Instead, he writes that “happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of wealth, health or even community. Harari thinks that just because human capabilities have increased, we shouldn't necessarily be happier as a species. So, were early humans actually happier than we are today? Harari's 200,000-year history of humankind comes down to the main question of whether our progression as a species has made us any happier in the end.īack to the hunter-gather example - foragers worked fewer hours and lived in less isolation, spending more time with close friends and family. Harari makes the case that the human species may have been better off as foragers before farming changed everything. Also, peasants working before our modern era faced longer hours and more exposure to disease than our early hunter-gatherer descendants.
Having surplus food may have allowed us to create politics, art, and philosophy - but it also led to war and a widening class system. But, he argues, it's questionable whether or not it was actually worth it. How can we think of early humans as "tree-huggers" if they were killing big game animals and causing mass extinctions like the Dodo? And religion may be just another method humans used for organizing society, similar to politics or economics, he writes.īut maybe the most contrarian point raised in "Sapiens" was that the Agricultural Revolution may have been a bad idea.įarming increased the amount of available food, increased the human population, and allowed people to specialize in a wide variety of trades. In the book, Harari makes contrarian claims throughout. That's because the company is not simply its people or its product - the idea of Peugeot as a business has been collectively agreed upon by society. If suddenly every Peugeot employee died and every car vanished from the streets, the company would still exist, Harari posits. Harari used the example of the French auto-giant Peugeot to illustrate his point. That same storytelling superpower that allowed for the creation of religions and economic systems, also helped businesses, as we know them today, to form into massive and lasting operations. We tell stories, give value to things, and fight (often literally) to keep those traditions alive. It is also why people believe in economies and a paper money system. This is how nation-states were built and world religions were formed, according to Harari. No other animals can band together by the millions because no other animals can tell stories. Above that number, the theory goes, humans have a hard time forming close relationships and trusting others.īut if we create myths and tell stories, we can form connections with people outside of our core group because we have a shared interest or knowledge in something, and trust can be formed. We were once limited by a supposed law of nature that makes it nearly impossible to organize a group of more than 150 people, a limit known to anthropologists as Dunbar's number. If there's one major takeaway from the book, it's that humans became the dominant species we are today because of our ability to create myths and tell stories. The logo of Peugeot, part of French carmaker PSA Group, is seen at a dealership of the brand in Saverne