Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was inc… - Yuval Noah Harari
" "Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
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About Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari (Hebrew: יובל נח הררי; born 24 February 1976) is an Israeli professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Native Name:
יובל נח הררי
Alternative Names:
Yuval N. Harari
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Additional quotes by Yuval Noah Harari
What will happen once we can ask Google, ‘Hi Google, based on everything you know about cars, and based on everything you know about me (including my needs, my habits, my views on global warming, and even my opinions about Middle Eastern politics) – what is the best car for me?’ If Google can give us a good answer to that, and if we learn by experience to trust Google’s wisdom instead of our own easily manipulated feelings, what could possibly be the use of car advertisements?
A lot of people sense that they are being left behind and left out of the story, even if their material conditions are still relatively good. In the 20th century, what was common to all the stories—the liberal, the fascist, the communist—is that the big heroes of the story were the common people. Not necessarily all people, but if you lived, say, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, life was very grim. But when you looked at the propaganda posters on the walls that depicted the glorious future, you were there. You looked at the posters which showed steel workers and farmers in heroic poses, and it was obvious that this is the future. Now, when people look at the posters on the walls, or listen to TED talks, they hear a lot of, you know, these big ideas and big words about "machine learning" and "genetic engineering" and "blockchain" and "globalization", and they are not there. They are no longer part of the story of the future. And I think that—again, this is a hypothesis—if I try to understand and to connect to the deep resentment of people in many places around the world, part of what might be going on there is people realize—and they're correct in thinking that—that, "The future doesn't need me. You have all these smart people in California and in New York and in Beijing, and they are planning this amazing future with artificial intelligence and bio-engineering and global connectivity and whatnot, and they don't need me. So maybe if they are nice, they will throw some crumbs my way, like universal basic income." But it's much worse psychologically to feel that you are useless than to feel that you are exploited.
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