Blinkist Summary Book

2021-10-14 06:39:44 Radical Honesty
Part of 2/17

g.
Let’s start at the very beginning: the womb.
A few months after conception consciousness dawns and that’s when you experience experience itself for the first time. Everything seems to be eternal timeless.
You may not consciously remember this experience but on some level it remains with you. It’s this experience of eternity that you like everyone else long to go back to.
But you can’t. Because once you’re born you learn how you’re expected to behave in the world around you. As the author puts it the mind takes over from the being . And that clarity you had in the womb is lost forever. That’s what religion and philosophy are about – they’re efforts to recapture that lost purity.
It’s like a disease the author says and it slowly kills us all. He calls it moralism .
The key message here is: Moralism means that your mind dominates your being.
In trying to do the best for their children parents teach them morals. These lessons learned from past behavior help keep them safe and te Open / Comment

2021-10-14 06:39:44 Radical Honesty
Part of 1/17


What’s in it for me? Discover the incredible power of the truth.
When was the last time you told a lie? It wasn’t anytime recently was it? Ah good. Well kudos on your honesty! Unless that is you’re lying right now. Are you? 
No matter how you answer that question it’s a fact: people lie constantly. At least that’s what the author Brad Blanton believes. We lie to others about how we’re feeling and we lie to ourselves about who we are and what we want. Learning to lie is simply part of growing up.
But that doesn’t make it healthy. The truth is all this lying is killing us inside. So how do you stop when lying is everywhere?
The answer is simple yet also incredibly difficult: you just have to tell the truth. Radically.
In these blinks you’ll learn
what moralism is and how we can escape it;
why there’s nothing noble about bottling up your anger; and
why you need to tell your partner every last detail about your sex life.
Moralism means that your mind dominates your bein Open / Comment

2021-10-14 06:39:43 Radical Honesty
Part of 0/17

Radical Honesty (first published 1993 this edition 2004) is a guide to help you tell the truth. We all lie all the time and it’s only through extreme honesty that we can escape from the moralism that surrounds us and truly be ourselves. Open / Comment

2021-10-03 06:40:01 Sapiens
Part of 19/26

roved many religious principles. For example most people have ceased to believe that God created the world in seven days; we now believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection.
As the verities of religion are called into question capitalist ideology comes to the fore. For example in place of the traditional belief of waiting for happiness in the afterlife we nowadays concentrate on maximizing our pleasure on Earth. This of course leads us to seek out buy and consume more and more products and services designed to make us happier.
Humankind has never been more peaceful than in our globalized times.
Globalization is decidedly on the march. Not everybody is happy about this however. Critics of globalization claim among other things that it is eroding cultural diversity turning the whole world into one dully homogenous unity.   
But despite criticisms such as these globalization has a huge benefit: it is helping to make the world a more peaceful place.
Modern na Open / Comment

2021-10-03 06:40:00 Sapiens
Part of 18/26

ed; by the nineteenth century the British Empire alone covered more than half the globe.
With this huge reach the European countries pushed their ideas into every corner of the world. Local customs cultures and laws were replaced by mega-cultures based on European norms – be they western religion democracy or science. And although the European empires have long since died out we are still dealing with our cultural inheritance.
By far the greatest of these now global cultural norms is capitalism. Thanks in large part to the European empires people worldwide believe in the importance and power of money.
Today whether they live in Brazil or Bhutan Canada or Cambodia most people live lives centered around money and material possessions; we all want to maximize our incomes or display our wealth with our clothes and gadgets.
In fact the power and reach of global capitalism with support from science is eroding many of the other global cultures especially religion.
Modern science has disp Open / Comment

2021-10-03 06:40:00 Sapiens
Part of 17/26

ey.  
For example the King of Castile financed Columbus’s famous journey across the Atlantic. In return for backing the exploration the king acquired a huge American empire abounding in valuable resources like gold and silver.
Similarly the British government sent out James Cook to explore the uncharted Southern Pacific – an undertaking that netted them the territories of Australia and New Zealand.
In both cases the European economies grew as a result of exploration and scientific innovation. Unfortunately European gains came largely at the cost of local indigenous populations.
“Most scientific studies are funded because somebody believes they can help attain some political economic or religious goal.”
Today’s global society with its central belief in the power of capitalism is a legacy of European imperialism.
We have just discovered how the scientific method was used by many European governments to enlarge their empires and increase their profits. And it certainly work Open / Comment

2021-10-03 06:39:59 Sapiens
Part of 16/26

et progress depend on God alone people started thinking how they themselves could improve society via science.
By applying the scientific principles of exploration experimentation and observation people made huge epistemological leaps in areas such as medicine astronomy and physics – each development helping to make society a better place to live.
Take child mortality for example. Ever since scientific methods were applied to medicine and public health the rate of child mortality has declined. In the past it was common for even the wealthiest members of society to lose two or three children to premature deaths. Nowadays the rate of infant mortality for everyone is just 1 out of every 1 000 people.  
As well as being beneficial for human health the pursuit of science proved to be good for economies – something that many European governments were quick to realize. In search of new ideas and resources to enrich their nations kings and emperors showered scientists and explorers with mon Open / Comment

2021-10-03 06:39:59 Sapiens
Part of 15/26

e religions they promoted grew in both scope and power. Sometimes by force sometimes by gradual assimilation processes imperial rule managed to corral a many diverse ethnic and religious groups into a few mega-cultures.
For the past 2 500 years empires have in fact been the most common form of political organization.
The scientific revolution modernized humanity paving the way for new technologies imperialism and economic growth.
For most of its existence humankind has been a rather pessimistic breed. The majority of people throughout history didn’t believe in their own abilities but in the power of an almighty god. And since god had control over each and every human there was no point in mere mortals trying to make scientific advances or acquire new knowledge. It was better to sit back and await your pre-determined fate.  
In the 16th and 17th centuries however this pessimistic simpering attitude began to change. A scientific revolution swept through Europe; rather than l Open / Comment

2021-10-03 06:39:55 Sapiens
Part of 14/26

l and economic stability. For one they provided effective bureaucracy that homogenized laws and customs.
For example take the Hammurabi Code a collection of laws issued by the Babylonian King Hammurabi in 1776 BC. This code was a set of laws – instated throughout the entire Babylonian Empire – governing areas such as tax theft and murder. This code of laws established an empire-wide understanding of what was permitted and what was not. Wherever they traveled or traded within the imperial borders people knew which laws and customs to follow.
In order to enforce their laws emperors and kings needed people to accept their authority. This was primarily accomplished by dint of religion. If people accepted that the ruler was placed at the top by the will of the god they would be far more accepting of imperial rule.
For example King Hammurabi legitimized his rule and his code by declaring that he had been appointed by the gods to rule over the citizens of Mesopotamia.
As empires spread th Open / Comment

2021-10-03 06:39:55 Sapiens
Part of 13/26

nvertible into whatever else he might need. Or if he promised you a pig you could record the transaction and hold him to his promise when the date arrived.
The emergence of empires and religion pushed humankind in the direction of global unification.
As we have just seen the invention of writing and money made it easier to conduct economic transactions and harder to commit economic fraud. And yet this of course didn’t mean that economies suddenly started behaving smoothly and efficiently. In fact as the societies and economies continued to grow they became more difficult to control and regulate.
So what did human societies do?
They developed laws to regulate how people behaved and systems of authority to ensure that people obeyed them. Thus the first hierarchical societies were born with a king or emperor at the top ruling over everyone else.
Although nowadays we see them as authoritarian and cruel the monarchies and empires of the past provided a great deal of political socia Open / Comment