For thousands of years, we have gained the power to control the world outside us but not to control the world inside. You could stop a river from flowing, but you could not stop your body from becoming old. You could kill mosquitoes, but you could not kill annoying thoughts buzzing inside your head.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the limits of human mastery over internal struggles compared to external control.
Yuval Noah Harari's quote reflects on humanity's long-standing ability to manipulate the external environment through technology and civilization, while emphasizing the profound difficulty of mastering our own internal thoughts and emotions. He draws a powerful analogy between controlling natural elements and the relentless passage of time and the complexities of the human mind, suggesting that despite our advancements, we often remain prisoners of our own inner turmoil.
In practice
In a discussion on mental health, this quote can serve to express the struggle of managing thoughts.
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.
The essence of good and evil is a certain disposition of the will.
I have ever regarded the freedom of religious opinions and worship as equally belonging to every sect.
All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.
In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.
Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth.
View your life from your funeral, looking back at your life experiences, what have you accomplished? What would you have wanted to accomplish but didn't? What were the happy moments? What were the sad? What would you do again, and what you wouldn't
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.