21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Summarized for Busy People: Based on the Book by Yuval Noah Harari

By Goldmine Reads

This book summary and analysis was created for individuals who want to extract the essential contents and are too busy to go through the full version. This book is not intended to replace the original book. Instead, we highly encourage you to buy the full version.

How can the rise of technology change our lives? How do we handle the spread of fake news? How can our nations and religions maintain their relevance? What can we teach our children about the future?

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari looks into the most pressing issues that we face today as a global nation as we move towards the uncertainty of the future. With each advancement in technology, it can be used especially as a weapon of war—and now, we live in a world that's more polarized than before. Harari shows the challenges there are in moving through our lives amid the constant change and distortion, but we have to ask the right questions in order to survive.

Throughout the chapters, Harari will move through the provocative thoughts that have been asked in his previous books—be it political, technological, social, or existential—and he offers advice on how to manage this change of which future we are not aware of. How can we retain our freedom amid daunting and even dangerous technology? What does the future look like for us and how can we ready for it? How can we stay safe despite the threat of terrorism? Why is liberal democracy in danger?

Harari seeks to understand where we came from and where we are going and this captured the imagination of millions of readers around the globe. Here, he invites us to begin questioning our values, beliefs, and meaning in a world full of illusions and lies. We are bombarded with information but clarity is power. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century becomes an important read especially in tackling the contemporary challenges that arise in today's global state.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Goldmine Reads
• Release date: Mar 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386628989

Book preview

PART ONE:  THE TECHNOLOGICAL CHALLENGE

Yuval Noah Harari tackles the challenges that come with the merger between infotech and biotech during the time when humankind is beginning to lose faith in the liberal views of global politics. He looks into this technological challenge from four perspectives: disillusionment, work, liberty, and equality.

Chapter 1: Disillusionment

The three tales that describe the past and future are the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story. The fascist story ended with the Second World War and the communist story ended with time. The last story standing is the liberal story—this promotes freedom and recognizes the hurdles mankind has overcome over the years from tyranny to oppression. It also recognizes that generations in the past have fought against oppression and instituted freedom.

It doesn’t immediately make the world well but freedom has become the key to discovering the answers to the problems that we face today. George Bush and Barack Obama became the common proponents of this mantra—believing that the liberal story will bring people peace and abundance for nations while nations who still continue with tyranny will continually suffer.

People, however, have begun to drift from the liberal stories and the truths it upholds. Oppression has begun to surface once again and countries have now tweaked what democracy truly represented. Great Britain’s exit from the European Union and the victory of Donald Trump as President of the United States confirmed this. Back then, people advocated for liberation in countries ruled by tyrants but people now see the liberal story as a fairytale that doesn’t exist.

Some people have opted for the old stories because of selfishness while others believe that the liberal story only benefits the cream of the crop. Today, there is no considered viable story because when there was a story, liberalists thought that all the problems in the world would be solved. But liberalists are afraid that this story no longer exists. This disillusionment makes people feel that the world is slowly coming to its end because it could not attain utopia. Everything seems to be happening so fast and out of control, so, the mind has conjured all sorts of bad endings.

The liberal story does not take into consideration the emergence of this seemingly disturbing technology in form of information technology and biotechnology. People are yet to understand that fully understanding this would allow them to control the influence technology has on political processes, financial processes, economic processes, and every other process that shape the world. More than this, it can also affect humans.

Humans have control over what they can do but do not seem to be able to control the internals and this is partly caused by the advent of technology. It’s been easier to control what man has created and, because of technology, we have a difficult time understanding how our actions affect the bigger picture and the operation of societies. Inventors don’t usually care about how technology can disrupt the existing political processes but politicians and world leaders don’t talk about how technology can influence political