The story begins with a group of hunter-gatherers around 70,000 years ago when they set out from Africa to explore and settle themselves all over the world. Somehow their time of landing appears to be highly correlated with wiping out of many species from these lands. In this period (between 70000 - 30000 years ago), a large number of changes happened in their societies and culture.
Of the many changes that happened, the one that would change them entirely was the development of language: a means to communicate. But wait! All animals, plants and even bacteria communicate. In fact, higher animals like some insects, birds, and mammals have also evolved to use sound as a means of communication. Then what makes the human language unique? The answer is structure. Human language has a well-defined structure. A limited number of sounds can be connected to create many words which can then be joined in many different ways to form complex sentences.
Humans could now express their experiences with words. They could tell their group members what food is good, who is cheating whom and what do the neighboring tribe members do. Social learning was taken altogether to a new level.
The power of language, however, is not in this expression of memories but in passing down knowledge about things that don’t exist at all. The food that can’t be eaten could then be said of being evil. The natural phenomenon could be given divine powers. Myths, gods, demons, prophecies started to appear. What good could this be? After all, people who are going to spend hours with gods and demons or go out in search of mythological objects are going to get a small hunt. They and their families will strive and thus have a lesser chance of passing down their genes.
However, imagination also allowed with something more: to dream in groups. The tales began to spread across tribes, and people who believed in similar things started uniting in groups. A typical human can maintain healthy contacts with about 150 other humans (Dunbar’s number 5, it is based on the data from primates and extrapolating it to average human brain size). However, when it comes to same ideology, people can unite under one flag without needing to know each other. The flag of divine power, of being in the same tribe, of being in the same country and of being a human. The cognitive limit exceeded the biological constraints. Today we all coexist just because we all believe in this flag of humanity. This gave us the power to rule: rule over the weaker, the animals who can’t unite in such huge numbers.
Today’s world in which you and I live could all be accounted for this leap of fiction. We believe in gods, in nations, in human rights all of which don’t exist physically but are somewhere in our minds. It gives the power to unify. People working in companies can believe themselves to be a part of something big: an emblem. Institutes, colleges, nations, governments, laws, and society all work because their members have faith in them.
It’s incredible, right? We all work and live our lives for and with things that don’t exist! More strange is that we talk about these objects as being a part of the world. Ascribing to them existence!
References:
1. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari
2. http://whoami.sciencemuseum.org.uk/whoami/findoutmore/yourbrain/whatisspecialabouthumanlanguage
3. Wikipedia
4. Britannica
5. Dunbar (1992) "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates"
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