The cognitive revolution: fiction as a superpower

Many animals communicate. A monkey can signal "eagle — run." Only Sapiens can say "the eagle is the guardian spirit of our tribe" — and get five hundred strangers to march under an eagle banner.

Gossip lets you cooperate with maybe 150 individuals you know personally; that's the natural ceiling of a troop. Fiction smashes it. Two Catholics who've never met will fund each other's hospitals; two lawyers who've never met will defend the same "legal person."

Everything Harari builds afterward rests on this: our superpower isn't intelligence, it's the ability to live inside stories together. The eagle isn't real. The cathedral it built is.