Sapiens 6 -- Building "Pyramids"

See also these transcripts, posted by someone else who took Dr. Harari's Coursera course.

Lesson 06 - part 1 --  People create large societies based on stories, imagined realities.

• Agricultural Revolution --> more complex societies --> more conflict.  
• Most wars are not started because we don't have enough food.  More often, there is some other cause.
• Why?  "Sapiens simply have no natural instincts for cooperating with large numbers of strangers. Humans evolved for millions of years living in small bands. The handful of millennium separating the agricultural revolution from the appearance of cities and empires were simply not enough to allow for mass cooperation instincts to evolve by natural selection."
• Instead of instinct Sapiens had to rely on inventing stories, new imagined realities, that could regulate cooperation on such a huge scale. 
• Han, Roman, Persian empires, for example.
• 2 "stories" that maintain empires:  Both documents promise that if humans act according to its sacred principles, then millions of them would be able to live together, to cooperate effectively, and to create a safe and peaceful and prosperous society.
• Code of Hammurabi (1776 BCE) -- established on the basis of the idea of a divinely ordained social hierarchy (inequality)
• Declaration of Independence (1776 CE) -- established on the exact opposite idea, that of equality
• Which one is right about its claims regarding universal principles of  justice?  Neither.  Universal principles of justice is a fictive concept that exists only in the imagination of Sapiens.
• Biologically speaking, the Declaration of Independence gets a lot completely wrong.
• We believe in a particular way that society should behave, not because it is objectively true, not because it’s a scientific fact, but because, by believing in this imagined story it enables us to cooperate effectively, and to forge a stable society.

Lesson 06 - part 2 -- Social order is unstable, because it's based on an imagined reality.

• Sapiens must invest a great deal in maintaining the imagined social order (courts, armies, prisons, etc.)  But it cannot be sustained by violence and coercion alone. "A single priest often does the work of 100 soldiers far more cheaply and effectively."
• How do you cause people to really believe in these fundamental stories?  3 main factors that prevent people from realizing that the order which organizes their lives/society exists only in their imagination:
1. We turn stories from ideas into physical, material culture; example = architecture as a reflection of our modern Western idea of individualism
2. The imagined order shapes our deepest desires and wishes; our most personal desires are usually programmed or determined by the imagined order of the society; example = travel/vacations as an expression of romantic consumerism
• Romanticism:  you must have a wide variety of experiences to have a full life; break free of daily routine
• Consumerism:  to be happy you must consume as many products and services as possible
• "People are so busy pursuing these fantasies that they seldom stop to ask themselves why they believe in them in the first place."
3. The imagined order is not just in your mind, but in the mind of all those around you, an inter-subjective reality.
• Objective vs. Subjective vs. Inter-subjective

"This then is how you build an effective imagined order in which millions of people might believe for decades and centuries and millenium. You embed it in the material environment that surrounds the people in the deepest beliefs and desires of millions upon millions of people. If you can do that then you could create a successful society. Without it you cannot create a stable society, even if you have all the food in the world. Social order will crumble no matter how much food you have in your possession."

Lesson 06 - part 3 -- Numbers are the 3rd ingredient for a successful large human society (1 = surplus food, 2 = imagined orders)

• You need to be able to store/process larger amounts of and a new kind of information (data, numbers)
• 1st = Ancient Sumerians between 3500 BC and 3000 BC invented writing, a new system for storing and processing information outside the brain.
• NOTE:  Writing was invented for storing numerical data.  You don't need writing for stories or legends, poems, religious/philosophical scriptures, which can be stored in your brain.
• Even today, your brain might "freeze" when you see a complicated mathematical equation, because our brains do not naturally think in that way.

"It is telling that the first recorded name in human history does not belong to a prophet, a poet, a philosopher or a great king, but to an accountant."

"Building Pyramids" is the title of this lecture, which is meant as an analogy for all the projects different human societies pursue because of their inter-subjective values.