For me as a faithful Christian this was a tough one. Especially after reading “The Book that Made Your World : How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization” by Vishal Mangalwadi, Matt Ridley’s book has been really challenging for me. Not only does he state that “all gods and all superstitions emerge from within human minds“, he also argues for seemingly crazy ideas such as free will of individuals being an illusion and the actions and/or existence of influential people in our world being irrelevant to its history and future development.
Favorite quotes from the book:
“Economic growth is more than just a growth of income – it is the appearance of a whole system of collaborative engagement among people to drive innovation that cuts the time it needs people to fill needs.”
“Fascism and communism were and are the religions of the state.”
Key takeaway:
My key takeaway from this one is, that almost everyone on our planet assumes, that the world is organised, created and influenced from top down. However this is not true in most of the cases, as Matt Ridley impressively proves. Regarding many different aspects of our society he shows off a significant error in the typical human way of thinking. Many people grant way too much credit to single sources of influence in our world rather than to historically and evolutionary grown ideas. No matter the reason of this phenomenon it can help being aware of this common mistake for your own life as well as for working and living with others.
Astounding fact:
Did you know that in order to control the world’s population millions of people actually have been and are being sterilized? During the years of 2013-2014 4.000.000 men and women from India had been sterilized in order to cope with the country’s growing population. In the 70s mass sterilizations started as a mandatory procedure for Indias government in order to receive urgently needed development aid by developed countries such as the United States. Nowadays especially low-income groups of Indias society sign up in sterilization programs all over the country in order to earn as much as a couple hundred dollars.
Often times the ability to have an own family is that way traded against a short term improvement of living conditions.
Unfortunatelly people in developing countries do not always pay a price as “low” as that. Resulting from poor medical conditions in these parts of our planet people die regularly from the aftermath of these operations.
My Rating: 7/10
Despite my skepticism about Ridley’s anti-religious point of view I learned a lot from reading his book. His uncommon analogies surprise the reader regularly and make him rethink his usual way of thinking. Though some of the chapters were quite challenging I really enjoyed reading the book and recommend it to anybody interested in the fields of science, history, economics, politics and philosophy.
Did you read The Evolution Of Everything too? Make sure to leave a comment so we can get in touch about this great piece of literature.
