Our eyes, for instance, are able to pick up less than one ten-trillionth of the available light spectrum.

In tight cultures – that include Pakistan, Germany, Malaysia, Switzerland, India, Singapore, Norway, Turkey, Japan and China – players dress more similarly, buy more similar things and possess superior self-control: they tend to have lower rates of crime, alcohol abuse and obesity. Their citizens are more punctual, and so is their public transport:

Stalin bought ‘the loyalty of the new middle class with “trinkets” but also with real privileges … thereby allowing for widening status differences’.

During the Raj, ‘many Indians adopted, with the zest of converts, Western ideas such as self-determination and human rights, and were dismayed when the British refused to live up to their own declared values by granting native Indians neither equal rights as British subjects or independence’, writes Harari. This pattern of status-striving has

Formal games madden us further by offering formal prizes that are zero-sum, with one person’s winning meaning another’s loss.

These mobs don’t seek to win over their victims and turn them into allies. They seek the maximal removal of their status and any of its symbols; ideally, reputational death.

Where once we belonged to our tribe, we began to belong to ourselves. Every human was precious; individuals had rights.

Humiliated grandiosity can trigger murder on an enormous scale because perpetrators inhabit a heroic story that says they’re categorically superior to their victims – effectively a different species of being. It’s typical for targets to be described in terms of low-status creatures: to the Communists, the middle classes were ‘leeches’; to the

When freedom means expulsion from the meaning you’ve spent your life making, then freedom is hell.