Sapiens

Seventy thousand years ago you would have had no reason to bet on us. Homo sapiens was a forgettable African ape, lodged in the anxious middle of the food chain, eating the marrow that bigger killers left behind. We were not the strongest, the fastest, or the cleverest of the human species then alive, and at least six kinds of human walked the Earth. Yet today one of those species owns the planet, has split the atom, decoded the genome, and reached for the keys to life itself, while the rest survive only as a faint smear of DNA in our blood.

The puzzle of this book is simple to state and unsettling to answer. How did so unremarkable an animal come to rule everything? The answer is not sharper claws or bigger muscles. It is a single, strange talent: the ability to cooperate flexibly, in vast numbers, with total strangers, by believing together in things that exist only in our shared imagination.

Gods, nations, money, laws, human rights, limited liability companies, none of these is found in any river or forest. They live in the collective mind, and yet they bind millions into common purpose, and that is the most powerful force our species ever discovered. A chimpanzee will never sacrifice a banana for the promise of reward in chimpanzee heaven. We will die for a flag, fund a hospital for a god, and trust a stranger because a coin in his hand carries a story we both believe.

These shared fictions are not lies. They are imagined orders, real in their effects precisely because so many of us agree to act as if they are true. Three revolutions carried this story forward. The Cognitive Revolution, around seventy thousand years ago, rewired our language so that we could speak of things that do not exist and so weave the myths that let strangers act as one.

The Agricultural Revolution, around twelve thousand years ago, chained us to wheat and rice and multiplied our numbers while making most individual lives harder, history's biggest fraud. The Scientific Revolution, some five hundred years ago, began with a humble and explosive confession, that we do not know, and married curiosity to empire and capital into runaway power. Each revolution multiplied what our species could do. None of them, as far as anyone can measure, made the average human any happier, because contentment tracks not our conditions but the gap between conditions and expectations, and that gap we keep widening.

This is the single most important realization the long view forces upon us: power and happiness do not rise together. We have grown, in a geological eyeblink, from creatures who cracked bones at the edge of the kill into creatures on the verge of redesigning life through genetic engineering, cyborgs, and artificial minds. We are becoming gods. And the final, vertiginous fact is that we have acquired godlike power without acquiring godlike wisdom or even clear desire.

We can do almost anything, and we do not know what we want. Having mastered our environment and terrorized our fellow creatures, we remain dissatisfied and dangerous, sailing fast toward a horizon no one has charted. Is there anything more perilous than a discontented god who does not know what he is for?