Concept

Shared Fictions

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Shared Fictions

A shared fiction, in Yuval Noah Harari‘s account, is a belief that exists only because a large enough group of people believe it collectively — money, nations, corporations, and religions are the clearest examples — and it is the mechanism, he argues, that allows humans to cooperate flexibly in unlimited numbers where every other species is capped at small groups. The concept sits between two more familiar categories: an objective fact (true whether or not anyone believes it, like the boiling point of water) and a subjective feeling (real only inside one person’s mind, like a private pain). A shared fiction is neither: it has no referent in physical reality, but it is not merely personal either, because its entire existence depends on many minds believing it at once. Philosophers call this third category intersubjective reality — real in the sense that it has genuine causal power in the world, but real only for as long as the collective belief holds.

The mechanism: cooperation without kinship or coercion

Harari’s starting puzzle is why Homo sapiens, with no clear individual advantage over Neanderthals or chimpanzees — who in some respects were physically stronger or larger-brained — came to dominate the planet. His answer is that around 70,000 years ago, sapiens gained the capacity to cooperate in numbers unlimited by direct acquaintance: chimpanzee troops and (on the archaeological evidence) Neanderthal bands cap out around fifty to a hundred individuals, because their cooperation depends on personally knowing every other member. Human trade networks, religions, and political structures involve millions or billions of total strangers acting in concert. Shared fiction is the substitute for kinship: a Christian in Manila and a Christian in Warsaw who have never met and never will can nonetheless fight the same crusade or build the same cathedral, because they share belief in a story neither invented.

Money is Harari’s sharpest illustration precisely because it looks like the opposite of fiction — hard-nosed, rational, quantifiable. A banknote or a unit of cryptocurrency has no nutritional or practical value; it is worth something only because enough people simultaneously believe it is, and that belief is sustained by professional storytellers (central bankers, finance ministers) rather than by any physical property of the paper or the ledger entry. The same logic applies to a nation (no biological boundary separates ‘Israeli’ from ‘Palestinian’ the way species boundaries separate gorillas from chimpanzees) and to law (a constitution or a set of football rules is binding only because people agree to be bound by it, not because it was handed down from outside human invention).

Fiction is not falsehood, and honesty about origin matters

A shared fiction is not automatically a lie or a bad thing — Harari’s point is structural, not moral. Rules of football were invented by people and are honestly presented as such; this honesty is precisely what allows them to be amended when they no longer serve their purpose. He draws the same contrast between the US Constitution, which opens ‘We the People’ and openly provides its own amendment mechanism, and the Ten Commandments, which claim divine origin and therefore cannot be revised by the people bound by them (his example: the Tenth Commandment’s tacit acceptance of slavery, unrevisable within its own frame, versus the US Constitution’s later amendment abolishing slavery). The danger is not fiction itself but forgetting, or concealing, that a story is a story — treating an invented rule as if it fell from heaven forecloses the possibility of changing it when it produces harm.

Stories versus the ultimate reality of suffering

Harari’s account carries a built-in corrective against taking the framework too far. Stories are not the deepest layer of reality even though they drive most of history: a nation cannot suffer when it loses a war, only the soldiers and civilians inside it can; a currency crash produces no experience in the currency, only in the people who held it. The ‘tragedy of history’, on his reading, is the recurring inversion of this order — humans treating the fiction as more real than the feeling beings the fiction was supposed to serve, and inflicting real suffering in a fiction’s name (a crusade fought over a story about Jerusalem; a war fought over a story about national honour). Fiction is a tool; the failure mode is letting the tool use its inventors rather than the reverse.

Contrast with Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge describes a structurally different — though related — mechanism for large-scale coordination. Common knowledge concerns mutual awareness of a fact that could in principle be independently verified: everyone knowing that everyone knows a bank is in trouble, or that a regime has lost support, generates recursive belief that triggers a bank run or a revolution. A shared fiction, by contrast, requires no underlying verifiable fact at all — money, nationhood, and religious doctrine are not true or false claims about the world that everyone happens to become simultaneously aware of; they are constructs whose entire reality consists in the collective belief. Common knowledge answers ‘how do independently-known facts become actionable together’; shared fiction answers ‘how do humans act together around things that are not facts at all’. The two are compatible and often operate together — a nation’s legitimacy is a shared fiction, but a moment of regime collapse is typically triggered by a common-knowledge cascade about opposition to it.

Where mainstream views differ

Harari’s framework, developed at length in Sapiens (2011), is widely credited as the accessible popularisation of an older idea in social ontology: philosopher John Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality (1995) formalises the same distinction (Searle’s term is ‘institutional facts’, created by collective intentionality and the formula ‘X counts as Y in context C’) decades before Harari’s popular treatment, and some scholars in that tradition regard Harari’s version as underspecified about the mechanism by which collective belief is generated and enforced — Searle emphasises constitutive rules and status functions; Harari leans more on narrative and myth. A separate line of criticism, from Marxist and materialist historians, is the one Harari names and rejects in the source conversation itself: that treating ideas and stories as an independent historical force understates the extent to which material interest, coercive enforcement, and institutional power (not mere belief) are what actually sustain a fiction such as money or national loyalty over time — on this view, Harari’s framework risks explaining too much through ‘story’ and too little through the police, the central bank, and the army that make disbelief costly.

In the wiki