Sapiens: The Cognitive Revolution
Yuval Noah Harari · 2011
"What let Homo sapiens outcompete every other human species and build large-scale civilization wasn't tool use or intelligence alone — it was the unique ability to believe in, and coordinate around, shared fictions like money, nations, and religions that don't physically exist."
Harari's central claim in Sapiens is disarmingly simple: humans don't just cooperate, we cooperate flexibly in huge numbers with total strangers, and the only reason that's possible is that we collectively believe in things that aren't physically real.
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Guns, Germs, and Steel
"Which civilizations ended up conquering others was driven overwhelmingly by geographic and environmental accident — access to domesticable plants and animals, and an east-west continental axis that let farming spread easily — not by any difference in the people themselves."