Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Quotes:
After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading of distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren't you wasting precios time, time better spend foraging, fighting and fornicating?

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common immagination of human beings.

Companies are a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a "legal fiction".

The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies?

The global trade network of today is based on our trust in such fictional entities as the dolar, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the totemic trademarks of corporations.

How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and persue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.

Advocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this line of reasoning. Their response is likely to be, "We know that people are not equal biologically! But if we believe that we are all equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society." I have no argument with that. This is exactly what I mean by "imagined order".