21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“The liberal story was the story of ordinary people.” 

The liberal story, in theory, valued the liberties and rights of all human beings. It assumed that if we continue to liberalize and globalize our economic and political systems, then it will produce global prosperity and peace. Since the 2008 economic crisis, however, more people believe they are losing their economic worth. Because of this, ordinary people are losing faith in the liberal story and democracy. Harari suggests that this might partially explain the rise of Donald Trump in the US and Brexit.

“What we are facing is not the replacement of millions of individual human workers by millions of individual robot and computers; rather, individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network.”

One of the most important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses is connectivity. Computers are integrated “into a single flexible network” (22). Thus, humans are facing the replacement of individual human workers with an integrated computer network. Because many alternative algorithms can run on the same integrated computer system, this will maximize both the benefits of individuality and the advantages of connectivity. Humans in a remote rural village could access AI doctors. If they don’t like what a particular AI doctor said, they could get a second opinion.  

“Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech.” 

One of the strengths of democracies in the late-20th century is that it was better at data processing than dictatorships. Authoritarian governments concentrate information and power in one place, whereas democracies diffuse the power to process information and make decisions among various institutions and people. The technology of this era ensured that no one person had the ability to process all of the information quickly and make the best decision. AI, on the other hand, makes it possible to process huge amounts of information in one central location. Thus, it might make centralized systems (authoritarian regimes) more efficient than diffused data processing systems (democracies). If democracy does not reinvent itself, Harari warns that we might soon live in digital dictatorships.

“Globalization will unite the world horizontally by erasing national borders, but it will simultaneously divide humanity vertically.” 

It is possible that individual nations will merge into one global community. At the same time, however, improvements in biotechnology might split humankind into two biological castes: a small group of superhumans and a vast underclass of disempowered humans. If this gap comes to fruition, it will be impossible to close. In the near future, the richest 1% might not just hold most of the world’s wealth, but also its health, creativity, and beauty.

“Humans have bodies.” 

In-person connection is vital to human flourishing. This is driven by our evolution. The ancestral human condition involved small groups of people. Yet, over the last few centuries, these small groups have been replaced by imagined communities of political parties and nations. In contrast to the small groups, humans do not know the majority of other people who live in these imagined communities. This has had profound psychological consequences: Humans are lonelier than ever. An attempt to build global human communities will need to successfully bridge the divide between virtual and in-person. 

“So when you watch the Tokyo Games in 2020, remember that this seeming competition between nations actually represents an astonishing global agreement.”

Harari uses a thought experiment to underscore how far humans have come in building a global community. He asks readers to imagine organizing an Olympic Games in 1016—an impossible feat. While nations are competing, they are all coming together under one event. To Harari, readers should feel great pride that humankind organizes such an event because it symbolizes the ability for great cooperation.

“Moreover, whereas nuclear war and climate change threaten only the physical survival of humankind, disruptive technologies might change the very nature of humanity, and are therefore entangled with humans’ deepest ethical and religious beliefs.” 

Biotechnology might someday produce superhumans; thus, altering the very nature of humankind. Yet, it is hard for humans to create ethical guidelines around bioengineering and AI because humans have wildly different opinions about using them to upgrade humans and create other life-forms. Nationalism and religious tradition will not help in formulating such ethical guidelines. Harari argues that we must go beyond both of these viewpoints and forge a global identity. In so doing, humans will find solutions to this threat. 

“In the twenty-first century, nations find themselves in the same situation as the old tribes: they are no longer the right framework to manage the most important challenges of the age.” 

We continue to be stuck in national politics, as supported by Trump’s “Make American Great Again” and Brexit. Yet, we live in an era with a “global ecology, a global economy, and a global science” (126). This mismatch prevents humans from successfully countering the main problems of the 21st century: nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruptions. As long as humans remain divided into rival nations, we will not make progress at overcoming these challenges. This is unfortunate because failing to overcome even just one of these issues could have catastrophic consequences for humankind.

“Though many traditional religions espouse universal values and claim cosmic validity, at present they are used mainly as the handmaiden of modern nationalism, whether in North Kora, Russia, Iran, or Israel.” 

Humans remain divided into rival religious groups, all of which believe that their followers are the center of the world. Because of this, religious traditions make it harder to transcend national differences. In turn, this impacts humanity’s ability to come together to find a global solution to the threats of nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption.

“It’s as if you take a seed of a eucalyptus tree from Australia and plant it in France. From an ecological perspective, eucalyptus trees are an invading species, and it will take generations before botanists reclassify them as native European plants. Yet from the viewpoint of the individual tree, it is French. If you don’t water it with French water, it will wither. If you try to uproot it, you will discover it has struck its roots deep in the French soil, just like the local oaks and pines.” 

The third clause of the immigration deal says that host countries must treat immigrants as first-class citizens if the immigrants make a sincere effort to assimilate. The root issue of this debate is between collective timescale and personal timescale. This passage illustrates these two perspectives. For a young adult born to immigrant parents in the host country, they believe that they are citizens of the host country. Pro-immigrationists would also consider them citizens. Yet, anti-immigrationists, in some cases, view them as invasive species. They argue that their family has not lived in the host country long enough to have truly assimilated, even though the host country is the only home the young adult has ever known.

“In this respect, terrorists resemble a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? It finds a bull, gets inside its ear, and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop.” 

Harari argues that fear of terrorists is overblown. Terrorism is the weapon of weak parties who cannot cause material damage against their enemy. Terrorists hope that their acts, which incite fear and confusion among the public, will result in the enemy overreacting. By doing so, the enemy risks this counterterrorism strategy backfiring, because it often leads to atrocities, shifts in the balance of political power, and the wavering of public opinion. One recent example is 9/11. The American bull was incited to destroy the Middle Eastern china shop by a few Islamic fundamentalists. Terrorist groups now have a strong foothold in the region.

“We should never underestimate human stupidity. Both on the personal and on the collective level, humans are prone to engage in self-destructive activities.” 

Human stupidity is one of the great forces in human history, yet it is often overlooked. Researchers, politicians, and army generals treat the world as a chess game and assume that their moves follow rational decisions. However, the world is far more complex than a chess game. Humans also do not make decisions based on rationality, but on emotion. Thus, most of the major leaders “end up doing very stupid things” (182). While another world war is not inevitable, it is also not impossible because of human stupidity. Harari suggests that one remedy to human stupidity is humility.

“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.” 

Religious traditions all espouse that they were especially important to the history of humankind when in reality they were not. However, this viewpoint makes it much harder for followers of particular religious traditions to cooperate with followers of other religious traditions because they are not from the same group. This negatively impacts humanity’s ability to come together to find a global solution to the threats of nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption. Yet, without humility, humans are far more likely to do something stupid rather than find solutions to these global problems. 

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

Many people believe that faith in God is a necessary condition for moral behavior. Without this belief, morality will disappear, and society will collapse. Followers of this assumption believe that morality is unnatural, however the opposite is true. All mammals have social codes that limit immoral behavior, such as murder and theft. Among humans, ethical codes are found in all societies, regardless of the divinities they follow. Thus, morality is not about “following divine commands.” Rather, it is about reducing the suffering of other humans given that we are also social animals.

“Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow and avoid the naïve reassurance that ‘it cannot happen to us.’” 

Secular movements have promised to perfect humanity, yet these very same promises have resulting in plagues, famines, detention camps, and rising sea levels. Secularists might argue that this is the fault of people distorting and misunderstanding the core secular ideas. This argument, according to Harari, is absolutely correct and is a common problem in all influential movements, including Christianity, Nazism, and Marxism. No single creed is truly infallible. All creeds have their shadows, or mistakes. Thus, it is naïve of their followers to ignore these mistakes and blind spots. 

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

Harari argues that if an individual wants to truly understand a topic of interest, they need a lot of time to filter out the rubbish (e.g., debunked theories and uniformed hunches). If people do not take the time to experiment with unproductive paths, then they will never learn true insights. Because of this, most people prefer power to truth. Power distorts the truth. People who remain in the center of power will never escape their distorted vision of reality. 

“Even if we truly want to, most of us are no longer capable of understanding the major moral problems of the world.” 

Our hunter-gatherer brains cannot comprehend the world’s complexity. Most of the injustices in the modern world are due to structural biases rather than from individual prejudices. Our hunter-gatherer brain, however, did not evolve to detect these structural biases. As a result, we are complicit in many of these major moral problems, but we prefer ignorance to truth. 

“For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit.” 

According to Harari, humans are post-truth species. Since at least the Stone Age, we have used myths to unite humans. These fictitious stories make large-scale human cooperation possible. 

“Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. 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.” 

This remark represents one of the key tenets of Harari’s book. Humans prefer power to truth. Power creates distorted visions of the world. Thus, to know truth, humans will have to give up their power. This includes acknowledging that the stories that have shaped their identities and governing institutions are false. Most humans renounce these stories because it would be a shock to their identities and worldview.

“But in truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind.” 

Humans are afraid of being trapped in a box manipulated by algorithms, yet we are already trapped within our mind and body. Biology and history shape everything we experience in life. There is an assumption that we are missing out on the wonders of the world, yet the experiences we would have in these places can be had anywhere, including inside a matrix. Our mental experiences are very real.

“Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.” 

This passage is a critique of the current education system. Teachers are still cramming kids with information. This pedagogy made sense during times when access to information was scarce. However, it does not make sense in our contemporary society, where people are inundated with information that is often misleading or false. As a result, people need to learn how to separate fact from fiction so that they can better make sense of our complex world.

“In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.” 

Harari discusses how algorithms will soon understand and manipulate human emotions, feelings, and decisions. While these algorithms are already watching us (e.g., Google search engine and Amazon), they have yet to hack humans. Harari repeatedly asserts that to prevent the hacking of humans, humans need to better understand themselves.

“So if you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about your own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is.” 

To Harari, suffering is the most real thing in the world. The mind generates suffering. An important step to ending suffering for one’s self and for others is to actually begin to understand this mental reaction.