Exclusive media partner: The New York Times

Newsletter

Receive regular updates about forthcoming events and other news from Intelligence Squared

Thanks

You have been added to our mailing list and will now be among the first to hear about events.

Play video1:27:14

Watch

Yuval Noah Harari on the Myths We Need to Survive

Yuval Noah Harari' bestselling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind achieved the staggering feat of compressing 70,000 years of human history into a single volume . He examines how our capacity for myth has shaped the foundations of our civilisation.

Myths. We tend to think they’re a thing of the past, fabrications that early humans needed to believe in because their understanding of the world was so meagre. But what if modern civilisation were itself based on a set of myths? This is the big question posed by Professor Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which has become one of the most talked about bestsellers of recent years. In this exclusive appearance for Intelligence Squared, Harari will argue that all political orders are based on useful fictions which have allowed groups of humans, from ancient Mesopotamia through to the Roman empire and modern capitalist societies, to cooperate in numbers far beyond the scope of any other species.

To give an example, Hammurabi, the great ruler of ancient Babylon, and the US founding fathers both created well-functioning societies. Hammurabi’s was based on hierarchy, with the king at the top and the slaves at the bottom, while the Americans’ was based on freedom and equality between all citizens. Yet the idea of equality, Harari will claim, is as much a fiction as the idea that a king or rich nobleman is ‘better’ than a humble peasant. What made both of these societies work was the fact that within each of them everyone believed in the same set of imagined underlying principles. In a similar vein, money is a fiction that depends on the trust that we collectively put in it. The fact that it is a ‘myth’ has not impeded its usefulness. It has become the most universal and efficient system of mutual trust ever devised, allowing the development of global trade networks and sophisticated modern capitalism.

Professor Harari came to the Intelligence Squared stage to explain how the fictions that we believe in are an inseparable part of human culture and civilisation.


Speakers

Chair

Kamal Ahmed

Journalist, author and former BBC News Editorial Director


Journalist who has been Editorial Director of BBC News and BBC Economics Editor. He has also held senior roles at The Telegraph Group, The Observer and The Guardian. He recently co-founded The News Movement, a start-up dedicated to tackling misinformation. He is the author of The Life and Times of a Very British Man.
Featuring

Yuval Noah Harari

Historian and bestselling author


After gaining a PhD in History from the University of Oxford, Harari now lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in World History. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, published in 2014, has become an international phenomenon and is published in nearly 40 languages worldwide. It was on the Sunday Times bestseller list for over six month in paperback, and was a New York Times top ten bestseller.