Quotes About Society

believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

Around 8500 BC the largest settlements in the world were villages such as Jericho, which contained a few hundred individuals.

Yet it might be poised to create the most unequal of all societies.

If, as is being demonstrated today so clearly, the patriarchal system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts for the universality and stability of this system?

Male chimps cannot gather in a constitutional assembly to abolish the office of alpha male and declare that from here on out all chimps are to be treated as equals.

A good rule of thumb is 'Biology enables, Culture forbids.

The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

This raises the possibility that the immense improvement in material conditions over the last two centuries was offset by the collapse of the family and the community.

What generalisations can we make about life in the pre-agricultural world nevertheless? It seems safe to say that the vast majority of people lived in small bands numbering several dozen or at most several hundred individuals, and that all these individuals were humans. It

And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? 'Life', certainly. But 'liberty'? There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree.

Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths.

História foi algo que um grupo muito pequeno de pessoas fez, enquanto todos os outros aravam os campos e carregavam baldes de água

essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

This escape clause has been the salvation of modern society, for it is impossible to sustain order without meaning. The great political, artistic and religious project of modernity has been to find a meaning to life that is not rooted in some great cosmic plan. We are not actors in a divine drama, and nobody cares about us and our deeds, so nobody sets limits to our power – but we are still convinced our lives have meaning.

Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths – by telling different stories. Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly.

We thus live in an increasingly lonely world of unravelling communities and families.

Trade cannot exist without trust, and it is very difficult to trust strangers. The global trade network of today is based on our trust in such fictional entities as currencies, banks and corporations. When two strangers in a tribal society want to trade, they establish trust by appealing to a common god, mythical ancestor or totem animal.

The imagined order is embedded in the material world.

Never before has peace been so prevalent that people could not even imagine war.

Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture.

it is overly concerned about a potential war between robots and humans, when in fact we need to fear a conflict between a small superhuman elite empowered by algorithms, and a vast underclass of disempowered Homo sapiens.

Qué tipo de culturas, sociedades y estructuras políticas habrían surgido en un mundo en el que coexistían varias especies humanas diferentes?

other words, while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two.

The collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market.