Yuval Noah Harari

There is some king chosen by God or some emperor chosen by the army, that people don't choose their profession.

If your father was a shoemaker, you will be a shoemaker.

If you are born into the Kshatriya caste, you will be a Kshatriya.

Definitely you can't choose your spouse and you can't choose your religion.

Now, I think, you know, even the vast majority of Trump voters would say yes to all these four questions.

So ideologically, the liberals and so-called conservatives are much closer than probably in any previous time in history.

But the type of discourse that is being produced makes people feel as if the differences are enormous.

And yeah, this is to a large extent because of this pressure to be exciting.

And we have politicians, you see the politicians who rise to the top, they're extremely exciting and engaging personalities.

You cannot take your eyes off them.

And thinking about it, you know, even in evolutionary terms,

This comes from misusing our evolutionary programming.

Like if you're walking around the African savanna tens of thousands of years ago, most of what you see is not very exciting.

Like, there are some bushes here, there are some gazelles there, that's fine.

And then there is a snake.

Now, the snake is exciting.

The snake literally excites your entire nervous system.

And if you don't focus your entire attention on the snake, you die.

So we are programmed that if something is exciting, we drop everything else and just focus on that.

And that makes sense in the African savanna.