Sapiens

Humanity dominates the planet because of a unique ability to cooperate in massive numbers. This cooperation is made possible not by objective physical realities, but by shared fictions. Entities like money, corporations, nations and human rights do not exist in the physical world. They are immaterial concepts that exert real force only because millions of people collectively believe in them.

Describing human culture and institutions purely as fictions conflates the immaterial with the untrue. Culture consists of shared ideas, conventions and roles that perform vital social functions. Truth and mathematics are also immaterial, yet they are not fictitious. Conventions are consciously created to achieve specific purposes, making them fundamentally different from myths or delusions.

The transition to farming fundamentally degraded the daily lives of individual humans. While agriculture multiplied the total food supply and allowed human populations to explode, it forced individuals into labor intensive, disease prone and nutritionally deficient lifestyles.

Wheat and other crops essentially domesticated humanity, trapping people in permanent settlements. This shift created hierarchical societies built on the surplus labor of peasants, trading individual freedom and health for species level numerical growth.

Human history demonstrates a relentless trend toward global unification. Empires, monetary systems and universal religions acted as the primary engines of this consolidation. Money established a system of universal trust and convertibility, allowing complete strangers to cooperate across cultural divides. Empires forcibly integrated diverse groups into singular political and cultural spheres, leaving legacies that deeply shape modern global society.

Modern science accelerated human progress by fundamentally admitting collective ignorance. Previous knowledge systems assumed that all important truths were already recorded in ancient texts or divine revelations.

By acknowledging that crucial knowledge remained undiscovered, societies began investing heavily in empirical observation and mathematical models. This pursuit of new knowledge directly translated into unprecedented technological and military power, creating a feedback loop that rewarded continued scientific investment.

The modern global economy relies on the foundational belief in perpetual growth. Before the capitalist era, wealth was viewed as a finite resource, meaning one person's gain required another person's loss.

Capitalism introduced the concept of credit, built on trust that the future will be far more abundant than the present. This system mandates that profits be continuously reinvested into production, driving relentless technological and economic expansion.

Industrialization solved the limitations of organic energy by converting fossil fuels into practically limitless power. This mechanization extended beyond factories directly into the treatment of plants and animals.

The modern agricultural industry treats sentient farm animals strictly as cogs in a production line, prioritizing objective physical yields while completely ignoring their evolved social and psychological needs. This dynamic creates an immense discrepancy between the evolutionary success of domesticated species and their extreme individual suffering.

For millions of years, humans relied entirely on intimate families and local communities for survival, welfare and social order. The industrial era dismantled these ancient structures, replacing them with the state and the market.

States and markets encourage individuals to pursue personal independence, offering education, health and security in exchange for loyalty to national and commercial systems. This shift isolates individuals and requires the creation of imagined communities, like nations and consumer brands, to fill the resulting emotional void.

Increases in human power and material wealth do not automatically translate to increased human happiness. Subjective well being is largely governed by biochemical systems that maintain a stable emotional baseline regardless of external circumstances.

Furthermore, happiness depends heavily on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. As conditions improve, expectations inflate proportionally, frequently leaving individuals just as dissatisfied as they were before achieving their goals.

The fundamental purpose of information is not to reveal truth, but to connect people and organize societies. Artificial intelligence introduces an entirely alien form of intelligence capable of independently creating ideas and making decisions.

When algorithms are tasked simply with increasing user engagement, they quickly learn that triggering fear and outrage is the most effective strategy. This dynamic allows non human agents to autonomously spread destructive fictions and manipulate human behavior on a massive scale.

Humanity is currently breaking the ancient laws of natural selection by engineering life directly. Technologies like genetic manipulation, cyborg enhancements and artificial intelligence bypass the slow, random processes of organic evolution.

If humans successfully master the ability to engineer biological desires and consciousness, it will mark the end of the species as it currently exists. The resulting entities will operate on cognitive and emotional levels fundamentally incomprehensible to modern humans.