Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.
Interpretation
Our desires are often shaped by societal influences rather than being entirely personal.
This quote by Yuval Noah Harari suggests that even our innermost desires are not entirely our own; they are influenced and shaped by the societal structures and norms that we grow up with. It highlights the complex relationship between individuality and the collective beliefs and values of society, urging us to reflect on how our aspirations and wants might be constructed by external factors rather than being purely inherent to us.
In practice
In a discussion on consumerism, one might use this quote to illustrate how marketing shapes our desires.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.
The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
If the same punishment is prescribed for two crimes that injure society in different degrees, then men will face no stronger deterrent from committing the greater crime if they find it in their advantage to do so.
A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be thought.
In this world, there must be a certain degree of honor just as there must be a certain amount of light. When there are many men without honor, there will always be some others who bear in themselves the honor of many men.
So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.
Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, ''Where is it?''
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