How Did The Wealthy Gain Power In The Past? - Yuval Noah Harari [2015] | Intelligence Squared

Now what usually happens is that some accidental process leads to a particular group of people, say the people who had H horses, finding themselves at the top, but then the crucial thing is how you maintain your position, how you establish not only a hierarchy temporary but a lasting hierarchy and then after 300 years coming to The Peasants and saying look, 300 years ago my great-great-grandfather had a horse so now you all have to obey me, I wouldn't convince anyone and I'd love to do it. However, seeing people try would be nice, and similarly, if you take a modern example, if in the 19th century, I don't know, in the southern United States, a white plantation owner approached the plantation slaves and told them: "it's okay. 300 years ago this happened and this is why you are now a slave on my Plantation PL not only would it be very difficult for these people to accept it even for himself to explain to himself what justifies my position my privileges my people of

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need something a kind of much deeper justification than some accident in history that happened 300 years ago, so they invent all kinds of stories, for example, of racial superiority or religious justification, like in India, you have this basic myth of the creation of that the original beings were the pora and the brahmins, the upper casts came out of their heads and the sudras were at the bottom of their hips, they came out of their legs, so they must obey the brahmins.

Now this sounds much more acceptable if you put it in the correct religious context instead of saying that 2,000 years ago some tribes from Central Asia invaded the Ganis Valley and subjugated the local population and that is why we have now discussed the system and moved on to another disparity that I know I was prepared for. Definitely asking you about tonight and that's gender. um you in your book, you, you, you show that so many cultures geographically spread across the world, temporally spread throughout history, have prioritized men over women and you struggle to offer as everyone does. convincing explanation of why this is so and why such communities have been so stable, can you explain this to us?

Do you have any more ideas since I wrote the book about how we might explain and understand that and why it's been such an incredible phenomenon? Well, it is one of the biggest enigmas of History because it is obvious that in this case it is not just the result of an accidental event and it is not just the result of an accidental history because you see the same structure in different ways in almost all societies. . There are exceptions, but in most societies known to science for thousands of years, the simplest explanation that comes to mind for many people is that men are physically stronger than women, so it is obvious Many other things we know about humans and about apes in general is that social

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in most cases is the result of social skills, not strength. physical.

If you look at the hierarchies of most human organizations, they do not correlate. with physical force if you think that perhaps the most durable organization in the world today is a Christian Church. You don't become Pope by beating up all the other cardinals and I don't think I will offend anyone if I say that Pope. Francis is not the strongest Catholic on Earth physically, so I have this image of a weightlifting competition taking place now in Chapel C or something, yeah, and it's not just a Catholic Church, I mean, you look everywhere, I mean. Even if you look at criminal organizations, very often the big boss is someone in their 50s or 60s whose power is the ability to tell other people, some thugs in their 20s, to go and kill someone; he is not going to kill it himself, and even among the chimpanzees. uh the alpha male is not the physically strongest man, he is the man who is able to build stable coalitions of followers, so they are social skills and very often at least it is believed that women have better social skills than men. men and, if so, and if they are social skills.

They are the key to social superiority so how come men don't do it? In society there is another very common theory that says that it is okay, maybe it is not physical strength, but the issue of childbirth and childcare, that women are busy with pregnancy all the time. with taking care of the children so that they do not have time to do all the important things that they leave to men, but the problem with this theory is that among other animals such as elephants such as bonobas, pygmy chimpanzees we have cases precisely because the females are Those who are in charge of taking care of the young need more support and since they need more support they need to cooperate more and they develop, that is why they develop their social skills because they need help from other elephants or other chimpanzees in raising the young and what is obtained It is a network of females that dominates society, while males, who have much fewer responsibilities regarding child rearing, are much more autonomous, much more self-centered, and have more difficulty cooperating. and they are basically left out, so even though the individual male bonobo is stronger than the individual female bonobo, you have a network of cooperating females that dominate the society, if this is possible among bonobos or elephants, why not among humans?

In your case, I mean, social skills are the most important skills. One of the possibilities, it's not yet supported by enough empirical data, so it's not the answer, but one of the possibilities is that maybe this common idea that women have. superior social skills are not true, at least when it comes to large-scale cooperation. A possibility worth exploring, emphasizing that it is just a possibility. It is not, it still does not have enough scientific support. Yes, in small-scale societies women have superior social skills. skills, but when it comes to large organizations that are based on all this myth-making and in which case you have to cooperate with complete strangers, then you have the opposite situation: women precisely because they need the direct social connection that they have. are at a disadvantage, while men who feel much more comfortable with an alienated situation with an impersonal hierarchy that is based on belief and not on actually knowing the other person, feel much more comfortable with this type of situation, for which when you have large scale societies and huge impersonal hierarchies, this is the situation where men actually have superior social skills now, like I said, it's just a theory worth examining, it's not the answer.

I vividly remember my college studies reading Herodotus and he tells a story about a tribe where all the women. of the village, for each male sexual partner, they put a bracelet on their leg and then when all the women of a particular generation reach a certain age, they count their bracelets and the woman with the most bracelets becomes the cheap of the village. Herodotus looks at it with some amusement, I say, but it's interesting that there are examples that break the paradigm, so to speak, but they are very few, aren't they? Generally they are from small-scale societies that we do not know as a large empire, which was material, it is one of the questions of history that has not yet been understood.

Yeah, can we move on to one of your main myths that you talk about? book money and we've already mentioned it once or twice this afternoon and one of the things you say about money is that you know it can bridge any cultural gap, even AMA Bin Laden is accepting US dollars and I was wondering how you felt that This is frustrating if we put it in the context of the recent economic crises that have been rocking Europe and particularly posed through Greece etc., which seem to me to have been having a very divisive effect and opening cultural gaps if anything.

Would you say the two work well together? I think in the recent economic crisis around the world we had some amazing examples of the power of our belief in money at the height of the economic crisis. I think two, three years ago, the Federal Reserve. in the US they created every day $3 billion dollars out of nothing, they together created a trillion dollars during that year just by logging into the computer and adding some zeroes somewhere, that's all. I mean, money isn't even printed nowadays. Money isn't even printed, it's just electronic data. The basic material with which money is made is human trust.

If you have confidence, you can monetize it on anything, even electronic data, so despite the recent blows that the capitalist system has taken. Since 2008, the amount of trust that the majority of people in the world have in the capitalist system is still incredible and this is what allows, for example, banks to create so much money out of nothing that they have trust in money. and in the system that produces money you also have to rely on the basic, basic, uh, capitalist stories that say, first of all, that maybe the most basic story of all of capitalism is the answer to all the problems, the key to all The questions that concern us is economic growth, regardless of what you want in the long term, the only way to achieve it is economic growth.

You want equality, you want freedom, you want jobs, you want democracy, you want peace, tell me, is it through economic growth, and if not, there will be economic growth. in the long term you will not have any of that on a personal level this translates into another extremely powerful myth the myth of consumerism which is part of this package that if you have a problem on a personal level the solution is to buy something, any problem you have probably I need to buy something and then everything will be fine. It can be: you can buy a product or you can buy a service.

You can buy a car. You can buy yoga. You can buy marriage counseling. Anything, except the answer to all of humanity's problems. On a collective level they come from economic growth, on an individual level they come from buying more things and yet the vast majority of the population certainly in Europe and most of the world believe in these stories and if they ever stop believing in those stories then capitalism The system will collapse, it will lead you to another of your great myths about religion. Now, you explain the book Many of the Religions of the World Today and show how there is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in quite a few of them. but I wanted to direct your attention to what you think about the religions of the future, and you know, obviously, in particular, as you pointed out from the beginning, that we are at the beginning of a new revolution, the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution.

It's really going to change our world once a

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beyond what we understand now and how do you see religion in the future? I mean, will there be religions based on technology? I mean, I think this morning on the radio for you we're talking about Silicon Valley, as a god to worship, maybe now and certainly in the future, yes, I think the future belongs to the techno religions. I mean the big religions, the big religions of the 21st century, they're more likely to come out of Silicon Valley than they are from the Middle East or Afghanistan or Syria or any of these places um it's a little bit similar to what happened in the 20th century.

XIX with the Industrial Revolution uh when the Industrial Revolution spread throughout the world there was a lot of reaction, it created many new problems it destroyed many old certainties and hierarchies, as brands and angles wrote in the Communist Manifesto, everything solid melts into air and When everything solid melts into air, people get very scared and look back to some ancient and reassuring tradition, mythology, religion. to give them security, then, in the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution led to a wave of fundamentalism throughout the world. The greatest war of the 19th century was not the Napoleonic Wars, it was not the American Civil War, it was the typographic rebellion in China. when, in reaction to the coming of the Industrial Revolution of British imperialism and the collapse of the ancient Chinese system, he had this failed scholar Hong XU kuang, who had a vision of God Alle supposedly in which God revealed to Hong that he is the younger brother of Jesus Christ sent to Earth to establish the kingdom of heavenly peace and toured southern China with this message of heavenly peace and millions followed him in the Typographic Rebellion, which was the bloodiest war of the 19th century by the most conservative estimates. 20 million people died in the typified rebellion that lasted 14 years until the larger war was suppressed and similarly there were other fundamentalist movements such as that of Sudan, the Mahadi quite similar in some ways to what we see today in the Middle East , but none.

This worked when we look back at the 19th century, we don't remember it as the age of faith. The really important religion or ideology that emerged from the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century was socialism. In 1800 there were no socialists. It started very little but then it spread like wildfire and becamein the most important ideological movement of the time, changing our lives completely and the key to the success of the socialists was that they were relevant, they looked to the future, not the past. By studying ancient scriptures, they studied the technology and economic structures created by the Industrial Revolution, therefore, they had something relevant to say about the new problems and opportunities of the Industrial Revolution.

We are now in the middle of a Second Industrial Revolution, this time the main objective. The drivers of change are not steam and electricity, they are biotechnology and computing. Intelligent design this time the main products will not be textiles and vehicles and things like that, they will be bodies, brains and minds. The main products of the 21st century will probably be bodies, brains and minds and the Islamic State has nothing relevant to say. about new opportunities or in danger of this, for example, what will happen when artificial

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replaces the majority of humans in the labor market, experts estimate that it could be profitable to take as little as 30 to 40 years for this happens, it has no answer. in the Bible what to do when humans are no longer useful to the economy, completely new ideologies, completely new religions are needed and they are likely to emerge from Silicon Valley or Bangalore and not the Middle East and they are likely to proceed to give people Visions based on technology everything that ancient religions promised H happiness and Justice and even eternal life but here on Earth with the help of technology and not after death with the help of some supernatural being.