Another superficial article by Yuval Noah Harari

Overall, it’s pretty trivial, although it’s fundamentally true. As has been his custom since then, here too he makes gross logical errors. For example, at the beginning he writes: It is a dangerous mistake to imagine that without national sentiment we would live in a liberal paradise. More likely we would live in tribal chaos. Peaceful, prosperous, and liberal countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland tend to enjoy a strong and well-established sense of nationalism. By contrast, countries whose residents lack a strong sense of nationalism, such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and Congo, tend to suffer from violence and poverty. The question, of course, is what the direction of the correlation is. Is it because of the lack of national sentiment that violence and poverty arise, or is it because of violence and poverty that national sentiments fade away? And so on.