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 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 temporary hierarchy but a longlasting hierarchy and then 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 with 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 slaves 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 instance of racial superiority or of religious just justif ation 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 were at the bottom of the hip they came out of his legs so this is why they must obey the the brahmins now this sounds much more acceptable if you if you put it in in the right religious 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 discussed system move on to another disparity which I know I was I was primed to definitively ask you about 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 phenomenon well it's one of the biggest riddles of History because it's obvious that in this case it's not 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 societ 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 we 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 I think that I won't be offending anybody if I say that Pope Francis is not the strongest Catholic on Earth in in physical terms so I've got this image of s of a weightlifting competition happening in the C Chapel now or something like that yeah and it's not just a 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 other people some thugs in the 20s to go and kill some 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 don't at 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 care of children that women are all the time occupied with being pregnant with taking care of children so they don't have time uh 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 chimpanzees we have cas 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 their 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 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 dominate Society if this is possible among bonobos or elephants why not among uh human beings which uh 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 a superior social skills is not true at least when it comes to large scale cooporation one possibility which is worth exploring 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 strangers then the you have the reverse sit situation that women precisely because they need the um 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 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 cheap 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 in far between isn't it and usually they are from a small scale societies we don't know of any like big Empire which was materical it's a one of the questions of History still to be understood yeah um can we breing 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 kind of posited 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 uh I think two three years ago the Federal Reserve in the US was creating every day $3 billion dollar out of nothing they created allog together a trillion doar 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 system that produces money you have also trust in the basic 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 a 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 this 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 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 techno 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 Alle 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 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 in the 19th 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 and the key to the success of the socialists was that they were relevant they looked to 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 angin 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 opportun opportunities of in danger of this for example what will happen when artificial intelligence will replace most humans in the job market experts estimate that it could pay 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 a a the Middle East and they are likely to Pro to give people Visions based on technology everything that the old 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

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Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024