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Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. 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.
Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. 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.
The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual
level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.
