I'm reading a history book about humans. It starts with the early hominids, and discusses why Homo sapiens took over the world. A main thesis in the book is that Homo sapiens outlived, and possibly destroyed, all other Homo species because sapiens invented lying.
The movie of the same name as this post posits a culture in which people all say what they mean. Everything they say is true. Everyone trusts everyone else, because no one knows how to say things that aren't true. It doesn't occur to them that anyone could say something that wasn't actually true. Watching the movie, one feels that maybe that world would have some benefits to it, but the hero of the story, or maybe anti-hero, says something untrue at a time when he thinks no one will ever find out. He gets away with it, not because of the computer glitch that inspires him, but because the bank teller believes his word over the account report on the computer.
But according to Yuval Harari, humans and other apes can only get along in small groups, usually up to about four dozen, and with gossip helping, maybe three times that many for brief periods of time. Everyone in a group needs to know everyone else well enough to know how to act together, how much trust to give them, how much to expect from them when working toward a common goal. With too many people, chaos develops, because the members of the group don't understand each other well enough.
Sapiens, however, invented myths. Norms of belief and behavior developed around those myths. Those allowed sapiens to cooperate with each other without actually knowing each other, so they could work in much larger groups, and managed to overwhelm the entire world. Granted, it did take tens of thousands of years, but it still happened.
So, if Harari is right, the culture of the movie could never exist. That's not the first movie that is about a people that couldn't exist in reality, but it does tell us something about humans, and how our desires are sometimes not rational or possible. We cannot live in a world without lies. We can live in a mythological world because so many of us believe in the same myths that we can cooperate in a functional society with billions of people, but I suppose if we stop believing in the myths, civilization with collapse, and nearly everyone will die.
And now I know that our civilization is held together by myths. So, am I now a threat to civilization? Time will tell, I guess, but I have no immediate plans to change my general behavior and find out.
Of course, that could change. Than and Cindy are moving to Seattle, and Erin and Taylor are talking about moving to Portland, so Liz is asking how we can get ourselves out there, too. I'm not sure making that big a change in our lives is safe now that we have the power of truth about human civilization. We might be tempted to use this power for our own benefit, and damn the consequences. Hmmm.
