Humankind's Greatest GIft Is Also Its Greatest Liability

If bees organize by innate mandate and chimps through tight-knit social interactions, the miracle of human ascendance in the animal kingdom owes to a penchant for behaving in accordance with social narratives. To put it bluntly, we act as if the stories we make up are real.

As Harari writes in the magisterial Sapiens, “As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.” A monkey can say, “There is a caribou by the river” but could never communicate that, “The caribou by the river is the spiritual guardian of our city.”

This ability to communicate about the unreal allows us to create all manner of social structures that help bring about predictable human behavior and that reliably breed trust. The State of Alabama, the Catholic church, the Constitution of the United States of America, the inalienable civil rights of man: none of these things are “real” in the strictest sense, but our shared belief in them and behaving as though they are real brings about orderly civilizations steeped in mutual trust. This ability to form and buy in to collective fictions is why, “…Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos.”

If our dominance as a species is a function of our shared trust in fictions, there is one fiction in particular that reigns supreme: money. Harari pulls no punches, “Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”