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An update
(by Peter Jakubowski)
to the book
"21 Lessons for the 21st Century"
(by Yuval Noah Harari)

On 1st September, 2018 appeared the third book by Yuval Noah Harari: "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" (Penguin Random House, UK). It is as full of new interesting ideas as Harari's two previous books, "Sapiens; History of Humankind", and "Homo Deus; A Brief History of Tomorrow". In my recent (German) book: "Bioresonanzen in der Einheitlichen Medizin" (Engl.: Bioresonances in the Unified Medicine), I have updated some of the Harari's greatest ideas from his two earlier books onto the perspective of my Unified Physics; Harari has necessarily used the traditional physics as his scientific background. In the present article, I am going to update in that sense some of the most important ideas from his newest book.

At first, according to the title of our article, we have to jump to Chapter 7, "Nationalism; Global problems need global answers", because our new physical definition of a natural quantization of the demographic units of natural human groups is the most important new tool for a scientific treatment of the present social, economic, and political situation of the world. Let us consider the following definition of the Demographic Quantum Spectrum of natural human groups (later on we will explain the relation of this quantization to the quantization of our cosmic home, the Solar System, and the quantization of all possible bioresonances in our own bodies).

I. Demographic Quantum Spectrum
of Human Communities

Human Group

Level

Components

Personal Contacts Range

World; ~ 5000 M

9

12 Continents

150 Nations

Continent; ~ 430 M

8

12 Nations

150 Metropolises

Nation; ~ 36 M

7

12 Metropolises

150 Cities

Metropolis; ~ 3 M

6

12 Cities

150 Districts

City; ~ 0.25 M

5

12 Districts

150 Clans

District; ~ 20-21 T

4

12 Clans

150 Great Families

Clan; ~1700

3

12 Great Families

150 Basic Families

Great Family; ~150

2

12 Basic Families

150 Persons

Basic Family; 12

1

4 children, 4 parents,

4 grandparents

-

An example of a possible Continental-Communities distribution over the World with hypothetical 5 Milliard humans:

Europe - 1, North and Middle America - 1, South America - 1,

Asia - 5 (or 6), Africa - 3 (or 2), Australia and Oceania - 1.

 

In Ch. 7. of his new book, Yuval Noah Harari writes:

"True, human are social animals through and through, with group loyalty imprinted in their genes. However, for hundreds of thousands of years Homo sapiens and its hominid ancestors lived in small intimate communities numbering no more than a few dozen people. Humans easily develop loyalty to small intimate groups such as a tribe, an infantry company or a family business, but it is hardly natural for humans to be loyal to millions of utter strangers. Such mass loyalties have appeared only in the last few thousand years - yesterday morning, in evolutionary terms - and they require immense efforts of social constructions."

Yes, I agree. But it is nothing unnatural that individual human beings cannot develop a direct loyalty to demographic quantum levels higher than their own Great Family (comp. Table I). Instead of the individual loyalty, a group loyalty became necessary to be developed and applied when the human population reached millions of people living on the same territory. I suppose, it was the case not earlier than at the end of the last Ice Age, during the life-period of the last "regular" Species of the Neanderthals Genus (between 22300 and 8700 years ago; the details will be explained in next pages), spread all over the Earth. Their Great Families was almost surely already earlier closed into Clans of 1700-1800 people, and the Clans to District-Communities of 20-21 thousands of members. Nevertheless, it is also highly probably that such Districts were only able to join themselves together to first Cities (of a quarter of million of people) after the ice sheets of the last Ice Age disappeared from Europe, Asia, and North America. Rests of such Cities have been found along the coast line of that time on almost all continents. It is also clear that Metropolises (of 3 million people) and Nations (of 36 million people) were not capable to feed their citizens prior to the full domestication of the highly productive plants and animals. Because of the extremely dramatic energetic turbulences of the last Cosmic Quantum Jump of level 5 (which culminated between 10000 and 6000 years ago), those demographic processes have been interrupted and could be continued first after the collective trauma of that period has become less acute.

A Nation remains the most important large community unit since then. Only such a unit can retain its integrity and stability, thus stay peaceful in relations to its neighbors. However, in order to secure its peaceful prosperity, a Nation cannot define itself as a homogeneous entity, neither social, nor cultural, and even nor demographic. It is always a natural union of about 150 Cities collected in about 12 higher quantum unities, which we have called Metropolises in Table I. They are Cities and their Districts, and not Nations, who build the natural units of human communities developing their own culture and traditions. The most urgent task in that respect would be to realize the really personal contacts of the individuals representing each demographic unit on the next higher quantum level. For example, I think, a mayor of a City, personally knowing 150 chefs of all Clans constituting his City, will be always a better "administrator" for all 250 thousand citizens of the City than any abstract body of unknown officials occupying the town halls in our present cities.

On the other side, a Nation is still too small to decide about global problems of the planet. As we have clearly recognized during the recent two decades on the example of the European Union, not only the individual Nations but even the Continental Communities are incapable to solve our really global problems. We have to unite all twelve (or more, in the present world) Continental Communities for this purpose. We have to develop a functioning, generally accepted and respected World Community, being the only Demographic Community capable to solve those global problems of Humanity.
Similarly to our above example, the future World Community can be successfully active in their global tasks only when the representatives of all (ideally ~150) Nations would be allowed to continue personal contacts to each other for a longer period of time (say 5 to 10 years). Everyone of those representatives has to be chosen very carefully and with full acceptance of all (~150) mayors of the Cities composing each Nation.

The first Chapter of Harari's book, entitled: "Disillusionment: The end of history has been postponed", begins with the explanation of the present global situation of our world.

"Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group and nation has its own tales and myths. But during the twentieth century the global elites in New York, London, Berlin and Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world: the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story. The Second World War knocked out the fascist story, and from the late 1940s to the late 1980s the world became a battleground between just two stories: communism and liberalism. Then the communist story collapsed, and the liberal story remained the dominant guide to the human past and the indispensable manual for the future of the world - or so it seemed to the global elite. ...
In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail; in 2018 we are down to zero. No wonder that the liberal elites, who dominated much of the world in recent decades, have entered a state of shock and disorientation. To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all. Every-thing is perfectly clear. To be suddenly left without any story is terrifying. Nothing makes any sense."

Next, we obtain an explanation to what makes the actual problem so dangerous.

"In the past, we have gained the power to manipulate the world around us and to reshape the entire planet, but because we didn't understand the complexity of the global ecology, the changes we made inadvertently disrupted the entire ecological system and now we face an ecological collapse. In the coming century biotech and infotech will give us the power to manipulate the world inside us and reshape ourselves, but because we don't understand the complexity of our own minds, the changes we will make might upset our mental system to such an extent that it too might break down."

The entire book gives a detailed analysis of this main problem, and presents many interesting, even brilliant proposals, how to try to solve it in the next future, before "our mental system might break down."

Yuvel Noah Harari complains: "To be suddenly left without any story is terrifying. Nothing makes any sense." On the other side, he hopes: "To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all." I am writing this update because I am able to deliver a physical basis for the missing story, a new global story of our past and our future. The scientific background of the new story could look like the narrative told in the several following pages.

* * *
Continue with Part II: The New Story for our First Global Civilisation
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