For millions of years, it was impossible to build an authoritarian regime. The big issue in politics is how to get lots of people to agree on something. You can't really build a tribe without some at least intuitive understanding of this mechanism of disgust. And so if you want to hack a human without technology and a i you just secretly give someone some ginger tea or something like that. Eam these techniques of how to activate or deactivate the sense of disgust go back thousands of years.
Yuval Noah Harari is one of the rare historians who can give us a two-million-year perspective on today’s headlines. In this wide-ranging conversation, Yuval explains how technology and democracy have evolved together over the course of human history, from paleolithic tribes to city states to kingdoms to nation states. So where do we go from here? “In almost all the conversations I have,” Yuval says, “we get stuck in dystopia and we never explore the no less problematic questions of what happens when we avoid dystopia.” We push beyond dystopia and consider the nearly unimaginable alternatives in this special episode of Your Undivided Attention.