Quotes About Society

Creemos en un orden particular no porque sea objetivamente cierto, sino porque creer en él nos permite cooperar de manera efectiva y forjar una sociedad mejor. Los órdenes imaginados no son conspiraciones malvadas o espejismos inútiles. Más bien, son la única manera en que un gran número de humanos pueden cooperar de forma efectiva.

Yuval Noah Harari

in the past people had to exert great effort and undergo years of hard moral training in order to overcome their anger, their hatred, and their dangerous passions. But now, if your anger or passion threatens to overwhelm you, all you need to do is swallow a few pills. "Anybody can be virtuous now," concludes Mustapha. "You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle.

Como você faz as pessoas acreditarem em uma ordem imaginada como o cristianismo, a democracia ou o capitalismo? Primeiro, você nunca admite que a ordem é imaginada. Você sempre insiste que a ordem que sustenta a sociedade é uma realidade objetiva criada pelos grandes deuses ou pelas leis da natureza.

Rather, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.

Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. An

New Guinea, violence accounts for 30 per cent of male deaths in one agricultural tribal society, the Dani, and 35 per cent in another, the Enga. In Ecuador, perhaps 50 per cent of adult Waoranis meet a violent death at the hands of another human!3 In time, human

Unfortunately, what was good for survival and reproduction in the African savannah a million years ago does not necessarily make for responsible behaviour on twenty-first-century motorways

Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From

humans. It's pointless to ask this power for victory in war,

Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don't know each other and don't trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively

Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life.

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

People are egalitarian by nature, and unequal societies can never function well due to resentment and dissatisfaction.

Despite all our achievements, we feel a constant pressure to do and produce even more.

All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies. What accounts for the differences

journalists who inform society about and thus protect it from cheats and freeloaders. Most

In 2010 only 2 per cent of Americans worked in agriculture and 20 per cent worked in industry, while 78 per cent worked as teachers, doctors, webpage designers and so forth. When mindless algorithms are able to teach, diagnose and design better than humans, what will we do?

Una de las pocas leyes rigurosas de la historia

First, capitalism has created a world that nobody but a capitalist is capable of running. The only serious attempt to manage the world differently – Communism – was so much worse in almost every conceivable way that nobody has the stomach to try again.

A igualdade só pode ser assegurada se forem diminuídas as liberdades daqueles que estão em melhores condições. Garantir que cada indivíduo seja livre para fazer o que desejar inevitavelmente compromete a igualdade.

Today, the global average is only 1.5 per cent, taking war and crime together. During the twentieth century, only 5 per cent of human deaths resulted from human violence – and this in a century that saw the bloodiest wars

Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

modernity needs to work hard to ensure that neither human individuals nor the human collective will try to retire from the race, despite all the tension and chaos it creates.