Nexus :- A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to Ai

 

            PART I

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Human Network CHAPTER 1

 

What Is Information?

I

t is always tricky to define fundamental concepts. Since they are the basis for everything that follows, they themselves seem to lack any basis of their own. Physicists have a hard time defining matter and energy, biologists have a hard time defining life, and philosophers have a hard time defining reality.

Information is increasingly seen by many philosophers and biologists, and even by some physicists, as the most basic building block of reality, more elementary than matter and energy. No wonder that there are many disputes about how to define information, and how it is related to the evolution of life or to basic ideas in physics such as entropy, the laws of thermodynamics, and the quantum uncertainty principle.[2] This book will make no attempt to resolve—or even explain—these disputes, nor will it offer a universal definition of information applicable to physics, biology, and all other fields of knowledge. Since it is a work of history, which studies the past and future development of human societies, it will focus on the definition and role of information in history.

In everyday usage, “information” is associated with human-made symbols like spoken or written words. Consider, for example, the story of Cher Ami and the Lost Battalion. In October 1918, when the American Expeditionary Forces was fighting to liberate northern France from the Germans, a battalion of more than five hundred American soldiers was trapped behind enemy lines. American artillery, which was trying to provide them with cover fire, misidentified their location and dropped the barrage directly on them. The battalion’s commander, Major Charles Whittlesey, urgently needed to inform headquarters of his true location, but no runner could break through the German line. According to several accounts, as a last resort Whittlesey turned to Cher Ami, an army carrier pigeon. On a tiny piece of paper, Whittlesey wrote, “We are along the road paralell [sic] 276.4. Our artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake stop it.” The paper was inserted into a canister on Cher Ami’s right leg, and the bird was released into the air. One of the battalion’s soldiers, Private John Nell, recalled years later, “We knew without a doubt this was our last chance. If that one lonely, scared pigeon failed to find its loft, our fate was sealed.”

Witnesses later described how Cher Ami flew into heavy German fire. A shell exploded directly below the bird, killing five men and severely injuring the pigeon. A splinter tore through Cher Ami’s chest, and his right leg was left hanging by a tendon. But he got through. The wounded pigeon flew the forty kilometers to division headquarters in about forty-five minutes, with the canister containing the crucial message attached to the remnant of his right leg. Though there is some controversy about the exact details, it is clear that the American artillery adjusted its barrage, and an American counterattack rescued the Lost Battalion. Cher Ami was tended by army medics, sent to the United States as a hero, and became the subject of numerous articles, short stories, children’s books, poems, and even movies. The pigeon had no idea what information he was conveying, but the symbols inked on the piece of paper he carried helped save hundreds of men from death and captivity.

Information, however, does not have to consist of human-made symbols. According to the biblical myth of the Flood, Noah learned that the water had finally receded because the pigeon he sent out from the ark returned with an olive branch in her mouth. Then God set a rainbow in the clouds as a heavenly record of his promise never to flood the earth again. Pigeons, olive branches, and rainbows have since become iconic symbols of peace and tolerance. Objects that are even more remote than rainbows can also be information. For astronomers the shape and movement of galaxies constitute crucial information about the history of the universe. For navigators the North Star indicates which way is north. For astrologers the stars are a cosmic script, conveying information about the future of individual humans and entire societies.

Of course, defining something as “information” is a matter of perspective. An astronomer or astrologer might view the Libra constellation as “information,” but these distant stars are far more than just a notice board for human observers. There might be an alien civilization up there, totally oblivious to the information we glean from their home and to the stories we tell about it. Similarly, a piece of paper marked with ink splotches can be crucial information for an army unit, or dinner for a family of termites. Any object can be information—or not. This makes it difficult to define what information is.

The ambivalence of information has played an important role in the annals of military espionage, when spies needed to communicate information surreptitiously. During World War I, northern France was not the only major battleground. From 1915 to 1918 the British and Ottoman Empires fought for control of the Middle East. After repulsing an Ottoman attack on the Sinai Peninsula and the Suez Canal, the British in turn invaded the Ottoman Empire, but were held at bay until October 1917 by a fortified Ottoman line stretching from Beersheba to Gaza. British attempts to break through were repulsed at the First Battle of Gaza (March 26, 1917) and the Second Battle of Gaza (April 17–19, 1917). Meanwhile, pro-British Jews living in Palestine set up a spy network code-named NILI to inform the British about Ottoman troop movements. One method they developed to communicate with their British operators involved window shutters. Sarah Aaronsohn, a NILI commander, had a house overlooking the Mediterranean. She signaled British ships by closing or opening a particular shutter, according to a predetermined code. Numerous people, including Ottoman soldiers, could obviously see the shutter, but nobody other than NILI agents and their British operators understood it was vital military information. So, when is a shutter just a shutter, and when is it information?

The Ottomans eventually caught the NILI spy ring due in part to a strange mishap. In addition to shutters, NILI used carrier pigeons to convey coded messages. On September 3, 1917, one of the pigeons diverged off course and landed in—of all places—the house of an Ottoman officer. The officer found the coded message but couldn’t decipher it. Nevertheless, the pigeon itself was crucial information. Its existence indicated to the Ottomans that a spy ring was operating under their noses. As Marshall McLuhan might have put it, the pigeon was the message. NILI agents learned about the capture of the pigeon and immediately killed and buried all the remaining birds they had, because the mere possession of carrier pigeons was now incriminating information. But the massacre of the pigeons did not save NILI. Within a month the spy network was uncovered, several of its members were executed, and Sarah Aaronsohn committed suicide to avoid divulging NILI’s secrets under torture. When is a pigeon just a pigeon, and when is it information?

Clearly, then, information cannot be defined as specific types of material objects. Any object—a star, a shutter, a pigeon—can be information in the right context. So exactly what context defines such objects as “information”? The naive view of information argues that objects are defined as information in the context of truth seeking. Something is information if people use it to try to discover the truth. This view links the concept of information with the concept of truth and assumes that the main role of information is to represent reality. There is a reality “out there,” and information is something that represents that reality and that we can therefore use to learn about reality. For example, the information NILI provided the British was meant to represent the reality of Ottoman troop movements. If the Ottomans massed ten thousand soldiers in Gaza—the centerpiece of their defenses—a piece of paper with symbols representing “ten thousand” and “Gaza” was important information that could help the British win the battle. If, on the other hand, there were actually twenty thousand Ottoman troops in Gaza, that piece of paper did not represent reality accurately, and could lead the British to make a disastrous military mistake.

Put another way, the naive view argues that information is an attempt to represent reality, and when this attempt succeeds, we call it truth. While this book takes many issues with the naive view, it agrees that truth is an accurate representation of reality. But this book also holds that most information is not an attempt to represent reality and that what defines information is something entirely different. Most information in human society, and indeed in other biological and physical systems, does not represent anything.

I want to spend a little longer on this complex and crucial argument, because it constitutes the theoretical basis of the book.

WHAT IS TRUTH?

Throughout this book, “truth” is understood as something that accurately represents certain aspects of reality. Underlying the notion of truth is the premise that there exists one universal reality. Anything that has ever existed or will ever exist in the universe—from the North Star, to the NILI pigeon, to web pages on astrology—is part of this single reality. This is why the search for truth is a universal project. While different people, nations, or cultures may have competing beliefs and feelings, they cannot possess contradictory truths, because they all share a universal reality. Anyone who rejects universalism rejects truth.

Truth and reality are nevertheless different things, because no matter how truthful an account is, it can never represent reality in all its aspects. If a NILI agent wrote that there are ten thousand Ottoman soldiers in Gaza, and there were indeed ten thousand soldiers there, this accurately pointed to a certain aspect of reality, but it neglected many other aspects. The very act of counting entities—whether apples, oranges, or soldiers—necessarily focuses attention on the similarities between these entities while discounting differences.[6] For example, saying only that there were ten thousand Ottoman soldiers in Gaza neglected to specify whether some were experienced veterans and others were green recruits. If there were a thousand recruits and nine thousand old hands, the military reality was quite different from if there were nine thousand rookies and a thousand battle-hardened veterans.

There were many other differences between the soldiers. Some were healthy; others were sick. Some Ottoman troops were ethnically Turkish, while others were Arabs, Kurds, or Jews. Some were brave, others cowardly. Indeed, each soldier was a unique human being, with different parents and friends and individual fears and hopes. World War I poets like Wilfred Owen famously attempted to represent these latter aspects of military reality, which mere statistics never conveyed accurately. Does this imply that writing “ten thousand soldiers” is always a misrepresentation of reality, and that to describe the military situation around Gaza in 1917, we must specify the unique history and personality of every soldier?

Another problem with any attempt to represent reality is that reality contains many viewpoints. For example, present-day Israelis, Palestinians, Turks, and Britons have different perspectives on the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire, the NILI underground, and the activities of Sarah Aaronsohn. That does not mean, of course, that there are several entirely separate realities, or that there are no historical facts. There is just one reality, but it is complex.

Reality includes an objective level with objective facts that don’t depend on people’s beliefs; for example, it is an objective fact that Sarah Aaronsohn died on October 9, 1917, from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Saying that “Sarah Aaronsohn died in an airplane crash on May 15, 1919,” is an error.

Reality also includes a subjective level with subjective facts like the beliefs and feelings of various people, but in this case, too, facts can be separated from errors. For example, it is a fact that Israelis tend to regard Aaronsohn as a patriotic hero. Three weeks after her suicide, the information NILI supplied helped the British finally break the Ottoman line at the Battle of Beersheba (October 31, 1917) and the Third Battle of Gaza (November 1–2, 1917). On November 2, 1917, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued the Balfour Declaration, announcing that the British government “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Israelis credit this in part to NILI and Sarah Aaronsohn, whom they admire for her sacrifice. It is another fact that Palestinians evaluate things very differently. Rather than admiring Aaronsohn, they regard her—if they’ve heard about her at all—as an imperialist agent. Even though we are dealing here with subjective views and feelings, we can still distinguish truth from falsehood. For views and feelings—just like stars and pigeons—are a part of the universal reality. Saying that “Sarah Aaronsohn is admired by everyone for her role in defeating the Ottoman Empire” is an error, not in line with reality.

Nationality is not the only thing that affects people’s viewpoint. Israeli men and Israeli women may see Aaronsohn differently, and so do left-wingers and right-wingers, or Orthodox and secular Jews. Since suicide is forbidden by Jewish religious law, Orthodox Jews have difficulty seeing Aaronsohn’s suicide as a heroic act (she was actually denied burial in the hallowed ground of a Jewish cemetery). Ultimately, each individual has a different perspective on the world, shaped by the intersection of different personalities and life histories. Does this imply that when we wish to describe reality, we must always list all the different viewpoints it contains and that a truthful biography of Sarah Aaronsohn, for example, must specify how every single Israeli and Palestinian has felt about her?

Taken to extremes, such a pursuit of accuracy may lead us to try to represent the world on a one-to-one scale, as in the famous Jorge Luis Borges story “On Exactitude in Science” (1946). In this story Borges tells of a fictitious ancient empire that became obsessed with producing ever more accurate maps of its territory, until eventually it produced a map with a oneto-one scale. The entire empire was covered with a map of the empire. So many resources were wasted on this ambitious representational project that the empire collapsed. Then the map too began to disintegrate, and Borges tells us that only “in the western Deserts, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar.” A one-to-one map may look like the ultimate representation of reality, but tellingly it is no longer a representation at all; it is the reality.

The point is that even the most truthful accounts of reality can never represent it in full. There are always some aspects of reality that are neglected or distorted in every representation. Truth, then, isn’t a one-to-one representation of reality. Rather, truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring other aspects. No account of reality is 100 percent accurate, but some accounts are nevertheless more truthful than others.

WHAT INFORMATION DOES

As noted above, the naive view sees information as an attempt to represent reality. It is aware that some information doesn’t represent reality well, but it dismisses this as unfortunate cases of “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Misinformation is an honest mistake, occurring when someone tries to represent reality but gets it wrong. Disinformation is a deliberate lie, occurring when someone consciously intends to distort our view of reality.

The naive view further believes that the solution to the problems caused by misinformation and disinformation is more information. This idea, sometimes called the counterspeech doctrine, is associated with the U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis, who wrote in Whitney v. California (1927) that the remedy to false speech is more speech and that in the long term free discussion is bound to expose falsehoods and fallacies. If all information is an attempt to represent reality, then as the amount of information in the world grows, we can expect the flood of information to expose the occasional lies and errors and to ultimately provide us with a more truthful understanding of the world.

On this crucial point, this book strongly disagrees with the naive view. There certainly are instances of information that attempt to represent reality and succeed in doing so, but this is not the defining characteristic of information. A few pages ago I referred to stars as information and casually mentioned astrologers alongside astronomers. Adherents of the naive view of information probably squirmed in their chairs when they read it. According to the naive view, astronomers derive “real information” from the stars, while the information that astrologers imagine to read in constellations is either “misinformation” or “disinformation.” If only people were given more information about the universe, surely they would abandon astrology altogether. But the fact is that for thousands of years astrology has had a huge impact on history, and today millions of people still check their star signs before making the most important decisions of their lives, like what to study and whom to marry. As of 2021, the global astrology market was valued at $12.8 billion.

No matter what we think about the accuracy of astrological information, we should acknowledge its important role in history. It has connected lovers, and even entire empires. Roman emperors routinely consulted astrologers before making decisions. Indeed, astrology was held in such high esteem that casting the horoscope of a reigning emperor was a capital offense. Presumably, anyone casting such a horoscope could foretell when and how the emperor would die. Rulers in some countries still take astrology very seriously. In 2005 the junta of Myanmar allegedly moved the country’s capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw based on astrological advice.A theory of information that cannot account for the historical significance of astrology is clearly inadequate.

What the example of astrology illustrates is that errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too. Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network. Information doesn’t necessarily inform us about things. Rather, it puts things in formation. Horoscopes put lovers in astrological formations, propaganda broadcasts put voters in political formations, and marching songs put soldiers in military formations.

As a paradigmatic case, consider music. Most symphonies, melodies, and tunes don’t represent anything, which is why it makes no sense to ask whether they are true or false. Over the years people have created a lot of bad music, but not fake music. Without representing anything, music nevertheless does a remarkable job in connecting large numbers of people and synchronizing their emotions and movements. Music can make soldiers march in formation, clubbers sway together, church congregations clap in rhythm, and sports fans chant in unison.

The role of information in connecting things is of course not unique to human history. A case can be made that this is the chief role of information in biology, too. Consider DNA, the molecular information that makes organic life possible. Like music, DNA doesn’t represent reality. Though generations of zebras have been fleeing lions, you cannot find in the zebra DNA a string of nucleobases representing “lion” nor another string representing “flight.” Similarly, zebra DNA contains no representation of the sun, wind, rain, or any other external phenomena that zebras encounter during their lives. Nor does DNA represent internal phenomena like body organs or emotions. There is no combination of nucleobases that represents a heart, or fear.

Instead of trying to represent preexisting things, DNA helps to produce entirely new things. For instance, various strings of DNA nucleobases initiate cellular chemical processes that result in the production of adrenaline. Adrenaline too doesn’t represent reality in any way. Rather, adrenaline circulates through the body, initiating additional chemical processes that increase the heart rate and direct more blood to the muscles. DNA and adrenaline thereby help to connect trillions of cells in the heart, legs, and other body parts to form a functioning network that can do remarkable things, like run away from a lion.

If DNA represented reality, we could have asked questions like “Does zebra DNA represent reality more accurately than lion DNA?” or “Is the DNA of one zebra telling the truth, while another zebra is misled by her fake DNA?” These, of course, are nonsensical questions. We might evaluate DNA by the fitness of the organism it produces, but not by truthfulness. While it is common to talk about DNA “errors,” this refers only to mutations in the process of copying DNA—not to a failure to represent reality accurately. A mutation that inhibits the production of adrenaline reduces fitness, causing the network of cells to disintegrate, as when the zebra is killed and its trillions of cells lose connection with one another. But this kind of network failure means disintegration, not disinformation. That’s as true of countries, political parties, and news networks as it is of zebras. Their existence too is jeopardized by loss of contact between their constituent parts, more than by inaccurate representations of reality.

Crucially, errors in the copying of DNA don’t always reduce fitness. Once in a blue moon, they increase fitness. Without such mutations, there would be no process of evolution. All life-forms exist thanks to genetic “errors.” The wonders of evolution are possible because DNA doesn’t represent any preexisting realities; it creates new realities.

Let us pause to digest the implications of this. Information is something that creates new realities by connecting different points into a network. This still includes the view of information as representation. Sometimes, a truthful representation of reality can connect humans, as when 600 million people sat glued to their television sets in July 1969, watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon. The images on the screens accurately represented what was happening 384,000 kilometers away, and seeing them gave rise to feelings of awe, pride, and human brotherliness that helped connect people.

However, such fraternal feelings can be produced in other ways, too. The emphasis on connection leaves ample room for other types of information that do not represent reality well. Sometimes erroneous representations of reality might also serve as a social nexus, as when millions of followers of a conspiracy theory watch a YouTube video claiming that the moon landing never happened. These images convey an erroneous representation of reality, but they might nevertheless give rise to feelings of anger against the establishment or pride in one’s own wisdom that help create a cohesive new group.

Sometimes networks can be connected without any attempt to represent reality, neither accurate nor erroneous, as when genetic information connects trillions of cells or when a stirring musical piece connects thousands of humans.

As a final example, consider Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the Metaverse. The Metaverse is a virtual universe made entirely of information. Unlike the one-to-one map built by Jorge Luis Borges’s imaginary empire, the Metaverse isn’t an attempt to represent our world, but rather an attempt to augment or even replace our world. It doesn’t offer us a digital replica of Buenos Aires or Salt Lake City; it invites people to build new virtual communities with novel landscapes and rules. As of 2024 the Metaverse seems like an overblown pipe dream, but within a couple of decades billions of people might migrate to live much of their lives in an augmented virtual reality, holding there most of their social and professional activities. People might come to build relationships, join movements, hold jobs, and experience emotional ups and downs in environments made of bits rather than atoms. Perhaps only in some remote deserts, tattered fragments of the old reality could still be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar.

INFORMATION IN HUMAN HISTORY

Viewing information as a social nexus helps us understand many aspects of human history that confound the naive view of information as representation. It explains the historical success not only of astrology but of much more important things, like the Bible. While some may dismiss astrology as a quaint sideshow in human history, nobody can deny the central role the Bible has played. If the main job of information had been to represent reality accurately, it would have been hard to explain why the Bible became one of the most influential texts in history.

The Bible makes many serious errors in its description of both human affairs and natural processes. The book of Genesis claims that all human groups—including, for example, the San people of the Kalahari Desert and the Aborigines of Australia—descend from a single family that lived in the Middle East about four thousand years ago. According to Genesis, after the Flood all Noah’s descendants lived together in Mesopotamia, but following the destruction of the Tower of Babel they spread to the four corners of the earth and became the ancestors of all living humans. In fact, the ancestors of the San people lived in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years without ever leaving the continent, and the ancestors of the Aborigines settled Australia more than fifty thousand years ago. Both genetic and archaeological evidence rule out the idea that the entire ancient populations of South Africa and Australia were annihilated about four thousand years ago by a flood and that these areas were subsequently repopulated by Middle Eastern immigrants.

An even graver distortion involves our understanding of infectious diseases. The Bible routinely depicts epidemics as divine punishment for human sins and claims they can be stopped or prevented by prayers and religious rituals. However, epidemics are of course caused by pathogens and can be stopped or prevented by following hygiene rules and using medicines and vaccines. This is today widely accepted even by religious leaders like the pope, who during the COVID-19 pandemic advised people to self-isolate, instead of congregating to pray together.

Yet while the Bible has done a poor job in representing the reality of human origins, migrations, and epidemics, it has nevertheless been very effective in connecting billions of people and creating the Jewish and Christian religions. Like DNA initiating chemical processes that bind billions of cells into organic networks, the Bible initiated social processes that bonded billions of people into religious networks. And just as a network of cells can do things that single cells cannot, so a religious network can do things that individual humans cannot, like building temples, maintaining legal systems, celebrating holidays, and waging holy wars.

To conclude, information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn’t. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic. Therefore, when examining the role of information in history, although it sometimes makes sense to ask “How well does it represent reality? Is it true or false?” often the more crucial questions are “How well does it connect people? What new network does it create?”

It should be emphasized that rejecting the naive view of information as representation does not force us to reject the notion of truth, nor does it force us to embrace the populist view of information as a weapon. While information always connects, some types of information—from scientific books to political speeches—may strive to connect people by accurately representing certain aspects of reality. But this requires a special effort, which most information does not make. This is why the naive view is wrong to believe that creating more powerful information technology will necessarily result in a more truthful understanding of the world. If no additional steps are taken to tilt the balance in favor of truth, an increase in the amount and speed of information is likely to swamp the relatively rare and expensive truthful accounts by much more common and cheap types of information.

When we look at the history of information from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, we therefore see a constant rise in connectivity, without a concomitant rise in truthfulness or wisdom. Contrary to what the naive view believes, Homo sapiens didn’t conquer the world because we are talented at turning information into an accurate map of reality. Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies. This is why even technologically advanced societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have been prone to hold delusional ideas, without their delusions necessarily weakening them. Indeed, the mass delusions of Nazi and Stalinist ideologies about things like race and class actually helped them make tens of millions of people march together in lockstep.

In chapters 2–5 we’ll take a closer look at the history of information networks. We’ll discuss how, over tens of thousands of years, humans invented various information technologies that greatly improved connectivity and cooperation without necessarily resulting in a more truthful representation of the world. These information technologies—invented centuries and millennia ago—still shape our world even in the era of the internet and AI. The first information technology we’ll examine, which is also the first information technology developed by humans, is the story.

                        Part 2:- 

would be limited in size to a few hundred individuals at most. However, humans have overcome this limitation by creating shared stories and beliefs. These shared narratives allow people to cooperate with strangers and form large, cohesive groups.

For example, billions of people believe in concepts like money, human rights, nations, and religions—not because these things exist in the physical world, but because they exist in our collective imagination. Money, for instance, has no inherent value. It is just a piece of paper or a number on a screen. Yet, it holds power because we all agree to believe in its value.

This unique ability to create and believe in shared stories has enabled humanity to build vast civilizations, establish laws, and trade resources on a global scale. It is what sets Sapiens apart from all other species and is the foundation of our dominance on Earth. 

and Palestine exist as sovereign states. In contrast, the governments of the United States and Hungary officially recognize Israel but not Palestine. Yet this disagreement doesn’t prove that states are objective entities like asteroids or subjective entities like pain. Instead, states exist on the intersubjective level, and their existence depends on the collective beliefs of millions or even billions of people. If tomorrow everyone in the world stopped believing in the existence of Brazil, there would be no Brazil.

Intersubjective entities have no physical form but can wield immense power because they shape and influence human behavior. The story of the United States, for example, inspires people to pay taxes, serve in the military, and follow laws. Similarly, the story of corporations like Apple or Tesla convinces billions of people to use their products, invest in their stock, and trust their brands.

These intersubjective realities are what make large-scale human cooperation possible. Without shared stories, humans would be limited to small, tight-knit groups like other social animals. But with intersubjective realities, humans can unite millions—or even billions—of people around common goals, values, and systems. This ability is what makes Sapiens the dominant species on Earth.

and justifies slavery as part of a divine order. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, however, the Ten Commandments did not provide mechanisms for their own amendment or revision, as they claimed to represent eternal and unchangeable truths handed down by God. This rigidity made it far more difficult to address injustices embedded within such divine laws.

The ability to acknowledge the fictive nature of a story while using it to create order and cooperation is a hallmark of human society. It allows for flexibility and adaptation over time, enabling communities to confront new challenges and correct past mistakes. However, it also underscores the power of stories to shape our collective realities, for better or worse.

Whether in the case of nations, religions, or ideologies, stories continue to wield immense influence over human behavior. They can unite millions under a shared identity or lead to devastating conflicts when competing narratives clash. Recognizing the fictional basis of many such stories is not an invitation to cynicism, but rather an opportunity to critically evaluate which stories serve our collective well-being and which perpetuate division or injustice.

By understanding the interplay between truth, fiction, and power, we can better navigate the complexities of human history and society, striving to craft stories that foster cooperation, justice, and progress.