The subjective reality, in contrast, depends on my personal beliefs and feelings. The author gives an example in the book pain, suppose I feel a sharp pain in my head and go to the doctor. The doctor checks me thoroughly but finds nothing wrong. So she sends me for a blood test, urine test, DNA test, X-ray, electrocardiogram, fMRI scan, and a plethora of other procedures. When the results come in she announces that I am perfectly healthy, and I can go home. Yet I still feel a sharp pain in my head. Even though every objective test has found nothing wrong with me, and even though nobody except me feels the pain, for me the pain is 100 percent real.
Most people presume that reality is either objective or subjective and that there is no third option. Hence once they satisfy themselves that something is not just their own subjective feeling, they jump to the conclusion that it must be objective. If lots of people believe in God; if money makes the world go round; and if nationalism starts wars and builds empires – then these things aren’t just subjective beliefs of mine. God, money and nations must therefore be objective realities.
However, there is a third level of reality: the intersubjective level.
Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans. Many of the most important agents in history are intersubjective.
Money, for example, has no objective value. You cannot eat, drink or wear a dollar bill. Yet as long as billions of people believe in its value, you can use it to buy food, beverages, and clothing. If the baker suddenly loses his faith in the dollar bill and refuses to give me a loaf of bread for this green piece of paper, it doesn’t matter much. I can just go down a few blocks to the nearby supermarket. However, if the supermarket cashiers also refuse to accept this piece of paper, along with the hawkers in the market and the salespeople in the mall, then the dollar will lose its value. The green pieces of paper will go on existing, of course, but they will be worthless. The author mentions a multitude of instances where such things actually happened in real life.
On 3rd November 1985, the Myanmar government unexpectedly announced that banknotes of twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred kyats were no longer legal tender. People were given no opportunity to exchange notes, and the savings of a lifetime were instantaneously turned into heaps of worthless paper. To replace the defunct notes, the government introduced new seventy-five-kyat bills, allegedly in honour of the seventy-fifth birthday of Myanmar’s dictator, General Ne Win.
In August 1986, banknotes of fifteen kyats and thirty-five kyats were issued. Rumour had it that the dictator, who had a strong faith in numerology, believed that fifteen and thirty-five are lucky numbers. They brought little luck to his subjects. On the 5th of September 1987, the government suddenly decreed that all thirty-five and seventy-five notes were no longer money.
The value of money is not the only thing that might evaporate once people stop believing in it. Our author says that the same can happen to laws, gods, and even entire empires. One moment they are busy shaping the world, and the next moment they no longer exist. Zeus and Hera were once important powers in the Mediterranean basin, but today they lack any authority because nobody believes in them.
The Soviet Union could once destroy the entire human race, yet it ceased to exist at the stroke of a pen.
At 2 p.m. on 8th December 1991, in a state dacha near Viskuli, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords, which stated that ‘We, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine, as founding states of the USSR that signed the union treaty of 1922, hereby establish that the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality ceases its existence.’
And that was that. No more the Soviet Union. Following the above quote, Our author says something that did truly make me question everything I had believed up until that point in time.
“It is relatively easy to accept that money is an intersubjective reality. Most people are also happy to acknowledge that ancient Greek gods, evil empires, and the values of alien cultures exist only in the imagination. Yet we don’t want to accept that our God, our nation or our values are mere fictions because these are the things that give meaning to our lives. We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our heads. Yet in truth, the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.”
Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories.
Those of us who grew up in fairly religious families will probably understand the shock of someone reading that chapter and those passages for the first time. If you grew up in an American Catholic family, the notion that God and America might just be stories we tell ourselves and real objective realities would probably be shunned down in your head before a moment of consideration as blasphemy and treason.
But that is just the nature of the book Yuval Noah Harari dared to write – it asks a lot of questions. A lof uncomfortable questions. Why does a particular action – such as getting married in a church, fasting on Ramadan, or voting on election day – seem meaningful to us? Most likely because our parents also think it is meaningful, as do our brothers, our neighbours, people in nearby cities, and even the residents of far-off countries. And why do all these people think it is meaningful? Because their friends and neighbours also share the same view.
People constantly reinforce each other’s beliefs in a self-perpetuating loop. Each round of mutual confirmation tightens the web of meaning further until you have little choice but to believe what everyone else believes.
Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities, and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organize crusades, socialist revolutions, and human rights movements.
Other animals may also imagine various things. A cat waiting to ambush a mouse might not see the mouse but may well imagine the shape and even taste of the mouse. Yet to the best of our knowledge, cats are able to imagine only things that actually exist in the world, like mice. They cannot imagine things that they have never seen or smelled or tasted – such as the US dollar, the Google corporation, or the European Union. Only Sapiens can imagine such chimeras.
Consequently, whereas cats and other animals are confined to the objective realm and use their communication systems merely to describe reality, Sapiens use language to create completely new realities.
During the last 70,000 years, the intersubjective realities that Sapiens invented became ever more powerful so that today they dominate the world. Will the chimpanzees, the elephants, the Amazon rainforests and the Arctic glaciers survive the twenty-first century? This depends on the wishes and decisions of intersubjective entities such as the European Union and the World Bank; entities that exist only in our shared imagination. No other animal can stand up to us, not because they lack a soul or a mind, but because they lack the necessary imagination. Lions can run, jump, claw and bite. Yet they cannot open a bank account or file a lawsuit. According to our author, in the twenty-first century, a banker who knows how to file a lawsuit is far more powerful than the most ferocious lion in the savannah.
In the book, the author lays out in larger detail how the ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively. 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 different 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.
Homo sapiens have been able to revise their behaviour rapidly in accordance with changing needs. This opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution. Speeding Down this fast lane, Homo sapiens soon far outstripped all other human and animal species in their ability to cooperate.
If cooperation is the key, how come the ants and bees did not beat us to the nuclear bomb even though they learned to cooperate en masse millions of years before us?
Because their cooperation lacks flexibility.
Bees cooperate in very sophisticated ways, but they cannot reinvent their social system overnight. If a hive faces a new threat or a new opportunity, the bees cannot, for example, guillotine the queen and establish a republic.
Social mammals such as elephants and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than bees, but they do so only with small numbers of friends and family members. Their cooperation is based on personal acquaintances.
“If I am a chimpanzee and you are a chimpanzee and I want to cooperate with you, I must know you personally: what kind of chimp are you? Are you a nice chimp? Are you an evil chimp? How can I cooperate with you if I don’t know you?”
To the best of our knowledge, only Sapiens can cooperate in very flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. This concrete capability – rather than an eternal soul or some unique kind of consciousness – explains our mastery of planet Earth.
Why are humans alone able to construct such large and sophisticated social systems?
All large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity.
‘If you sacrifice ten bulls to the sky god, the rain will come; if you honour your parents, you will go to heaven; and if you don’t believe what I am telling you – you’ll go to hell.’
As long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the same stories, they all follow the same rules, making it easy to predict the behaviour of strangers and to organize mass-cooperation networks.
Chimpanzees cannot invent and spread such stories, which is why they cannot cooperate in large numbers. Neither could the Neanderthals, or the dwarf-like humans of Flores Isles. So when a band of Homo Erectus met a much, much larger band of Homo Sapiens somewhere in East Asia – it didn’t matter that an individual Homo Erectus had far superior strength than Sapiens, they were significantly outnumbered, and at the end of the day, the Sapiens prevailed.
Sapiens is a book that tackles many subjects, Religions, Agriculture, Empires, and Capitalism – as the subtitle suggests, it presents a brief history of Humankind – how humans went from insignificant apes to the most fearsome species on the planet. But out of all the topics it explores, the impact of language and especially fiction is what grabbed my attention and held it. I first read the book in August of 2019 – and it has been holed up in my mind ever since. It wasn’t human intelligence or the tool-making abilities that made us into the Kings of the earth. All the other human species also had our big brains and our nimble thumbs, and they have perished with all the other animals that have gone extinct for the last 70,000 years. It was our ability to tell stories to each other and believe in those fictions as if they were as real as the sun and the moon – that united our species and gave us an edge that no other species had.
Even though we have named ourselves Homo(humans) Sapiens (wise), meaning wise humans if directly translated, intelligence is not what is unique about us – it is our ability to use language in a way that no other species can, and create myths to be united in one belief system. It certainly makes you question everything you ever believed in. Was Santa real? Did Odin really sacrifice his eye in exchange for knowledge? Those are easy questions to answer because we don’t believe in those stories ourselves. But Sapiens is a book that makes you ask the really uncomfortable questions – What if our God was as much of a story as the Norse or Greek gods. What if Jesus was as much of a myth as Thor and Loki. Sapiens explores more in-depth where these common myths such as different types of religions, empires, and economic systems come from. But just being aware of the fact that our entire lives are based around fiction that we collectively choose to believe in, I think, gives life a new perspective that I didn’t have before. It completely changes how we choose to see issues like Animal Agriculture, Veganism, and climate change. Because at the end of the day, we’re not superior to nature, we’re not superior to other creatures living on earth.
We’re just storytelling animals play-pretending to be grander and more gorgeous on a stage.
Author
Artie Frost
Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari.
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