Yuval Noah Harari: prediction

Transcript context

…Now you’re describing some interesting and powerful ideas throughout human history. Can you just speak to the mechanism of how humans start to believe ideas? Is there something interesting to say there from your thinking about it, how idea is born and how it takes hold, and how it spreads, and how it competes with other ideas? First of all, ideas are an independent force in history. Marxists tend to deny that. Marxists think that all history is just a play of material interests, and ideas, stories, they are just a smokescreen to hide the underlying interests. My thoughts are to some extent the opposite. We have some biological objective interests that all humans share, like we need to eat, we need to drink, we need to breathe, but most conflicts in history are not about that. The interests which really drive most conflicts in history don’t come from biology. They come from religions and ideologies and stories. It’s not that stories are a smokescreen to hide the real interests. The stories create the interests in the first place. The stories define who are the competing groups. Nations, religions, cultures, they are not biological entities. They’re not like species like gorillas and chimpanzees. No. Israelis and Palestinians, or Germans and French, or Chinese and Americans, they have no essential biological difference between them. The difference is cultural. It comes from stories. There are people that believe in different stories. The stories create the identity. The stories create the interests. Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over Jerusalem not because of any material interest. There are no oil fields under Jerusalem, and even oil. You need it to realize some cultural fantasy. It doesn’t really come from biology. The stories are independent forces. Now, why do people believe one story and not another? That’s history. There is no materialistic law, “People will always believe this.” No. History is full of accidents. How did Christianity become the most successful religion in the world? We can’t explain it. Why this story about Jesus of Nazareth? The Roman Empire in the 3rd Century CE was a bit like, I don’t know, California today. So many sects and sub-sects and gurus and religions, everybody has their own thing, and you have thousands of different stories competing. Why did Christianity come up on top? As a historian, I don’t have a clear answer. You can read the sources, and you see how it happened. Oh, this happened and then this happened, and then Constantine adopted it, and then this and then this, but why? I don’t think anybody has an answer to that. If you rewind the movie of history and press play and you rewind and press play a hundred times, I think Christianity would take over the Roman Empire in the world maybe twice out of a hundred times. It was such an unlikely thing to happen. ress play and you rewind and press play a hundred times, I think Christianity would take over the Roman Empire in the world maybe twice out of a hundred times. It was such an unlikely thing to happen. It’s the same with Islam. It’s the same, I don’t don’t know, with the communist takeover of Russia. In 1914, if you told people that in three years Lenin and the Bolsheviks will gain power in that czarist empire, they would think you’re utterly crazy. Lenin had a few thousand supporters in 1914 in an empire of close to 200 million people. It sounded ludicrous. Now we know the chain of events, the First World war, the February Revolution and so forth, that led to the communist takeover, but it was such an unlikely event, and it happened.…

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