Sapiens by Harari covers this extensively. So much of human development is our ability to ascribe fictive boundaries and definitions to things. Rules, authorities, myths, money, culture, countries, companies. What are any of them? They're all made up. We could just stop believing in all of them tomorrow.

That is on my shelf ready to read. Just got to finish a couple more currently in the queue.

A convenient stance, I suppose, when discussing what to do with “useless eaters.”

> “useless eaters.”

Unfamiliar term. Turns out it is Nazi political slang.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useless_eater

Yes, Harari echoes this term in some of his speeches, asking what to do with the “useless class of people” that emerge in the wake of the AI Revolution. Instead of asking whether we should be evaluating the materialistic “usefulness” of human beings in terms of the purely economic value they generate, or even whether we should be pursuing technologies that will create these conditions, he satisfies himself with questions about how to keep the “useless people” out of the way with drugs and the Metaverse.

That, and the idea that humans are now programmable and the concept of free will is over. He and his son-of-a-Nazi mentor, Klaus Schwab, want to turn you into the Borg. Literally.

Harrari is a class A megalomaniac and psychopath. Study him if you like, but never let that fact slip your mind as you read his psychotic musings.

Convenience isn't the point. The rules of society, laws, morality, ethics, compassion as a virtue ... they don't exist as physical laws. They're human constructs, and humans can (and do) choose to ignore them.

It's an important growth moment to realise that the consequences of violating those "laws" are not delivered by the laws of nature but instead by the behaviour of humans. So you can be rude or arrogant, and the only punishment for that comes from people choosing not to work with you or similarly being unpleasant back to you.

Nazis had a lack of compassion and denied some people the (man-made!) rights of humanity based on race, ability, sexual orientation, and other categories. The consequences for that behaviour had to come from other people standing up to them.

I've met people who think that "the universe" will deliver just punishment for violating an ethical or moral code. In reality, every society and set of values is held together by people defending them and meting out punishing to violators. Sometimes formally (police, courts, armies, declarations of war) and sometimes personally.

I understand the argument you’re putting forth, I just view it as the equivalent of the argument made by the Nihilist Germans in The Big Lebowski. It ends in will to power.

Within the constraints of the materialistic assumptions underlying it, I do agree that the ideals of compassion and empathy are examples of best-case behavior but the humans who rise to the top in such systems are usually not encumbered with the capacity for either. They would push back on the constraints of such “objective ideals” anyway because they see no coherent place for them in will to power systems.

At macroscopic level ,human construct is as valid as nature's

What are useless eaters? You’ve put it in quotes, but I don’t see it elsewhere.

I often see Harari and Graeber's being discussed at the same time, and I am always surprised.

Harari write pop sci, a grand narrative with many liberties with both history and science.

Graeber's books are heavily referenced pieces of work. Debt: The first 5000 years ends at 73% on my Kindle, because the remaining 27% of the book (144/534 pages) is references and footnotes.

Their books are not in the same intellectual category.

The number of references are not an indication of the quality of a work. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments but in Debt, Graeber invents Adam Smith's morality whole cloth.

I have no intention of reading Dawn of Everything but reviewers have noticed references that say the opposite of what the authors claim they say.

I am aware that there are problems with the books, even some serious ones. But I find that hardly surprising from a book that references a 1000 other scholarly works. But the reason you can critique the book effectively is because he references where his claims originate from.

In the language of this essay [1], Graeber's work is legible, Harari's not at all.

[1] https://acesounderglass.com/2022/02/07/epistemic-legibility/

I find this interesting. I've read Graeber essays, but the only book I tried is "Utopia of Rules" and I found that it read as if he did exactly what you describe Harrari as doing.

It felt like he set up a windmill separate from reality to tilt at.

I do agree that Harari is great for thought piece stuff, I put him in the same category as Gladwell. Entertaining to read, but not to be trusted as a singular source.

Our models and explanations of the world are dependent on our belief system and the framework through which we look at. For example, a marxist's explanation of the economic system is very different from that of a neo-liberal. The two would not even agree on an ontology, yet alone the mechanism.

Graeber was a self-proclaimed anarachist. His books indeed have a different description of reality than the orthodox description of reality. If you don't agree with his description, then it will indeed look outlandish - the same way an atheist's and religious person's descriptions sound outlandish to each other. If you do agree with his descriptions, or at least that there are many different conceptions of the world, then his views are more reasonable.

Harari is not making scholarly arguments at all, so we cant even say much about his books.

But it’s all fictive boundaries. Don’t stop at countries and companies -nothing exists until it’s named.

This was my personal big breakthrough. I realized that humans deal with abstractions of things and not things themselves. Accordingly, most of what humans argue about isn’t even real, but rather only what is perceived through layer upon layer of abstraction.

I've had this revelation too but wouldn't describe it as a big breakthrough though sometimes it feels like it should matter more. Can I ask how you feel like this affects your day to day life?

It allows me to turn the volume down on things. So many things actually matter very little. Also, it allowed me to see things a bit more clearly. For example, all forms of categorization and measurement are somewhat arbitrary (no matter how useful). Another one I got from this is that meaning is assigned and not found as it exists only in the mind. Or, another favorite of mine, concepts don’t really exist. Like meaning or measurement, they are useful but not real.

For me the most concrete practical use of this kind of thinking is achieving "mind over matter" when dealing with physical pain. It seems to ease the emotional impact if you focus on the physical sensation of pain itself rather than the idea of pain, which carries so much more baggage that adds an extra dimension to the suffering that becomes counterproductive in non-survival scenarios like lifting heavy weight at the gym.

Indeed, except conceptually, there is no actual separation between "things."

See: quantum mechanics.

Most of those things are backed up with guns though. Which for me, makes them as real as they need to be.

All values ,social construct and structure we create as human maybe just as part of our human existence (essence ) ,same a wildlife photographer watches wild animals ,like a passive observer ,without any moral judgement and prejudice .We can watch humans with same lens ,all our man made problem ,may it be ecological disasters or economic system ,it maybe just side effect of our existence as a species.

+1 for the Graeber quote. I wasn't familiar with it but makes sense he would have originated it. Dovetailing that with this Ask HN theme: When you realize that bog-standard consumer loan amortization formulae are arbitrary and not grounded in any fundamental reality more detailed than "the lender gets something in addition to the amount lent", it's eye-opening. I didn't really recognize that until after reading his Debt: The First 5000 Years, but it put alternatives I learned about in business school, like zero-coupon bonds (special to corporates, bondholders, and banks) into context. (Yes, I'm familiar with the statement flaws that others have commented before about his works)