Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari gives a talk at Love Tomorrow Conference on sustainable ... [+]
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is among the most successful nonfiction books of recent times. It covers the whole of human history, beginning 2.5 million years ago, and spans the story of our species over 425 pages.
It’s a fascinating journey, but a long one. That’s why many people might enjoy something shorter and more visual, like an illustrated book intended for young readers. Harari’s new set of books, Unstoppable Us, bridges the gap.
I recently spoke to Harari about the key theme of his books, a concept that Unstoppable Us makes clear and vivid:
Sapiens conquered the world because we can tell stories that inspire people to cooperate in very large numbers.
“Storytelling is our superpower,” Harari told me.
“We are the only species with the ability to use language—not just to describe things we can see, taste, and touch, but also to invent stories about things that don’t exist.”
In other words, narrative is the first and most crucial step for leaders who want to solve big problems and shape the world for the better. After all, a person can have the greatest idea in the world, but if they fail to rally others to make that idea come alive, nothing gets done.
Storytelling is an essential milestone in the evolution of our species. Two million years ago, several kinds of humans roamed the Earth. According to Harari, “the emergence of storytelling” 70,000 years ago allowed Sapiens to break out, expand around the world, and to become the most dominant animal of them all.
Storytelling is a powerful rhetorical tool not because people want to be entertained, although that’s important to keep the audience’s attention. Storytelling’s power lies in what it allows people to do: cooperate.
“All the big achievements of humankind, such as flying to the moon, were the result of cooperation between hundreds of thousands of people,” says Harari.
Reaching the moon was only a figment of people’s imagination, and few believed it was possible—until 1961. That’s when dreamer John F. Kennedy leveraged the power of words and stories to galvanize massive cooperation.
Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 speech to Congress is a masterful example of storytelling techniques. Kennedy relied on metaphors to paint a picture in people’s minds. He said space is a “new ocean” to explore, and the country would “set sail” on this new sea to gain new hopes for knowledge and peace.
Kennedy’s passion, vision, and storytelling skills—his superpower—galvanized the country’s collective imagination and inspired 400,000 people to support Kennedy’s “adventure.”
Unstoppable Us, Volume 2, by Yuval Noah Harari
“A human tribe with a good story was the most powerful thing in the world,” writes Harari in Unstoppable Us, Volume 2.
“Dreams and stories can be extremely useful…people in ancient kingdoms wouldn’t have built dikes, reservoirs, and granaries, and today there would be no countries, no schools, and no hospitals. There would be no cars, no airplanes, and no computers.”
While dreamers and storytellers play a valuable role in our society, Harari warns us that rhetorical power of narrative can also do real damage if they cause people to suffer. “Many wars in history were fought over stories,” Harari says.
“Stories are tools. They can be very helpful, but if a particular story makes people miserable instead of helping them, why not change it?”
The world needs massive numbers of people to cooperate with one another to make progress and it needs dreamers to weave well-intentioned stories to spark our collective imagination.
“Stories are the greatest human invention. People need stories in order to cooperate,” says Harari. “But there’s also something else very important: they can change the way they cooperate by changing the stories they believe.”
