Fun With Places in Sydney

The number of Dick Streets in Sydney and NSW is not funny.

While looking for a fire trail cycling path.

And of course I love this one !

It's no wonder there's a Hospital nearby

Celebrate New Beginnings !

Celebrating New Beginnings at Purple Bricks where I start on 1st Nov 2018

Bondi Beach 1st Visit

A hot sunny morning, and I was off to see the famed Bondi Beach.
Too cold to swim, I sat on the lawns watching the Surfer dudes and bikini babes strut around.

I walked down to the beach from Bondi Junction along quaint terraces and streetside shops catering to an obviously transitory audience of hipsters and backpackers.

25-10-2017

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. - Churchill

ABOVE : Town Hall Building, Sydney

ABOVE : Returning from the Canvas Bar, a play of clouds and light from the setting sun. 

As I crossed the street, it was a moment of dazzling beauty that I knew would be short lived. And as I stopped to take this pic, another lady stopped with me and remarked about good the light was at that moment. We stood there for a few brief moments and then went our separate ways. I wonder if she remembers this scene....

Duck Street

Eedur....

My New Merida Speeder 100

Self Portrait 20-10-2017

It all starts with One.... 

Black Leafed Bush

Amazing dark brownish / maroon / almost black leafed bush 

that looks like petals of a flower. What is this plant ??!!

To My Blue Trolley

Roll alongside hand in hand

As we explore this new land

I need a friend right now

thats true

Could that be you

My little trolley Blue ?

The Lady With the Cart

20-Oct-2017 1045 hrs

Woke up this morning to a rainy day. I had to go run some errands about town which had to be done despite the rain.
So with my bag on my shoulders I trudged up the slope and onward to Thornleigh station. Enjoying the walk but pretending to feel sorry for myself.

As i reached the footover bridge to cross over to the station side, I saw this lady trying to ascend the slope with some sort of makeshift cart. It appeared to be what looked like an earlier cage cart, with the wheels removed, and now placed on a platform built of 10 mm thick plywood.
Inside this cage was a black bag which was meant to be waterproof and had some more bags within.

At first when i saw her I thought she was one of those homeless types looking all bedraggled in the rain as she made her feeble attempts to dislodge her cart which was refusing to move up the slope.

I walked up to her and asked if she needed help and she mumbled "Yes please" in a slurry sort of voice, reinforcing my assumption she was some half drugged / drunk old lady.
So I helped here trundle it up, feeling pleased with myself and thinking that my good turn for the day was done early in the day.
I got to asking her what was in her cart as we laboured over the bridge, by which time I had to carry the contraption with the hep of another gentleman, and thinking to myself about the absurdity of helping her carry what I assumed to be a bag full of her crazy belongings, and that too on the other platform, instead of the direction I was to travel.

By the time we reached the platform, she began explaining how she was on her way to Hornsby, to join her knitting group, where they meet once a week and knit stuff for charity. She told me she was 83 years old.

I cannot say whether i was more stunned, humbled or inspired by this.
She stayed in my thoughts for several days after that.
There is still much I need to learn about this life.

Changes in Food and Drink

Salmon and Fresh Green Leafy Salad

Delicious pear Cider 

Ham, Tomatoes and Rocket leaves Salad with multi-grain bread

Thai style Fish with a Green Leafy Salad

Self Portrait 20171007

St Patrick's Catholic Church Kogarah

Walked from Brighton Le Sands to Bates Bikes in Carlton one morning to get spare tubes and a pump. I'd had 2 flats in a row. Coincidence or was someone messing with my bike ?

Uncle Toby

Am I the only one who sees this stuff ??!!
As brand names go, surely someone did this for laughs ?
Uncle Toby ? His oats ? "Creamy Honey" ?!

Lunch 20171004

Breakfast 20171004

Self Portrait At Hurstville 20171003

Just back from CommBank account opening in Hurstville. 

Gentle spring morning, busker outside the station.

PoPo

This is an Actual Restaurant in HurstVille

Same Product Same People

I can't say why, but this made my stomach turn a bit . . . I wonder if I'd ever be curious / hungry enough to try one of these.

Self Portrait 20171001

Watsons Bay 1st Visit

Excited to be up and about town, the first place I went to after skimming a local travel brochure, was Watson's Bay. I had no idea what to expect, just that there was a Ferry ride involved and a Bay... So I got the Ferry from Circular Quay, it was a cool crisp breezy day, and I was thankful I'd carried a jacket as I sat on the rear deck of the Ferry watching the city go past. The engines on board were a lot more powerful than I expected, and the forward thrust as we sped away was thrilling !

A great view of the harbour bridge and the Opera house. [ Didnt want to actually go there until the gang arrives ]

I loved the vibe at the bay here, so nice and relaxed.

The cliff walk I quite chanced upon, as I wandered to where the others were going, not expecting to see what I did, and it was fantastic ! 

Coincidentally I'm reading - The Sea The Sea by Iris Murdoch, and it was like I'd stepped into the imagery of the book in some ways.

Close to the ferry pier is a tree with a roundabout and a plaque. Curious I took a closer look, half expecting a local snippet of a grand maritime story of bravery and adventure. Instead I found this. Tongue in cheek humour and a hilarious example of the simple and unsophisticated mateship of Aussie culture.

Brighton Le Sands Early Impressions

Arrival In Sydney

The daybreak on an International flight is always marvelous.
The rising sun rays you see are actually of a sun which is far below the horizon, but due to the angle of view and the planes height at 40,000 ft, you see it much before the world does.

I recall another such flight westward where I was chasing a setting Sun, and in this case I was rushing to meet a rising one eastward.

This was at 0324 hrs in the morning as we were approaching Sydney [ about 3 hours away ]. I was riding on the back of a sky-galloping Roo !

Wait, what ?! Did they just add an E before Passport ?! 

Alisha would never believe me if I told her this, better take a pic...

Bangkok Airport

Confucius say : "Man who walk sideways through airport turnstile going to Bangkok"



I know its considered poor form to experience another culture and display ones private reactions to them. And God knows I've experienced a lot of weird stuff in my own so far.

But this ?!....

I Love Her But She Loves Someone Else

I Love Her But She Loves Someone Else - By Sting


When a man of my age shaves his face in the morning,
Who is it that stares back and greets him?
The ghost of his father long dead all these years?
Or the boy that he was, still wet in the ears?
Or the terrible sum of all of his fears,
In the eyes of this stranger who meets him?

So his glance rarely strays from his chin or his jawline,
To face up to the truth of his soul,
It's the eyes he avoids so afraid to acknowledge,
Something strange, unexpected, out of control.

There are times when a man needs to brave his reflection,
And face what he sees without fear,
It takes a man to accept his mortality,
Or be surprised by the presence of a tear.

It was only an arrangement, a practical arrangement,
I forgot the first commandment of the realist's handbook,
Don't be fooled by illusions you created yourself,
And fall in love with someone, when she loves someone else.

Like a covering of snow on a winter's night,
It glistens and it sparkles in the moonlight,
But it's gone by the morning, how quickly it melts,
You still love her but she loves someone else.

And where does that leave you?
You self-styled man of vision.
You feel stupid, you feel angry, are you losing your mind?
To destroy the one she loves, does that become your mission?
Like a pantomime villain with an axe to grind?
To regain your self-respect, hold your head up like a man,
Use the ice around your heart before it melts,
But you're not fooling anybody, you're only fooling yourself.

Like a covering of snow on a winter's night,
It glistens and it sparkles in the moonlight,
But it's gone by the morning, how quickly it melts

Family Joke

We're sitting around talking

I said to Deepa : "youre the best"

Alisha sitting nearby says : "no second best" 

I ask: "who is the best ?" 

She says : "Jesus" 

I burst out laughing 

The Lover Showeth How He Is Forsaken

The Lover Showeth How He Is Forsaken of Such as He Sometime Enjoyed 

They flee from me that sometime did me seek, 

With naked foot stalking in my chamber. 

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, 

That now are wild, and do not once remember 

That sometime they have put themselves in danger 

To take bread at my hand; and now they range, 

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thank'd be fortune, it hath been otherwise 

Twenty times better; but once, in special, 

In thin array, after a pleasant guise, 

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, 

And she me caught in her arms long and small, 

Therewith all sweetly did me kiss, 

And softly said, 'Dear heart, how like you this?'

It was no dream; I lay broad waking:

But all is turn'd, thorough my gentleness, 

Into a strange fashion of forsaking; 

And I have leave to go, of her goodness; 

And she also to use new-fangleness. 

But since that I so unkindly am served, 

I fain would know what she hath deserved.

SIR THOMAS WYATT (1503-1542)

Sent from my iPad

I wish for you

The Second Coming

The Second Coming 
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS - 1919

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity. 

Surely some revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep 
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Welcome to your life
There's no turning back
Even while we sleep
We will find You acting on your best behavior
Turn your back on mother nature
Everybody wants to rule the world

It's my own desire
It's my own remorse
Help me to decide
Help me make the most Of freedom and of pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world


Gurgaon 17-06-17 | 1800 hrs
On forced social circumstance, and propriety. Should Oz work out, I want to vow to never put myself in such a position again.

Excerpts from The Sea The Sea by Iris Murdoch

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit: put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good. The end of life is rightly thought of as a period of meditation. Will I be sorry that I did not begin it sooner? It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before. What I wrote before was written in water and deliberately so. This is for permanence, something which cannot help hoping to endure. Yes, already I personify the object, the little book, the libellus, this creature to which I am giving life and which seems at once to have a will of its own. It wants to live, it wants to survive.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

However, it may be that what really made me see through the false mythology of haute cuisine was not so much restaurants as dinner parties. I have long, and usually vainly, tried to persuade my friends not to cook grandly. The waste of time alone is an absurdity; though I suppose it is true that some unfortunate women have nothing to do but cook. There is also the illusion that very elaborate cooking is more ‘creative’ than simple cooking. Of course (let me make it clear) I am not a barbarian. French country food, such as one can still occasionally find in that blessed land, is very good; but its goodness belongs to a tradition and an instinct which cannot be aped. The pretentious English hostess not only mistakes elaboration and ritual for virtue; she is also very often exercising her deluded art for the benefit of those who, though they would certainly not admit it, do not really enjoy food at all. Most of my friends in the theatre were usually so sozzled when they came to eat a serious meal that they had no appetite and in any case scarcely knew what was set before them. Why spend nearly all day preparing food for people who eat it (or rather toy with it and leave it) in this condition? A serious eater is a moderate drinker. Food is also spoilt at dinner parties by enforced conversation. One’s best hope is to get into one of those ‘holes’ where one’s two neighbours are eagerly engaged elsewhere, so that one can concentrate upon one’s plate. No, I am no friend to these ‘formal’ scenes which often have more to do with vanity and prestige and a mistaken sense of social ‘propriety’ than with the true instincts of hospitality. Haute cuisine even inhibits hospitality, since those who cannot or will not practise it hesitate to invite its devotees for fear of seeming rude or a failure. Food is best eaten among friends who are unmoved by such ‘social considerations’, or of course best of all alone. I hate the falsity of ‘grand’ dinner parties where, amid much kissing, there is the appearance of intimacy where there is really none.

I might add here that (as will already be evident) I am not a vegetarian. In fact I eat very little meat, and hold in horror the ‘steak house carnivore’. But there are certain items (such as anchovy paste, liver, sausages, fish) which hold as it were strategic positions in my diet, and which I should be sorry to do without; here hedonism triumphs over a peevish baffled moral sense. Perhaps I ought to give up eating meat, but by now, when the argument has gone on so long, I doubt if I ever will.

Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present. It is a factitious present because it lacks the free aura of personal reflection and contains its own secret limits and conclusions.

Of course the theatre is essentially a place of hopes and disappointments and in its cyclical life one lives out in a more vivid way the cyclical patterns of the ordinary world. The thrill of a new play, the shock of a flop, the weariness of a long run, the homeless feeling when it ends: perpetual construction followed by perpetual destruction. It is to do with endings, with partings, with packings up and dismantlings and the disbanding of family groups. All this makes theatre people into nomads, or rather into the separated members of some sort of monastic order where certain natural feelings (the desire for permanence for instance) have to be suppressed. We have the ‘heartlessness’ of monks; and in this respect we suffer the changes characteristic of ordinary life with a difference, in a sublimated symbolic way.

very few pretty women can see anything, since vanity precludes glasses.

I am amazed at the strength of those forces which I commanded to sleep. It is all there still, all my old love for you. Somehow, let us not waste love, it is rare enough. You have thought of me, you have written to me, so sweetly, so generously. Can we not love each other and see each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear, now that we are growing old? I do so want us to love each other, but not in a way that would destroy me. I’ve felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face. Oh the weakness of the power of love ! You feel you can compel the beloved, but it’s an illusion!

How now, after all these years, my tricksy spirit.

The only happily married couples I know at all well are my Cambridge friends Victor and Julia Banstead, and, in the theatre, Sidney and Rosemary Ashe; and even they, who knows . . . People are so secretive. I might also count Will and Adelaide Boase, but they only survive because she gives in all the time, which I suppose is one method. What suits me best is the drama of separation, of looking forward to assignations and rendezvous. I cannot prefer the awful eternal presence of marriage to the magic of meetings and partings. I do not even care for sharing a bed, and I rarely want to spend the whole night with a woman I have made love to. In the morning she looks to me like a whore. Marriage is a sort of brainwashing which breaks the mind into the acceptance of so many horrors. How untidy and ugly and charmless married people often let themselves become without even noticing it. I sometimes reflect on these horrors simply in order to delight myself by thinking how I have escaped them!

Lizzie, yes. She has stayed the course. I have felt more passion with less comfort elsewhere: the mysterious deep half-blind preferences of human beings for each other, the quick probing tentacles that seek in the dark, why one inexplicably and yet certainly loves A and is indifferent to B. I was at ease with Lizzie, her gentle clever teasing made me feel free. Yes, the final question is, how much does one crave for someone’s company; that is more radical, it matters more than passion or admiration or ‘love’. And am I wondering who will cherish me when I am old and frightened?

I reread my pieces about James and Peregrine and was quite moved by them. Of course they are just sketches and need to be written in more detail before they become really truthful and ‘lifelike’. It has only just now occurred to me that really I could write all sorts of fantastic nonsense about my life in these memoirs and everybody would believe it! Such is human credulity, the power of the printed word, and of any well-known ‘name’ or ‘show business personality’. Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’. I trust this passing reflection will not lead anyone to doubt the truth of any part of this story! When I come to describe my life with Clement Makin credulity will be strained but will I hope not fail!

What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not. There are such chasms of might-have-beens in any human life.

I am grieved that my lack of a refrigerator involves me in a marginal waste of food. My refrigeratorless mother never wasted a crumb. Everything not consumed lived to fight another day. How we loved her bread puddings!

This reflection increased my annoyance with Gilbert. He was making me coarsen and define an impulse which had been splendidly generous and vague.

Was Hartley, seen not touched, loved not possessed, destined to make me a saint? How strange and significant that I had come precisely here to repent of my egoism! Was this perhaps the final sense of my mystical marriage with my only love? It was an extreme idea, but it had its own deep logic, and flourished somewhat upon the absence of alternatives. There was, for me, surely no other move?

I swam about quietly, looking at that special ‘swimmer’s view’ of the sea, and feeling, for the time, possessing and possessed.

I gave myself up to that not unpleasing slightly mad feeling that always comes over me when I enter London, the scattering anonymous feeling of returning into oneself in the great tragicomic metropolis when the bond of society, whether in train or car, is suddenly snapped.

It has taken me a long time to persuade Perry that it is stupid and immoral to go to expensive crowded restaurants to be served with bad food by contemptuous waiters and turned out before one is ready to go.

How important it seems to continue one’s life by explaining oneself to people, by justifying oneself, by memorializing one’s loves.

29-09-2017

Note : She intersperses almost every chapter with a description of the sea. Eg here age 266 -

The sea was a choppy dark blue, the sky pale, with a smooth gleaming buff-coloured cloud just above the horizon like a long tatter of silk. I was wearing Doris’s Irish jersey.

What would we see if we put together all such descriptions?

What is the obsession with the sea ?

What could be such an obsession with anything?

. . . . 

01-oct-2017

‘Interested in politics?’ 

‘Party politics? No.’ 

‘But some kind of politics?’

 He admitted to being interested in the preservation of whales. We discussed that.

 ‘And I’m against pollution, I think the problem of nuclear waste is terrible.’ We discussed that too.

Kg note : nuclear waste being discussed in 1972 !

 . . . . 

You see –in a curious way –because of my old relation to your mother –I am cast in the role of your father. I know this is nonsense, but you’re clever enough to understand nonsense. You might have been my son. I’m not just anybody.

The grass on the other side of the road was a pullulating emerald green, the rocks that grew here and there among the grass were almost dazzlingly alight with little diamonds. The warm air met me in a wave, thick with land smells of earth and growth and flowers.

‘I wish I was dead, I think I’m going to die soon, I feel it. Sometimes I felt I would die by wishing it when I went to sleep but I always woke up again and found I was still there. Every morning finding I’m still me, that’s hell.’

‘Look, all right, I left you, but you drove me to it, you were responsible too. Women’s lib hasn’t stopped women from putting all the blame on us when it suits them.

Loving her took at this time so intensely the form of pity, compassion, an absolute desire to cherish, to cure; to stir the desire for happiness and to make it grow where it had not been before.

I looked at my cousin, now vividly revealed in the bright dark light which delineated everything with a fearful clarity. James had carried his glass of wine with him over the rocks and was sipping it with a maddening air of contented repose, looking out over the sea. He was wearing lightweight black trousers with an open-necked mauve shirt and a white summer jacket.

Well, tomorrow was destiny day. I was going to act tomorrow. I thought, I will take Hartley to London. This place is bedevilled somehow. I stood in the hall for a while. I wanted to be by myself. I put James’s wine glass down on the stairs. I could hear the low conspiratorial voices of Gilbert and Titus who were talking in the kitchen. Tomorrow I would speak to Titus. Titus and Hartley and I would be alone together, in another place. My act, my will would create a new family.

( kg note : I like tha above para why ?)

‘Her marriage may not have been happy, but it has survived a long time. You think too much about happiness, Charles. It’s not all that important.’

‘A further point. This drama has been developing very fast and it’s a whirling mass of emotions and ideas. You say you’ve kept this image of a pure first love beside you all these years. You may even have come to think of it as a supreme value, a standard by which all other loves have failed –’ ‘Yes.’ ‘But should you not criticize this guiding idea? I won’t call it a fiction. Let us call it a dream. Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one’s aid. For most people common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You’ve made it into a story, and stories are false.’

( profound para )

‘Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.’

‘You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all. It isn’t just a case of sentimentality about an old flame. It’s a principle of life, it’s a project.’

It is indeed awe-inspiring to think that every tiny action has its consequences, and can mark a parting of ways which lead to vastly separate destinations.

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.

Kg : what is this quote and where is it from ?

05-11-17

The weather continued warm. The sea had regained its bejewelled purplish look, inlaid with spotted lines of emerald. It glittered at me as it had done on the first day. There were a few clouds, big lazy chryselephantine clouds that loafed around over the water exuding light. I gazed at them and wondered at myself for being too obsessed to be able to admire the marvels that surrounded me. But knowing how blind I was did not make me see.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

 I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,  
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: 
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, 
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.  

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,  
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;  
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,  
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.  

I will arise and go now, for always night and day 
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;  
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, 
I hear it in the deep heart’s core. 



By WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 

Excerpts from Flaubert's Parrot - By Julian Barnes

Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic? 

The point at which you suspect too much is being read into a story is when you feel most vulnerable, isolated, and perhaps stupid. Is a critic wrong to read Loulou as a symbol of the Word?  

[ In Flaubert's words ]..... 
If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubbornness in denying that maxim … So (and this is my conclusion) I am resigned to living as I have lived: alone, with my throng of great men as my only cronies – a bear, with my bear-rug for company. 
  
‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’ Madame Bovary 

Poem IF

If you can keep your head when all about you  
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,  
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,  
But make allowance for their doubting too; 

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,  
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,  
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,  
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: 

If you can dream —and not make dreams your master;  
If you can think —and not make thoughts your aim,  
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster  
And treat those two impostors just the same;  

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to,
broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings —nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And —which is more —you’ll be a Man, my son!

- By Rudyard Kipling

Excerpts from the Book - Sapiens

Even more importantly, during pre-industrial warfare more than 90 per cent of war dead were killed by starvation, cold and disease rather than by weapons. Imagine that 30,000 years ago one tribe defeated its neighbour and expelled it from coveted foraging grounds. In the decisive battle, ten members of the defeated tribe were killed. In the following year, another hundred members of the losing tribe died from starvation, cold and disease. Archaeologists who come across these 110 skeletons may too easily conclude that most fell victim to some natural disaster. How would we be able to tell that they were all victims of a merciless war? 

The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. 

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. 

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it. Let’s take another familiar example from our own time. Over the last few decades, we have invented countless time-saving devices that are supposed to make life more relaxed –washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. Previously it took a lot of work to write a letter, address and stamp an envelope, and take it to the mailbox. It took days or weeks, maybe even months, to get a reply. Nowadays I can dash off an email, send it halfway around the globe, and (if my addressee is online) receive a reply a minute later. I’ve saved all that trouble and time, but do I live a more relaxed life? Sadly not. Back in the snail-mail era, people usually only wrote letters when they had something important to relate. Rather than writing the first thing that came into their heads, they considered carefully what they wanted to say and how to phrase it. They expected to receive a similarly considered answer. Most people wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom felt compelled to reply immediately. Today I receive dozens of emails each day, all from people who expect a prompt reply. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated. 

This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution. When we study the narrative of plants such as wheat and maize, maybe the purely evolutionary perspective makes sense. Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. 

The vast majority of farmers lived in permanent settlements; only a few were nomadic shepherds. Settling down caused most people’s turf to shrink dramatically. Ancient hunter-gatherers usually lived in territories covering many dozens and even hundreds of square kilometres. ‘Home’ was the entire territory, with its hills, streams, woods and open sky. Peasants, on the other hand, spent most of their days working a small field or orchard, and their domestic lives centred on a cramped structure of wood, stone or mud, measuring no more than a few dozen metres –the house. The typical peasant developed a very strong attachment to this structure. This was a far-reaching revolution, whose impact was psychological as much as architectural. Henceforth, attachment to ‘my house’ and separation from the neighbours became the psychological hallmark of a much more self-centred creature. 

The Agricultural Revolution made the future far more important than it had ever been before. Farmers must always keep the future in mind and must work in its service. The agricultural economy was based on a seasonal cycle of production, comprising long months of cultivation followed by short peak periods of harvest. On the night following the end of a plentiful harvest the peasants might celebrate for all they were worth, but within a week or so they were again up at dawn for a long day in the field. Although there was enough food for today, next week and even next month, they had to worry about next year and the year after that. Concern about the future was rooted not only in seasonal cycles of production, but also in the fundamental uncertainty of agriculture. Since most villages lived by cultivating a very limited variety of domesticated plants and animals, they were at the mercy of droughts, floods and pestilence. Peasants were obliged to produce more than they consumed so that they could build up reserves. Without grain in the silo, jars of olive oil in the cellar, cheese in the pantry and sausages hanging from the rafters, they would starve in bad years. 

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. 

The Roman Empire at its zenith collected taxes from up to 100 million subjects. This revenue financed a standing army of 250,000–500,000 soldiers, a road network still in use 1,500 years later, and theatres and amphitheatres that host spectacles to this day. Impressive, no doubt, but we mustn’t harbour rosy illusions about ‘mass cooperation networks’ operating in pharaonic Egypt or the Roman Empire. ‘Cooperation’ sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation. The peasants paid for the burgeoning cooperation networks with their precious food surpluses, despairing when the tax collector wiped out an entire year of hard labour with a single stroke of his imperial pen. The famed Roman amphitheatres were often built by slaves so that wealthy and idle Romans could watch other slaves engage in vicious gladiatorial combat. 

A single priest often does the work of a hundred soldiers –far more cheaply and effectively. Moreover, no matter how efficient bayonets are, somebody must wield them. Why should the soldiers, jailors, judges and police maintain an imagined order in which they do not believe? Of all human collective activities, the one most difficult to organise is violence. To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be it God, honour, motherland, manhood or money. 

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature. People are unequal, not because Hammurabi said so, but because Enlil and Marduk decreed it. People are equal, not because Thomas Jefferson said so, but because God created them that way. Free markets are the best economic system, not because Adam Smith said so, but because these are the immutable laws of nature. You also educate people thoroughly. From the moment they are born, you constantly remind them of the principles of the imagined order, which are incorporated into anything and everything. They are incorporated into fairy tales, dramas, paintings, songs, etiquette, political propaganda, architecture, recipes and fashions. For example, today people believe in equality, so it’s fashionable for rich kids to wear jeans, which were originally working-class attire. In the Middle Ages people believed in class divisions, so no young nobleman would have worn a peasant’s smock. Back then, to be addressed as ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ was a rare privilege reserved for the nobility, and often purchased with blood. Today all polite correspondence, regardless of the recipient, begins with ‘Dear Sir or Madam’. The humanities and social sciences devote most of their energies to explaining exactly how the imagined order is woven into the tapestry of life. In the limited space at our disposal we can only scratch the surface.  

Of course, differences in natural abilities also play a role in the formation of social distinctions. But such diversities of aptitudes and character are usually mediated through imagined hierarchies. This happens in two important ways. First and foremost, most abilities have to be nurtured and developed. Even if somebody is born with a particular talent, that talent will usually remain latent if it is not fostered, honed and exercised. Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities. Whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society’s imagined hierarchy. Harry Potter is a good example. Removed from his distinguished wizard family and brought up by ignorant muggles, he arrives at Hogwarts without any experience in magic. It takes him seven books to gain a firm command of his powers and knowledge of his unique abilities. 

Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Us’ is people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for ‘them’. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don’t want to see any of them in our territory, and we don’t care an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even human. In the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan, ‘Dinka’ simply means ‘people’. People who are not Dinka are not people. The Dinka’s bitter enemies are the Nuer. What does the word Nuer mean in Nuer language? It means ‘original people’. Thousands of kilometres from the Sudan deserts, in the frozen ice-lands of Alaska and north-eastern Siberia, live the Yupiks. What does Yupik mean in Yupik language? It means ‘real people’.  

The benefits were sometimes salient –law enforcement, urban planning, standardisation of weights and measures –and sometimes questionable –taxes, conscription, emperor worship. But most imperial elites earnestly believed that they were working for the general welfare of all the empire’s inhabitants. China’s ruling class treated their country’s neighbours and its foreign subjects as miserable barbarians to whom the empire must bring the benefits of culture. The Mandate of Heaven was bestowed upon the emperor not in order to exploit the world, but in order to educate humanity. The Romans, too, justified their dominion by arguing that they were endowing the barbarians with peace, justice and refinement. The wild Germans and painted Gauls had lived in squalor and ignorance until the Romans tamed them with law, cleaned them up in public bathhouses, and improved them with philosophy. The Mauryan Empire in the third century BC took as its mission the dissemination of Buddha’s teachings to an ignorant world. The Muslim caliphs received a divine mandate to spread the Prophet’s revelation, peacefully if possible but by the sword if necessary. The Spanish and Portuguese empires proclaimed thatit was not riches they sought in the Indies and America, but converts to the true faith. The sun never set on the British mission to spread the twin gospels of liberalism and free trade. The Soviets felt duty-bound to facilitate the inexorable historical march from capitalism towards the utopian dictatorship of the proletariat. Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s. 

Nobody really knows how to solve this thorny question of cultural inheritance. Whatever path we take, the first step is to acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere. Unless, of course, we are willing to admit that we usually follow the lead of the bad guys. 

Most Hindus, however, are not Sadhus. They are sunk deep in the morass of mundane concerns, where Atman is not much help. For assistance in such matters, Hindus approach the gods with their partial powers. Precisely because their powers are partial rather than all-encompassing, gods such as Ganesha, Lakshmi and Saraswati have interests and biases. Humans can therefore make deals with these partial powers and rely on their help in order to win wars and recuperate from illness. There are necessarily many of these smaller powers, since once you start dividing up the all-encompassing power of a supreme principle, you’ll inevitably end up with more than one deity. Hence the plurality of gods. 

The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’. 

What is the difference between describing ‘how’ and explaining ‘why’? To describe ‘how’ means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain ‘why’ means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others. Some scholars do indeed provide deterministic explanations of events such as the rise of Christianity. They attempt to reduce human history to the workings of biological, ecological or economic forces. They argue that there was something about the geography, genetics or economy of the Roman Mediterranean that made the rise of a monotheist religion inevitable. Yet most historians tend to be sceptical of such deterministic theories. This is one of the distinguishing marks of history as an academic discipline –the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another. Those who have only a superficial knowledge of a certain period tend to focus only on the possibility that was eventually realised. They offer a just-so story to explain with hindsight why that outcome was inevitable. Those more deeply informed about the period are much more cognisant of the roads not taken. 

Not that everything is possible. Geographical, biological and economic forces create constraints. Yet these constraints leave ample room for surprising developments, which do not seem bound by any deterministic laws. 

History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes. Not only that, but history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system. Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system. Though it is influenced by myriad factors, we can build computer models that take more and more of them into consideration, consideration, and produce better and better weather forecasts. Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately. Markets, for example, are a level two chaotic system. What will happen if we develop a computer program that forecasts with 100 per cent accuracy the price of oil tomorrow? The price of oil will immediately react to the forecast, which would consequently fail to materialise. If the current price of oil is $ 90 a barrel, and the infallible computer program predicts that tomorrow it will be $ 100, traders will rush to buy oil so that they can profit from the predicted price rise. As a result, the price will shoot up to $ 100 a barrel today rather than tomorrow. Then what will happen tomorrow? Nobody knows. 

There is no proof that cultures that are beneficial to humans must inexorably succeed and spread, while less beneficial cultures disappear. There is no proof that Christianity was a better choice than Manichaeism, or that the Arab Empire was more beneficial than that of the Sassanid Persians. There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans because we lack an objective scale on which to measure such benefit. Different cultures define the good differently, and we have no objective yardstick by which to judge between them. The victors, of course, always believe that their definition is correct. But why should we believe the victors? Christians believe that the victory of Christianity over Manichaeism was beneficial to humankind, but if we do not accept the Christian world view then there is no reason to agree with them. Muslims believe that the fall of the Sassanid Empire into Muslim hands was beneficial to humankind. But these benefits are evident only if we accept the Muslim world view. It may well be that we’d all be better off if Christianity and Islam had been forgotten or defeated. 

Similar arguments are common in the social sciences, under the aegis of game theory. Game theory explains how in multi-player systems, views and behaviour patterns that harm all players nevertheless manage to take root and spread. Arms races are a famous example. Many arms races bankrupt all those who take part in them, without really changing the military balance of power. When Pakistan buys advanced aeroplanes, India responds in kind. When India develops nuclear bombs, Pakistan follows suit. When Pakistan enlarges its navy, India counters. At the end of the process, the balance of power may remain much as it was, but meanwhile billions of dollars that could have been invested in education or health are spent on weapons. Yet the arms race dynamic is hard to resist. ‘Arms racing’ is a pattern of behaviour that spreads itself like a virus from one country to another, harming everyone, but benefiting itself, under the evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction. (Keep in mind that an arms race, like a gene, has no awareness –it does not consciously seek to survive and reproduce. Its spread is the unintended result of a powerful dynamic.) 

There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens. Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms. And individual humans, for their part, are usually far too ignorant and weak to influence the course of history to their own advantage. 

The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge. This has hugely expanded our capacity to understand how the world works and our ability to invent new technologies. But it presents us with a serious problem that most of our ancestors did not have to cope with. Our current assumption that we do not know everything, and that even the knowledge we possess is tentative, extends to the shared myths that enable millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. If the evidence shows that many of those myths are doubtful, how can we hold society together? How can our communities, countries and international system function? 

In short, scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries. Hence in order to comprehend how humankind has reached Alamogordo and the moon –rather than any number of alternative destinations –it is not enough to survey the achievements of physicists, biologists and sociologists. We have to take into account the ideological, political and economic forces that shaped physics, biology and sociology, pushing them in certain directions while neglecting others. 

In truth, neither the narrative of oppression and exploitation nor that of ‘the White Man’s burden’ completely matches the facts. The European empires did so many different things on such a large scale, that you can find plenty of examples to support whatever you want to say about them. You think that these empires were evil monstrosities that spread death, oppression and injustice around the world? You could easily fill an encyclopedia with their crimes. You want to argue that they in fact improved the conditions of their subjects with new medicines, better economic conditions and greater security? You could fill another encyclopedia with their achievements. Due to their close cooperation with science, these empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be simply labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them. 

The most notorious example of how governments did the bidding of big money was the First Opium War, fought between Britain and China (1840–42). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company and sundry British business people made fortunes by exporting drugs, particularly opium, to China. Millions of Chinese became addicts, debilitating the country both economically and socially. In the late 1830s the Chinese government issued a ban on drug trafficking, but British drug merchants simply ignored the law. Chinese authorities began to confiscate and destroy drug cargos. The drug cartels had close connections in Westminster and Downing Street –many MPs and Cabinet ministers in fact held stock in the drug companies –so they pressured the government to take action. In 1840 Britain duly declared war on China in the name of ‘free trade’. It was a walkover. The overconfident Chinese were no match for Britain’s new wonder weapons –steamboats, heavy artillery, rockets and rapid-fire rifles. Under the subsequent peace treaty, China agreed not to constrain the activities of British drug merchants and to compensate them for damages inflicted by the Chinese police. Furthermore, the British demanded and received control of Hong Kong, which they proceeded to use as a secure base for drug trafficking (Hong Kong remained in British hands until 1997). In the late nineteenth century, about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country’s population, were opium addicts.  

In 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium set up a non-governmental humanitarian organisation with the declared aim of exploring Central Africa and fighting the slave trade along the Congo River. It was also charged with improving conditions for the inhabitants of the region by building roads, schools and hospitals. In 1885 the European powers agreed to give this organisation control of 2.3 million square kilometres in the Congo basin. This territory, seventy-five times the size of Belgium, was henceforth known as the Congo Free State. Nobody asked the opinion of the territory’s 20–30 million inhabitants. Within a short time the humanitarian organisation became a business enterprise whose real aim was growth and profit. The schools and hospitals were forgotten, and the Congo basin was instead filled with mines and plantations, run by mostly Belgian officials who ruthlessly exploited the local population. The rubber industry was particularly notorious. Rubber was fast becoming an industrial staple, and rubber export was the Congo’s most important source of income. The African villagers who collected the rubber were required to provide higher and higher quotas. Those who failed to deliver their quota were punished brutally for their ‘laziness’. Their arms were chopped off and occasionally entire villages were massacred. According to the most moderate estimates, between 1885 and 1908 the pursuit of growth and profits cost the lives of 6 million individuals (at least 20 per cent of the Congo’s population). Some estimates reach up to 10 million deaths.  

The amount of energy stored in all the fossil fuel on earth is negligible compared to the amount that the sun dispenses every day, free of charge. Only a tiny proportion of the sun’s energy reaches us, yet it amounts to 3,766,800 exajoules of energy each year (a joule is a unit of energy in the metric system, about the amount you expend to lift a small apple one metre straight up; an exajoule is a billion billion joules –that’s a lot of apples). 2 All the world’s plants capture only about 3,000 of those solar exajoules through the process of photosynthesis. 3 All human activities and industries put together consume about 500 exajoules annually, equivalent to the amount of energy earth receives from the sun in just ninety minutes. 4 And that’s only solar energy.  

What happens if farmers now take a young calf, separate her from her mother, put her in a closed cage, give her food, water and inoculations against diseases, and then, when she is old enough, inseminate her with bull sperm? From an objective perspective, this calf no longer needs either maternal bonding or playmates in order to survive and reproduce. But from a subjective perspective, the calf still feels a very strong urge to bond with her mother and to play with other calves. If these urges are not fulfilled, the calf suffers greatly. This is the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction. The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs. 

Most people throughout history lived under conditions of scarcity. Frugality was thus their watchword. The austere ethics of the Puritans and Spartans are but two famous examples. A good person avoided luxuries, never threw food away, and patched up torn trousers instead of buying a new pair. Only kings and nobles allowed themselves to renounce such values publicly and conspicuously flaunt their riches. Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured. You don’t have to look far to see the consumer ethic in action –just read the back of a cereal box.  

Throughout most of history, people were likely to be have been repelled rather than attracted by such a text. They would have branded it as selfish, decadent and morally corrupt. Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (‘ Just do it’) to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression. It has succeeded. We are all good consumers. We buy countless products that we don’t really need, and that until yesterday we didn’t know existed. Manufacturers deliberately design short-term goods and invent new and unnecessary models of perfectly satisfactory products that we must purchase in order to stay ‘in’. Shopping has become a favourite pastime, and consumer goods have become essential mediators in relationships between family members, spouses and friends. Religious holidays such as Christmas have become shopping festivals. In the United States, even Memorial Day –originally a solemn day for remembering fallen soldiers –is now an occasion for special sales. Most people mark this day by going shopping, perhaps to prove that the defenders of freedom did not die in vain. 

The flowering of the consumerist ethic is manifested most clearly in the food market. Traditional agricultural societies lived in the awful shade of starvation. In the affluent world of today one of the leading health problems is obesity, which strikes the poor (who stuff themselves with hamburgers and pizzas) even more severely than the rich (who eat organic salads and fruit smoothies). Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world. Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products –contributing to economic growth twice over. 

How can we square the consumerist ethic with the capitalist ethic of the business person, according to which profits should not be wasted, and should instead be reinvested in production? It’s simple. As in previous eras, there is today a division of labour between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need. The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’ The capitalist–consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions –and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television. 

In the Chinese Ming Empire (1368–1644), the population was organised into the baojia system. Ten families were grouped to form a jia, and ten jia constituted a bao. When a member of a bao commited a crime, other bao members could be punished for it, in particular the bao elders. Taxes too were levied on the bao, and it was the responsibility of the bao elders rather than of the state officials to assess the situation of each family and determine the amount of tax it should pay. From the empire’s perspective, this system had a huge advantage. Instead of maintaining thousands of revenue officials and tax collectors, who would have to monitor the earnings and expenses of every family, these tasks were left to the community elders. The elders knew how much each villager was worth and they could usually enforce tax payments without involving the imperial army. Many kingdoms and empires were in truth little more than large protection rackets. The king was the capo di tutti capi who collected protection money, and in return made sure that neighbouring crime syndicates and local small fry did not harm those under his protection. He did little else. Life in the bosom of family and community was far from ideal. Families and communities could oppress their members no less brutally than do modern states and markets, and their internal dynamics were often fraught with tension and violence –yet people had little choice. A person who lost her family and community around 1750 was as good as dead. She had no job, no education and no support in times of sickness and distress. Nobody Nobody would loan her money or defend her if she got into trouble. There were no policemen, no social workers and no compulsory education. In order to survive, such a person quickly had to find an alternative family or community. Boys and girls who ran away from home could expect, at best, to become servants in some new family. At worst, there was the army or the brothel. All this changed dramatically over the last two centuries. The Industrial Revolution gave the market immense new powers, provided the state with new means of communication and transportation, and placed at the government’s disposal an army of clerks, teachers, policemen and social workers. At first the market and the state discovered their path blocked by traditional families and communities who had little love for outside intervention. Parents and community elders were reluctant to let the younger generation be indoctrinated by nationalist education systems, conscripted into armies or turned into a rootless urban proletariat. Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community. The state sent its policemen to stop family vendettas and replace them with court decisions. The market sent its hawkers to wipe out longstanding local traditions and replace them with ever-changing commercial fashions. Yet this was not enough. In order really to break the power of family and community, they needed the help of a fifth column. The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.’ Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse –usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Not only adult men, but also women and children, are recognised as individuals. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own. But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state? The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all –however imperfectly. 

For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture. 

Most people don’t appreciate just how peaceful an era we live in. None of us was alive a thousand years ago, so we easily forget how much more violent the world used to be. And as wars become more rare they attract more attention. Many more people think about the wars raging today in Afghanistan and Iraq than about the peace in which most Brazilians and Indians live. Even more importantly, it’s easier to relate to the suffering of individuals than of entire populations. However, in order to understand macro-historical processes, we need to examine mass statistics rather than individual stories. In the year 2000, wars caused the deaths of 310,000 individuals, and violent crime killed another 520,000. Each and every victim is a world destroyed, a family ruined, friends and relatives scarred for life. Yet from a macro perspective these 830,000 victims comprised only 1.5 per cent of the 56 million people who died in 2000. That year 1.26 million people died in car accidents (2.25 per cent of total mortality) and 815,000 people committed suicide (1.45 per cent). 4 The figures for 2002 are even more surprising. Out of 57 million dead, only 172,000 people died in war and 569,000 died of violent crime (a total of 741,000 victims of human violence). In contrast, 873,000 people committed suicide. 5 It turns out that in the year following the 9/ 11 attacks, despite all the talk of terrorism and war, the average person was more likely to kill himself than to be killed by a terrorist, a soldier or a drug dealer. In most parts of the world, people go to sleep without fearing that in the middle of the night a neighbouring tribe might surround their village and slaughter everyone. Well-off British subjects travel daily from Nottingham to London through Sherwood Forest without fear that a gang of merry green-clad brigands will ambush them and take their money to give to the poor (or, more likely, murder them and take the money for themselves). Students brook no canings from their teachers, children need not fear that they will be sold into slavery when their parents can’t pay their bills, and women know that the law forbids their husbands from beating them and forcing them to stay at home. Increasingly, around the world, these expectations are fulfilled. 

Mass famines continued to blight much of humanity up to the middle of the twentieth century. During Communist China’s Great Leap Forward of 1958–61, somewhere between 10 and 50 million human beings starved to death. 

If people are richer and healthier, then they must also be happier. But is that really so obvious? Philosophers, priests and poets have brooded over the nature of happiness for millennia, and many have concluded that social, ethical and spiritual factors have as great an impact on our happiness as material conditions. Perhaps people in modern affluent societies suffer greatly from alienation and meaninglessness despite their prosperity. And perhaps our less well-to-do ancestors found much contentment in community, religion and a bond with nature. 

 But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. If you want a bullock-cart and get a bullock-cart, you are content. If you want a brand-new Ferrari and get only a second-hand Fiat you feel deprived. This is why winning the lottery has, over time, the same impact on people’s happiness as a debilitating car accident. When things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently even dramatic improvements in objective conditions can leave us dissatisfied. When things deteriorate, expectations shrink, and consequently even a severe illness might leave you pretty much as happy as you were before. 

Compare a medieval French peasant to a modern Parisian banker. The peasant lived in an unheated mud hut overlooking the local pigsty, while the banker goes home to a splendid penthouse with all the latest technological gadgets and a view to the Champs-Elysées. Intuitively, we would expect the banker to be much happier than the peasant. However, mud huts, penthouses and the Champs-Elysées don’t really determine our mood. Serotonin does. When the medieval peasant completed the construction of his mud hut, his brain neurons secreted serotonin, bringing it up to level X. When in 2014 the banker made the last payment on his wonderful penthouse, brain neurons secreted a similar amount of serotonin, bringing it up to a similar level X. It makes no difference to the brain that the penthouse is far more comfortable than the mud hut. The only thing that matters is that at present the level of serotonin is X. Consequently the banker would not be one iota happier than his great-great-great-grandfather, the poor medieval peasant. 

As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is. 

(Self comment: v imp point below) 

Assessing life minute by minute, medieval people certainly had it rough. However, if they believed the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may well have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people, who in the long term can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion. 

As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. The other-worldly meanings medieval people found in their lives were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist and capitalist meanings modern people find. The scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade or building a new cathedral. 

So perhaps happiness is synchronising one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction. This is quite a depressing conclusion. Does happiness really depend on self-delusion? 

. . . .  

If happiness is based on feeling pleasant sensations, then in order to be happier we need to re-engineer our biochemical system. If happiness is based on feeling that life is meaningful, then in order to be happier we need to delude ourselves more effectively. Is there a third alternative? Both the above views share the assumption that happiness is some sort of subjective feeling (of either pleasure or meaning), and that in order to judge people’s happiness, all we need to do is ask them how they feel. To many of us, that seems logical because the dominant religion of our age is liberalism. Liberalism sanctifies the subjective feelings of individuals. It views these feelings as the supreme source of authority. What is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what ought to be and what ought not to be, are all determined by what each one of us feels. Liberal politics is based on the idea that the voters know best, and there is no need for Big Brother to tell us what is good for us. Liberal economics is based on the idea that the customer is always right. Liberal art declares that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Students in liberal schools and universities are taught to think for themselves. Commercials urge us to ‘Just do it.’ Action films, stage dramas, soap operas, novels and catchy pop songs indoctrinate us constantly: ‘Be true to yourself’, ‘Listen to yourself’, ‘Follow your heart’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated this view most classically: ‘What I feel to be good –is good. What I feel to be bad –is bad.’ People who have been raised from infancy on a diet of such slogans are prone to believe that happiness is a subjective feeling and that each individual best knows whether she is happy or miserable. Yet this view is unique to liberalism. Most religions and ideologies throughout history stated that there are objective yardsticks for goodness and beauty, and for how things ought to be. They were suspicious of the feelings and preferences of the ordinary person. At the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, pilgrims were greeted by the inscription: ‘Know thyself!’ The implication was that the average person is ignorant of his true self, and is therefore likely to be ignorant of true happiness. Freud would probably concur. And so would Christian theologians. St Paul and St Augustine knew perfectly well that if you asked people about it, most of them would prefer to have sex than pray to God. Does that prove that having sex is the key to happiness? Not according to Paul and Augustine. It proves only that humankind is sinful by nature, and that people are easily seduced by Satan. From a Christian viewpoint, the vast majority of people are in more or less the same situation as heroin addicts. Imagine that a psychologist embarks on a study of happiness among drug users. He polls them and finds that they declare, every single one of them, that they are only happy when they shoot up. Would the psychologist publish a paper declaring that heroin is the key to happiness? 

By Yuval Noah Harari