There Is No Justice in History

If imagined orders are powerful enough to move stone and build empires, Harari argues they are equally powerful at producing imagined hierarchies. Class, gender, and race have all, at different points in history, been treated as fixed facts of nature, even though each is really a cultural line that gets reinforced and made to feel natural through law, custom, and, when needed, outright violence.

Once inequality is built into a society's institutions, it tends to keep reproducing itself with very little further effort from anyone at the top. Privilege accumulates quietly across generations in the form of better food, better education, greater physical safety, and stronger social networks; the next generation then inherits that head start and, often sincerely, renames it merit — not because anyone is lying, but because the advantage has become invisible to the people who benefit from it.

Harari is explicit that history offers no built-in guarantee of eventual moral accounting. Conquests, slavery, and systematic discrimination do not automatically resolve themselves into justice over time; there is no cosmic ledger correcting the balance. Myths of racial purity, national destiny, or divine favor have repeatedly done real work making outright cruelty feel not just acceptable but honorable to the people carrying it out.

His example of the caste system in India, and of racial hierarchies constructed to justify the Atlantic slave trade, both illustrate the same underlying mechanism: an arbitrary, invented distinction gets dressed up as an eternal, natural, or divinely ordained fact, and once enough institutions — legal, religious, economic — are built on top of that story, unwinding it becomes far harder than inventing it was.

To actually read power in any historical or present-day system, Harari's method is to track concretely who benefits from a given story and who carries its cost, and then to notice how difficult it is, in practice, for those two roles to swap or dissolve. That difficulty is rarely an accident — the hierarchy is very often designed, whether deliberately or through accumulated self-interest, not to change.