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The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution.
Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
nation,
Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.
There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination.
Lawyers call this a ‘legal fiction’.
It can’t be pointed at; it is not a ph...
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But it exists as a leg...
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Peugeot belongs to a particular genre of legal fictions called ‘limited liability companies’.
If Jean had borrowed 1,000 gold coins to set up his workshop and the business failed, he would have had to repay the loan by selling his private property – his house, his cow, his land.
If he couldn’t cover the debt, he could be thrown in prison by the state or enslaved by his creditors.
He was fully liable, without limit, for all obligations incur...
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And indeed this legal situation discouraged entrepreneurship.
In the US, the technical term for a limited liability company is a ‘corporation’,
Despite their having no real bodies, the American legal system treats corporations as legal persons, as if they were flesh-and-blood human beings.
he set up a limited liability company.
If one of the cars broke down, the buyer could sue Peugeot, but not Armand Peugeot.
The loan, after all, had been given to Peugeot, the company, not to Armand Peugeot, the Homo sapiens.
Peugeot, the company, is still alive and well.
right words at the right moment, mundane bread and wine
turned into God’s flesh and blood.
and hocus pocus – the bread turned into C...
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millions of devout French Catholics behaved as if God really existed in the con...
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and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was incorporated.
does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies?
this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’, or ‘imagined realities’.
Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most sincerely believe in the existence of gods and demons.
Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies.
Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existen...
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As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.
right circumstances myths can change rapidly. In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people.
Animal behaviour is also influenced by environmental factors and individual quirks.
Male chimps cannot gather in a constitutional assembly to abolish the office of alpha male and declare that from here on out all chimps are to be treated as equals.
As a prime example, consider the repeated appearance of childless elites, such as the Catholic priesthood, Buddhist monastic orders and Chinese eunuch bureaucracies.
since these dominant members of society willingly give up procreation.
Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of Wilhelm II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same.
Archaeologists excavating 30,000-year-old Sapiens sites in the European heartland occasionally find there seashells from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts.
Neanderthal sites lack any evidence of such trade. Each group manufactured its own tools from local materials.
The Catholic alpha male abstains from sexual intercourse and raising a family, even though there is no
genetic or ecological reason for him to do so.
Trade cannot exist without trust, and it is very difficult to trust strangers.
The global trade network of today is based on our trust in such fictional entities as the dollar, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the totemic trademarks of corporations.
When two strangers in a tribal society want to trade, they will often establish trust by appealing to a common god, m...
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If archaic Sapiens believing in such fictions traded shells and obsidian, it stands to reason that they could also have traded information, thus creating a much denser...
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served Neanderthals and other arc...
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Fifty Neanderthals cooperating in traditional and static patterns were no match for 500 versatile and innovative Sapiens.
The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’.
The ancient flint spearhead was manufactured in minutes by a single person, who relied on the advice and help of a few intimate
The production of a modern nuclear warhead requires the cooperation of millions of strangers all over the world – from the workers who mine the uranium ore in the depths of the earth to theoretical physicists who write long mathematical formulas to describe the interactions of subatomic particles.
