Is this good?

samharris.org/podcast/item/reality-and-the-imagination

This may be a good intro to him.

i don't like shitty pop books written by biased people with an agenda, if he was a 20th century south african white criticizing iraqi oppression of the kurds but not criticize apartheid i'd say he was full of shit too

well he's obviously not going to come out and say "gas the palestinians, race war now!" he's very subtle and wraps his agenda in accessible prose and insights that laymen will find impressive

Basically he is saying we are living in our imagination, our religion, our nation, our money are valuable because we think it is, which isn't that new, I mean hey, every edgy teenager think like that but most scholars aren't. And we will make some new toy or fall into a new imagination to fulfill our latest desire and make our society keep running.

All people are biased and have agendas. Are his ideas interesting from an amoral perspective though?

Don't really care about particular tribal drama.

>I mean hey, every edgy teenager think like that but most scholars aren't.

what the hell are you talking about? "scholars" have been thinking like that since nietzsche. it's a book for pseuds, fucking kys.

>a history of humanity is for pseuds

Recommend a digestible book that covers the same ground as this one, and we'll see how different it is

it's just materialist determinism, if you've ever read any marx ever, it's not going to be anything new, but if you're a pseud who never went to school or read a book, it's as good a starting point as any i suppose

That unironically sounds like Mein Kampf (and other fascist metaphorical shit).

oriental despotism by wittfogel

Sounds eerily familiar. Almost spookily so..

exactly, it's just the same stuff germans having been writing about forever, but this time from the perspective of an israeli settler, so if you prefer israel to germany, go ahead, support ya boy, but otherwise you probably have a half dozen books on your shelf already covering this ground better

>oriental despotism by wittfogel

If centralised uber-bureaucratic oriental states are so great, why have they been losing for the past several centuries? Huh? Huh?

What's fascist about it?

Not that specifically. But fascist literature has a common theme of using naturalistic comparisons and metaphors, while arguing around weird interpretations of evolutionary theory, always having a strong emphasis on "winners" and "losers".

To this day. Just a year ago or so, the Austrian right wing party brought out some kind of anthology, which used them. (Some of the contributors are openly Ethno-nationalists.)
And in Germany some books like that pop up from time to time. Even sell well.

Sapiens doesn't talk about that stuff though. The author discusses humans as a whole, and how we advanced by essentially collective imagination (money, nations, etc) and by being violent towards other animals.

I don't see what's so Mein Kampf about that.

Didn't say it was. Just that the short description sounded similar.

Surely you can appreciate the very simple and often made mental leap from "Your ethics are bs. Also we survived by beating all other animals. Darwinism is life. Now about those hairy guys..."

Maybe since Buddha

>tfw reading Pali Canon and realizing Gautama Buddha realized nihilism and instantly solved it
>tfw Schopi almost did as well, but bitched out at the last second

I don't think he never said they were great.

it'd be really neat if we could have a single thread without ZOG conspiracy theories.

*ever

It has interesting ideas but its meant to be sensational. And he completely ignores the argument that farming allowed humanity to specialize and further our technological base.

try reddit. you'll love it there.

No.
Serves as baseless speculation with trickles of basic info, it's little more than pet opinion/ideology shilling.

>in many ways worse than they were before
Explain. Beyond the advantage of simplicity and being more animalistic, there are no benefits.

wait, are there people who actually believe large scale agriculture was good for humans? ok i think harari sucks, but if you're that backwards then fucking read it, holy shit

large scale agriculture sucks less now because machinery, fertilizers, and genetic engineering make our agriculture more productive, but agriculture was definitely shitty for the majority of humans since it starts

i guess people that never thought about this stuff before get their mind's blown by harari, and if you're that pleb then in that case, by all means read it

i hope you weren't the guy complaining about " centralised uber-bureaucratic oriental states" then, since if you actually read Oriental Despotism instead of being a wikipedia cowboy you'd know the origin of them is large scale agriculture in climates that require large scale irrigation

Then you are a fucking easily manipulated idiot. The tribal nature of most humans is gonna have an effect on more or less everything, so you have to see his ideas in that context.

Also, no, the book is pretty bad. Its just a biased crashcourse into anthropology.

>totalizing pop-anthropology based on common sense musings
fucking kill yourself

Yeah that's not really difficult. Being a peasant farmer in the ancient world would suck dicks.
He doesn't, it's pretty clear that he knows the scientific revolution wouldn't have occurred without the agricultural. He points out that for individual humans early farming was probably a shit life. That doesn't mean it had no long term benefits for the species as a whole.

Not that I think it's a great work or anything. It's easy to read pop anthropology with a bit of pop philosophy. Serves its purpose well, won't rot your brain, but won't be worth reading if you're already well read.

Well, it looks like it's written by a black, so probably not.

I think the world has had enough stuffed shirt Obamas to respectfully nod at.

>black
Apply yourself next time you shitpost my man

The author is a turbodegenerate new-age idiot from Israel. Of course it's not good.

>he spends a lecture or two bashing hindu caste system
He isn't furthering the interest of his "tribe" then, Israel's political establishment would bend over backwards to enforce a solidarity and geo-strategic alliance with India to contain the pakis who are btw what many islamists look at as lying into their own fold complete with their nukes.

Biologist think like that when they started to study plants, there are loads of documentary talking about how flowering plants shape the landscape of the Earth and of course they considered the impact of large scale agriculture.

yes

>tfw you realize that large scale agriculture was the building block of every first (proto-)monarchy in any culture
>tfw before that we had mostly peaceful egalitarian social structures
Was it worth it?

Worth it implies they had some kind of choice in the matter. After they killed all the walking supermarkets their only consistent source of calories was plants so it was probably worth it at that point. Bamboo is worth it for Pandas even though they're carnivores who can barely digest the shit.

You are a fucking idiot. He has claims of scientific nature. Does he not supply credible references? If he does, why do you disagree with him?

If you have nothing to argue against him other than "MAH JOOS!!!" then shut the fuck up. Have you even read the book? I did, and I highly recommend it.

>tfw you will never bring home a Neanderthal girl to piss off your conservative parents
Life feels emptier after you read it. We've lost a lot with our murderous tendencies.

They've been winning since the dawn of civilisation and have only had a setback at the start of modernity. Now they're on their way back to the top while the West decays.

Liberal democracy is shit. Gas the individuals, honour the parents now!

>Gautama Buddha realized nihilism and instantly solved it
How did he solve it?

At least we are now moving back to self-sustaining, decentralized resource management.
So long as nobody drops the bomb, we might actually go full circle and make it back to our prehistoric utopia (minus the child mortality rate n stuff).

Bombs are the least of our problems.

>gay vegan jew with an Oxford degree living in an illegal settlement in Palestine with his husband and two dogs writing bestsellers except for 1/6th of the year when he is on a silent meditation retreat

Rather interesting lad desu.

A shitty summary would be radical practical phenomenology, which kinda naturally leads to a holistic monism, but with some actual advice on how to effectively realize it and not just be bummed out all of the time.
There are very few axioms you need for that philosophy. Stuff like causation, monism (anatta, anatman), absolute impermanence, interdependence of all things,...

Nothing is special, your conceptions of the world and yourself are pretty much all BS (read: illusions, no matter how close to truth they get) so the best thing you can do is be curious about your human condition, while continuously trying to fully realize yourself just as much part of all as a wave is of the ocean.

Again, shitty summary and way more to it.
But reading the pali canon and some sutras (lotus and diamond in particular), you'll be surprise how concise it all is.
There is some metaphysical BS in it (muh god plains), but you can read past that, as the Buddha said himself it doesn't mean shit anyway.

Thank you.

Is there any secondary literature you recommend? I'm not sure of if I'd be contextually lost if I just hop into the Pali canon.

Tuvalu Harari is definitely a smart guy and is asking the right questions about the future of humanity.

Gethin gives some great comments.
If you really want the basics of the basics, check out the Secular Buddhism podcast. Or literally just read the Wiki articles. They aren't bad.
Apart from that:
I highly suggest to start off with Zen Buddhism and (if you even want to) work backwards.
Theravada tried to cut all the BS, but kinda failed imho.

Stay away from hippie authors. If you find yourself looking at forums for info, take that shit with a spoon of salt, as those are crawling with new-age nuts and 9th level enlightenment gurus.
When you get familiar enough with the stuff, it's easy to spot tho. I remember watching a video of Thich Nhat Hahn, where a woman asked about the ghost of her late husband and he gave a weird answer. Only after I was comfortable with the basics of Buddhism did I understand that he thought she was a nutjob and was trying to give a kind answer.

>If you find yourself looking at forums for info, take that shit with a spoon of salt, as those are crawling with new-age nuts and 9th level enlightenment gurus.
I've done that before and it seems like people were trying to mimic the language of shitty 19th century translations of old sutras.

Smh desu.

Yeah. You wouldn't believe the amount of people who think Dukkha literally means Suffering.

>I've done that before and it seems like people were trying to mimic the language of shitty 19th century translations of old sutras.

oh i see this with maoist cranks sometimes, like the "Revolutionary Communist Party featuring Bob Avakian" writes every statement like it was poorly translated from Chinese in the 1950s

It's worse with Zen/Buddhism, because the first real translations were pretty much collectively by the Beat Gen and then by some reformed hippies, who stumbled onto Suzuki in Cali to "get high without drugs". They then badly translated antiquated Japanese texts, which were translated from antiquated Chinese text, which were translated from antiquated Hindi or dead language Pali texts.
Becoming a Buddhist monk was basically becoming a linguist.

Rupert Gethin may be the only scholar around whom I fully trust with the English translations. Bless him.
He has an interesting lecture on Buddhist psychology, btw. It's on YT.