Humans invented a whole bunch f stuff. Gods, nations, money, you name it. But take a closer look… and it’s the exact same thing again and again—unfair hierarchies

EVERY society is based on imagined hierarchies… fictional stories determine who gets which opportunities.

Evolution has no master plan. The functions performed by organs are constantly changing and the way they evolve doesn’t follow any predetermined path

In the last few decades we’ve invented countless tools that are meant to save time… but in spite of all that, I’m constantly rushed off my feet

All humans live inside the dreams of dead people… born into a world shaped by the myths of their ancestors, none of them ever really breaks free

Stories are just tools we create to help people… if they do more harm than good, we should change them.

Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalization and bureaucracy.

Large scale warfare isn’t a universal human characteristic. It was invented… then it spread like the plague

Switching from mother’s milk to goat’s milk and gruel weakened your children’s immune systems… we wanted to create the perfect place for humans but we accidentally created the perfect place for germs

History was made by very few people while everyone else plowed fields and carried water buckets.

We all believe in some kind of imagined order. Not because it’s objectively true—nuh-uh! It’s just that believing in it helps us cooperate and keep society in better shape.

Unlike ants, humans have no instinct for mass cooperation... There wasn't time for a new instinct for mass cooperation to evolve

Romanticism tells us that to live life to the fullest, we need more feelings and more experiences. So romanticism and consumerism are perfect bedfellows.

The British killed, injured and persecuted the inhabitants of the subcontinent, but they also united a bewildering mosaic of warring kingdoms, principalities and tribes, creating a shared national consciousness... the modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire.

The monotheistic religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity, for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little from those of the polytheistic gods.

Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists... Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition. It worked... Today most people outside East Asia adhere to one monotheist religion or another

The transition from many small cultures to a few large cultures and finally to a single global society was probably an inevitable result of the dynamics of human history.

Every point in history is a crossroads. A single traveled road leads from the past to the present, but myriad paths fork off into the future.

Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, indivisible and immutable... Yet over the last 200 years, the life science have thoroughly undermined this belief.

Our judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient discoveries [science undermining beliefs in an indivisible, immutable self] under the carpet. But how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?