You Don't Need to Tell the Truth About a Nation

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I think one of the key points here in your work is it's not about telling bigger and bigger, more complex truths that that unite us. It's actually simple fictions that are able to tell us we will go to monkey heaven if we inor whatever. The different stories that we can get ourselves to believe cohere us exactly. You don't need to tell the truth in order to get a lot of people to co operate. You need a good story which could be completely ridiculous, but if enough believe it, it works. For me, nationalism is not about hating foreigners. It's about loving millions of strangers that you never met.

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.