Chapter 8: There is No Justice in History

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So how do societies even manage to get millions of people working together?

It's a fundamental puzzle, isn't it?

Our biology doesn't really seem set up for that kind of mass cooperation.

It really doesn't.

That's the core issue we're looking at today.

Unlike, say, bees or ants who have it sort of hardwired.

Right, they have their genetic programming.

Exactly.

Humans, well,

we had to figure something else out.

And our sources bring up this really powerful idea,

imagined orders, and the scripts that come with them.

Yeah, think of them as the shared stories, the belief systems, the rules.

They aren't biologically real, are they?

Not at all.

But we all collectively buy into them.

And that's what lets us cooperate on this huge scale.

It's like a human workaround for our biology.

A brilliant workaround in many ways.

And for everyone listening, our goal in this deep dive is really to unpack where these imagined orders come from.

And maybe more critically, why they so often seem to bake in inequality, right?

We want to give you a clear pathway through this complex concept.

Absolutely.

We'll look at examples like Hammurabi's Code, even the early U .S.

Republic.

Yeah, those really highlight the unfairness that can be built in.

And we'll dig into how these hierarchies we see based on caste, race, wealth, are essentially built on fictions, shared fictions.

And how discrimination gets stuck, creating these, like, vicious circles.

Definitely.

And we can't skip the really persistent, really complicated hierarchy of gender.

That's a big one.

So the takeaway for you, the listener, hopefully a much deeper grasp of the forces shaping our societies.

And maybe a bit of surprise at how, well, how little biological basis there actually is for so many inequalities we've just sort of accepted.

Okay, so cooperation.

It's the bedrock of human progress, obviously, working together in vast numbers.

But here's the catch our sources point out, right?

These imagined orders that enabled it all.

They weren't exactly fair in how they handed out the rewards.

That's a really central point.

This large -scale collaboration brought amazing achievements, sure, but the frameworks, they almost always involved sorting people, ranking them.

Like Hammurabi's code, it laid out a very distinct social ladder.

You had superiors, commoners, and slaves.

And the rules applied completely differently depending on where you stood on that ladder.

Totally.

Superiors had privileges, commoners less so, and slaves.

They faced incredibly harsh penalties, even just for, you know, complaining.

So right there, in one of the earliest legal codes, you see this principle.

Invent a social structure, then back it up with rules, even if those rules are incredibly unequal.

It's like a blueprint, isn't it, for how societies create winners and losers based on categories they just made up?

It really shows how these early imagined orders embedded inequality right into the law.

It wasn't just how things were, it was how things had to be, legally speaking.

And it's not like things magically got fairer later on.

Think about the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.

All men are created equal.

Famous words.

Hugely famous.

But the reality,

starkly different.

Yeah.

This nation founded on equality was, at the same time, deeply hierarchical.

Absolutely.

White men mostly got the benefits.

Women.

Largely excluded from political power, legal standing.

And the elephant in the room, of course, was slavery, existing right alongside all this talk of liberty.

Black people, Native Americans, they just weren't included in that all men part.

Not really.

So the big takeaway is that hypocrisy, right?

Right at the heart of even these revolutionary ideals.

These imagined orders of equality often had, well, very exclusive membership lists from day one.

It's almost hard to wrap your head around.

Many signers of the declaration were slave owners themselves.

And they didn't seem to see the massive contradiction.

Or maybe they chose not to.

Well, their idea of equality was quite specific.

It mostly meant equal laws among white men.

It wasn't about social or economic leveling.

Not really.

And liberty.

Heavily focused on protecting private property, which, of course, tended to lock in the wealth inequalities that already existed.

And crucially, these hierarchies weren't seen as, like, temporary problems to be fixed.

No, not at all.

They were presented as natural, even inevitable, part of the proper order of things.

That's a key feature, isn't it?

Imagined orders tend to claim they reflect some deep truth.

God's will, nature's laws.

Exactly.

It legitimizes the whole system.

Which brings us to this really core idea.

These distinctions—free slave, white, black, rich, poor—our sources argue they're basically rooted in shared fictions.

Right.

Except, as we'll get into,

the male -female hierarchy is maybe a bit more complicated.

But for these others, it's the stories we believe collectively.

Even though they're often presented as natural, unchanging truths.

They're human inventions, ultimately, not reflections of some inherent biological reality.

Just look at the justifications used throughout history.

Hammurabi thought slavery was divinely ordered.

And Aristotle, a giant of philosophy, right?

He argued some people just had a slavish nature, others a free nature.

Their social position was just their essence showing through.

Wild.

And later you had white supremacists using pseudoscience.

Uh -huh.

Trying to prove biological differences in intelligence, morality, you name it, between races.

And even today, you hear arguments about vast wealth gaps being just, you know, the natural outcome of different talents and efforts—meritocracy.

The idea that the rich are rich simply because they deserve to be.

Inherently.

Our sources also bring up this interesting concept of purity and pollution.

How that's used to keep hierarchies in place.

Oh yeah, that's a powerful tool.

Creating boundaries,

associating certain groups with being unclean or contaminated.

Physically and socially.

It creates these really strong emotional barriers, doesn't it?

Makes it harder to mix, harder to question the order.

You see echoes of it even today in how certain groups get talked about.

The Hindu caste system is a classic example.

That creation myth about Parusa.

The primal being, yeah.

Different castes coming from different body parts, Brahmins from the mouth, Shudras from the feet.

If you believe that story, then the social divisions seem as natural as having arms and legs.

And you find similar myths elsewhere, like Nuwa in ancient China, making nobles from fine yellow earth and commoners from mud.

These stories anchor the social divisions in some kind of primordial past, making them seem legitimate, inevitable.

The key thing is, these are stories.

As far as we know, Brahmins and Shudras weren't literally made from different parts.

Right.

That hierarchy came from laws and customs invented in India maybe 3000 years ago.

Exactly.

And contra Aristotle, there's no biological marker for slave or free.

Humans make those categories through laws and norms.

And while there are biological differences between groups we call racist skin color, hair texture, there's zero scientific proof for inherent differences in intelligence or morality.

Zero.

So it's a perfect illustration of imagined orders, creating social roles that feel real but aren't rooted in biology.

It's funny how we look at other societies' hierarchies and see the flaws, isn't it?

Like modern Westerners might easily condemn racial segregation.

But often don't question huge wealth disparities quite as readily.

Which really highlights how arbitrary our sense of just can be.

We condemn racial hierarchies, but wealth hierarchies, where your birth often dictates your opportunities.

That often seems, well,

more acceptable.

Even though, as the sources point out, a lot of wealth is simply inherited.

And so is poverty.

Often.

Okay, so if these hierarchies are often unjust and based on fiction, why have them at all?

It seems counterintuitive.

Well, the rather sobering argument from our sources is that complex human societies seem to need them.

They serve a function.

Apparently so.

They provide a way for strangers to interact in predictable ways, a kind of social shorthand.

Like in Shaw's Pygmalion, Henry Higgins instantly sizes up Eliza Doolittle based on how she speaks.

Exactly.

Her accent signals her class, and boom, a power dynamic is established immediately.

Or think about a florist dealing with dozens of customers.

Right.

They can't have a deep chat with everyone.

They use cues, clothes, age, maybe even same color, unfortunately, to make quick judgments on how to interact.

It's efficient, maybe, but obviously prone to prejudice.

Now, talent and ability must play some role, right?

Of course they do.

But the sources stress that these abilities usually get filtered through the existing imagined hierarchies.

In what way?

Two main ways, really.

First, most talents need nurturing.

You might be born gifted, but if you don't get the chance to develop that gift.

It stays hidden, and opportunities aren't spread evenly across the social ladder.

Precisely.

The Harry Potter example is pretty good here.

He's from a powerful wizarding family, but raised by muggles.

Completely unaware of his magic.

Until he gets into the wizarding world, gets training,

then his potential emerges.

Okay, so lack of opportunity is one filter.

What's the second?

Even if people from different backgrounds develop the exact same skills, they're often playing by different roles.

Ah, so the playing field isn't level.

Not at all.

Think of an entrepreneur from a marginalized group versus one from a privileged background.

Same skills, same idea.

But vastly different access to funding, networks, even just being taken seriously.

Exactly.

Their chances of success are likely very different because of the hierarchy they operate within.

So that leads us to how these things get stuck, how they perpetuate themselves, the vicious circle idea.

Yeah, it starts with some initial circumstance, maybe even an accident of history.

And then it becomes entrenched.

The groups on top gain an interest in keeping things the way they are.

Right.

The original reason might fade, but the structure persists because it benefits some people.

Let's look at the Hindu caste system again.

The theory involves the Indo -Aryan migration, right?

Around 3 ,000 years ago.

That's the prevailing idea.

These newcomers subjugate the locals, set up a stratified society, put themselves on And being a minority, they'd worry about losing their status, their identity.

So they create castes, specific roles, rights, obligations, and crucially, strict rules against mixing.

No intermarriage.

And then they weave it into religion.

Purity and pollution concepts become central.

Contact with lower castes pollutes you, pollutes society,

keeps everyone in their place.

It's that fear of contamination again,

a powerful social control mechanism.

If you want to isolate a group,

convince everyone they're dirty or dangerous.

It's a recurring tactic throughout history.

And over centuries, those four main castes split into thousands of sub -castes, the Jati.

Each with its own detailed rules about jobs, food, where you live, who you marry.

And anyone outside the system.

They became the untouchables, at the very bottom doing the most stigmatized work, living apart.

And incredibly, even though the caste system is officially illegal in India now.

It still influences marriage, jobs, social life in many places, shows how sticky these imagined orders can be.

A really powerful example of that long -term inertia.

Okay, now let's pivot to the racial hierarchy in America.

Sources describe a similar vicious circle there.

Very similar dynamics.

The enslavement of millions of Africans wasn't random, there were specific factors.

Like what?

Well, three main things.

Africa was relatively close, geographically.

Compared to where else Europeans might have gotten labor.

Right.

Second, there were already existing slave trading networks within Africa that Europeans could tap into.

Okay.

And the third?

This is the really grim irony.

Africans had some genetic resistance to diseases like malaria and yellow fever, which were rampant on plantations.

Europeans died off much more easily.

Wow.

So a biological advantage, immunity, actually led to social subjugation.

Perversely, yes, because they could survive the brutal conditions better, they became the preferred enslaved workforce.

And just like the Aryans in India, the white Europeans needed justifications beyond just economics.

Exactly.

They needed to legitimize it.

So cue the myths,

religious ones, pseudoscientific ones.

The curse of ham interpretation from the Bible.

To argue that Africans were destined for servitude and so -called scientific arguments about black people being inherently less intelligent, less moral.

Even unclean, disease -ridden, that pollution narrative again.

Absolutely.

These myths got woven deep into the culture.

And they didn't just vanish when slavery was abolished, did they?

Not at all.

The racist ideas persisted long after the laws changed.

Segregation continued, legally and socially.

And that's where the vicious circle really kicks in.

Post -slavery, black families start with huge disadvantages.

Less wealth, fewer educational opportunities.

Generations of stolen labor and denied rights created a massive gap from the start.

But it wasn't just money.

It was also the stigma.

Black people labeled as lazy, violent, hypersexual, polluted.

Which made it incredibly hard to get good jobs, good education, even if you had the talent.

The prejudice was everywhere.

And you see the self -reinforcing loop?

Lack of opportunity leads to fewer black professionals.

Which prejudice people then point to as proof of inferiority.

See?

They can't succeed on their own.

Ignoring the massive barriers, of course.

This prejudice then fuels things like Jim Crow laws.

Segregated everything, schools, buses, water fountains, restrictions on voting.

All justified by these myths about black inferiority and the need to protect whites.

They even use dodgy scientific studies to try and prove it.

The story of Klen and King is just chilling.

A black student tries to enroll at Ole Miss in 1958.

And they commit him to a mental asylum.

Just for trying to register, shows the extreme measures taken.

And the intense taboo around interracial sex, enforced by groups like the KKK.

It all comes back to that obsession with racial purity, fear of contamination.

Even beauty standards got warped.

White features became the ideal.

Internalizing the hierarchy on a really deep subconscious level.

So these vicious circles, they can last for centuries, making inequality worse over time.

Privilege breeds privilege.

Disadvantage breeds disadvantage.

It really drives home why history matters so much.

Yeah, if these divisions were biological, we'd just study biology.

But the biological differences are tiny.

Exactly.

So you have to look at the historical events, the power plays, the invented stories that turned imagined ideas into brutal social realities.

OK, let's shift gears now to a hierarchy that our sources say is maybe the most significant in human history, gender.

Yeah, the division between men and women, it seems to be present in almost every society we know of.

And usually, especially since agriculture, it's involved men holding more power being valued more highly.

It's remarkably consistent, even more so than race or caste, which have varied a lot more across time and place.

We see glimpses of it really early on, those Chinese oracle bones around 1200 BC.

What about Lady Hay giving birth?

Yeah, they ask if the birth date is auspicious.

She has a daughter on an inauspicious day and the record just says,

not lucky, it was a girl.

Oof, pretty blunt.

And that preference for boys persisted for millennia, even during China's one -child policy recently.

The cultural bias was so strong it led to abandonment, even infanticide of baby girls, just tragic.

In many societies, women were treated almost like property, belonging to fathers, then husbands.

And the laws reflected that, like rape laws often focusing on the violation of the man's property rights, not the woman's bodily autonomy.

That Bible passage mentioned is a stark example.

A man assaults an unmarried virgin.

He has to pay her father and marry her.

Her own perspective, largely irrelevant in the legal sense there.

And the fact that marital rape wasn't even a crime in many places until relatively recently just underscores that power imbalance within marriage itself.

So this raises the big question for gender.

Is this hierarchy, this preference for men, another imagined order like caste or race?

Or does it have deeper biological roots?

And if it does have biological roots, do they actually explain why men almost always ended up on top?

It's tricky.

Our sources acknowledge that clear biological differences women bearing children, obviously.

But they argue that societies have built enormous cultural structures on top of that biological reality.

Layers and layers of beliefs and norms that have very little actual basis in biology.

So again, we're seeing imagined order shaping how we understand even fundamental biological differences.

Think about all the traits societies label masculine or feminine.

Often there's no biological reason for it.

Compare women in ancient Athens, few legal rights, barred from public life, with women in modern Athens participating everywhere.

Their biology hasn't changed.

But their social roles, completely transformed, culture changed.

Even something like sexual attraction gets shaped by culture.

The modern West often sees exclusive heterosexuality as natural.

But ancient Greece,

totally different attitude.

The Iliad, Alexander, and Havassian same -sex relationships were much more accepted.

Which leads to that useful rule of thumb the sources offer.

Biology enables, culture forbids.

Meaning biology allows for a huge range of possibilities.

But culture steps in and says, okay, these possibilities are acceptable, those are not.

And that whole idea of natural itself, it's not really a biological concept, is it?

Not in the way it's often used.

The sources trace it back to Christian theology.

God creating things with a specific purpose.

But evolution doesn't work like that.

It's messy, it tinkers.

Organs evolve for one thing, then get repurposed.

Like mouths evolve for eating, now used for speaking, kissing.

Or wings on insects, maybe originally for temperature control, now used for flight.

Arguing a mosquito is unnatural for flying shows how silly that rigid definition of purpose can be.

So applying that to gender.

Saying women's natural function is only having babies.

Or that homosexuality is unnatural.

It doesn't hold up from an evolutionary perspective.

It really doesn't.

Which brings us neatly to distinguishing sex from gender.

Okay, sex is biological, right?

Male -female chromosomes.

Correct.

Gender is cultural, man -woman.

It's the social category, with all the roles, rights, duties a society attaches to it.

And while sex and gender usually align.

The cultural baggage tied to man and woman often has very little connection to the underlying biology.

What it meant to be a man, for Louis IVIII in France, wigs, heels, makeup.

Totally different from, say, Barack Obama's image of masculinity.

Biology hasn't changed, but the gender script has, massively.

So gender, the social rules, is an imagined order layered onto biological sex.

Exactly.

And becoming a man or a woman, culturally speaking, is this ongoing performance, isn't it?

You have to constantly prove you fit the mold.

Which circles back to that big question.

What's so good about men?

Why has patriarchy valuing men more been so incredibly common since agriculture?

Yeah, across almost all societies, regardless of how they defined man or woman.

Being male generally came with higher status, more rewards.

Patriarchy socializes everyone into these roles, and then rewards conformity unequally.

Women often end up with fewer resources, fewer opportunities, less power.

Even famous powerful women Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, Wu Zetian, are often seen as exceptions proving the rule.

Look at Elizabeth in England.

The queen was female, sure.

But almost every other position of power,

held by men.

And this pattern shows up everywhere.

Afro -Eurasia, the Americas before Columbus, cultures that had no contact, still develop a patriarchal system.

Which strongly suggests there might be some universal factor at play.

But crucially, our sources say we don't have a really convincing biological explanation for it yet.

Okay, let's look at the biological theories that have been proposed and why they fall short.

First up, muscle power.

Men are stronger, so they dominate.

Seems intuitive, but it has problems.

First, men are stronger on average, and mainly in specific ways, like upper body strength.

Women often have greater endurance.

And, historically, women did tons of hard physical labor, didn't they?

But they were still excluded from positions of power that didn't require strength.

Exactly.

And the biggest issue,

in humans,

physical strength just doesn't directly correlate with social power.

Right.

Think of elderly leaders, or skinny intellectuals influencing policy, or plantation owners versus slaves.

Strength isn't the deciding factor.

Social skills, alliances, organizations, those seem much more important for human power structures.

So, basing the most widespread hierarchy solely on brute force seems unlikely.

Okay, theory two.

Aggression.

Men are more violent, control the military, therefore control society.

Again, there might be average differences in aggression, biologically speaking, but the leap from men are more likely to be soldiers, to men inevitably control everything, is flawed.

It's like saying, because the factory workers are mostly group X, the managers must also be group X.

Doesn't follow.

History gives us counter examples.

Military leaders who weren't warriors themselves, like aristocratic generals.

Or China, where civilian mandarins often held ultimate authority over the military.

Plus, running an army or a war effort requires organization, cooperation, logistics.

Skills not exclusively male,

maybe even stereotypically female sometimes, like diplomacy and appeasement.

Look at Augustus, his success came more from political skill, clementia, than just military might.

Alright, third theory.

Patriarchal genes.

Different evolutionary strategies for men and women.

This one suggests men evolved to be ambitious, competitive to win mates, while women evolved to be submissive, nurturing, needing male support for kids.

But that assumes women's dependence automatically means dependence on men.

Right.

Why not dependence on female relatives, on the community, and look at other species?

Like elephants or bonobos.

Exactly.

Matriarchal societies where related females cooperate and actually dominate the more competitive males.

So the big puzzle for humans is, if cooperation is key for homo sapiens, why does the supposedly less cooperative gender, in this theory, end up controlling the supposedly more cooperative one, women?

We don't have a good answer.

It really challenges our assumptions about gender and power.

What we do know, though, is that things are changing rapidly.

Absolutely.

The last century or so has seen a huge revolution in gender roles in many places.

Equal legal rights, political rights, economic opportunities.

And a fundamental rethinking of gender itself and sexuality.

The speed is stunning.

Think about it.

Early 20th century, women voting was outrageous in most places.

Female Supreme Court justices, unthinkable.

Now, commonplace in many countries.

And legal same -sex marriage spreading.

These are massive shifts in the imagined order.

Profound shifts.

So if patriarchy was based mainly on myths, as these changes suggest,

why was it so universal and stable for so long?

That remains the perplexing question, doesn't it, as we wrap up?

So let's quickly summarize the key takeaways from this deep dive.

We've seen how imagined orders, these shared fictions, are crucial for human cooperation on a mass scale.

But they almost always come with hierarchies, which are often deeply unfair, even though they're presented as natural or inevitable.

We explored how these hierarchies, whether based on class, caste, or race, get entrenched through vicious circles of discrimination.

And we spent a good deal of time on the gender hierarchy, perhaps the most persistent and widespread, yet biologically the hardest to fully explain.

Understanding that these powerful social structures are often built on imagination, on stories, is just essential for grasping human history and how our societies work.

Absolutely.

Which leaves us with a final thought for our listeners.

Given how quickly gender roles have changed, and how we now recognize the flimsy basis of past hierarchies like race,

what seemingly natural aspects of our current social order might future generations look back on with total disbelief?

What injustices are we blind to today because they feel normal?

It's definitely something to chew on.

We should constantly question the naturalness of our own social norms.

Definitely worth pondering.

Okay, I think we've managed to cover the key ideas, the timelines, the arguments, the examples from this time to pretty thoroughly.

The imagined orders, the hierarchies, the shifts.

Yes, we've aimed to hit all the main points regarding Harari's theses on how these constructs shape humanity.

It's complex stuff.

It really is.

Thanks for joining us for this deep dive.