Yuval Noah Harari — "The most powerful empires are not built on steel, but on stories."
The most powerful empires are not built on steel, but on stories.
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More from Yuval Noah Harari
"Democracy might not be able to survive the age of big data and AI."
"Google and Facebook will be able to hack the human brain."
"Happiness is not a natural state; it's a social construct."
"The key question of the 21st century is what to do with all the useless people."
"Humans are now hackable animals."
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.