Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

Hoc est corpus meum!
’ (Latin for ‘This
is my body!’) and hocus pocus – the bread turned into Christ’s esh. Seeing that
the priest had properly and assiduously observed all the procedures, millions of
devout French Catholics behaved as if God really existed in the consecrated bread
and wine.
In the case of Peugeot SA the crucial story was the French legal code, as written
by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certi ed lawyer
followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths
on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and a xed his ornate signature to the
bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was incorporated.
When in 1896 Armand Peugeot wanted to create his company, he paid a lawyer to
go through all these sacred procedures. Once the lawyer had performed all the
right rituals and pronounced all the necessary spells and oaths, millions of upright
French citizens behaved as if the Peugeot company really existed.
Telling e ective stories is not easy. The di culty lies not in telling the story,
but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this
question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories
about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it
gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to
cooperate and work towards common goals. Just try to imagine how di cult it
would have been to create states, or churches, or legal systems if we could speak
only about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees and lions.
Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories.
Within this network, ctions such as Peugeot not only exist, but also accumulate
immense power. The kinds of things that people create through this network of
stories are known in academic circles as ‘ ctions’, ‘social constructs’, or ‘imagined
realities’. An imagined reality is not a lie. I lie when I say that there is a lion near
the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there. There is nothing
special about lies. Green monkeys and chimpanzees can lie. A green monkey, for
example, has been observed calling ‘Careful! A lion!’ when there was no lion
around. This alarm conveniently frightened away a fellow monkey who had just
found a banana, leaving the liar all alone to steal the prize for itself.
Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as
long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the
world. The sculptor from the Stadel Cave may sincerely have believed in the
existence of the lion-man guardian spirit. Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most

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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 existence of human rights. No one was
lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the
human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya and human rights are all
figments of our fertile imaginations.
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has 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 gods, nations and corporations.
Bypassing the Genome
The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of
strangers to cooperate e ectively. But it also did something more. Since large-
scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be
altered by changing the myths – by telling di erent stories. Under the 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. Consequently,ever since
the Cognitive Revolution