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Reading notes about A Brief History of Humankind

The most special feature of human languages isn’t about delivering human or lion’s messages, it’s about expressing doesn’t even exist.

   A bunch of people who don’t know each other can co-operate if they believe in the same story.

   Whether in modern countries, medieval churches or ancient tribes, the foundation of all kinds of massive human cooperation exists only in collective fictions. There exists no God, no country, no money, no human right, no law or justice outside human conjunct imagination.

    The so-called “imagined reality” means something that everyone believes and as long as this conjunct belief still exists, its power can affect the world.

Just because the massive human cooperation is based on imagined stories, so once the story is changed, so is the mode of human cooperation.

  The reason why there is global trade network is because we believe in some virtual entity, like dollar, Federal Reserve Bank and the trademark of enterprises.

 

  Homo sapiens invented so much imagined reality which developed all kinds of behavior patterns, and these are exactly the bases of our “culture”. When culture came into being, you can no longer stop its change or development. And all these inevitable changes made our “history”.

 

The real difference between human and chimpanzees are those imaginary stories, the combined thousands of people, families and groups like glue. This glue makes us the dominator of all.

 

   Some environmentalists claim that our ancestors live harmoniously with nature while it’s actually not true. Early before the industrial revolution, homo sapiens had been the culprit of distinction of many plants and animals.

 

   Human think they acclimated plants, but in fact it’s plants that acclimated human.

 

   The essence of agricultural revolution is to let more people live a worse life.

   

As to evolution, domestic hens or cows are probably the most successful achievement made by human while they are actually living the worst life ever. Domestication for animals is built on a series of barbarous behaviors and its degree will only go higher as time goes by.

 

    An important lesson that we learn from agricultural revolution is probably that the success of species evolution doesn’t represent individual happiness.

 

Generally speaking, peasants will build a solid link with constructions like house. The significance of agricultural revolution is so deep that it influences both construction and psychology. After that, human became more self-centred, they were linked closely to their home and drew a boundary between other species and themselves. After agricultural revolution, the importance of future was enhanced to the highest.

 

  All the imposed grain fed politics, war, art and philosophy and people used them to build palaces, bastions, monuments and temples. Before late period of modern times, 90% of population were peasants. They got up at sunrise and supported a tiny group elites:king, officers, warriors, priests, artists and philosophers, who were almost all written in history, Thus, history only tells us what a few people did but most people’s life was just labouring.

No matter Hammurabi or founders of the US, they all have a imagined reality. They imagined there exist some eternal principals that suits all, but principals like that exists only in human’s imagination, in the imaginary stories that they create and tell each other about.  These principals are never objective.

   There’s no doubt that evolution doesn’t concern equality. The concept of equality is related to the concept “create”. The equality of Americans comes from Christianity, they believe each soul is created by God and all souls are equal in front of God. However, if we don’t believe in myths about God creating souls then what doesn’t equality mean? The basis of evolution is difference, not equality. Each person carries different genetic codes, they are influenced by different environments after their birth and develop different characteristics which leads to different probability of surviving. “Born to be equal” should have been “evolved to be different”.

 

   If people are born to be equal, then it’s not because Thomas Jefferson said so, it’s because God created human this way.If free market is the best economic regime, then it’s not because Adam Smith said so, it’s because this is an invariable rule.

  Imaginary regime is not fiction, it exists among inter-subjectives and the conjunct imagination of thousands of people.

 

  Millions of strangers follows this man-made rather than inborn instinct and co-operate closely with each other. This man-made instinct is what we call “culture”.

 

  Money is the most common and efficient mutual trust system throughout history.

 

  The point of religion is “I believe in it” while that of money is “they believe in it”.

 

  We are easy to divide people into good people and bad people and all the empires might be categorized as bad. After all, almost all the empires were built on blood and maintained power through oppression and war.However, most of the cultures nowadays are legacies of empires. If empires are categorized as bad, then what about us?

 

  It’s likely that all human will live in a single empire in the future and this one will become a real global empire.

 

  If a religion intends to hold people of different races and nations, then it must posses two qualities. One, the rule that it believes in must suit all and be eternal; Two, it must be steadfast to spread this relief to the masses.

My interest in science fiction actually came from history. Whether in modern countries, medieval churches or ancient tribes, the foundation of all kinds of massive human cooperation exists only in collective fictions. There exists no God, no country, no money, no human right, no law or justice outside collective human imagination. The contracts we sign nowadays are essentially the same with sorcerer rituals in tribes - once we sign it, all magic works from that moment. Human civilization has developed for such a long time, we have been accustomed to those fictions and we trust the value that they brought to us. I began to realize that my motive for creation weakened because of the weakened curiosity. In The Story of Art, the author E.H. Gombrich compared the presentation of artists’ talents to the growing of a pearl - its core was only a dust, impure and probably for religion, money or war, but artists’ talents developed on this core. Without economic interests, all these supports for my motive were interest and curiosity. When history looked back on its origin, I began to jump out of all the familiar fictions and reconsidered everything to rebuild the new curiosity. And this curiosity is extremely obvious in science fiction field, so to speak, science fiction seems to be based on history. Science fiction is now the highlight of my practice.

photograph from the nuture history museum

sketch by Hongyang Zhang

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