Sapiens does present some really powerful ideas, though. I enjoyed it a lot, but the book clearly glosses over a lot of details. Then again, it tries to tackle a ridiculously big scope, so I can see how it can't get into all of the details. I still consider it a worthy read despite its shortcomings. But read it more for the ideas than for the facts.

[–] lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Isn't the "idea" a very eurocentric understanding of progress and how colonialism is actually good because it civilized the colonized? But I'm sure there is more to the book than that

[–] mcv@lemmy.zip 3 points 21 hours ago

That's not what I picked up from it. The biggest idea that it presents very early in the book is that of a shared subjective truth: most of the things that make up our society, like countries, laws, corporations, etc. do not exist objectively; they only exist because we all believe in them. Objectively, these things don't exist, but our society is built upon everybody agreeing that these imaginary orders exist, and we're constantly inventing new imaginary structures on top of that.