1C Agenda 8-29-19: Sapiens & The Cognitive Revolution

Homework #2 for next class:

Read Sapiens, up to page 132 and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains Harari makes the claim that the Agricultural Revolution is history’s “biggest fraud.”

Homework #3 for next class, 9-3-19:

Read Sapiens to page 159 and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how “imagined orders and hierarchies” resulted in “unfair discrimination.”

Essay #1 Choice A

Develop an argumentative thesis about Yuval Noah Harari's explanation of the Cognitive Revolution.

Approach That Achieves Specificity:

Using Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act episode "Supreme" show the dark side of the Cognitive Revolution. 

Some things to consider:

Sample Thesis: Hasan Minhaj's takedown of Supreme in his Netflix show The Patriot Act shows the dark side of the Cognitive Revolution: that our collective imagined reality makes us vulnerable to hype, manipulation, FOMO (fear of missing out), and greed. 

Mediocre Informative Thesis for Option A

Humans separated from other mammals through the Cognitive Revolution because humans have superior language skills, a propensity for gossip, and a capacity to share common legal fictions. 

The above is too factual and too self-evident. 

 

Improved Argumentative Thesis Statements

The very shared legal fictions that allow us to cooperate on a mass level and dominate other creatures is the same drive that will lead to humans' demise. 

While humans are superior to other animals due to their capacity to share imagined stories, these imagined stories have been largely used for evil: slavery, racism, and structural inequality. 

Humans' competing legal fictions are coming to a head in the democratic and authoritarian story. According to Timothy Snyder, author of The Road to Unfreedom, the story of inevitability is at war with the story of eternity. This war could lead to the world's destruction. 

We can see in the context of Sapiens that without a strong story to believe in, humans cannot attain any kind of success. 

Harari's claim that shared fictions created a Cognitive Revolution is too obvious to be worthy of merit. He is simply stating what is self-evident, that humans, unlike other animals, rely on abstractions and language to form societies. To make a fuss over Harari's book is to be ignorant of an already shared understanding of human history. 

Sample Thesis

The Cognitive Revolution not only expanded the gap between Sapiens and other animals and provided motivation for huge improvements in technological innovation; it accelerated human evil on a mass scale by making us more eager to embrace various forms of exploitation, class hierarchy, and genocide. 

Sample Thesis

While the Cognitive Revolution encouraged bad actors to behave in ways we call "evil" on a mass scale, the CR was also responsible for flourishing democratic societies, which attracted millions looking for freedom and equality. 

The idea of democracy is a "legal fiction," an idea or principle that we support with laws. Such a principle encourages mass cooperation, which helps democracy flourish. 

Choice B

Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”  

Sample Thesis

While I largely agree with Harari's critique of the Agricultural Revolution, his implication that we were better off as hunters and gatherers is fallacious when we consider _________________, __________________, _________________, and _________________________. 

Be sure to have a counterargument section (1 or 2 paragraphs) before you reach your conclusion.

Your conclusion is a dramatic restatement of your thesis.  

Use Netflix documentary Fyre

 

Develop a thesis about the power of manipulation and deception of Harari's notion of Imagined Reality by addressing the fraud evident in the Netflix documentary Fyre (Links to an external site.). 

Paragraph 1: We will define cognitive revolution according YNH. 

Paragraph 2: We will write a thesis similar to this: The Netflix documentary Fyre shows how the Cognitive Revolution creates imagined realities that work in the service of hucksters, hacks, sociopaths, and mountebanks who can spin an imagined reality or narrative resulting in mass manipulation, self-deception, a quest for status, and _______________________. 

Your body paragraphs will support the above thesis mapping components. 

 

Lesson One Study Questions 

One. That Sapiens is an exclusive species today emerging from several species of great apes is both “peculiar and incriminating.” Explain. 

Evolution,the idea of human progression, may be a myth. We may grow in fits and bursts with episodes of regression. 

Evolution Assumption Fallacy

Harari wants us to question common assumptions about Sapiens?

Why? In part because critical thinking is about questioning mindless assumptions.

For example, we assume humans are marching on an arc of progress toward justice and reason. Such an assumption may not be in concert with reality. 

Social media is part of the Great Dumbing Down and is evidence that we are devolving or degenerating:

For example, social media may be causing us to reverse in two major ways: We're becoming infantile as we feature ourselves in narcissistic fashion, curators of our phony self. 

We're giving up our private data to social media. This is stupid, not a sign of evolution.

We're reading and sharing weaponized fake news in the service of destroying democracy.

Other mindless assumptions:

Or we may assume that if we go to college and play by the rules, we'll find a good job, good real estate, a long, healthy life, and vibrant love to reward us for our toil. 

Or we may assume that if we lose a big chunk of body weight and get lean and attractive, all our problems will be solved, the world will love us, and our newfound popularity will create a huge tidal wave that will carry us to the land of Milk and Honey. 

Mindless Assumptions in Sapiens

Now let's look at a mindless assumption in the context of Sapiens:

Mindless Assumption #1

Humans are a dominant species with an indefinite shelf life. We like to think we, as humans, have an indefinite stay in the world's VIP room. We are here to stay. It's our birthright. But we're grossly mistaken.

We may be at the end. Think of global warming. 

Reality

Humans are a fragile species that owing to their penchant for self-destruction have a tenuous shelf life.

The window of history of a dominant, exclusive species called Sapiens is rather small. Harari speculates that we won't last long relative to other species.

Humans are hard-wired to be violent and look for systems to exploit masses of people.

Further, it appears that as a species we tend to kill other species. Killing our competition appears to be part of our nature. Our tendency toward violence seems to contradict our self-aggrandizing name “homo sapien,” which means “wise man.” 

Yuval Noah Harari's critics accuse him of being a misanthrope, someone who scorns the human race.

Three revolutions define Sapiens as the dominant species: 

Cognitive Revolution from 70,000 years ago.

Agricultural Revolution from 12,000 years ago.

Scientific Revolution from 500 years ago. 

Two. What are defining characteristics of Sapiens? 

We have big brains relative to other mammals that suck 25% of our body’s energy. 

We walk upright on two legs, freeing our hands for fine motor skills, playing musical instruments, painting caves, and performing other forms of advanced communication.

We are born underdeveloped and as babies require a lot of nurture and protection. Without our parents, we'll be carried away by a giant pterodactyl and fed to the baby pterodactyls. 

We have advanced rapidly from the middle of the food chain to the top of the food chain resulting in disrupting the ecosystem and killing other species, often to the point of extinction.

At the top of the food chain, we are shown to have ravenous appetites and brutally violent tendencies without proper checks to insure the world's safety and our own. 

Unlike other mammals, we learned to use fire to alter our environment and to cook food that otherwise could not be digested efficiently.

Because we are insecure in our Top Dog Food Chain position, we are like “Banana Republic dictators” full of fear and anxiety over our apex role, and as a result we inflict cruelty, havoc, and destruction everywhere we reign. In other words, we are warmongers. Peaceful existence is the exception, not the rule (11). 

Barbarian Throng

Reading Sapiens reinforces the Hobbesian notion of the “barbarian throng,” which can only be controlled by fear and rule of law.

The problem with seeing humans as barbarians is the tendency to ditch democracy for totalitarianism and the latter has a history of brutality, severed human rights, and genocide.

Critics of Harari, such as Rod Dreher, accuse him of being a hedonist, a materialist, and a misanthrope who sees human race improving through genetic editing. 

Three. What two competing theories explain the emergence of Sapiens as the exclusive species? 

One is Interbreeding Theory, which states that Sapiens and Neanderthals mated and evolved into the Sapiens we are today. 

The second is Replacement Theory, which states that Sapiens committed genocide against other species, including the Neanderthals. If this theory is true, all of us can be traced back to East Africa from 70,000 years ago. If Replacement Theory is correct, we have some seriously violent hard-wiring in our DNA. 

Most Sapiens have a religious-based belief that they are exclusive to the animal kingdom, superior and apart, but Harari claims humans are deluded; in fact, humans were related to other species, which they wiped out: 

Soloensis and Denisova were wiped out 50,000 years ago.

Neanderthals were wiped out 30,000 years ago.

Flores Island dwarf-like humans were wiped out 12,000 years ago (18). 

Cognitive Revolution

Four. How did language cause Sapiens to become more advanced than other species? 

From 70,000 to 30,000 years ago, Sapiens embarked upon the Cognitive Revolution (described in Harari's Ted Talk video).

Objective Reality

Animals live exclusively in an objective reality. The zebra, for example, lives near the Nile River and must navigate across past hungry 20-foot crocodiles. The same zebra must be on the lookout for hungry lions and leopards. The zebra survives by paying keen attention to its objective reality.

Legal Fictions

Imaginative Reality or The Shared Imagination

Humans, too, survive by having a clear awareness of their objective reality, their actual physical environment.

But they have imposed another layer of reality over their physical reality. This added layer of reality is in the realm of the imagination, what Harari calls "legal fictions." 

This second reality is the main ingredient of the Cognitive Revolution. This ability for humans to have a shared imagination is what separates humans from other animals. Furthermore, this shared imagination allows humans to dominate over the other animals. 

Shared Imaginative Reality Leads to Mass Cooperation

No other animal engaged in an imaginary reality that would cause mass cooperation toward a shared goal. 

Bees cooperate in the hive, but their cooperation is instinctive and rigid. Any changes in the environment that disrupt the cooperation cannot be met with an adaptive response from the honeybees. They will perish.

Dolphins and chimpanzees are less rigid and more flexible than honeybees in their cooperation. But the flexible cooperation of dolphins and chimps is limited to small numbers: These mammals need an intimate knowledge and trust of one another to be flexible in their cooperation.

Humans take cooperation to a higher level. Humans are both flexible in their cooperation and they can scale it to big numbers. They don't need intimate knowledge of one another. They rely on agreed fictions or collective imaginations to cooperate toward shared goals, values, and aspirations. 

Because humans have advanced language skills, they can create these imaginary worlds with vivid detail. 

Examples of Shifting Imaginary Worlds

In the Cognitive Revolution, we agree that an imaginary world presents a reality that is in our best interests. 

For example, before the 20th Century, marriage was imagined as a family business arrangement in which men owned women as property. This was agreed upon in patriarchal (man-dominated) societies. 

The good news is that marriages didn't end in divorce. The bad news is that women were treated like property. 

By the 21st Century, patriarchal societies slowly transformed into consumer societies. The advent of photography, cinema, and television produced vectors for powerful consumer images.

The idea of marriage shifted from a business arrangement to one of Romantic Love. 

Romantic Love is an imagined reality. 

The story of Romantic Love as a consumerist idea is this:

Women can buy soaps, hair products, cosmetics and engage in activities that will bring them to the apotheosis of pulchritude (physical beauty) and they can exact high demands on men in courtship. By doing these two things: achieving maximum beauty and physical attraction while demanding that a man "step up his game" in courtship, a woman transforms man, a disgusting beast unworthy of love, into a noble savage slavishly devoted to monogamy in the pursuit of his True Love. 

That the divorce rate, between 50-70% depending on what part of the country you survey, contradicts this narrative, doesn't matter.

The consumer imagined reality of Romantic Love persists in our collective consciousness. 

In Smithsonian interview, Harari elaborates on imagined realities in society and how they stabilize and bond societies:

 

Humanity's greatest invention is religion, which does not mean necessarily mean belief in gods. Rather, religion is any system of norms and values that is founded on a belief in superhuman laws. Some religions, such as Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, believe that these superhuman laws were created by the gods. Other religions, such as Buddhism, Communism and Nazism believed that these superhuman laws are natural laws. Thus Buddhists believe in the natural laws of karma, Nazis argued that their ideology reflected the laws of natural selection, and Communists believe that they follow the natural laws of economics.

No matter whether they believe in divine laws or in natural laws, all religions have exactly the same function: to give stability to human institutions. Without some kind of religion, it is simply impossible to maintain social order. During the modern era religions that believe in divine laws went into eclipse. But religions that believe in natural laws became ever more powerful. In the future, they are likely to become more powerful yet. Silicon Valley, for example, is today a hot-house of new techno-religions, which promise us paradise on earth with the help of new technologies. From a religious perspective, Silicon Valley is the most interesting place in the world.

Imagined Realities Translate into Distinct Societies

Autocratic Despot

Ethno-Nationalism

Theocracy

Democracy: human rights, equality, justice, freedom, individuality

The latter is the most appealing to most humans who will flee to those societies, which will enjoy technological and general innovation. 

Language, Gossip, and Shared Values

Unlike other animals, humans can use language to gossip, to pain pictures of other humans that either detestable or enviable. We avoid certain behaviors so we don't become of the object of gossip about the detestable human being and as a result are shunned in the realm of reproduction. We are drawn to other behaviors that would generate gossip so that we could be the topic of conversation that paints us in a venerable and admirable light so that we would be desirable in terms of reproductive success. In this regard, we share common values.

Cooperating within the tribe would win us "Brownie Points." Not cooperating would paint us as pariahs. Therefore, most of us were motivated to cooperate and show reciprocity within the tribe.

Gossip allowed us to separate decent people from cheats. Apes could not gossip. We developed social networks far more advanced than apes because largely in part of our capacity for gossip. 

To this day, we love gossip. We are obsessed with gossip. We watch "reality TV" that focuses on gossip. When we hang out with friends, our primary activity is gossip. Gossip is in our DNA. 

Gossip thrives in the social media age. Twitter is in your face gossip full of "hot takes." 

Downside of Gossip

Downside of gossip is that we talk behind people's backs. We are all naturally born back-stabbers. Mark Twain famously said that if we could be the fly on the wall and listen to what our friends said about us when they didn't know we were listening, none of us would have any friends. 

Gossip about our reality was only the beginning. 

Beyond Gossip, Language Takes an Even More Radical Turn 

Harari says our radical departure from other animals is in our capacity to live in an invisible or imagined reality: "Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. 

Unlike animals, we live in a shared imagination:

Legends

Myths

gods

religions

religious fables

idea of an afterlife

idea of monogamy and "living happily ever after."

idea of virtue

idea of moral dissolution (disintegration) 

politics such as nation states

economics such as money being worth X (this bill is the value of three cheeseburgers)

brands such as Apple, Mini Cooper, Google represent a type of human and a type of lifestyle

laws based on "human rights," something we imagine to exist

We imagine a $10 Casio on a certain type of man and a $20K Rolex on another type of man. 

Racism is an imaginary idea that certain people agree upon to base their identity and behavior.

Nationalism is an imaginary idea that affects our identity and behavior.

Tribalism and other "isms" are imagined realities that affect our identity and behavior. 

Collective Imagination: Or Shared Fictions

We don't just imagine things. We imagine things collectively. 

Gossip limited our social cooperation to groups of about 150 members.

Imagined realities scaled that cooperation.

Harari calls these imagined realities fiction (27). He writes: "Any large-scale human cooperation--whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe--is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination." Belief in Christ or Allah can move millions, even billions, of people to perform the same rituals and adhere to the same behaviors and attitudes. 

The love of coastal property can compel many people to work three jobs so they can live by the sea and work so many hours that they have no free time to walk along the beach.

A cadre of lawyers who never met each other can work together to free a man from prison because that prisoner represents the violation of human rights that this team of lawyers all wish to defend. 

A business is a fiction.

Harari points to Peugeot SA as an example of a fiction. Peugeot makes cars and has factories, but if these material things did not exist, Peugeot, the brand, would still exist. It could use its money to make new factories, make new cars, and hire new managers.

Harari writes: "In short, Peugeot SA seems to have no essential connection to the physical world. Does it really exist?" He answers by writing the following: "Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a 'legal fiction.' It can't be pointed at; it is not a physical object. But it exists as a legal entity."

Harari goes on to explain that "Peugeot belongs to a particular genre of legal fictions called 'limited liability companies.' The idea behind such companies is among humanity's most ingenious inventions."

Legal liability companies accelerated human innovation.

Property had to shift from family to giant business, called a legal liability company:

Harari explains that a family business could be wiped out by litigation. Families could be sued into extinction, even lose family members to indentured servitude (30). 

As a result, people imagined legal liability companies. A legal liability company, like Peugeot, outlives its founder Armand Peugeot, because the enterprise exists as a fiction.

Harari compares this fiction to demons and devils of the church. No one needs to see these demons and devils, but they exist in the imagination and are used to affect and control behavior. 

Further, taking Holy Communion is based on a shared belief that exists in the collective imagination.

Harari then returns to the case of Peugeot SA in which the lawyer must follow "all the proper liturgy and rituals," "sacred procedures," and "hocus pocus" to make Peugeot exist as a legal fiction.

Function of these legal fictions:

Harari then asks what is the purpose of these legal fictions? He writes, "much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about god, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals. Just try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, or churches, or legal systems if we could speak only about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees, and lions" (31).

These fictions, such as Peugeot, "accumulate immense power." 

We call these "fictions," "social constructs," or "imagined realities," but they are not lies. Unless they are charlatans, they believe in their fictions like wizards believe in their magic spells, demons, and gods. 

Some Apple employees who work at the "Genius Bar" believe they are truly geniuses. 

These fictions enable humans to cooperate in millions of numbers, and this capacity for mass cooperation allows humans to do good, evil, and destruction on a massive scale. 

 

Review: How did “legal fiction” advance Sapiens to develop cities, political systems, and business enterprises? 

We read one of the book’s most important passages: “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths” (26). 

Religious, nationalist, and judicial values and beliefs can bind alliances between people who have never met each other. They share a common commitment based on a common value system. 

This value system is based on shared beliefs. These beliefs emerge from shared stories. 

“Yet none of these things exist outside the stories people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings” (27). 

To make a successful business, Harari asserts that we must be “powerful sorcerers” and “tribal shamans.” He uses the example of Peugeot. Like Rolex, Mercedes, and Apple, Peugeot is an entity that does not exist as a person or a group of persons, but as a brand, an idea, a symbol.

Giving value to a symbol or a brand is unique to Sapiens, and this activity has a great influence on human affairs. 

Peugeot is a “legal fiction” and a “figment of our collective imagination” (29). 

Peugeot is a corporation, a legal entity, an institution that pays taxes. Individuals are not sued, but the corporation Peugeot can be sued. 

Peugeot as a legal fiction is what is called a limited liability company. Before Sapiens invented the limited liability company, they were at too much risk to have their own business because they, not the legal fiction, were liable in the event of being sued. Their children could be sold into servitude, they could lose all of their possessions, and they could be put into prison simply because they were liable for any shortcomings or violations their company presented. 

Such legal exposure discouraged people from innovation. In the wake of a limited liability company, however, innovation flourished. 

Therefore, limited liability companies, the product of legal fiction, are a huge force in accelerating creativity, business, and innovation. 

Harari observes a comparison between religion and business: Both require a story and “hocus pocus” to emerge and exist in people’s collective imagination. Religion needs stories to supports its divine claims. Businesses need the legal magic of lawyers to produce paperwork with legal codes to create a fabrication. 

These fabrications, or “legal fictions,” propel human lives in large numbers and disrupt the evolution of societies. 

“Telling effective stories is not easy,” the author writes, but the successful, compelling stories create immense power for those in are held in authority of these stories because “millions of strangers to cooperate and to work towards common goals” (31). 

A college is not a professor, a group of professors, or a bunch of administrators. A college is an idea, a legal fiction that provides a positive narrative to the community. This positive narrative is about upward mobility and personal enrichment. If the story does not corroborate with reality in some compelling way, the legal fiction or the brand is in danger of weakening or being completely upturned into something else. 

When we speak of legal fictions, we are not speaking of lies. Harari writes:

“An imagined reality is not a lie.” 

Rather, an imagined reality is a shared value or belief system such as “justice for all,” “diversity in education and the workplace,” “overcoming structural inequality,” “individualism over utilitarianism,” “sacrifice to the family and community and public duty over personal pleasure and personal fulfillment” and so on. 

The above are imagined realities that millions of people may share and that millions of others may reject in favor of some contradictory belief system. 

Sapiens Live in Dual Reality

Because of the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens live in a dual reality: the objective reality of the world around us and the imagined reality of value systems that are sustained by compelling stories (32). 

Competing myths or stories can radically alter our value systems. For example, the author observes France in 1789 when myths supporting “divine right of kings” were supplanted by myths supporting “sovereignty of the people.” 

In the United States with structural inequality getting worse and worse, American Millennials are not as friendly toward stories about American democracy and equality and therefore are not necessarily supportive of democratic ideals. Millennials may in fact reject stories that support notions of democratic ideals and equality. 

Shared stories or “imagined realities” make humans cooperate toward common goals and have the effect of making Sapiens dominate all other species on the planet. 

This is why we cannot overestimate the effects of “legal fictions” or “imagined realities” on the Apex Predator status of Sapiens. 

One of the biggest effects of legal fictions is trade. We trade objects based on the object’s value, and the value is based on some story. 

Apple computer is a story about creativity, hipster coolness, and innovation.

Rolex and Mercedes are stories about achieving the ultimate in success of “making it.”

Such stories existed tens of thousands of years ago for jewels, spices, fabrics, precious metals, etc. 

Trade established the need for trust and trade stimulated world travel, further propelling Sapiens toward world domination (36). 

Shared imagined realities also created culture. In fact, culture is defined as a shared imagined reality and the ways this shared imagined reality manifests itself. 

Before the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens were defined by biology but after the Cognitive Revolution Sapiens were defined by imagined realities, which comprised of their culture. 

Five. How does the pre-agricultural period affect Sapiens today? 

Harari observes that “nearly entire history” of Sapiens is pre-agricultural society, also known as foraging society or hunting and gathering society. 

This historical period defines who we are today.

After foraging, Sapiens lived for 10,000 years in Agricultural Age: farmers and herders.

For only 200 years, we have lived in Industrial Age: urban laborers and office workers. 

Our gorging gene is traced to our need to eat before competing predators could eat our kill and our discovery of sweet fruit. Of course, now we’re maladapted to all the calorie-dense food produced in the Industrial Age. 

We may be slighter dumber with slightly smaller brains than foragers because foragers had to have everyday survival skills and know how to work in the environment whereas we can be lazy slobs, turn on a light, turn on a computer, flip a switch, order a pizza, and watch Netflix (49). 

Foragers

In many ways, foragers had a “more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle” than industrial Sapiens. In affluent societies today, people work 45 hours a week with little free time and few friends, are full of stress, and overworked to deal with declining real wages. In developing countries, people today may work 80 hours a week and are essentially work bots. 

In contrast, foragers had leisure time with one another and worked maybe 3-6 hours a day (50). 

Foragers had a more diverse, nutritious diet as opposed to a diet of monocrops, same crops, and same food for farmers. Today, we load up on processed food and sugar. 

Of course, Harari points out, foragers often led short, brutish lives, often rife with infanticide and similar atrocities, but on balance their lives could be richer and more affluent than the lifestyles of those in Agricultural and Industrial Periods. 

Six. Why is human visitation to Australia one of the “most important events in history”? 

We see how destructive Sapiens are to ecosystems living apart from human contact. 

We see Sapiens as the “deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth” (64). Within a few thousand years, all of the continent’s giant animals became extinct. 

Sapien colonization on any new landfront is a massive disaster. Sapiens leave mass destruction in their wake. 

 

Guidelines:

About 80% of your essay should be written in your voice with your words.

Another 20% of your essay will consist of quotations, paraphrase, and summary from the book Sapiens and credible source of your choice.  We call this "cited material."

When you introduce your cited material, you must use signal phrases. 

Example Link #1

Example Link #2

When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations. 

Example Link #1

Example Link #2

You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.

Signal Phrases

We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.

We include the author's background information to give author credibility or ethos in our argumentation. 

After we cite the information, we present our own analysis to show how this material supports our argument. 

Examples of a signal phrases:

We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”

The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."

Variation of the above:

The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."

 

 

 

 

Sapiens' Penchant for Destruction Based on Zero-Sum Game.  

When we live for Zero-Sum Game, we become lobsters, for better and worse. 

Adapted from Jordan Peterson Uses Lobster Society to Give Us 5 Essential Life Lessons 

Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back 

Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life has a famous chapter comparing lobsters to humans. Peterson’s view of competition is dark and realistic, and it is the basis for his claim that we need to be self-reliant and abandon all naivete about our plight in this world. 

Deeper Meaning 

Peterson's analogy makes us realize what we’re up against in a world of competition, and he makes us identify negative feedback loops that make us prey to predators, and he helps us replace those negative feedback loops with positive ones in order to help us succeed in life.

Life Lesson #1: Our Territory Determines Our Quality of Life

Jordan Peterson observes that lobsters have survived for 350 million years, far longer than dinosaurs and humans, and that their survival instincts can give us some essential life lessons.

Competition for Territory

Like lobsters, we compete for territory because territory (zip code, if you will) determines our quality of life.

The rich live in premium locations and enjoy longest, healthy lives. The poor live in high-stress areas and live shorter, more sickly, more brutal lives.

I live in Torrance, about a mile and a half from the beach, and you can live 7 miles from here in the city of Wilmington, which is close to oil refineries known to produce spikes in asthma, heart disease, and cancer.

If you live a mile or closer to the freeway, you have increased risk for cancer, heart disease, and dementia.

Like lobsters, we compete for where we will live. We compete for territory.

Life Lesson #2: The world we live in a zero-sum game.

Zero-sum game means that if you win the game you will have wealth, resources, good health, and top-ranking social hierarchy.

If you lose in the zero-sum game, you will suffer poverty, deprivation, sickliness and low-ranking status for overwhelming majority. The crisis of being poor is the poor have the worst healthcare, but the poor get struck with the worst diseases.

This is a brutal principle. A winner in some category of life, reproductive success, the arts, business, home ownership in premium coastal locations comes with someone else paying the price.

Luxury Hotel

Someone enjoys staying in a luxury hotel in Hawaii that costs thousands of dollars a night.

Someone cleans the bathroom of that luxury hotel for minimum wage and lives in brutal conditions to make sure that hotel customer has the best and cleanest amenities.

If you get the bad end of the stick, the world doesn’t care because the world’s default setting is to ignore you and assign you zero worth. This brutal condition compels us to take responsibility for our own station in life. If we don’t fight for our territory, like the lobster fights for his, we are doomed.

Life Lesson #3: We exist in a pecking order that affects our serotonin levels.

We are in a constant competition for resources in a fight to win ranking on what Peterson calls a “pecking order” for quality of life and reproductive success.

Pecking order, largely based on income, for humans, determines neurochemistry, which elevates serotonin in lobster victory and elevates octopamine in defeat. These hormones affect body language, either bold and proud or cowering and ashamed.

This body language propels us into a perpetual feedback loop, leading us to Life Lesson #3. 

Life Lesson #4: Our success or failure in life depends on what kind of constant feedback loop we set into motion.

Our social status ranking affects others’ perception of us, and how we see others perceive us affects our hormones, and our hormones, manifest in body language, affect how people perceive us, so that we exist in a constant feedback loop.

High serotonin levels make people attracted to us, which in turn elevate our serotonin levels even more, creating a positive feedback loop.

The converse is also true: Low serotonin levels make us repellent to others, which in turn lowers our serotonin levels even more, creating a negative feedback loop.

Bullied People

Peterson uses example of an adolescent who was bullied and who reacts to life’s challenges based on being a bullying victim. He becomes fragile, whiny, and helpless with low levels of serotonin, making him more vulnerable to further bullying, which reinforces his negative view of the world.

His groveling, defeatist body language, cowering before some catastrophe, sets him up as a victim for future bullies.

Unloved Depressed People

Depressed people feel useless. A lot of depressed people never received love as children. They grow up with low levels of serotonin. They give depressed vibes to others who turn away from the depressed who in turn feel unloved, a perception that makes them even more depressed, and so the negative feedback loop continues.

The can continue to lead a miserable life defined by this negative feedback loop, or they can do something about it by creating a positive feedback loop.

How is this achieved, and do you really want to achieve this? If you do, please listen: 

Principle #5: You Are Responsible for Creating a Positive Feedback Loop

Taking care of yourself, your fitness, your nutrition, your sleep, your limited screen time on social media, your body posture, to name some examples, can create a positive feedback loop. Respecting yourself causes others to respect you, which in turn reinforces your self-respect.  

“People, like lobsters, size each other up” (40), so you need to take care of yourself.

Self-care is the first step in the road to achieving a positive feedback loop.

The Obvious Isn’t the Commonly Practiced

Taking care of yourself may sound obvious, but most people don’t take care of themselves.

Here’s an example: Up to 30% of people never fill their doctors’ prescriptions for their illnesses. Another 50% who do fill their prescriptions don’t follow the instructions.

Most people follow prescription instructions for their pets more than they do themselves.

We can conclude that most people like their pets more than they like themselves.

They may not even be aware of how they abuse and neglect themselves in a sign of zero self-worth.

You have to want to value yourself and you have to show this through self-care.  

Examples of Self-Care

Social Media Excess

By posting too much on social media, you’re advertising your loneliness and neediness. You’re making yourself appear like a weak lobster in the social media universe, and others will avoid you, causing you to feel rejected, ensuing more feelings of loneliness, neediness, and depression, which will create a negative feedback loop.

Defend your honor and your self-respect by cutting back on social media, achieving excellence in your fitness and studies, and creating a positive feedback loop through those pursuits.

Diet and Exercise

Defend your honor and your self-respect by no longer larding your diet with excessive sugars and processed foods and getting “punk fed, which will result in metabolic syndrome, dyspepsia, fatigue, and diabetes, having the cumulative effects of being a Weak Lobster. Instead, eat whole foods and find exercise that you enjoy doing consistently so that you show yourself and others that you care about yourself so that you can create a positive feedback loop.  

College Studies

Defend your honor and your self-respect by “going all in” your college studies instead of approaching college with a sullen, half-hearted, slovenly cowardice that tells yourself and the world that you’re too scared and weak-hearted to be successful.

In the realm of social media, diet, exercise, and college studies, you need to cultivate Lobster Strength and Dignity to protect your territory.

Serotonin Affects Your Personality

Self-care increases your serotonin levels.

Jordan Peterson reminds us that physical and attitudinal changes mentioned in the above examples don’t just hormonally alter our body and change our body language; they change our spirit and psychology in a way that steers us toward success.

Respond to a Challenge; Don’t Brace Yourself for Catastrophe

Making the above changes is the first step in “responding to a challenge rather than bracing for a catastrophe” (40).

Your Posture Changes Your Psychology

Peterson calls his lobster chapter “Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back.”

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is not just a physical posture; it is a position you take with your mind to defend your honor and self-respect. Such a posture is the first responsibility: To take charge of how you react to a world rife with challenges, competition, and evil.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back makes you attentive to others so you can read social cues and respond appropriately.

To slouch like a sad sack sends your brain signals deep inside your head so you become oblivious to the outside world around you and clueless you become a victim.

Reject Victim Mentality by Taking Responsibility for Protecting Your Self Interests

Reject the victim mentality and replace the victim with a more heroic version of yourself. This is the essence of Peterson’s message in this chapter.

Review of Lobster Society in the Human World

One. Understand that the world’s default setting is to ignore you, so that you are responsible for carving out your own territory.

Two. Understand you can redirect your negative feedback loop through self-care and create positive feedback loop that will point you to success.

Three. Understand that you can only rely on yourself to create a positive feedback loop. There is no guarantee that you will find a mentor or benevolent human being to guide you.

I never had a mentor, and I had to find my own way, but I do two mentorships at my college.

I do Puente and Project Success. Recently, I’ve mentored a student who got into Berkeley law school, a student who got into Morehouse screen writing program, a student who got a civil engineering job, and a student who got an electrical engineering job.

I give myself zero credit for these students’ success. They saw the stakes that were before them, they rose to the occasion, they fought through adversity, poverty, unsupportive parents, moving from their native country, and even depression.

But they made it because, even though they didn’t know it, they followed the principles of lobster society.

The lobster has survived for 350 million years for a reason: Its instincts are correct because the lobster has a proven track record, so we’d be wise to learn from those instincts.  

Living Like a Lobster Is Only Half the Answer 

The lobster by itself is not a teacher of salvation. The lobster is only part of a healthy human being

Lobster competition in world of social media tribalism and structural inequality has resulted in a loss of balance. 

Knowing that we compete against one another is a brutal reality that we should understand.

A Moral Sense

However, our Inner Lobster needs to be balanced by our Moral Sense, which consists of moral laws, empathy, cooperation, and universal humanitarian values.

When we fail to achieve a balance between our Lobster and our Moral Sense, we endanger ourselves.

Too much Inner Lobster makes us vulnerable to the barbarian throng: “every man for himself,” “dog eat dog,” “fight tooth and claw,” “only strong survive in the jungle,” and so on.

Living in a world ruled by the barbarian throng is a world gone to chaos.

Too Much Morality?

But living too much on the Moral Sense side of the equation makes us weak, passive, and naive to external invaders, predators, and clever enemies. We must have some of the Alpha Lobster’s defensive instincts and swagger to protect ourselves.

So a balance must be achieved for our self-preservation.

In America, the balance is out of whack:

One. Rapid globalization scares the hell out of us.

Two. Rapid automation scares the hell out of us.

Three. Structural inequality making it more and more impossible for regular folks to afford housing, healthcare, and education scare the hell out of us.

Four. White people, especially of an older generation, are scared that America doesn’t look as white as it did when they were young so that racist political demagogues appeal to these white people’s worst instincts.  Racism, including racist hate crimes, are on the rise.

Five. Social media generates news algorithms based on their personality profiles that silo social media users into isolating political bubbles so that they hear only what they want to hear based on cognitive biases.

Six. Americans are more and more divided along political lines to the point that a recent poll shows that more parents fear their children will marry someone of the “wrong political persuasion” over a different religious faith.

Seven. Americans no longer see their fellow Americans as sharing a common goal but as enemies who must be destroyed through trolls on social media or even worse methods resulting in what some are calling a “soft civil war.”

Eight. A lot of social media trolls are connected to Alt-Right racist and nationalist movements, and these trolls, which would be laughed at as a fringe movement just 10 years ago, feel empowered as they see mainstream politicians pushing for their cause.

Nine. National unity and shared purpose has taken a back seat to Zero-Sum Game: winners and losers.

Ten. Critical thinking, civil discussions in the marketplace of ideas, is no longer the priority: It’s now blood sport: Kill your enemy because their loss is your gain.

Lobster society has taken over critical thinking and our Moral Sense.

With the loss of critical thinking, with the loss of national unity, with tooth-and-claw Zero-Sum Game being the top priority, America exists in a state of huge chaos and instability. Hate crimes are on the rise. Racism is more flagrant and outspoken to the degree that one of my African-American students recently had “KKK” spray painted on his car in the parking lot of this college.

We are in trouble.

The Lobster without moral balance is an ugly creature hellbent on destruction.

We need our Inner Lobster, but we need it to be balanced. 

 

 

 

If time, show video: 

YouTube Ted Talk Video: Harari’s “Why Humans Run the World”