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Imagined Order and Collective Myth

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Imagined Order and Collective Myth

Among the most powerful ideas in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is a simple but disorienting claim: the large-scale cooperation that makes human civilization possible rests not on biological instincts, not on direct personal relationships, but on shared fictions — stories that everyone believes, whose power derives entirely from that shared belief.

The Cognitive Revolution: The Origin of Fiction

Approximately 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens underwent a cognitive transformation that Harari calls the Cognitive Revolution: the emergence of language capable of describing not just observable reality but entities that don’t physically exist at all.

“The truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.”

“The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.”

The biological substrate for large-scale cooperation did not change. Humans, like other primates, have social instincts built for bands of roughly 150 individuals (Dunbar’s number). Above that scale, direct personal knowledge and reciprocity break down. What enables million-person and billion-person cooperation is not biology but shared narrative.

Three Orders of Reality

Harari distinguishes three categories of reality:

Objective reality: Exists regardless of human consciousness or belief. Radioactivity was real before it was discovered. Rivers flow whether humans name them or not.

Subjective reality: Exists in the consciousness of a single individual. When you stop believing in a personal god, that god ceases to exist for you, regardless of what others believe.

Intersubjective reality: Exists within networks of communicating human minds. It depends on collective belief but has real force in the world. Money, nations, laws, companies, human rights, religions — all are intersubjective.

“The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. If a single individual changes his or her beliefs, or even dies, it is of little importance. However, if most individuals in the network die or change their beliefs, the inter-subjective phenomenon will mutate or disappear. Inter-subjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignificant charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity, but their impact on the world may still be enormous. Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.”

Why Myths Are Necessary (and Dangerous)

The necessity of shared fictions: without them, large-scale cooperation is impossible. There are no nations without the shared belief in nationhood. There is no money without the collective trust that others will accept it. There are no corporations without the legal fiction of personhood. There are no human rights without the collective agreement that such rights exist. Every large-scale human institution is built on intersubjective foundations.

“We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.”

The danger: because these realities depend on belief, they are fragile in principle (everyone could stop believing simultaneously) and therefore require active maintenance — through education, ritual, law, propaganda, and force.

“An imagined order cannot be sustained by violence alone. It requires some true believers as well.”

The deeper danger: because the orders are imagined but presented as natural or inevitable, they disguise their own contingency.

“It is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.”

Every stratified social order — slave/free, lord/serf, race-based hierarchy, gender hierarchy — was at some point presented not as a human construction but as the natural order of things, often with religious sanction. Recognizing these as imagined orders is the first step toward the possibility of changing them.

Money: The Most Universal Myth

Harari treats money as perhaps the most successful imagined order in history — the one that has proved most capable of bridging cultural, religious, linguistic, and political divides:

“Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.”

“Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”

The key insight: money works not because everyone trusts each other, but because everyone trusts that everyone else trusts the money. It is a second-order belief — you believe in it because you believe others believe in it.

“Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.”

Matt Ridley’s complementary perspective: trade and exchange — enabled by money — are what make human intelligence cumulative rather than merely distributed. The specialization that exchange enables produces innovation; without exchange, technology stagnates.

“Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty.” — Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

The Luxury Trap and the Agricultural Revolution

Harari’s account of the Agricultural Revolution is a master class in how imagined orders become self-sustaining traps. The adoption of agriculture was not a rational choice by people who saw its long-term benefits:

“This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”

The trap mechanism: each improvement in food production allowed a larger population; the larger population required the improved food production to survive; attempting to return to foraging was no longer possible. The “luxury” (more food security) became a necessity, then an obligation.

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.”

This is the macro-historical parallel to the hedonic treadmill at the individual level: the conditions that were expected to increase well-being become the new baseline, and the effort required to maintain them consumes the gains they were supposed to provide.

Imagined Orders and the Challenge of Rethinking

Grant’s intellectual humility framework engages directly with intersubjective reality, though without using Harari’s terminology. The most resistant beliefs — the ones that most powerfully trigger the preacher, prosecutor, and politician responses — are typically ones embedded in shared cultural myths. Challenging them feels not just personally threatening but socially dangerous.

“Psychologists find that many of our beliefs are cultural truisms: widely shared, but rarely questioned.”

The challenge is structural: cultural truisms are difficult to question because the social environment reinforces them constantly. The person who questions them appears not just wrong but disloyal or dangerous. This is why collective myths are so stable: they have social immune systems, not just cognitive ones.

Epistemic hazard

The claim that all large-scale human institutions are “imagined orders” can be misread as nihilism — as if nothing is real or matters. Harari is careful to distinguish this from the claim that these institutions are unimportant or purely arbitrary. Their power is entirely real, even if its source is collective belief. The point is not that we should stop believing in nations or money or human rights, but that we should recognize them as human constructions — which means they can be changed, reformed, or replaced in ways that improve collective well-being.

Practical Implications

For leadership and organizational culture: organizational culture is an imagined order. It has real behavioral effects precisely because people share and act on its beliefs. Understanding this means recognizing that culture can be changed — not by mandate alone, but by changing the stories, symbols, and shared narratives through which it is maintained.

For negotiation and persuasion: the most durable agreements are built on shared narratives about what is fair and what matters, not just on self-interest calculations. This is why Kahneman’s framing effects are so powerful — they are not merely cognitive tricks but engagements with the narrative structure through which we construct value.

For individual epistemic hygiene: recognize which of your beliefs are cultural truisms (adopted from the ambient environment without examination) versus beliefs arrived at through genuine inquiry. The Enneagram and contemplative traditions suggest that many of our most “personal” beliefs and values are actually inherited social programs running in the background.

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