Yuval Noah Harari — "The most powerful empires are built on shared fictions."
The most powerful empires are built on shared fictions.
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More from Yuval Noah Harari
"The human body is the most sophisticated piece of technology in the known universe."
"The future of humanity is not about us, it's about data."
"We are now designing not just tools, but life itself."
"The new ruling class will be those who own the data."
"The biggest question facing humankind is: What do we want to want?"
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.
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