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Sapiens

Decent Essays

Throughout out the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind written by Yuval Noah Harari he discusses factors, events and institutions that have helped shaped our modern world. The three factors that conceptualized shaped our modern world are religion, money, and empire. These three things have shaped our world modern world in different ways such as; religion influencing our laws and people’s perspective of how to live with different cultures. Money has had positive and negative effects on creating our modern world. As for empire it created a foundation of what we call today our modern day government. Even though these few factors have shaped our modern world there are still events, factors and institutions that are shaping our world today. …show more content…

The beginning of money started with barely when it became a universal measure for evaluating and exchanging all other goods and services in that time of history (181). This set the way for the modern world to use money in the same way. According to Harari “Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and just any system of mutual system: money is the most important universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised” (180). This is the foundation on which money was built on and how it works in today’s modern world. The reason for money being such a big part of our modern world is because it “… is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation” (186). This quote provides the reason how money has helped the formation of our modern world. It shows how different cultures started to come together through trade of money. This is the positive aspect of the modern use of money. Even though money may have a positive effect on the trade and industry but, the principle of money itself has an evil side. It can effect someone’s traditions, relations, and human values. Many people believe that money can’t buy loyalty, love, or honor but, in today’s modern society it can. An example of this being betrayed is when Harari says, …show more content…

An empire is a political order with two important characteristics (190). It has to have a rule over a significant number of people all having different cultural identity and separate territories. Also empires have cultural diversity and territorial flexibility was not only their unique character, but also their central role in history (190). Harari says, “The truth is that empire has been the world’s most common form of political organization for the last 2,500 years” (191). These characteristics of how an empire was and this quote provides how the formation of our government was made of, which eventually what we call a democracy. Also Harari states, “Empire is also a very stale form of government” (191). This shows what type of impact empires had on our modern world by just giving the foundation of a type of government. The difference between an empire and nation, our modern world, is that empires typically didn’t work because it was not possible to rule effectively over a large number of people. Also empires were used for destruction, exploitation, and people have the right to self-determination (191). Although a portion of that may be true empires influenced our modern world in many more positive ways. An empire would deliberately spread ideas, institutions, costumes and norms. The reason for this is because it makes people lives easier and it’s difficult for an

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