Yuval Noah Harari
Homo sapiens conquered the globe not through physical strength, but through a unique cognitive ability to invent and believe in shared fictions like money, gods, and nations.
The Cognitive Revolution separated humans from other animals by enabling language that communicates abstract fictions, allowing millions of strangers to cooperate flexibly.
The Agricultural Revolution acted as an evolutionary trap that exponentially increased the human population at the severe cost of individual health, dietary variety, and leisure time.
Shared imagined orders, particularly religion, empires, and money, served as the psychological mechanisms that successfully united disparate human populations into a single global society.