Category Archives: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

page 39 of 443 of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

This all realates to myth in that we are seeing the importance of fictions as a social necessity to maintain order and allow humans to work as a team consisiting of far more people than we could ever hope to be socialy active with. Our imagination allows our tribe to be of indefinte size because we’ve reduced the risk that goes along with trusting strangers.

page 34 of 443 of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

As the author demonstratd earlier, we humans can only deal socially in groups no more than 100-150 people. After that it’s too many and problems arrise. However, because we can create these fictions, we can trust that people we’ve never met, whom otherwise we would be at war with, we enter into agreements of commerce and for other services, even though they are not part of our “tribe” of 150.

page 30 of 443 of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Interesting juxtaposition between conjuring up a LLC and a priest turning water and wine into Christ’s blood and body. There is a lot of convincing going on in both cases and the stronger the argument the more likely we’ll buy into the idea. “Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulity lies not in telling the story, but convincing everyone else to believe it.”