FOR ALL OUR SELF-GLORIFICATION, WE HUMANS ARE RATHER PATHETIC

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015) ("Impressive, no doubt, but we mustn't harbour rosy illusions about 'mass cooperation networks' . . . 'Cooperation' sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation. The peasants paid for the burgeoning cooperation networks with their precious food surpluses, despairing when the tax collector wiped out an entire year of hard labour with a single stroke of his imperial pen. The famed Roman amphitheatres were often build by slaves so that wealthy and idle Romans could watch other slaves engage in vicious gladiatorial combat. Even prisons and concentration camps are cooperation networks, and can function only because thousands of strangers somehow manage to coordinate their actions." Id. at 104. "Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or services (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better." Id. at 115. "We cannot explain the choices that history makes, but we can say something very important about them: history's choices are not made for the benefit of humans. There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along. There is no proof that cultures that are beneficial to humans must inexorably succeed and spread, while less beneficial cultures disappear...." Id. at 241. "People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by 'culturism'. There is no such word, but it's about time we coined it. Among today's elites, assertions about the contrasting merits of diverse human groups are almost always couched in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between race. We no longer say, 'It's in their blood.' We say, 'It'sin their culture.'" Id. at 303.).