happens, the gut instinct of Facebook users is to pull out their smartphones, take a picture, post it online, and wait for the “likes”. In the process they barely notice what they themselves feel. Indeed, what they feel is increasingly determined by the online reactions.

People estranged from their bodies, senses and physical environment are likely to feel alienated and disoriented. Pundits often blame such feelings of alienation on the decline of religious and national bonds, but losing touch with your body is probably more important. Humans lived for millions of years without religions and without nations — they can probably live happily without them in the twenty-first century, too.

6. Civilisation: There is just one civilisation in the world

People care far more about their enemies than about their trade partners. For every American film about Taiwan, there are probably fifty about Vietnam.

Though it has no intrinsic value — you cannot eat or drink a dollar bill — trust in the dollar and in the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords and North Korean tyrants.

People still have different religions and national identities. But when it comes to the practical stuff — how to build a state, an economy, a hospital, or a bomb — almost all of us belong to the same civilisation. There are disagreements, no doubt, but then all civilisations have their internal disputes. Indeed, they are defined by these disputes.

7. Nationalism: Global problems need global answers

Humans easily develop loyalty to small intimate groups such as a tribe, an infantry company or a family business, but it is hardly natural for humans to be loyal to millions of utter strangers. Such mass loyalties have appeared only in the last few thousand years — yesterday morning, in evolutionary terms — and they require immense efforts of social construction.

Does this perhaps rationalize Trump’s somewhat “un-American” rhetoric? He doesn’t have loyalty to the nation because it’s a false creation?

My ability to nevertheless feel loyal to this nebulous mass is not a legacy from my hunter-gatherer ancestors, but a miracle of recent history. A Martian biologist familiar only with the anatomy and evolution of Homo sapiens could never guess that these apes are capable of developing communal bonds with millions of strangers. In order to convince me to be loyal to “Israel” and its 8 million inhabitants, the Zionist movement and the Israeli state had to create a mammoth apparatus of education, propaganda and flag waving, as well as national systems of security, health and welfare.

The notion of protected welfare engenders loyalty

Total annihilation has a way of sharpening people’s minds, and thanks in no small measure to the atom bomb, the impossible happened and the nationalist genie was squeezed at least halfway back into its bottle.

An atom bomb is such an obvious and immediate threat that nobody can ignore it. Global warming, in contrast, is a more vague and protracted menace.

Particularly in a xenophobic dog-eat-dog world, if even a single country chooses to pursue a high-risk, high-gain technological path, other countries will be forced to do the same, because nobody can afford to remain behind. In order to avoid such a race to the bottom, humankind will probably need some kind of global identity and loyalty.

In the context of artificial intelligence and destructive powers, this is the thing that concerns me most. Pinker says it’s self defeating but it’s a prisoners dilemma. Someone breaks and could have a lead. Just like with nukes right?

But as new kinds of offensive and defensive weapons appear, a rising technological superpower might conclude that it can destroy its enemies with impunity. Conversely, a declining power might fear that its traditional nuclear weapons might soon become obsolete, and that it had better use them before it loses them.

We now have a global ecology, a global economy and a global science –but we are still stuck with only national politics.

8. Religion: God now serves the nation

No matter which economic policy Khamenei chooses, he could always square it with the Quran. Hence the Quran is degraded from a source of true knowledge to a source of mere authority.

Human power depends on mass cooperation, mass cooperation depends on manufacturing mass identities — and all mass identities are based on fictional stories, not on scientific facts or even on economic necessities. In the twenty-first century, the division of humans into Jews

Humankind now constitutes a single civilisation, and problems such as nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption can only be solved on the global level. On the other hand, nationalism and religion still divide our human civilisation into different and often hostile camps. This collision between global problems and local identities manifests itself in the crisis that now besets the greatest multicultural experiment in the world — the European Union.

9. Immigration: Some cultures might be better than others

Do we enter the immigration debate with the assumption that all cultures are inherently equal, or do we think that some cultures might well be superior to others? When Germans argue over the absorption of a million Syrian refugees, can they ever be justified in thinking that German culture is in some way better than Syrian culture?

Cultural relativists argue that difference doesn’t imply hierarchy, and we should never prefer one culture over another. Humans may think and behave in various ways, but we should celebrate this diversity, and give equal value to all beliefs and practices. Unfortunately, such broad-minded attitudes cannot stand the test of reality. Human diversity may be great when it comes to cuisine and poetry, but few would see witch-burning, infanticide or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and coca-colonialism.

Intolerant of whom, or what?

Ask the question — be specific

If Greeks and Germans cannot agree on a common destiny, and if 500 million affluent Europeans cannot absorb a few million impoverished refugees, what chances do humans have of overcoming the far deeper conflicts that beset our global civilisation?

10. Terrorism: Don’t panic

The Paris attacks of November 2015 killed 130 people, the Brussels bombings of March 2016 killed thirty-two people, and the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017 killed twenty-two people. In 2002, at the height of the Palestinian terror campaign against Israel, when buses and restaurants were bombed on a daily basis, the yearly toll reached 451 dead Israelis.5 In the same year, 542 Israelis were killed in car accidents. A few terrorist attacks, such as the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, kill hundreds. The 9/11 attacks set a new record, killing almost 3,000 people. Yet even this is dwarfed by the price of conventional warfare. If you add all the people killed and wounded in Europe by terrorist attacks since 1945 — including victims of nationalist, religious, leftist and rightist groups alike — the total will still fall far short of the casualties in any number of obscure First World War battles, such as the third Battle of the Aisne (250,000 casualties) or the tenth Battle of the Isonzo (225,000).

A terrorist is like a gambler holding a particularly bad hand, who tries to convince his rivals to reshuffle the cards. He cannot lose anything, and he may win everything.

States find it difficult to withstand these provocations because the legitimacy of the modern state is based on its promise to keep the public sphere free of political violence. A regime can withstand terrible catastrophes, and even ignore them, provided its legitimacy is not based on preventing them.

Today, a government may take a softer approach to domestic and sexual violence than to terrorism, because despite the impact of movements such as #MeToo, rape does not undermine the government’s legitimacy. In France, for example, more than 10,000 rape cases are reported to the authorities each year, with probably tens of thousands of additional cases left unreported. Rapists and abusive husbands, however, are not perceived as an existential threat to the French state, because historically the state did not build itself on the promise to eliminate sexual violence. In contrast, the much rarer cases of terrorism are viewed as a deadly threat to the French Republic, because over the last few centuries modern Western states have gradually established their legitimacy on the explicit promise to tolerate no political violence within their borders.

This is what makes the theatre of terrorism so successful. The state has created a huge space empty of political violence, which now acts as a sounding board, amplifying the impact of any armed attack, however small. The less political violence in a particular state, the greater the public shock at an act of terrorism. Killing a few people in Belgium draws far more attention than killing hundreds in Nigeria or Iraq. Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence makes them particularly vulnerable to terrorism.

start persecuting all dissident groups on the grounds that they might one day try to obtain nuclear weapons, or that they might hack our self-driving cars and turn them into a fleet of killer robots.

11. War: Never underestimate human stupidity

China, the rising power of the early twenty-first century, has assiduously avoided all armed conflicts since its failed invasion of Vietnam in 1979, and it owes its ascent strictly to economic factors. In this it has emulated not the Japanese, German and Italian empires of the pre-1914 era, but rather the Japanese, German and Italian economic miracles of the post-1945 era. In all these cases economic prosperity and geopolitical clout were achieved without firing a shot.

Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often discount it.

12. Humility: You are not the centre of the world

Morality, art, spirituality and creativity are universal human abilities embedded in our DNA. Their genesis was in Stone Age Africa.

Christianity (2.3 billion adherents), Islam (1.8 billion) and Judaism (15 million). Hinduism, with its billion believers, and Buddhism, with its 500 million followers — not to mention the Shinto religion (50 million) and the Sikh religion (25 million) don’tt make the cut.

All social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins and monkeys, have ethical codes, adapted by evolution to promote group cooperation. For example, when wolf cubs play with one another, they have “fair game” rules. If a cub bites too hard, or continues to bite an opponent that has rolled on his back and surrendered, the other cubs will stop playing with him.

We can only speculate what drove the gruff old leader to take care of the orphaned toddler, but apparently ape leaders developed the tendency to help the poor, needy and fatherless millions of years before the Bible instructed ancient Israelites that they should not “mistreat any widow or fatherless child” (Exodus 22:21), and before the prophet Amos complained about social elites “who oppress the poor and crush the needy” (Amos 4:1).

The Bible is far from being the exclusive font of human morality (and luckily so, given the many racist, misogynist and homophobic attitudes it contains).

Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought “Let me glorify my own religion” only harms his own religion. Therefore contact between religions is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others.

Many religions praise the value of humility — but then imagine themselves to be the most important thing in the universe. They mix calls for personal meekness with blatant collective arrogance. Humans of all creeds would do well to take humility more seriously.

13. God: Don’t take the name of God in vain

I personally never cease to wonder about the mystery of existence. But I have never understood what it has got to do with the niggling laws of Judaism, Christianity or Hinduism. These laws were certainly very helpful in establishing and maintaining the social order for thousands of years. But in that, they are not fundamentally different from the laws of secular states and institutions.

The idea that we need a supernatural being to make us act morally assumes that there is something unnatural about morality. But why? Morality of some kind is natural. All social mammals from chimpanzees to rats have ethical codes that limit things such as theft and murder.

Among humans, morality is present in all societies, even though not all of them believe in the same god, or in any god. Christians act with charity even without believing in the Hindu pantheon, Muslims value honesty despite rejecting the divinity of Christ, and secular countries such as Denmark and the Czech Republic aren’t more violent than devout countries such as Iran and Pakistan.

Morality doesn’t mean “following divine commands”. It means “reducing suffering”.

14. Secularism: Acknowledge your shadow

As we come to make the most important decisions in the history of life, I personally would trust more in those who admit ignorance than in those who claim infallibility. If you want your religion, ideology or world view to lead the world, my first question to you is: “What was the biggest mistake your religion, ideology or world view committed? What did it get wrong?” If you cannot come up with something serious, I for one would not trust you.

15. Ignorance: You know less than you think

As noted earlier, behavioural economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than on rational analysis, and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with life in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate in the Silicon Age.

What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality, but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.

A hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age knew how to make her own clothes, how to start a fire, how to hunt rabbits and how to escape lions. We think we know far more today, but as individuals, we actually know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs.

Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.

If you cannot afford to waste time you will never find the truth.

If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power, and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the centre, because the centre is built on existing knowledge. The guardians of the old order usually determine who gets to reach the centres of power, and they tend to filter out the carriers of disturbing unconventional ideas.

16. Justice: Our sense of justice might be out of date

Human morality was shaped in the course of millions of years of evolution, adapted to dealing with the social and ethical dilemmas that cropped up in the lives of small hunter-gatherer bands. If I went hunting with you and I killed a deer while you caught nothing, should I share my booty with you? If you went gathering mushrooms and came back with a full basket, does the fact that I am stronger than you allow me to snatch all these mushrooms for myself? And if I know that you plot to kill me, is it OK to act pre-emptively and slit your throat in the dark of night?

The system is structured in such a way that those who make no effort to know can remain in blissful ignorance, and those who do make an effort will find it very difficult to discover the truth. How is it possible to avoid stealing when the global economic system is ceaselessly stealing on my behalf and without my knowledge? It doesn’t matter if you judge actions by their consequences (it is wrong to steal because it makes the victims miserable) or whether you believe in categorical duties that should be followed irrespective of consequences (it is wrong to steal because God said so). The problem is that it has become extremely complicated to grasp what we are actually doing.

One can try to evade the problem by adopting a “morality of intentions”. What’s important is what I intend, not what I actually do or the outcome of what I do. However, in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know.

In trying to comprehend and judge moral dilemmas of this scale, people often resort to one of four methods. The first is to downsize the issue: to understand the Syrian civil war as though it were occurring between two foragers; to imagine the Assad regime as a lone person and the rebels as another person, one bad and one good. The historical complexity of the conflict is replaced by a simple, clear plot.

The second is to focus on a touching human story, which ostensibly stands for the whole conflict. When you try to explain to people the true complexity of the conflict by means of statistics and precise data, you lose them; but a personal story about the fate of one child activates the tear ducts, makes the blood boil, and generates false moral certainty.

The third method to deal with large-scale moral dilemmas is to weave conspiracy theories.

The fourth and ultimate method is to create a dogma, put our trust in some allegedly all-knowing theory, institution or chief, and follow them wherever they lead us. Religious and ideological dogmas are still highly attractive in our scientific age precisely because they offer us a safe haven from the frustrating complexity of reality.

17. Post-Truth: Some fake news lasts for ever

In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives.

As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively.

When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month — that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years — that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it “fake news” in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath). Note, however, that I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion. Just the opposite. For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s toolkit. By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible. They inspire people to build hospitals, schools and bridges in addition to armies and prisons. Adam and Eve never existed, but Chartres Cathedral is still beautiful. Much of the Bible may be fictional, but it can still bring joy to billions and can still encourage humans to be compassionate, courageous and creative — just like other great works of fiction, such as Don Quixote, War and Peace and Harry

On the other hand, you cannot organise masses of people effectively without relying on some mythology. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. Without myths, it would have been impossible to organise not just the failed Maji Maji and Jewish revolts, but also the far more successful rebellions of the Mahdi and the Maccabees.

false stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. If a big chief says “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west” loyalty to the chief is not required in order to applaud him. But if the chief says “the sun rises in the west and sets in the east”, only true loyalists will clap their hands.

Hence in practice there is no strict division between “knowing that something is just a human convention” and “believing that something is inherently valuable”.

Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate ways. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things — for example about the sources of your own power — that will anger allies, dishearten followers or undermine social harmony.

As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it — and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it. Therefore, if you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens. Better try your luck with chimps.

It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information. As noted in earlier chapters, we cannot investigate everything ourselves. But precisely because of that, we need at least to investigate carefully our favourite sources of information — be they a newspaper, a website, a TV network or a person.

First, if you want reliable information, pay good money for it.

The second rule of thumb is that if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. And by scientific literature I mean peer-reviewed articles, books published by well-known academic publishers, and the writings of professors from reputable institutions. Science obviously has its limitations, and it has got many things wrong in the past. Nevertheless, the scientific community has been our most reliable source of knowledge for centuries.

18. Science Fiction: The future is not what you see in the movies

Humans control the world because they can cooperate better than any other animal, and they can cooperate so well because they believe in fictions. Poets, painters and playwrights are therefore at least as important as soldiers and engineers. People go to war and build cathedrals because they believe in God, and they believe in God because they have read poems about God, because they have seen pictures of God, and because

19. Education: Change is the only constant

So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs” critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations.

But in the twenty-first century, you can hardly afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whooooosh.

To stay relevant — not just economically, but above all socially — you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.

20. Meaning: Life is not a story

What kind of an answer do people expect? In almost all cases, when people ask about the meaning of life, they expect to be told a story. Homo sapiens is a storytelling animal, that thinks in stories rather than in numbers or graphs, and believes that the universe itself works like a story, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy endings. When we look for the meaning of life, we want a story that will explain what reality is all about and what is my particular role in the cosmic drama. This role defines who I am, and gives meaning to all my experiences and choices.

All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don’t really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. A New Guinean tribesman is unlikely to believe in Zionism or in Serbian nationalism, because these stories don’t care at all about New Guinea and its people. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them. Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons. The story provides me with an identity and gives meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself. But there is always a danger that I might start wondering what gives meaning to that “something bigger”.

Most successful stories remain open-ended. They never need to explain where meaning ultimately comes from, because they are so good at capturing people’s attention and keeping it inside a safe zone. Thus when explaining that the world rests on the back of a huge elephant, you should pre-empt any difficult questions by describing in great detail that when the elephant’s gigantic ears flap they cause hurricanes, and when the elephant quivers with anger earthquakes shake the surface of the earth. If you weave a good enough yarn, it won’t occur to anyone to ask what the elephant is standing on. Similarly, nationalism enchants us with tales of heroism, moves us to tears by recounting past disasters, and ignites our fury by dwelling on the injustices our nation suffered. We get so absorbed in this national epic that we start evaluating everything that happens in the world by its impact on our nation, and hardly think of asking what makes our nation so important in the first place.

A crucial law of storytelling is that once a story manages to extend beyond the audience’s horizon, its ultimate scope matters little. People may display the same murderous fanaticism for the sake of a thousand-year-old nation as for the sake of a billion-year-old god.

Most stories are held together by the weight of their roof rather than by the strength of their foundations.

Once personal identities and entire social systems are built on top of a story, it becomes unthinkable to doubt it, not because of the evidence supporting it, but because its collapse will trigger a personal and social cataclysm. In history, the roof is sometimes more important than the foundations.

The stories that provide us with meaning and identity are all fictional, but humans need to believe in them. So how to make the story feel real? It’s obvious why humans want to believe the story, but how do they actually believe? Already thousands of years ago priests and shamans discovered the answer: rituals. A ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real.

When you inflict suffering on yourself in the name of some story, it gives you a choice: “Either the story is true, or I am a gullible fool.” When you inflict suffering on others, you are also given a choice: “Either the story is true, or I am a cruel villain.” And just as we don’t want to admit we are fools, we also don’t want to admit we are villains, so we prefer to believe that the story is true.

Unable to live up to the ideal, people turn to sacrifice as a solution. A Hindu may engage in tax frauds, visit the occasional prostitute and mistreat his elderly parents, but then convince himself that he is a very pious person, because he supports the destruction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya and has even donated money to build a Hindu temple in its stead. Just as in ancient times, so also in the twenty-first century, the human quest for meaning all too often ends with a succession of sacrifices.

Hardly anyone has just one identity.

In itself, the universe is only a meaningless hodge-podge of atoms. Nothing is beautiful, sacred or sexy — but human feelings make it so. It is only human feelings that make a red apple seductive and a turd disgusting. Take away human feelings, and you are left with a bunch of molecules.

If by “free will” you mean the freedom to do what you desire then yes, humans have free will. But if by “free will” you mean the freedom to choose what to desire then no, humans have no free will.

We don’t have free will, but we can be a bit more free from the tyranny of our will. Humans usually give so much importance to their desires that they try to control and shape the entire world according to these desires. In pursuit of their cravings, humans fly to the moon, wage world wars, and destabilise the entire ecosystem. If we understand that our desires are not the magical manifestations of free choice, but rather are the product of biochemical processes (influenced by cultural factors that are also beyond our control), we might be less preoccupied with them.

The universe has no meaning, and human feelings too are not part of a great cosmic tale. They are ephemeral vibrations, appearing and disappearing for no particular purpose. That’s the truth. Get over it.

When you are confronted by some great story, and you wish to know whether it is real or imaginary, one of the key questions to ask is whether the central hero of the story can suffer.

21. Meditation: Just observe

The most important thing I realised was that the deepest source of my suffering is in the patterns of my own mind. When I want something and it doesn’t happen, my mind reacts by generating suffering.