Which things have I learned after watching Yuval Noah Harari’s dialogue?
After watching a hard understanding video of Harari, I want to share my thoughts related to Harari’s thinking styles. For me, it is not enough to watch just one video, I have watched all his videos to understand fully his perspectives. So, in a nutshell, these are the main factors I have learned.
The basic thing I have learned is human strength. After watching the video, I understood that humans are the same species as the other animals but now we dominate the world because of our own main strength which is the ability to do a mass corporation. Yes, it is. We can do it which other animals cannot. So the question that pops up here is how do we corporate like that a million and billion of people together? The simple answer is that we create fictional stories and convince people to believe in them.
Another thing is that we believe in quid pro quo by living in a dual reality while other animals live in an objective reality which is a tangible reality. Dual reality means that we live in objective reality as well as fictional reality. At this point, I mentioned quid pro quo which means in simple terms, give and take. According to our cultures and traditions, we use this term a lot in every aspect of areas. For example, in our religion, we believe in karma, which means if you do good things, good things will come back to you. I have learned here that we always have expectations whatever we do. For example, if I do this thing, what things will I get back? It is our instinct gut.
We use our languages not merely to describe our reality but also to create fictional stories. That happened to a big corporation. However, all corporation isn’t nice at all. The vast majority of happening war is not because of food or territory. It is because of fictional stories that we created. For example, if you have two groups, and each group has its strong fictional stories, and they can’t agree with each other. That happened war. Fictional stories that we created are everywhere in the legal, political, economic, and religious fields. Nowadays these fictional stories are really strong, so other species objective reality depends on human fictional entities like the banks, EU, and nations.
Another question that I caught up in the video is that “ Is Global Governance an epitome of evil in the mindset of people?”. In my opinion, yes, it may be especially in historically disenfranchised countries. For these countries, Global Governance sounds like it will definitely come from a very westernized idea. However, I think we need to do global corporation because if we don’t do global governance, and if we suffer from climate change and from technological disruptions, the worst suffering will not be in the US, the worst suffering countries will be exactly the countries which suffered the most from the last 200 years of globalization, imperialism, and industrialization. So the results of a calamity will not be shared equally between everybody. The rich can easily do it as usual.
Harari said that there are two main reasons we should do global corporations based on our biological reality of homo sapiens. The first reason is we are completely dependent on the ecological system around us. Because even our ecological systems are interdependent with each other to become a balanced atmosphere. The second reason is that we, humans are social animals. He mentioned that the feelings that people today have of alienation and loneliness and not finding their place in the world is not because of global capitalism. The problem is people became disembodied because they all went to screen. So we have to reconnect with our bodies to feel things that are really happening inside our body and if you are back at your body, you will feel much more at home in the world also. Another thing we all need to understand is that global governance doesn’t replace or abolish local identities and communities. It should be part of a single package. We all need to collaborate global level + the local community is the perfect match.
In conclusion,
We controlled the environment to match with our satisfaction but we are never fully satisfied although our environment is deteriorating gradually. So getting control of the world outside us didn’t really make us satisfied. So we now try to gain control of the world inside us. There may be some risks if we do like that. But we humans always like to challenge ourselves.