21 Lessons for the 21st Century

I’m not up to reviewing Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book (21 Lessons for the 21st Century) but I liked this one by The Guardian. I really liked his two previous books, Sapiens and Homo Deus, and you can read some of my favorite excerpts in previous posts. I’m doing the same below but first I’ll say this book made me questions some of my long held beliefs. Nationalism, Religion and Immigration, just to name a few. This is a good example of what I mean when I suggest you ditch Facebook and TV news and read a book.


“The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour a different grown-up walks in and starts talking. The grown-ups are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body.”

“If somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then again, if somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false.”

“When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion.” 

“As a species, humans prefer power to truth.”

Trust in the dollar and in the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords, and North Korean tyrants.”

“A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed.”

“In 2016, despite wars in Syria, Ukraine, and several other hot spots, fewer people died from human violence than from obesity, car accidents, or suicide.”

““Once AI makes better decisions than we do about careers and perhaps even relationships, our concept of humanity and of life will have to change.“”

““Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in “digital dictatorships.””

“In the twenty-first century data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.”

“So in the twenty-first century religions don’t bring rain, they don’t cure illnesses, they don’t build bombs—but they do get to determine who are “us” and who are “them,” whom we should cure and whom we should bomb.”

“We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.”

“If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.”


Sam Harris “conversation” with Yuval Noah Harari

The Passing Scene

“Life is like looking out of the window while sitting in a train. You have no control over what appears in view. There’s even the moment after the train has paused, when it imperceptibly begins moving again. The appearance is that the train is motionless, but the scenery outside the window is moving. That, too, is a view that life sometimes gives us, a falsely relative view. We make no attempt to control the scene observed outside the train, knowing that wishing that it was something that it isn’t would be useless. And so it is, for the person who relaxes into Absolute awareness. Whatever passes across the screen of consciousness, whatever the organism experiences, is viewed dispassionately. The viewer acknowledges that all things change, and merely witnesses the changes impartially.”

Abiding In Nondual Awareness (Robert Wolfe)

Suzuki Roshi on the inner experience of Zen: “The sights we see from the train will change, but we are always running on the same track. And there is no beginning or end to the track.”

“What Virgil Flowers Wore”

Fans of the Virgil Flowers novels by John Sanford know and respect Virgil’s fondness for rock band t-shirts. I was afraid I would have to reread the novels to make a list but that won’t be necessary.

What Virgil Flowers Wore: An unofficial guide

“Dark of the Moon”
Sheryl Crow (carp)
Modest Mouse
Flaming Lips
Decemberists
Arcade Fire
AC/DC
Franz Ferdinand

“Heat Lightning”
Bif Naked
WWTDD
Hole
KMFDM (Money)
Pogues
Interpol
Death Cab for Cutie

“Rough Country”
Sebadoh
Nine Inch Nails
Breeders
Rolling Stones (Paris, 1975, tongue)
Gourds
Blood Red Shoes
Appleseed Cast

“Bad Blood”
Virgins

“Shock Wave”
Freelance Whales
My Chemical Romance
Slobberbone

“Mad River”
Wolfmother

No one here

“There is peace in this solitary spot on the globe because there is “no one” here. The human, who is merely part of the landscape, has no agenda, no ideas, no intent or motivation; he will not be rising from his chair in a moment to attempt to control something; to influence or change anything. Where could he begin to make any changes that would lastingly improve the situation?”

— Living Nonduality (Robert Wolfe)

Forgetting

Most of us has had the experience of committing something to memory. The multiplication tables; important dates in American history, etc. But how does one go about intentionally forgetting something? The following is from a novel (crime fiction) by Lawrence Block, one of my favorite authors. The protagonist is a contract killer and the excerpt describes how he avoids thinking about the people he kills.

“Years ago he’d learned how to clear his mind after a job. Very deliberately he let himself picture the master bedroom on Caruth Boulevard as he had last seen it. Portia Walmsley lay on her back, stabbed through the heart. Beside her was her unnamed lover, comatose with drink, his fingers clenched around the hilt of the murder weapon. It was the sort of image you’d want to blink away, especially if you’d had something to do with it, but Keller fixed it in his mind and brought it into focus, saw it in full color and sharp relief.”

“And then, as he’d learned to do, he willed the image to grow smaller and less distinct. He shrank it, as if viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope, and he washed out the bright colors, dimming the image to black and white, then fading it to gray. The details blurred, the faces became unrecognizable, and as the image disappeared, the incident itself its emotional charge. It had happened, there was no getting around it, but it was as if it had happened years and years ago, and to somebody else.”

I don’t know if this works. Like everyone, I’ve had moments in my life I’d rather not recall but I’ve never made this kind of conscious effort to forget.

The consumer economy is dead

You might have noticed how governments (and corporations) are getting chill on the topic of marijuana. The best explanation I’ve see for this trend is from a 2012 crime novel by John Burdett (Vulture Peak):

“The world economy has positioned itself in such a way that almost everyone is going to be unemployed by the middle of this century. The American sucker-consumer is now bankrupt for the next fifty years, and there’s no way Asians generally are going to waste their money en masse on toys like iPods — hoarding is hardwired in every head east of Suez. Americans are strange people. They allow themselves to be bled white by gangsters for generation after generation and call it freedom. But that blissful ignorance may be in its endgame. The consumer economy is already dead — what we’re experiencing right now is its wake. What do you think governments are going to use to keep everyone docile when the shit finally hits the fan?”

The answer? Cannabis.

“The best thing about it: young men delude themselves into believing they’re already war heroes. They don’t need to kill anyone.”

One more…

“Remember, no one’s elected in Beijing. That means they have to plan ahead. They have teams looking fifty, even a hundred years into the future. They have detailed economic and social models. And they don’t have democracy. They know what’s coming next.”