Yuval Noah Harari-Modern History of People Believing in Stories

In this story, I will summarize Harari’s anecdotes on people believing in stories. Most of the information is taken from his Ted Talks and his latest book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”.

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group, and nation has its own tales and myths. These stories keep people together and provide a sense of unity and purview.

People believe in stories because their personal identity is built on the story long before they develop the intellectual and emotional independence necessary to question and verify such stories. By the time their intellect matures, we are so heavily invested in the story, that we are far more likely to use our intellect to rationalize the story than to doubt it. This concept can be applied to nationality or religion. We as humans embrace these identities long before we have the capacity to question them, making it more difficult to change our predispositions.

Beyond the individual level, the human tendency to think in stories has had a large-scale effect on politics. During the twentieth century, the global elites in New York, London, Berlin, and Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world:

• the fascist story
• the communist story
• and the liberal story

The Second World War knocked out the fascist story, and from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, the world became a battleground between just two stories: communism and liberalism. Then the communist story collapsed, and the liberal story remained the dominant guide to the human past and the indispensable manual for the future of the world — or so it seemed to the global elite.

However, new global predicaments started to rise, the capacity of the liberal story is ambiguous. Thus, many like Yuval Noah Harari started to question this. Can liberalism tackle nuclear war, climate change, or the rise of AI? With the devastating effects of COVID-19, trust in the liberal story along with the capitalist world order has been faltering.

In his work, Harari does not offer a new story but rather makes the reader question current world news and the liberal storys’ origins.