AI Governance: The Next Imagined Order After the Nation-State

From Myth to Megasociety: Harari on Human Cooperation

Yuval Noah Harari’s books Sapiens and Homo Deus remind us that large-scale human cooperation is built on shared myths or “imagined orders.” In Sapiens, Harari argues that Homo sapiens rose to dominance by inventing fictions, like nations, money and religions that allowed millions of strangers to trust and. A nation-state, for example, isn’t a tangible biological reality; it exists because people collectively believe in it, follow its laws, and even sacrifice for. Such imagined realities enabled humans to overcome our cognitive limit of managing only small tribes, scaling up to societies of millions. “Fictional creations such as nations, money, and culture,” Harari writes, “ultimately pushed humanity over the hump” to global dominance.

Harari observes that the arc of history bends toward unity. Over time, smaller tribes merged into bigger kingdoms, and those into empires, moving humanity toward a single global. Today, concepts like nation-states or human rights are near-universal, showing how our guiding myths have. In Harari’s view, this consolidation is not yet complete: distinct cultures are continuously blending, and global challenges are forcing us to imagine even larger scales. He notes that ancient peoples couldn’t fathom a world united by common principles, but by 1000 BCE three key myths had already started linking humanity: money (enabling global trade), empires (seeking to unite territories), and universal religions (proposing a common moral law for all humans). Of these, Harari quips, money became the “most unifying” story of our modern. Crucially, none of these orders are inevitable or eternal. They are stories we tell one another, and “something else could do so in the future” to unify us on a global.