Читаю отличную книгу Ювала Ноя Харари «Краткая история человечества». Позволю себе процитировать несколько отрывков.
We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.
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It is easy to accept that Hammurabi’s Code was a myth, but we do not want to hear that human rigths are also a myth. If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn’t there a danger that our society will collapse?
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Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.
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The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as libralism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism.
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Our modern attempts to stabilise the sociopolitical order have had no choice but to rely on either of two unscientific methods: a. Take a scientific theory, and in opposition to common scientific practices, declare that it is a final and absolute truth. This was the method used by Nazis (who claimed that their racial policies were the corollaries of biological facts) and Communists (who claimed that Marx and Lenin had divined absolute economic truths that could never be refuted). b. Leave science out of it and live in accordance with a non-scientific absolute truth. This has been the strategy of liberal humanism, which is built on a dogmatic belief in the unique worth and rights of human beings — a doctrine which has embarrassingly little in common with the scientific study of Homo sapience.
Очень занимательное чтиво. Крайне рекомендую.