Fiction, Cooperation, and Culture Theme Analysis

In Sapiens, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that humankind’s early ancestors, Homo sapiens, conquered the world 70,000 years ago because of a newfound ability to imagine—and collectively believe in—fictional realities, which he calls “imagined orders” (e.g., myths, religions, and concepts like “money” or “nation”). To Harari, believing in the same fictions or stories about how the world works enables people who wouldn’t otherwise know or trust each other to cooperate on a mass scale and coordinate their efforts to achieve a common goal (like global domination). Harari also stresses that “imagined orders” work because they successfully make people cooperate—not because they’re true or fair to everyone who believes in them. In fact, most imagined orders impose hierarchies that privilege some people and marginalize others, but Harari emphasizes that such hierarchies are neither absolute nor permanently binding. People can thus change their societies (and the power structures within them) by establishing new “imagined orders.” As long as the new ideas also facilitate mass cooperation in society and make it function on a large scale, Harari thinks they’ll take hold.

Harari argues that humans dominate life on Earth because we’re able to believe in shared fictions, or imagined stories about the world. Most animals, Harari explains, can only cooperate in small groups, and even archaic humans could only cooperate in groups of a few hundred people at most. Social groups tend to fracture into smaller factions when they get too large for the group’s members to know (and therefore, trust) the other members. Around 70,000 years ago, ancient humans figured out that individuals can “bond” with an idea, story, or myth (like “God” or “money”) and trust that others who also believe the story will follow its rules, even if they don’t know (or may never meet) each other. To Harari, cooperation with vast numbers of strangers is what makes large societies thrive—and believing in the same fictions thrusts people into cooperating.

Harari argues that myths about the world (like religions or political ideologies) work because people think the stories are true, so they comply. Yet, such myths can also have negative effects (for instance, legitimizing slavery or gender oppression), so it’s important to remember that humans can change the “imagined orders” we collectively rally around. Harari argues that although imagined orders pretend to offer true facts about the world, they don’t actually have any basis in biological reality. For example, Hammurabi’s Code, an archaic Mesopotamian social order, argues that there’s a “natural” social order (ordained by the “gods”) with aristocracy at the top, followed by commoners, and then slaves. Harari argues that Hammurabi’s Code is effective because it makes people believe they have a fixed role in society that they’re morally obligated to follow: the set-up successfully facilitates large-scale cooperation, but it’s neither true nor fair for everyone who believes in it. For Harari, it doesn’t make a difference if an imagined order is unfair or exploitative of some people. The fiction “sticks” if it’s “stable,” meaning people believe in it and therefore cooperate. Because imagined orders aren’t rooted in biological facts, they’re highly mutable, meaning human societies can—and often do—change the fictions that unite them. Harari thinks the French Revolution was a case in which one imagined order (the idea that all people are equal and fit to govern themselves) replaced another (the idea that aristocrats are born superior to commoners, and therefore more suited to rule the society). Believing in new myths, thus, can tangibly change societies. Harari subtly implies that any “imagined order” that makes people cooperate will likely stick and make the society function effectively, but humanity should also think about the negative impact that a particular imagined order has on a population if we want to mitigate oppression.