Seventy-thousand years ago, our ancestors were insignificant animals.
Their impact on the world was not much greater than that of jellyfish or fireflies or woodpeckers.
Today, in contrast, we control this planet.
And the question is: How did we come from there to here?
How did we turn ourselves from insignificant apes, minding their own business in a corner of Africa,
into the rulers of planet Earth?
Usually, we look for the difference between us and all the other animals on the individual level.
But the truth is that, on the individual level, I'm embarrassingly similar to a chimpanzee.
The real difference between humans and all other animals is not on the individual level;
it's on the collective level.
All the huge achievements of humankind throughout history,
whether it's building the pyramids or flying to the moon,
have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.
The next question that immediately arises in the mind of an inquisitive listener is:
How, exactly, do we do it?
The answer is our imagination.
We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers,
because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictional stories.
And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction,
everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values.
All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality.
Humans, in contrast, use their language not merely to describe reality,
but also to create new realities, fictional realities.
We humans control the world because we live in a dual reality.
Over the centuries, we have constructed on top of this objective reality
a second layer of fictional reality, a reality made of fictional entities,
like nations, like gods, like money, like corporations.
As history unfolded, this fictional reality became more and more powerful
so that today, the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities.
Today, the very survival of rivers and trees and lions and elephants
depends on the decisions and wishes of fictional entities,
like the United States, like Google, like the World Bank --
entities that exist only in our own imagination.