There is No Justice in History

Core idea

Every complex society organises itself through hierarchy, and every hierarchy is born of historical accident — a contingent advantage, an early law, a one-off conquest — that later generations dress up as the natural order. Slavery, caste, race, and patriarchy are not biological facts. They are imagined orders perpetuated by a vicious circle in which the original injustice produces conditions that look like justifications for it.

Why it matters

If hierarchies were truly natural, reforming them would be a futile war against biology. Harari's argument is the reverse: because they are invented, they can be unwound — but only if we stop accepting their self-flattering origin stories. Recognising the gap between accident and "nature" is the precondition for any serious project of justice.

Key takeaways

Mental model

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Practical application

Audit any hierarchy with three questions

When you encounter a social ranking presented as obvious or natural, ask: (1) what historical accident installed it, (2) what laws or customs perpetuated it across generations, and (3) what gap between groups is now being used as evidence of essence? If the answer to the first is "no one knows, it has always been so," that is itself a warning sign — every hierarchy was new once.

Distinguish ability from access

Harari notes that even genuine differences in talent are mediated by the hierarchy: talent only shows up when nurtured. When debating meritocracy, separate the question "are abilities distributed unequally?" (often yes) from "did everyone have equal access to develop them?" (almost never). Conflating the two is the favoured trick of the powerful.

Example

Consider South African beaches under apartheid, reserved for whites only. There was no biological logic — pale skin is more vulnerable to sun, not less. The original cause was Dutch and British conquest in the 17th–19th centuries. Laws like the Group Areas Act locked the advantage in. Generations of unequal schooling, capital, and movement produced unequal outcomes. By the 1950s, white commentators could point to those outcomes as proof of natural superiority — the loop closed. The same pattern explains why African slavery in the New World drew on Africans (proximity, immunity to tropical disease, established slave routes) rather than on intrinsic difference, then re-emerged as pseudo-scientific racism a century later.

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