Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Harari sticks a pin in humanity’s inflated ego and lets the air out. He shows that humanity’s real power is not physical but its capacity to “make up fictions and believe in them en masse.” States, religions, corporations, money and human rights are all shared fictions we invented. We say Cevvela is the voice of those left half-finished because no one believed in them; this book, too, shows how a belief — a fiction — builds the world. It shatters received wisdom by saying that the agricultural revolution was not progress but a trap that made humans slaves to wheat. You fall into a deep sense of nothingness as you realize that the ideologies you fight for and your bank accounts are merely ghosts that exist only inside your mind. We are savages who tell stories.