Could you convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven? Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths — and this is what makes large-scale cooperation possible. Every institution, nation, corporation, and religion runs on shared fiction.
Simple Picture
ELI5: ants cooperate because it is hardwired. Humans cooperate because they believe the same stories. Money, nations, human rights, corporations — none of these exist outside the stories we tell. The stories are not lies; they are the operating system of civilization. Change the story and you change the world. Forget that it is a story and you are trapped inside it.
The Agricultural Trap
The Agricultural Revolution was not a great leap forward. It was the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. Foragers worked less, ate better, and suffered less disease. But farmers could produce more calories per acre, which meant more babies, which meant more mouths, which meant you could never go back.
The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. One of history’s few iron laws: luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
This is locally-optimal at the civilizational level. Each step — planting a few seeds, building a granary, irrigating a field — made life slightly easier in the short term. But the cumulative effect was a trap: more labor, more disease, more hierarchy, less freedom, and no way back because the population had already grown to depend on the surplus. The forager could move when threatened. The farmer tended to stay put and fight to the bitter end.
The diligent peasants almost never achieved the future security they craved. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the surplus and leaving peasants with bare subsistence. A single priest often does the work of a hundred soldiers — far more cheaply and effectively.
The State Replaces the Family
Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken traditional bonds. The state sent policemen to stop family vendettas. The market offered alternatives to community support. The offer could not be refused:
“Become individuals. Marry whomever you desire. Take up whatever job suits you. Live wherever you wish. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead.”
The collapse of family and local community — and their replacement by state and market — is one of the defining transformations of modernity. Markets and states foster imagined communities containing millions of strangers tailored to national and commercial needs.
This is the strong gods thesis from the historical angle: the post-war project did not invent the dissolution of community — it accelerated a process that began with the Agricultural Revolution and intensified with industrialization. Hirschman’s framework applies: the state offered individuals a permanent exit from the obligations of family and community, and the people who took the exit were the ones with the most options — leaving behind those who could not leave.
Even the freedom we value so highly may be working against us. We can choose our spouses, friends, and neighbors, but they can choose to leave us. With unprecedented power to decide our own path, we find it ever harder to make commitments. We live in an increasingly lonely world of unraveling communities and families — which is precisely the loneliness Arendt identified as the precondition for ideological capture.
Happiness and the Pursuit of Feelings
Assessing life minute by minute, medieval people had it rough. But if they believed in everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may have viewed their lives as far more meaningful than modern secular people who can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion. Happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. It consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.
The Buddha’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving. The real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes a constant state of tension, restlessness, and dissatisfaction. True happiness is independent of inner feelings. The more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer. The recommendation: stop not only the pursuit of external achievements but also the pursuit of inner feelings.
This is pleasure as organizing principle from the deepest angle: the problem is not that we organize around pain instead of pleasure, but that organizing around feelings at all — pleasant or unpleasant — is the trap. The game of Black and White becomes a fight when we fail to see the connection between crest and trough. The pursuit of happiness has become a mechanical rabbit that moves ahead at whatever speed it is pursued.
Trust in the Future
The most important economic resource is trust in the future. Previous eras didn’t lack the idea of credit — they lacked the belief that tomorrow would be better than today. The modern economy runs on the revolutionary assumption that growth is possible and likely. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest.
The magic circle of imperial capitalism: credit financed discoveries → discoveries led to colonies → colonies provided profits → profits built trust → trust translated into more credit. This is antifragility at the economic level: the system gains from volatility as long as trust in the future holds. When trust collapses, so does everything built on it. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust.
Consumption as Identity
Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. Paris is not a city, nor India a country — they are experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons and make us happier.
Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world. Instead of eating little, people eat too much and then buy diet products — contributing to economic growth twice over. People are defined above all by what they consume. It is the keystone of their identity. A German vegetarian might prefer to marry a French vegetarian than a German carnivore.
This is Bourdieu at population scale: taste as identity, consumption as class performance, and the entire apparatus running on the fiction that buying the right things makes you the right person.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “everything is just made-up stories — nothing is real.”
The midwit take is “Harari is a popularizer who oversimplifies complex history.”
The better take is that the power of shared fiction is not a debunking but a recognition: the stories that organize civilization are neither true nor false — they are functional or dysfunctional. Money works not because gold has inherent value but because everyone believes everyone else believes it does. Religion asks us to believe in something; money asks us to believe that other people believe in something. The question is never whether a story is “real” but whether it produces a world you want to live in. The most successful shared fictions eventually compress into hyper-distilled symbols — the cross, the crescent, 道 — glyphs so dense with accumulated meaning that they synchronize millions of nervous systems in a glance, solving the bandwidth problem that fiction alone cannot: you cannot coordinate a civilization on a novel, but you can coordinate one on a symbol that has been through two thousand years of lossy compression.
Main Payoff
Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires, the real question is not “What do we want to become?” but “What do we want to want?” Those who are not spooked by this question probably have not given it enough thought.
We are wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
References:
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind