Look around you. The chair where you sit, the device you hold, the coin you use to pay for the coffee and the country whose flag is on your passport. None of this would exist without the greatest superpower of our kind: the ability to invent stories and believe them.
The history of Homo sapiens is not only a chronicle of biological evolution or technological achievements; it is fundamentally the story of how we become the largest storytellers on the planet. About 70,000 years ago, the Cognitive Revolution turned into a common primate, who disputed space in the African savannah with lions and hyenas, into the undisputed ruler of the Earth. The secret of this twist was not physical strength or a brain just slightly larger, but the imagination of shared fictions.
Unlike other animals, who can only cooperate in small groups based on intimate knowledge and physical touch — as chimpanzees, whose social limit revolves around 150 individuals —, humans have discovered how to collaborate with millions of unknowns. And the cement that holds this colossal gear together are the imagined orders: myths that exist only in our collective mind, but that shape material reality with an overwhelming force.
Money is perhaps the most successful and universal myth ever created. A piece of paper or a handful of bits on a screen have no intrinsic value; you cannot eat them or shelter yourself in them. However, billions of people wake up every day to work in exchange for these coins because we all share the same faith that the neighbor, the baker and the government will also believe in their value. Money is mutual trust transformed into matter.
Likewise, nations and religions operate under the same logic of mass cooperation. An imaginary line drawn on the map creates the identity of a country, making people who have never seen each other in life ready to die and kill in the name of a flag. Gods, laws, human rights and even limited companies are legal and cultural fictions that organize the chaos of the real world, allowing us to build skyscrapers, organize health nets and send rockets into space.
The great paradox is that these myths, created to serve us, have ultimately profoundly shaped our current psychology. Our mind still carries the hunter-collector instincts that needed to survive in the jungle, but today we operate in a hypersocial world of abstract connections. We suffer from anxiety because of floating numbers in the stock market, we conflict by ideological differences and seek belonging to digital tribes. We were shaped to believe, and it is this belief that makes us capable of more heroic altruism or more systemic cruelty.
Understanding our trajectory under this macro lens gives us a lucidity shock. The world we live in is not an absolute and unchanging truth, but a tapestry woven by human imagination. And if we're the ones who invented the rules of the game that we play today, that means we also have the power to rewrite tomorrow's stories.