The Importance of Language in the Making of a Nation

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I think this is such an important aspect of your work, as you basically argue that nationalism is a sort of a boot loader for democracy. You have to go through these stages, and you have to have a period where you cohere around the story of a nation. I know in your past work, you've talked about the importance of language in doing that. And something i tink hear fom ooften all is that, yes, the map is not the territory, but once you have a map, that map starts to terraform the territory. Our stories about the world start affecting the mississippi. Yes, they become the most powerful thing in the world.

Yuval Noah Harari is one of the rare historians who can give us a two-million-year perspective on today’s headlines. In this wide-ranging conversation, Yuval explains how technology and democracy have evolved together over the course of human history, from paleolithic tribes to city states to kingdoms to nation states. So where do we go from here? “In almost all the conversations I have,” Yuval says, “we get stuck in dystopia and we never explore the no less problematic questions of what happens when we avoid dystopia.” We push beyond dystopia and consider the nearly unimaginable alternatives in this special episode of Your Undivided Attention.