Yuval Noah Harari on the myths we need to survive

Good evening ladies and gentlemen it's a great pleasure to be here this evening and these chairs move quite a lot um if I go sliding away don't take any offense at any point um it's my pleasure to introduce yal Noah Harari who is a lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where his online course A Brief History of humankind attracted over 65,000 signups these are the sort of Attendance numbers that any lecture at any University can normally only dream of um and his book sapins which we're here this evening to discuss has been a worldwide

success translated into over 30 languages and he we are very lucky to have him here this evening he's in the UK for I think 48 hours 48 hours only so you saw him here and perhaps heard him on Radio 4 this morning before he moved smoothly to discuss the book also on absolute radio so the difference between Those two I think is quite an extraordinary mental leap if nothing else um and he has been described by the Sunday Times uh and his book has been described as the sort of book that sweeps the cobwebs out

of your mind its author is an intellectual acrobat whose logical leaps will have you gasping with admiration his writing radiates power and Clarity making the world strange and new well he's not going to be doing acrobatics in front of us this evening At least not physically but mentally we're hoping very much to see the best on display ladies and Gentlemen please welcome once again youal Noah [Applause] Harari and I must just Echo Robert's comments earlier that there will be a book signing afterwards so if you head out of the doors on the right hand side

of the stage afterwards uh we will you will be able to get your copy if you haven't read it already signed um as Well from one sapen to another um can we begin just with outlining what you see as the the phrase framework of of of the book itself and and to me it's it's it's all posited around three key revolutions tell us a little bit about each of those well um 70,000 years ago human beings Homo sapiens were basically just insignificant Apes in a corner of Africa uh not very different in their impact on

the ecosystem from many other animals uh Before that our prehistory what is called is really just biology uh history begins about 70,000 years ago with the cognitive Revolution uh during which we don't exactly know how and why uh We've gained remarkable cognitive abilities above all abilities to communicate to use language and to create and spread fictions which we'll speak about a lot later on uh these new cognitive abilities turned our specie from this insignificant ape into To the most powerful force on the planet uh and led to the very quick spread of sapiens from East

Africa all over the world uh the extinction of all the other species of humans that back then populated the planet and the colonization of the entire planet by our species then you have the Agricultural Revolution about 10,000 years ago which kind of sped up uh the historical process it again gave our specie immense new Powers uh enabling us to create trade networks kingdoms cities Empires and so forth and then the last uh Revolution which began about 500 years ago and which we are still really just in the beginning of it is the Scientific Revolution H

again humankind gains immense new powers uh s such big powers that you can say they might really transform us not only from just Apes into the rulers of the planet they might transform us into gods and this is meant Literally not as some kind of of metaphor but humankind are now in the process of acquiring Divine abilities through scientific research and technological development if in the Bible God creates animals and plants and humans according to his wishes so now you humankind is gaining the ability to start redesigning and creating other animals and plants and also

ourselves according to our wishes so this is the third and potentially biggest revolution Of all the Scientific Revolution can I take you to the first one to the cognitive Revolution there's a there's a short passage um page 12 very soon into the book which jumped out at me in which I think speaks to when the newspapers say that you chase the cobwebs out of the mind it's this that you posit when when Homo sapiens jump to the top of the food chain uh your your your comparison is to a Banana Republic Dictator where suddenly as

a result of that very quick jump not through evolutionary process uh that left Homo sapiens full of uh anxieties over their position um and you go on to claim that you know many historical calamities from Wars to EC iCal catastrophe have resulted from that over hasty jump very early on in in the homo sapiens story tell us a little bit more about that I mean how can we really claim that you know the the terrible things we see in Our world today could in some way be linked back to a sudden jump to the top

of a food chain well if you look at the other ER animals at the top of the food chain in the world like uh lions or sharks or alligators they have evolved to fill this position for Millions upon millions of years they didn't get there very fast or by accident and both they themselves and the entire ecosystem had time to adjust to it um therefore you have many Checks and balances both internal and external to make sure that uh they don't destroy the the entire food chain with homo sapiens the situation is very different H

humans have appeared on Earth about 2 and a half million years ago evolving from previous species but for most of these period for two and a half million years they were quite similar to us they walked on two legs they had relatively big brains they had relatively sophisticated social systems They used tools and we tend to think that this must have made them the most powerful and important creatures on Earth but this was not the case for more than 2 Mill years you had humans with big brains sophisticated societies tools working on two legs and

not doing much or at least not having much of an impact on the rest of the ecological system you had a few very few million humans spread over Africa and Eurasia and uh they were not the top predators they were Somewhere in the middle they hunted small animals they ate carcasses left behind by the big predators and they themselves were prey to the big predators like the Lions or like the tigers or whatever and then quite quickly in the last 100,000 years which is a very short time in evolutionary terms you have Homo sapiens one

of these human species jumping very quickly to the top of the food chain not thanks to a long process of biological evolution By natural selection but thanks to a much quicker process of cultural evolution and both we ourselves and the entire ecological system simply didn't have enough time to adjust to it you see it most clearly when the first humans arrived to Australia about 45 or 50,000 years ago you have the first humans arrive Homo sapiens no previous species could reach Australia because of the ocean sapiens arrive about 45,000 years ago and within a few

thousand years more Than 90% of all the big animals of Australia become extinct and 15,000 years ago you see the same thing happening in America with the first humans The first Homo sapiens crossing over the bearing Straits to Alaska and then spreading down and within something like 2,000 years more than 70% of the big mammals of America become extinct so there is there are no checks and balances there and you see the process continuing of course today with the Destruction of the ecological system today on the on planet Earth more than 90% of all big

animals are either we Homo sapiens or the domesticated animals that we have enslaved to our needs and desires and we're the bana Republic dictators and and yeah this is like the Banana Republic dictator in the sense that we are very insecure in our position you look at a lion in the Savanah he's very secure in his position homo sapiens is basically a bunch of Sheep that got um nuclear weapons and atomic power and sheep with nuclear weapons are far more dangerous than wolves with nuclear weapons because they are not accustomed to such kind of power

they are and they are much more frightened and to have somebody who is afraid with nuclear weapons is much more dangerous than to have somebody who feels very secure with nuclear weapons well I'll never look at president Obama or Putin again in the same light Sheep with nuclear weapons is how we can think of them going forward but once we get to the cognitive Revolution you start to talk about gossip Theory and this is where your your your idea about the myths that we need to survive really starts to kick in I think in in

your narrative um and you talk about it simply from the point of view of how communities cooperate with one another as they grow larger that as they get beyond the size where people can know Everyone and know everyone's business and sort of self-regulate if you want to grow beyond that you need structures you need the myths you need the common stories um how how do you think you talk a little bit about about the importance of getting others to believe those stories for them to work but how does that really happen you know I can

tell a story uh and you can tell a story but how are we going to get this group to believe your story or my story Well the basic method is to get everybody in our community telling the same story and doing it doing it again and again and again and again from early on if you grow up in a society and you hear everybody telling you the same story even people who hate each other telling you the same story from a very early age there is very little chance that you will doubt this story so

this is the the basic method that has has been used throughout history of course There are occasions when you have con conflicting stories and then you have big problems but underneath for a stable Society you need to have at least some stories about which everybody agree so like like you have today very tolerant and liberal Society but basically almost everybody at least say in the UK believe accept the basic myth of humanism about human rights and uh the basic basic myth of capitalism about about the economy which We may discuss later on what are these

B basic me can I push you a little further on that I mean I can understand how after generations and generations of people telling the same story within a community you accept it as tradition as fact as whatever it may be but at the very outset how do those myths gain Credence do you think how how do they gather their first generation of Believers well the crucial thing is in Most cases at least in the most successful cases it is not a matter of cheating or manipulating people if you want to convince people to believe

something usually you have to believe it yourself and uh most I think most Christian priests they really believe in their stories just the same most capitalist Bankers they really believe in the stories that they are telling us they are not going behind in the in some back Room and then laughing about us that we believe their stories I mean really believe I think we might think they do sometimes to be perfectly honest but carry on this is the basic thing you really believe the story also usually you find that there are several stories that people

keep in their mind at the same time and uh when one story fails they immediately grasp another story this is again one of the things that differentiates us from other animals That because so much of our behavior depends on believing in these fictional stories we can change our Behavior extremely rapidly simply by switching from one story to the other and we usually keep several stories in our heads and when one fails we just reach out for the other and you see it happening in history very quickly how this is again it's amazing you think for

ex you think for example about German history in the 20th century and you see The same people with the same DNA the same geography the same class climate and during a 100 years they switch between five completely different stories just like that from the second Reich to The viar Republic to the Nazi regime to communist East Germany at least if you liveed say in liik and then to a reunited and liberal Democratic Germany and it's the same people and they somehow manag to very quickly switch the stories in which they believe And again as a

historian I tend to think that most of the time it's not um it's not a trick people really believe the story and they completely forget the story in which they believed 5 years ago or 10 years ago and we also know it from our from our own personal lives usually people hold several narratives of themselves of their own lives and they switch between them and when they switch they can like shut down something and they completely forgot that they ever Believed something else about themselves and the other point you make about the the myths that

communities tell to enable themselves to exist as communities also has a downside which in that in the creation of those communities around a shared myth you create different communities with different myths and thus those myths that that that bring people together also simultaneously are dividing people at the same time I mean is there a way Out of that dissonance or do you think that is just the nature um the Miss themselves uh there is a way out in the long run and you see that as history progresses there basically fewer and fewer stories which more

and more people believe if you go back uh 2,000 years or 4,000 years you find that almost every little tribe has its own mythology has its own set of beliefs about about the world you go about the world today and Today at least in some respects all human on the planet have a set of of beliefs of stories which they all share whether it's again capitalism is maybe the best example money is probably the most successful story ever told uh not everybody believes in the same God or in the same or in the same political

myth but almost everybody on the planet believe in the same economic stories about money even say Osama Bin Laden he may not have believed in American Politics or American culture American religion but he had nothing against American dollars I mean if you gave him American dollars he would not throw them away I don't believe that and I was learning recently and I wonder here whether again we can bring science back into our historical story mean I think one of the great things about the story you tell is it's it's interdisciplinary nature isn't it that you're

moving from science you're moving To history and Back Again bring the two together and I was hearing that a recent test has been done in America with uh the congregation in a in a Baptist Church and they've been examining their brain patterns as they are listening to their charismatic preacher MH and what people were expecting to see was affirmation enjoyment excitement around the message kind of endorphins jumping going crazy all these sorts of things but what in instead they saw was that The prefrontal cortex the sort of the critical thinking area at the front of

the brain completely shut down now this is not it was shown later this particular congregation and and what the the scientists are now thinking is that when faced with or listening to a charismatic leader however you define that the alpha male of the pack Etc what's happening is that our brain Is actually hardwired to stop questioning what we're hearing from them MH and just accept it and I wonder how that kind of idea might play in into your your world in which you know the common belief in myths is absolutely essential for Community defunction for

the dispersion of myths uh amongst the community and for the ability to change those myths as you've been outlining uh yeah because Society is Based on these belief in common stories and uh it also involves you know even even marking that I believe in the same story by wearing a particular kind of hat or having a big beard or wearing a suit so you just need to see the person you know ah he believes in the same stor that I believe so it's extremely important so I think it's very very reasonable that we have something

very deep in the way that our bodies that our brain functions that enables us to just Accept the common stories of society without thinking about them too much because if all the time we went about thinking about these stories then Society will collapse I mean I don't want to give the impression that all these fictions are bad the basic message is that without these fictions no Society could function at least not any large scale Society if you look at a band of 100 people it can function without Any um any mythology or any common fictions

just on the basis of knowing everybody else and I know who you are and so I can trust you or not and cooperate with you or not but if you try to build a society with thousands of people or millions of people you must have some unifying stories in which everybody believes and if we didn't have this mechanism maybe for shutting down the prefrontal cortex then it wouldn't work and you go beyond I mean in your Book it's not just stories I mean I think we can understand if they're they folk stories told around the

fire or as you say a story we can all happily buy into like money but you also talk about make believe groups you know entire hierarchies of society that that would come under the title of a story a myth for you as well and I wondered there whether again calling them a make-believe group you know we may presume that the people Believe them when they're they're making them up but to call them that isn't that taking away a little bit from certain realities nature nurture for instance as part of the debate I mean one of

the examples was how do Elites uh come about uh in Societies in you know early societies say in the medieval period or something like that um and there one could argue say look well you know if you've got someone who can afford a horse uh and afford some armor to be on The top of that horse then they can defend the people uh and as a result of being able to defend the people they as a result occupy an elite position in society and make decisions about what that Society should do now I'm I'm struggling

with seeing that as a completely makeb beleve group as opposed to it being a very obvious common sensical kind of well they're able to do that so that's why they get the position that they do how would you kind of Square those two no definitely what usually happens is that some accidental process leads to a particular group of people say the people who had horses H finding themselves on top but then the crucial thing is is how do you uh how do you maintain your position how do you establish not just a tempor orary hierarchy

but a longlasting hierarchy and then after 300 years coming to The Peasants and saying look 300 years ago my great great great grandfather had a Horse so now you must all obey me it wouldn't convince anybody and I'd love to see people try though that would be well worth and similarly if you take like a modern example if in the 19th century I don't know in the Southern United States the white Plantation owner would come to the to the slave on the plantation and say okay 300 years ago this and this happened this is why

you are now slaved on my PL Plantation not only it would be very difficult for These people to accept it even for himself to explain it to himself what justifies my position my privileges my power people need some kind of much deeper justification than some accident of history that happened 300 years ago so they invent all kinds of stories uh for for instance of racial superiority or of religious just justification like in India you have this basic creation myth that you had the original beings the pora and the Brahmins the upper casts they came out

of its head and the the sudras OR at the bottom of the hip they came out of his legs so this is why they must obey the brahmins now this sounds much more acceptable if you if you put it in in the right religious cont context than saying that 2,000 years ago some tribes from Central Asia invaded the ganis valley and subjugated the local population and this is why we have now this cast System move on to another disparity which I know I was I was primed to definitively ask you about this this evening and

that's gender um you in your book you you you you show that so many cultures geographically spread around the world temporally spread across history have prioritized men over women and and you struggle to to to offer as everyone does a convincing explanation for why that is and why such communities have been so Stable can you talk us through that have you got any more insights uh since writing the book as to how we might explain and understand that and and quite why it's been such a incredible phenomena well it's one of the biggest riddles of

History because it's obvious that in this case it's not just just the result of some one accidental event and it's not just the result of one accidental story 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 now the simplest explanation that comes to the mind of many people is that men are physically stronger than women so it's obvious why they have dominated Society but this doesn't really fit in with a lot of other things know about human beings

and about apes in general and that is that social power in most cases is the result of social skills not of Physical strength if you look at the hierarchies of many most human organizations they not they do not correlate with physical strength if you think about maybe the most longlasting organization in the world today is a Christian Church uh you don't become Pope by beating up all the other Cardinals and I I think that I won't be offending anybody if I say that that Pope Francis is not the strongest Catholic on Earth in in physical

terms So I've got this image of sort of a weightlifting competition happening in the sine Chapel now or something like that yeah and it's not just the Catholic church I mean you look everywhere I mean you look even at criminal organizations so very often the big boss is somebody in his 50s or 60s whose power is the ability to tell tell other people some thugs in of 20s to go and kill someone he's not going and killing him himself and even among Chimpanzees uh the alpha male is not the strongest male physically he is the

male that is able to construct stable coalitions of supporters so it's social skills and it's very often at least believed that women have better social skills than than men and if so and if social skills are the key to social superiority so how come men dominate Society there is another very common theory that okay maybe it's not physical strength but it's the issue of Childbirth and and taking CH care of children that women are all the time occupied with being pregnant we taking care of children so they don't have time H to do all the

important stuff which they they they leave to men but the problem with this theory is that among other animals like elephants like bonobas the pigm Shimp panes we have cases of precisely because the females are the ones that are responsible for taking Care of the young they need more support and because they need more support they need to cooperate more and they develop this is why they develop those social skills because they need help from other Elephants or from other chimpanzees in raising the the young and what you get is a network of females which

dominates Society whereas the males which have much fewer responsibilities with regard to raising the children they are much more autonomous they are much more Self-centered they have a more difficulties in cooperating and they're basically pushed aside so even though the individual male bonobo is stronger than the individual female bonobo you have a network of cooperating females that dominates Society if this is possible among bonobos or elephants why not among uh human beings which H in which in their case I mean social skills are are the most important skills one of the Possibilities uh it still

doesn't have the the backing of enough empirical data so it's not like the answer but one of the possibilities is that maybe this common idea that women have Superior social skills is not true at least when it comes to large scale cooporation one possibility which is worth exploring and emphasizing it's just a possibility it's not it still hasn't got enough scientific backing is that yes in in small scale Societies women have Superior social skills but when it comes to the big organizations as that are based on all this myth making and in which case you

have to cooperate with complete strength strangers then the you have the reverse situation that women precisely because they need the uh the direct social connection they are at a disadvantage whereas men who are much more comfortable with an alienated situation with an impersonal hierarchy which is Based on make belief and not on actually knowing the other person they feel much more comfortable with this kind of situation ation so when you have large scale societies and huge impersonal hierarchies this is the situation where men actually have Superior social skills now as I said it is just

a theory worth examining it's not the answer I remember vividly from undergrad studies reading Herodotus and he tells a story about a tribe where all the women of the village Uh for every male sexual partner they put a bracelet uh on their leg and then when all the women of a particular generation get to a certain age they count up their bracelets and the woman with the most bracelets becomes Chieftain of the Village um Herodotus looks on it with some some amusement I to say but it kind of it's an interesting kind of that there

are examples that that break your the Paradigm as it were but they are very Few involved between isn't and usually they are from small scale societies we don't know of any like big Empire which was matriarcal it's a one of the questions of History still to be understood yeah like um can we break come on to to one of your your your main myths that you talk about in the book money and we've mentioned it once or twice already this evening and and one of the things you say about money is that that you know

it Can Bridge any cultural Gap even AMA Bin Laden is taking American dollars and I just wondered how you felt that uh uh foil um if we place it against the recent economic crises that have been rocking Europe and particularly deposited through Greece Etc which seem to me to have been having a very uh divisive effect and and opening up cultural gaps if anything how would you say the two work together well I think In the recent economic crisis all over the world we got some amazing examples of the power of our belief in money

at the height of the economic crisis uh I think two three years ago the Federal Reserve in the US was creating every day3 billion doar out of nothing they created all together a trillion dollars during during that year simply by going into the computer and adding a few zeros somewhere that's it I mean today you don't even print the money most money is Not even printed it's just electronic data the basic uh material from which you make money is human trust if you have trust you can monetize it into anything into even even into electronic

data so despite the the the the recent hits that the capitalist system has had in in in since 2008 still the amount of trust that most people in the world have in the capitalist system is incredible and uh this is what enables For example the the banks to create so much money out of nothing you have trust in money and in the systems that produces money you have also trust in the basic uh capitalist stories that say first of all maybe the most basic story of all of capitalism is the answer to all problem the

key to all the questions that bother us is economic growth no matter what you want in the long term the only way to achieve it is economic growth you want equality you want Freedom you want employment you want democracy you want peace name it it's through economic growth and if there will not be economic growth in the long run you won't have any of that on the personal level this translates into another extremely powerful myth the myth of consumerism which is part of this package that if you have any problem on the personal level the

solution is to buy something any problem whatsoever you probably need to buy something and then It will be okay 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 whatever but the answer to all the problems of humankind on the collective level they come from economic growth on the individual level they come from buying more stuff and still the vast majority of the population certainly in Europe and most of the world they believe in these stories and if

ever they stop believing In those stories then the capitalist system will collapse take you on to another of your your big myths thinking about religion now you you take us through in the book A lot of the religions of the world today and show how there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in quite a few of them but I was wanted to direct your attention towards what you think about the religions of the future uh and you know obviously particularly as you Pointed out right at the beginning we're in the throws of a new Revolution

the Industrial Revolution that and scientific revolution that is is really going to change our world once again beyond anything that we understand now and how do you see religion in the future I mean are there going to be techn based religions I mean I think this morning on on radio for you we're talking about Silicon Valley uh as as as as some God to be worshiped uh perhaps Now and certainly in the future yeah I think the future belongs to techn religions I mean the big religions the important religions of the 21st century are more

likely to emerge from Silicon Valley than they are from the Middle East or from Afghanistan or Syria or any of these places um it's a bit similar to what happened in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution uh when the Industrial Revolution swept through the World you had a lot of reaction it created a lot of of new problems it destroyed a lot of old certainties and hierarchies as marks and angles wrote In The Communist Manifesto everything solid melts into air and when everything solid melts into air people become very afraid and they look back

to some reassuring old tradition mythology religion to give them security so back in the 19th century the Industrial Revolution led to a wave of fundamentalism all over the World uh the biggest war of the 19th century was not the Napoleonic Wars it was not the American Civil War it was the typing rebellion in China when in reaction to the coming of the Industrial Revolution of British imperialism of the collapse of the old Chinese system you had this failed scholar Hong XU kuang who had a vision from God allegedly in which God revealed to Hong that

he Hong is the younger brother of Jesus Christ sent to Earth to Establish the kingdom of heavenly peace and he went around southern China with this message of heavenly peace and millions followed him into the typing Rebellion which was the most bloody war of the 19th century according to the most uh moderate estimates 20 million people died perished in the typing Rebellion which lasted 14 years until it was repressed the biggest war and similarly you had other fundamentalist movements like you had in Sudan the Mahadi quite similar in in some respects to what we see

today in the Middle East but none of this worked when we look back to the 19th century we don't remember it as the age of Faith the really important religion or ideology that came out of the Industrial Revolution and the 19 century was socialism in 1800 you didn't have any socialists it started very little but then it spread like wildfire and became the most important ideological movement Of the era changing our lives completely completely and the key to the success of the Socialists was that they were relevant they looked the future not to the past

they didn't study ancient scriptures they studied the technology and the economic structures created by the Industrial Revolution therefore they had something relevant to say about the new problems and opportunities of the Industrial Revolution now we are in the midst of a Second Industrial Revolution This time the main engines of change are not Steam and electricity they are biotechnology and computer science intelligent design this time the main products will not be textiles and vehicles and things like that they will be bodies and brains and Minds the main products of the 21st century are likely to be

bodies and brains and minds and the Islamic state has nothing relevant to say about the new opportuni opport of end danger of this for example what will Happen when artificial intelligence will replace most humans in the job market experts estimate that it could take as little as 30 40 years for this to happen you don't have any answer in the Bible what to do when humans are no longer useful to the economy you need completely new ideologies completely new religions and they are likely to emerge from Silicon Valley or from Bangalore and not from the

Middle East and they are likely to Pro to give people Visions Based on technology everything that the old religions promised 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 if we can finish up with one more question before I want to open it up to the audience for the second half of this evening but one of the the key tenants of the Scientific Revolution you put it is is the fact that we were able to admit ignorance That

there were things that we didn't yet know and that it was worth going out trying to find them out MH and how do you feel that sits with the myths we tell that we need to survive in communities that need to be believed that need to be all encompassing how do those two things sit by side by side and how will they sit by side by side in the future do you think well science doesn't provide any answers for ethical questions therefore it can never stand By itself and even in at a deeper level science

is not really at least this is why view as a historian science is not really about truth it's about power the real aim of science as an project as an establishment is not truth it's power particular individuals particular scientists may be very interested in the truth personally but as a institution the real aim of science is power and therefore it can and it must form alliances always with some ideology or Religion we have in our head this again story this myth that science and religion are enemies that they are fighting against each other and that

hopefully in the end s the light of science will prevail over the darkness of superstition and and religion I think this is very very very far from what is actually happened in the last few centuries and what will continue to happen in the next Century science there are conflicts between particular Scientific theories and particular religions yes but at basis science and religion our friends our allies uh science provides the power religion tells us what to do with it with the same technology say artificial intelligence or genetic engineering you can do completely different things with artificial

sorry with genetic engineering you can cure cancer or you can make designer babies what to do with it scientists have no answer there is no Experiment in biology or physics which will tell you what to do with genetic engineering for this you need to believe in some story in some religion in some ideology and this will continue to be the case in the 21st century also thank you very much so we're going to open it up now uh to the audience and the way this is going to work is we've got down on the ground

floor here we've got some four mic spotters yes you you deserve a glass of water after that um uh to uh Pick up to get a mic to you and if you're up on the top level you there is a freestanding mic right in the center uh and you need to make your way to that uh microphone is it in the center is to the sorry just to the right hand side here so if you've got a question in the upper level ref you're actually going to have to make your way over to the microphone

um to to answer the question and down here uh we've got some mic spotters so can I ask you um please to Wait until you've got a mic to you so to ask your question so that we can all hear your question clearly otherwise we won't have a chance to hear it um and I'll probably take questions a couple at a time and then we can throw them all to your V at the same time so if we're going start in this section here there's a lady uh just yes with dark hair that and then

we'll go to the gentleman uh in the row in front and then there's a lady in the blue here as well we'll do this Section first then we'll come to this section and we'll take some uh in between from the top hi uh thank you Dr Rari um first of all thank you so much for uh expanding so many Minds with your book um my question is really with the gender imbalance uh issue uh I know you've said that you don't have a convincing answer for it yourself and we look forward to the day when

we hear from you on that um but I wonder if you have an opinion given what you know of Different groups of people throughout history and how they've attained power looking at the world today what in your opinion could be the most important thing women could be doing to address um this gender imbalance either in Behavior or action and related to that um if you have an opinion on that why do you think it hasn't happened already Okay so we've got J we'll hold that one if you don't mind and if you pass the microphone

forward to the Gentleman in the RO in front hi thank you for such a great talk uh Jewish and Christian and Catholic religions have committed terrible genocides based on their myths do you think these religious leaders who've created these lifts and pushed these myths around the world should go to prison based on their myth belief and pushing it across the world thank you okay so we've got gender and religion two small topics for you to deal with and one more uh Coming from the lady in the blue and another easy one climate change um I'd

love to hear your thoughts on what you think Homo sapiens communities will look like over the next 50 hundred years given that we're in the beginning stages of maybe the the next mass extinction and yeah just your thoughts on how you think we're going to respond to climate change yeah okay okay the future gender religion and climate change okay so um Two minutes so with regard to gender I think that there's been a tremendous change over the last century uh it may be the biggest social change in thousands of years of history for thousands of

years you had so many different revolutions political social and economic so many different things changed but this basic patriarcal structure of most human societies at least the more the bigger human Societies didn't change uh and over the last 100 years you see a really fundamental change in the status of women and in the relation in gender relations in general it's still very far from being a completely egalitarian society and it's questionable whether it it will be possible ever to have a completely egalitarian society but I I wouldn't say that nothing has has been done or

accomplished in the Last few decades looking to the Future and it's also links to to to the other question I'm not sure there'll still be genders uh in 50 or 100 or 150 years uh with this new ability to re-engineer to create bodies and brains and Minds as the basic products of the 21st century economy the most uh fundamental um structures of the human body and mind them themselves might change so I'm not so sure that a 100 years from now people will have a clear Gender of just one gender uh just to give an

example that already starting to happen um in Virtual realities for example it's very easy for a person to adopt a different gender uh to change genders or to construct all kinds of alternative genders and you have today like kids H boys who play the roles of girls and vice versa in as as avatars in Virtual Worlds today it's still very primitive you sit in front of the computer and it's a two-dimensional Reality but in 30 years years uh more and more of a life might be transferred into a three-dimensional virtual reality which provides people with

far more excitement and far more interest than the drab life in the outside world in an economy where they are no longer needed and a political system which in which they have no power and in such a situation I mean it's it's I wouldn't just take it for granted that the gender structure Familiar to us today and from thousands of years in the past will still be relevant in in 50 or 100 years so these are a few thoughts about gender uh the other topic was religion religion yes uh whether to to put on trial

um people for propagating myth that then causes genocide and so forth I think the qu the big the real question is uh I don't have like a a an answer for all cases but a very obvious question to ask is what is the relation of cause and effect between The people who first invented the me and spread them and the people who committed the the atro atrocities of the genocide I wouldn't put Jesus on trial for what the Crusaders have done a thousand years after after his his death at least according to the best of

my understanding there is a very very big difference between what he preached and what the Crusaders understood from his preaching in on other occasions for instance in The case of I don't know the Hitler and the Nazis there is a much closer link between the people who first spread their stories and the atrocities that were committed in the name of of these stories what we need to remember is that thos sapiens has an incredible capacity to reinterpret stories this is one of the of of of the of the power of stories that it enables them

to change and to adapt so a story can say white and people will say yes yes Yes this is just an allegory when it says when it's written white it actually mean black and when it says that you should love their neighbor it actually means that you should crucify their neighbor or you should put him burn him if he doesn't believe in the same version of the religion of love and compassion as as as your version so from this perspective I wouldn't blame the people who or necessarily the people who invented the Story in the

first place I would also look at the people who reinterpret the story in very creative ways sometimes and then climate change particularly in light of VW recently well climate change is is a very depressing issue because in in this case there was a lot of talk but no fundamental change and and the basic problem here is um probably the H fundamental capitalist story of economic growth at least at present maybe in the future they'll find some way to to make The two work together but at least at present there is really no way of reducing

say the emission of greenhouse gases of stopping slowing down even a global warming without reducing halting or decreasing economic growth and no government almost no government today is willing or able to do that when the capitalist story clashes with this problem of H global warming the capitalist story always wins so maybe we'll find some new technological ways Of of settling the the two together but H if that doesn't happen then I don't think that chances at least now is that we won't do anything radical enough in time and that uh this is a unfolding disaster

that humanity is simply walking into and will have to face the consequences in and not to distant future okay we're going to go up to the top to the standing mic can we get the First sort of three questions uh from up the top please hi good evening um I wanted to ask a similarly uh small question about uh the relationship between these stories and what you might view as some kind of objective reality um basically is there some sort of relationship between the most successful stories that we tell in society and some kind of

objective truth um or is it more their ability just to bring people together And you mentioned this uh interesting example of of Isis has no response to the development of humanity over the next you know 50 to 100 years does that mean that you know our proximity to a sort of scientific truth means that the story will be more successful than just a story which is entertaining and gives people Solace mhm okay thank you and the next hi so the question is what should we believe because I feel like I had this idea that as

human mean we tend to Know the basic values like compassion and kindness but our mind is also so weak that is so easily interfere for example Nazi and um now right now we're seeing Isis that just turn normal people into killing machines so how should we think that as normal people living in the society when somebody trying to make us believe what they want us to believe how can we distinguish how can we keep Independence and and one more if we hadn't Here um I would like to ask um firstly the cognitive leap do you

have any idea why that happened um secondly hear the cognitive leap um why did that happen Okay um also how aware of you how how aware are you of the myth that you're propagating yourself okay and and do you have a belief in truth mhm uh it seems the top row are very much more philosophical maybe it's the quality of the air up There so should we start with the cognitive leap first and and then answer go for it uh so about the um objectivity there is surprisingly little connection between the objective truthfulness of a

story and its historical success some of the most successful stories in history and I won't name names not to offend anybody are the most far-fetched and and and strange I mean we are so used to them that we are it's reasonable for for Somebody to believe that but just try to think about it from the Viewpoint of somebody who never heard them before and how can anybody believe that uh so there is no connection you very often it's accident D Al why one religion becomes dominant and spreads and not another religion it very often has

nothing to do with the truth value of the story it depends more on all kinds of either organizational skills or accidents of History um about the second question What whether there is any kind of of truth that can serve as a basis for ethics for Morality uh and what is real in in the world so for me ethics is not about obeying the commands of some this imaginary entity or or that imaginary entity but it all revolves around the question of suffering which as far as I understand is the most real thing in the world

or the thing which is most easily most easy to test it's it's reality suffering is Real it can be the outcome of belief in all kinds of imaginary stories and and and entities but the suffering itself is real the easiest test whether something is real or not just ask yourself can it suffer uh a nation cannot suffer we say that the nation suffered the defeat in war this is just a metaphor a nation doesn't suffer even if it loses a war the people in in the nation the civilians the solders they can suffer but a

nation doesn't suffer similarly if A a bank goes bankrupt the bank doesn't suffer if the Euro loses its value the Euro doesn't suffer and similarly if the Temple of Zeus is burned down Zeus doesn't suffer uh his Believers may suffer yes uh humans are real things they really suffer animals really suffer a cow who is separated from her cough in the dairy industry they the the cow and the cough they really suffer this is real but a nation that loses a a war doesn't suffer So this is I think the the the clearest there are

other tests of course but for me this is the clearest and most important test about the cognitive leap cognitive Revolution what what caused it we don't really know um there are all kinds of of theories but it's unclear what happened to Homo sapiens about 70,000 years ago I mean before that if you go back a 100 thousand years ago you find humans that look very much like us with brains the Same size as ours but they behave in a completely different way the best theory we have is that some small genetic mutation or a few

small genetic mutation occurring around 70,000 years ago led to a change in the internal structure of the Sapien brain perhaps linking together two brain areas which were previously separate or or vice versa and this resulting in new cognitive abilities but again this is just a hypothesis at present uh I think The best thing about science is that when you don't know something you don't have to invent some fanciful story you can just say I don't know so we don't know what caused the cognitive Revolution there was another question I think linked to it how aware

are you of of the myths you're spinning for us I I try to be notice he avoided that one get out I I try to be as as aware as possible again I try to use the same test that I mentioned earlier uh the Test of suffering and as some something to hold on when you see the immense power that stories have over humanity and also over myself to keep asking myself what is really real and not just a story in my mind and the test I keep returning to is the test of suffering what

uh what is really what is suffering and what causes it and focus on that and that can give you at least some some lead away from just immersing Yourself in more and more fictions and mythologies to bring things down a little bit I'm reminded very much of the Matrix uh movie where the guy says or the computer says you know we tried an iteration of your world first without any suffering and nobody bought it right everyone you had to have the suffering kind of within the Matrix world for it to be believe um but you

spent a lot of time in your book also talking about happiness yes I just think just to jump In with the happiness that that happiness is not studied enough as a subject within the historical narrative that we tell um and yet suffering is your by line for for your your your check if you like how do you see the two what what's the use of studying happiness then suffering is two sides of the same coin and at least my Publishers told me that if I write about suffering nobody would like to read it if you

write about happiness ah yes happiness We want to hear about happiness so uh so like in in the headline you have happiness but when you read the small print you see oh it's actually a lot about suffering this sounds like the best advertising gig has ever been put together we're going to come to this part of the audience for questions uh first we've got some mics coming too we've got a gentleman in the second row we've got a gentleman in the first row And uh we've got a a lady right next to him as well

that kind of thing we'll go those through at the first and then come to the back after that just picking up on the genetics point do you believe that Humanity genetically can all believe the same myth and I give the slight sort of fasile example of the white and gold dress or the blue and d and black dress and therefore is genetic manipulation in the future the way in which those that are truly seeking to Influence Humanity can get them to bond around a powerful myth mhm okay that's one come to you next um it's

kind of the same ballpack but I was wondering you've spoken a lot about how we change stories and our ability to change mop one pick up another one and how we might do that with religion in the future and it might become something that looks completely different and I wondered if on the flip side there are any stories that run all the way through that Humanity has had Kind of from the beginning and might have changed but there's a kind of immutable core or are we just creatures that constantly move on mhm okay and we

have one more from the front row and then take those three together thank you there's a Mike there hi there yeah we've spoken a lot about money being the biggest story that Humanity's created and with religion and capitalism uh as you know kind of the second ones under that what uh do you think will be the Next biggest story in Humanity's next Leap Forward and or is there even a bigger Story the money in your opinion mhm okay should we take those so sort of uh genetically manipulating everyone to the same myth the successful ones

and what's going to be the next big story well um it is possible for everybody to believe in the same story at the same time we have examples again like like money uh which has been the most successful Story Probably and it's it's A very good story I'm not implying that there is something bad about it it has done Humanity a lot of good in in in many ways uh both money and capitalism um it's very common today not only today today to blame them from all the evils in the world but you have to

say that they are also responsible for some very good developments uh today in the world more people die each year from eating too much than from eating too little more people die each year um from old Age diseases than from infectious diseases and childhood diseases and more people commit suicide each year than all the people killed by War and crime put together and all three are wonderful news it may not sound like it but if you think about it again this wonderful news and the capitalist system has a lot of credit for all these three

achievements reducing famine H reducing disease and reducing violence in the world uh so I felt I just had to say it to Counterbalance maybe the the wrong impression so it is possible for all people to believe in the same myth even without uh genetic engineering or biological engineering um we can't really say what will be the next stage um the most probable thing is that the next stage of History will involve fundamental changes in humanity itself um for thousands of years of History we had social and political and Technological revolutions but Humanity itself stayed the

same we still have the same bodies the same brains the same Minds as hunter gatherers 20 or 30,000 years ago it's very likely that the next stage will involve uh changes and manipulations on the most fundamental feature of homo sapiens on the body the brain and the mind and it could be uh used also to make people believe all in the same story or in the in different stories I don't know uh but It's certainly a a possibility uh the second question was most successful myth to date I mean that might be money for you

it sounds like and then what's the next uh kind of myth um about the most successful what it the question the most successful oh oh yeah whether something has not change well again the the the the power of stories as against genetics is that they are extremely adaptable and malleable for a beehive to change its Social structure would take probably thousands of generations of natural selection the bees cannot wake up one morning and have a revolution execute the queen and establish a republic of bees or a Communist dictatorship worker bees of the world unite let's

have a Communist dictatorship of bees it won't work um humans can do it because we don't need to change our DNA we change the story and this can be done very very quickly so you don't people sometimes Believe that you have stories that remain the same for thousands of years this is especially the case in religions that people convince themselves that I believe in the same thing and follow the same uh Commandments as people did thousands of years ago but when you look deeper into into it in almost all cases you find that there are

enormous changes like uh again like favorite example the pope is always good when you need Something some example like this so you now have the pope saying to people in Europe open the churches to the Muslim refugees coming from Syria this is the Christian thing to do is to welcome these Muslim refugees into your churches go back a thousand years and the Pope says go to Syria and kill these infidels and still the pope would say no it's the same Christianity it's the same it's the same basic story so people tell themselves that nothing changes

but in Reality changes all the time in quite drastic ways uh what was the third the next big myth the next big myth um well it will be complicated to explain in in two or three minutes but um I think the the next big story is data uh if to tell the story of like history in a nutshell uh first people believed in God and humans were important simply because God created them and gave them special privileges And whatever and then you had the humanist Revolution and people stopped believing in God and started to believe

in themselves in humans human beings became the sacred sacred in their own right this is the the faith in human rights that homo sapiens is sacred why just because because we are sacred we are the most important thing in the universe we are the source of all meaning and Authority the next big thing I my guess is that we'll move from uh as We moved from a decentric to a homocentric worldview we'll move from a homocentric to a data Centric Viewpoint the basic myth which you see starting to emerge from Silicon Valley is that the

entire universe is a flow of data everything in the universe is just different patterns of data flow all organisms are algorithms all or organisms giraffes Tomatoes humans and flu viruses are just different data processing Systems up till now the most successful the most advanced algorithms in the universe were humans which was why it was a good reason to sanctify humans they are the best data processing systems in the world but we are now creating better Data Systems than humans and humans will move aside and the future will belong to a completely different kinds of algorithms

um this is my personal guess uh where we are heading to in the 21st 22nd century data replacing humanism as the central myth of History suddenly everyone starts cutting up their Tesco Club cards and U Can we head to the the back section on this side and then we'll come over here after that there was uh a gentleman with his hand up high with the paper in his hand there's a lady row or so behind him and there's a gentleman in the front row of the center oh sorry we'll go for the lady in the

front row as well we'll take Those three and then we'll come round to the left is there a mic um thank you you mentioned that myths are necessary for large societies to organize themselves and the nation state was really very much relied on on myths during the 20th century and was the construct that we used to organize ourselves politically in the 20th century 19th centur 20th century what do you think going forwards is going to be The organizing principle for political states in the 21st 22nd century I mean where are we going MH okay and

then there was a a lady in the front row yeah there I want to ask um do you think love is a myth now that's the kind of question get and there's a lady in the back row on that section as well thank you um um I have a question um regarding um well it seems it seems um that we're kind of between stories at The moment and uh a lot of the questions here today seem to um uh pinning their hopes for new stories and so is the case with mine um I'm just wondering

if you have um or what your view is on the dissonance between um the stories we tell children about nature and animals and the um abysmal way in which we allow animals to be treated mhm yeah okay uh okay so first about the nation state in in politics uh for the last 200 years the Nation nationalism was one of the most important stories and myth in the world but we are now seeing the the decline in the importance of of of nationalism despite all the talk about the Revival of nationalism say say in Europe when

you compare the strength of nationalism in Europe today to what it was a century ago it's there is absolutely no comparison uh just 100 years ago in the first world war Italy for example joined The war the first world war in 1915 nobody forced it to join the war nobody invaded it it joined the war of its own volition in order to gain a few little territories mainly triest and the trantino that they claim this is sacred Italian soil illegally occupied by the austr Hungarian Empire Italy lost in the war something like 650,000 soldiers killed

and more than a million soldiers injured for triest and the trantino no Italian Government today would risk even 5,000 soldiers to get some territory from Slovenia or from Austria it's it's almost Unthinkable similarly if you think about all the the the independence movement in Scotland if you compare that to what you had say 200 300 years ago uh there is no comparison almost no body was willing to be killed or to kill somebody for or against a Scottish independence compared to the situation two 300 years ago when the government in London was willing to basically

send its Army to the highlands and then then practice a sort of ethnic cleansing after koden after 1745 so it's a totally different kind of story uh you can maybe talk today in Europe about Boutique nationalism which is kind of nice to have under this big protective umbrella of the European Union but nobody's going to be killed for this Boutique nationalism and it makes good historical Sense for nationalism to be waning because the big problems of humankind in the 21st century are all Global in nature and there is no country that can solve these problems

on its own uh it's not the right level whether it's global warming whether it's the global economic crisis whether it's the opportunities and dangers of new technologies like artificial intelligence what will happen when artificial intelligence will outperform Humans in Co in in cognition in intelligence uh this is not the kind of thing that a single government of a single country can solve by itself so uh in in this sense the future hopefully would belong to a more Global sort of politics if humankind cannot move to this level of more a global political system not necessarily

Global government but some kind of more effective Global political system we will not be able to face effectively the Really important problem and dangers of the 21st century so this is about politics What About Love About Love so my husband is in the audience so I have to be careful very careful about what I'm saying now love is certainly real but there are many many many myths that have [Music] [Applause] been love is is a both a biological and a personal subjective Reality uh but there are a tremendous amounts of mythologies and stories woven around

around it uh like you see a a a Hollywood science fiction movie and you have the aliens Conquering the Galaxy and invading Earth or you have the Matrix this all knowing all powerful system that enslaves humankind and you have the hero being manipulated right and left by this system and you have the evil robots of the aliens he's is riddled with bullets from from from These aliens or robots or whatever and then in the very last moment when everything seems hopeless and humanity is going to be destroyed or conquered by the aliens suddenly something happens

and the hero wakes up and turns the table and the aliens don't know what what happened and the Matrix cannot understand what is happening and this is all because of love this is the best that most Hollywood screenwriters can come up With and um it's not even some you know it's not even some Cosmic Compassion or something like that it's usually a very caral type of love between two mammals and uh um my personal Viewpoint is that it's extremely unlikely that aliens that have managed to conquer the entire galaxy or a super intelligent computer that

that rule this entire reality cannot fathom cannot understand a hormonal rush so I I don't think that this kind of of Myth works that was the most diplomatic mentioning of pig gate I've heard so far in the last and but moving on to animals the final question was about about the the very poor treatment of animals that we seem very comfortable with in the 20th and 21st century yeah so uh here we we have a huge difference between the kind of stories that you you you open a children's book and it's all full of sto

nice stories about cuddly animals uh Both farm animals and and wild animals and it's miles and miles away from how we from the actual lives of these animals and and how we treat them um so it's about compartmentalizing uh our minds uh again homo homo sapiens humans have an amazing capacity for cognitive dissonance of knowing something and not knowing it at the same time believing something and believing just the Opposite at the same time if we did not have this capacity we probably would have been unable to form any functioning Society any functioning culture because

all societies and cultures are based on contradictions like you have you believe in an all powerful all knowing god and at the same time you exempt this God from all the suffering in the world and blame say the devil now it it it cannot work together either you believe in a single God that is all powerful and Controls everything and creates everything and if there is a devil then the devil must also be the creation of that same God and then that God is responsible for whatever the devil is doing or the devil is independent

of God and then he's not a single Creator he's not all powerful he's not all knowing you have at least two Gods fighting each other but somehow people manage to reconcile it in their their minds to be both monotheists and dualists and to to Take out the right story at the right time so it's the same with with the attitude to animals we can tell a bedtime story to to a child about this cow its adventures and then we f it a stake and demanded it finishes everything in the plate without making the connection between

the story and the think we're going to have to move to um super fast snap questions in our di minutes I want to come back up to the top so if we can have two questions from Up the top and then we'll come to two questions here in the in the center back if you can put your hands up and we'll get some mics to you very quickly and it will have to be 30 second answers go for it okay do you think that today's world can function successfully without money without money h no brilliant

my son turned six yesterday what advice would you give him as he prepares for a world of Robotics and Artificial intelligence um is that nothing they teach him in the educational system today is really relevant to the to the world in which he he will actually live he uh the most important capacity he will need to have is to all the throughout life learn there will be no ending to learning and to Reinventing ourselves again and again and again because the situation in which you learn things until you are 20 or 25 and then Most

of life you just work in whatever you learned or or use whatever wisdom you've gained it's not going to work anymore the pace of change is so fast that uh you'll have to learn all your life okay we've got someone in the center we had uh someone on the front row yes gentlemen there those who can make man believe absurdities can make man commit atrocities how on Earth that was said by volter by the way very wise man how does One inoculate Society against the toxic the orthod toxic myth takes that abound today the future

Generations how do we inoculate them against such myth takes and can we have the lady just next to you as well one at times yeah yeah sure sure sure um it's it's extremely ult again I don't know the answer um it Demands a really tremendous amount of work of personal work to free yourself even a little bit from the dominant stories of the age um I'm not familiar With any example from history that a large scale populations have managed to do it and uh therefore I again I I'll use the scientific way method and say

that I don't know the answer to to that one and the lady next to hi um it was interesting to hear your thoughts on consumerism and the idea that we buy things or in the book you say that we travel for example because we're driven by um a consumerism lifestyle do you think it's also possible that we would Travel because we um we want to explore the world we are people who are driven to a higher intelligence or experiences cultural experiences MH yeah we often tell ourselves that we want we travel to the other side

of the world because we want to explore the world but all the airports and all the resorts look exactly the same and uh there is less and less exploring to do in this geographical sense of really going to the other side of the world and even When not all of course not all travelers but very often when people do go to the other side of the world they still want to have all the things that they had back home they in a deep sense they don't really want to explore the world again they they believe

in these stories that they see on the commercials and and so forth that by traveling to Thailand or to Mexico I will explore a different reality and I'll get in touch with a different part of myself but in reality I I don't think there is kind of inside yourself there is a box of emotions and Sensations with the label open only when you're in Mexico and then you get to Mexico and wonderful things come out basically I think that everything you can hope to know about yourself you probably can know it even here in London

that's not something the plane companies want to hear said um I'm very sorry to you who we haven't managed to get to for questions I think we're going To have to wrap things up now and one thought that that that struck my mind that we've been painting a picture which is potentially not that happy uh about about the future and you know the way you end your book describing us as dissatisfied and irresponsible Gods who who don't know what they want um I think sets of a question mark by where that future's going but to

be honest I comfort myself with the fact that um if you remember back to Back to the Future Part Two when they when they went to the Future and imagined it the year they actually went to was 2015 uh and here we are and I still don't have my flying car and uh the self-tying laces of the Nike trainers um haven't turned up although apparently Nike have promised something of that sort by the end of the year so perhaps you know give even our best intentions we can't predict the future with any accuracy um and

I throw that last thought to you for the final word yeah definitely there is no way we can predict the future today less than ever before in history uh nobody really has a clue how the economy or Society or gender relations would look like in 2050 what we can do is uh explore some of the possibilities uh I think that the for historians for academics the task with regard to the future is not to make predictions it is to explore different possibilities to Prepare ourselves for different possibilities and in this sense it's often said that

you study history in order to kind of predict the future and learn lessons from the mistakes of the past and so forth I think that the main reason to study history is to free ourselves from the past the past controls us through all these stories institutions the past controls our hopes our thoughts our dreams our fears and shapes them and this really Limits The Horizon of possibilities which we can see before us and I see my job as a historian in trying just a little bit to relax this grip of the past and enable us

to Envision a wider Horizon of possibilities pleas and and gentlemen yal Noah [Music] [Applause]