The Gift of the Cognitive Revolution: Value as a Form of Collective Belief
According to ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Noah Harari, what made Homo sapiens the most powerful species in the world is our capacity for storytelling — the ability to share ideas, even those that exist only in our collective imagination.
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Forming communities has been crucial to human survival. Individually, we stand little chance against most wild animals. But as a community of 100 people, we become far more powerful than merely 100 individuals. This enables strategies and synergies that multiply our strength against threats. However, community size has a natural limit — around 150 people. Beyond that, maintaining cohesion requires more than just language and personal familiarity. This pattern is observable in family businesses, combat units, and even among chimpanzees. What allows us to transcend this limit is storytelling: the ability to create, understand, and share concepts that exist purely in our imagination.
This capacity for collective belief gave rise to communities, nations, religions, and systems of value. The gods of Olympus, for example, allowed strangers in ancient Greece to cooperate without knowing each other personally…
