My main ambition as a historian is to figure out what's really happening in the world, instead of the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or control what's happening in the world.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the historian's quest to uncover truths about the world, distinguishing them from fabricated narratives.
In this quote, Yuval Noah Harari reflects on the role of historians in society, highlighting their ambition to uncover the reality of human experiences rather than the false stories that have persisted throughout history. He suggests that throughout time, humans have constructed narratives to explain complex realities and exert control over their circumstances, but true understanding comes from a pursuit of factual histories that reveal what is genuinely occurring in the world.
In practice
This quote could inspire students in a history class to think critically about historical narratives.
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.
It is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody’s out there.
Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering.
Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.
Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.
Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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