John Blackwell

“Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“We see a complex relationship between technology on the one hand and religions and other kinds of stories on the other hand. Every new technological revolution also upsets the old systems of cooperation. Unless people can find new stories, the technology itself only results in chaos...
…In the 19th century, humans gained power over new kinds of technology like the steam engine and radio, but the immediate result was to create a lot of social and political chaos. The transition from a traditional to a modern industrial economy was hard and difficult. New classes of people emerged, especially the urban proletariat, and people did not know what to do…
One of the first reactions to this social and technological upheaval is to try to go back to the old stories, and find some security. Many people, especially beyond a certain age, do not like change. Their stories have been disrupted.
This is fundamentalism.
You often find that technological revolutions are accompanied by a wave of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism means looking for a basis and trying to go back to something that seems eternal, secure, and can protect us against all these changes.”
― Yuval Noah Harari

“A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind