Yuval Noah Harari — "Fiction is not merely a distraction. It is what allows us to cooperate on a larg…"
Fiction is not merely a distraction. It is what allows us to cooperate on a large scale.
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More from Yuval Noah Harari
"The meaning of life is not something you discover; it's something you create."
"The greatest challenges of the 21st century are technological and ecological, not ideological."
"Human rights are just like heaven and hell—they are a fictional story."
"Free will is an illusion."
"Religion is the most successful brand in history."
About Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976)
Israeli historian whose Sapiens (2011) and Homo Deus (2015) reframed big history for a mass audience and sold tens of millions of copies. Closely associated with Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel author and Harari's clearest intellectual ancestor) and Steven Pinker (data-driven optimist contemporary). For an intellectual contrast, see Jordan Peterson, Canadian psychologist and Maps of Meaning author — Peterson's Maps of Meaning argues that religious-mythological structure is the load-bearing architecture of human meaning — exactly the framing Harari's 'religion as useful fiction' thesis treats as historically transitory. The two are the largest-platform popular intellectuals of the 2010s with opposite views on whether religion encodes deep truth.