Everybody since the '60s has been saying the nation is a fiction - the nation is an imaginary unity - but people didn't connect the dots and say all human endeavours sprang from the same principle.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that nations are constructs of human imagination and that all human actions are rooted in this shared conceptual framework.
Yuval Noah Harari emphasizes the idea that nations, while often viewed as real entities, are actually imagined constructs that unify people under a shared narrative. This perspective encourages a deeper understanding of how human endeavors and social structures are interlinked by the principles of shared beliefs and collective imagination, highlighting the importance of narratives in shaping our realities.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about national identity in a sociology class.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.
The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
Sometimes the very presence of God is barred by our presuppositions and our intense and constant desire for triumph.
It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.
Things have changed for the worse. That's why former eastern bloc countries are electing communists again. We are missing them and longing for the times we cursed before.
I think the United States is sick. It suffers from the sickness, the disease of being the victor and it needs to cure itself from this disease.
ATHENA: You wish to be called righteous rather than act right. [...] I say, wrong must not win by technicalities.
Today, nobody sees, or wishes to see, that in our time the enslavement of the majority of men is based on money taxes, levied on land and otherwise, which are collected by government from the subjects.
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