The Simpler the Story

The line opens the first chapter of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Jonathan Cape, 2018). Harari’s first example is the twentieth century, which he retells as a contest between three simple stories, “the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story”, each of which “claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world”.

Harari had already made this argument at book length in Sapiens (2014): what sets humans apart is that “fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively”, and shared fictions are what let huge numbers of strangers cooperate. He means it literally: “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings”. His worked example is a company. The carmaker Peugeot, he writes, is “a figment of our collective imagination”, what lawyers call a “legal fiction”: an entity nobody can point at, which still owns property and pays taxes. Imagined does not mean fake. “An imagined reality is not a lie”, because as long as everyone keeps believing it, it “exerts force in the world”: money buys things, nations field armies, companies build cars.

Which is why nobody rallies around a spreadsheet. Inside a company, a strategy travels only as a story: something simple enough that people can repeat it to each other in the hallway, and repeat it again when they explain their own work to their team. The company itself survives the same way, retold and believed. So the work isn’t finished when the analysis is right. It’s finished when there is a story of it simple enough to travel.