So, the youtuber that incentivised me to read Sapiens primarily posts reddit reaction content, and in a video about 'millenials killing industires' he makes an offhaneded comment asking why all the titles pose the refusal to enage with an industry as violence, and it got me thinking, in the golab economy, money is power, and so the idea that millenials are leveraging thier collective power, and starving these industries of an entire market, within the system that's been created, one could consider that violence, even though a single individual has not been harmed.
Also, Yuval Harari referred to Communism and Capitalism as religions, and it nearly broke my brain
"The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism, in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. But if we take into consideration natural-law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervour, unparalleled missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history. The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam."
He then goes on to explain the differences and similarities and how they affect categorization, and makes a point of saying that if we are to separate religion from ideology purely based on the presence of a supernatural presence, certain religions would become ideologies, and certain ideologies, namely liberalism, would become religions, due to its reliance upon the existence of a supernatural being to uphold its systems of belief, which is explained in furthur detail in the book. Later in the book Yuval also makes the claim that racism, as we define it, no longer exists, and its place has been taken by "culturalism," a term he coined, saying that:
"Among today’s elites, assertions about the contrasting merits of diverse human groups are almost always couched in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races. We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’"
I think this idea is too focused on a rigid definition of racism, it doesn't account for the change in culture, the root source of racism has not changed, only the language around it. The only reason we no longer say 'It's in their blood' is because it has become culturally unacceptable to do so, so racists have found new ways of articulating the same ideas. I think Harari's proposal to change the term we use to define the phenomenon does nothing to benefit the parties affected by racism, and in fact benefits the racists by absolving them of their racism.
Also, yeah yeah, I know, I originally planned to only make 1 post about a book, and only after I'd finished it, but this is my blog and I do what I want, also the book is over 500 pages, and if I don't write down my thoughts I will forget them by the time I finish the book, and yeah, sure, I could just put everything into a note in my phone till I'm done reading, but what fun is that? Either way, I'll probably end up including these pieces in my overall summation of the book, just to be able to consolidate it all to one place.
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