Cognitive dissonance serves as a feature rather than a bug in human belief systems. The ability to maintain contradictory values provides several advantages:<ul><li>Flexibility to adapt behavior to different contexts without restructuring entire belief systems</li><li>Ability to cooperate in multiple, sometimes contradictory social arrangements simultaneously</li><li>Psychological protection from paralysis that complete logical consistency might create</li><li>Capacity to navigate complex social environments with competing expectations</li><li>Potential for gradual ethical evolution without requiring revolutionary breaks</li></ul>Every culture contains internal contradictions in its ethical codes, and individuals internalize these inconsistencies. Rather than representing failure, these contradictions create adaptive spaces where new ideas can emerge and practical compromises can be made without requiring wholesale rejection of existing values.

Inconsistent Ethical Codes

The truly unique trait of Sapiens is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities.

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

The Cognitive Revolution represents the critical mutation that launched our species' dominance. This evolutionary leap enabled:<ul><li>Flexible cooperation with unprecedented numbers of strangers</li><li>Creation and belief in shared imagined realities like gods, nations, and corporations</li><li>Formation of communities larger than the ~150 individuals our brains evolved to track</li><li>Development of constantly changing social norms without requiring genetic evolution</li></ul>Unlike other animals limited to objective reality, Homo sapiens inhabit dual reality—the physical world and a symbolic one of shared imagination. This symbolic reality grows more dominant as civilization advances, with most modern human behavior driven by fictive constructs that exist purely through collective belief.

The Cognitive Revolution

The romantic contrast between modern industry that destroys nature and our ancestors who lived in harmony with nature is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions.

Imagined orders are the intersubjective beliefs that organize human societies beyond their biological programming. These social constructs:<ul><li>Exist only through mass collective belief, yet shape objective reality</li><li>Must be embedded in material reality (buildings, documents, symbols) to persist</li><li>Require constant reinforcement through education, art, law, and violence</li><li>Present themselves as either natural laws (caste systems) or divine commands (religious hierarchies)</li><li>Are inherently unstable, requiring constant reinforcement against competing narratives</li></ul>All human-created systems—from ancient caste hierarchies to modern democracy and capitalism—are neither natural nor inevitable, but rather carefully maintained webs of shared stories. Their power comes from the fact that, while entirely imaginary, they coordinate behavior among millions or billions of strangers.

Imagined Orders

The Luxury Trap reveals how expectations rise to consume resources supposedly freed by efficiency. This paradox operates because:
<ul>
<li>New capabilities quickly transform from luxuries to necessities, creating new obligations</li>
<li>Time saved through technology creates space for new expectations and responsibilities</li>
<li>Material abundance often corresponds with time scarcity as consumption requires maintenance</li>
<li>Status competition ensures that no level of consumption ever feels enough</li>
<li>Psychological well-being correlates poorly with material abundance beyond basic needs</li>
</ul>
This pattern operates across history—from first farmers working harder than foragers, to industrial workers facing relentless production quotas, to modern professionals constantly available through digital devices. Each increase in productive capacity creates new baselines that eliminate the anticipated leisure.

Luxury Trap

Money represents the most successful and universal system of mutual trust humans have created. Unlike other social constructs, money works because:
<ul>
<li>It converts anything into anything else through a universally recognized medium</li>
<li>It enables cooperation between strangers who may share no other beliefs or values</li>
<li>It stores value across time, allowing present work to be converted into future benefits</li>
<li>It standardizes the otherwise incommensurable (how many apples equals one violin lesson?)</li>
<li>It functions across cultural, religious, and national divides where other shared beliefs fail</li>
</ul>
Money requires only pragmatic acceptance of its value—no shared ideology. This minimal fiction allows cooperation even between enemies. As history's first global trust network, money enabled specialization and trade worldwide.

Money as Universal Trust

The Scientific Revolution succeeded through a unique bargain between knowledge and power. This transformative deal works through several mechanisms:<ul><li>Institutional willingness to admit ignorance, replacing dogma with systematic investigation</li><li>Development of mathematical models that can predict and control natural phenomena</li><li>Public investment in research based on anticipated practical applications</li><li>Marriage of scientific theory with technological engineering and capitalist enterprise</li><li>Empire-building that spreads scientific practices globally while gathering data</li></ul>Unlike previous knowledge systems that claimed certainty, science begins with ignorance. This humility paradoxically creates power by uncovering genuine causality. When knowledge translates to technology, it creates a feedback loop of funding and discovery.

The Scientific Bargain

The Happiness Paradox explains why unprecedented material abundance hasn't created corresponding increases in subjective well-being. This occurs because:<ul><li>Happiness evolved as a temporary reward mechanism spurring survival-promoting activities</li><li>Satisfaction quickly fades regardless of achievement, propelling continued striving</li><li>Expectations adapt to current conditions, creating a hedonic treadmill</li><li>Social comparison matters more than absolute standards for psychological satisfaction</li><li>Biochemical happiness baselines largely resist long-term change through external circumstances</li></ul>This explains why massive material progress over centuries hasn't substantially increased subjective well-being measures. Our biochemistry evolved in environmental conditions requiring constant vigilance and striving, not contentment with achievement. When expectations rise at the same rate as conditions improve, the subjective experience remains similar despite objective changes.

Happiness Paradox

Intelligent design is replacing natural selection as the driving force in human evolution. This unprecedented transition involves several revolutionary technologies:
<ul>
<li>Genetic engineering allowing direct manipulation of the human germline</li>
<li>Brain-computer interfaces creating direct integration between minds and machines</li>
<li>Artificial intelligence potentially developing consciousness beyond human limitations</li>
<li>Biotechnology extending lifespan and enhancing physical and cognitive capabilities</li>
</ul>
For nearly all evolutionary history, natural processes determined species development. Now, human decisions are directly shaping not just our environment but our biology. This represents the end of Homo sapiens as we've known them—not through extinction but through engineered transformation into something else entirely. The species that conquered Earth through imagination may soon exist only in the imagination of its successors.

Humanity's Future Divergence

Humanism represents the dramatic shift making human experience, rather than divine will, the measure of all things. This revolution encompasses three key variants:<ul><li>Liberal humanism: Individual freedom as the ultimate value, with experiences interpreted through personal choice</li><li>Socialist humanism: Collective human experience as primary, with equality and solidarity as central virtues</li><li>Evolutionary humanism: Some human experiences superior to others, leading to problematic hierarchies of human types</li></ul>Though seemingly secular, humanism functions religiously—it attributes ultimate authority and meaning to human experience rather than external divinity. This unprecedented belief system places humans rather than gods at the center of existence, deriving ethics from wellbeing rather than commandments.

Humanism's Ascent

The Agricultural Revolution represents a Faustian bargain that transformed human existence. Contrary to progressive narratives, this shift brought multiple regressions:
<ul>
<li>Narrower diets dependent on few crops, causing nutritional deficiencies</li>
<li>Crowded conditions ideal for spreading infectious diseases</li>
<li>Longer, harder labor compared to foraging</li>
<li>Vulnerability to crop failures and resulting famines</li>
<li>Emergence of hierarchy and systemic inequality</li>
</ul>
From the crops' perspective, wheat, rice, and corn manipulated humans into expanding their territory. The gradual transition prevented any generation from recognizing the trap until escape became impossible.

The Agricultural Trap

Ever wonder how humans conquered the planet despite being relatively weak animals? This mind-blowing journey through our entire species' history reveals how our unique ability to believe in shared myths—from gods to money to human rights—allowed us to cooperate in unprecedented numbers. Historian Yuval Noah Harari shows how these collective stories transformed us from middle-of-the-food-chain apes into earth's dominant force in just 70,000 years. Prepare to see everything—religion, nations, capitalism, even your own identity—in a completely new light.

New York Times BestsellerA Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli public intellectual, historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI