The Long Way Back to Ourselves

1.5

Shared Myths: How Millions of Strangers Cooperate

This episode explains how millions of strangers cooperate through shared fictions like money, nations, and companies, drawing on John Searle's concept of institutional facts, where something counts, by agreement, as what it physically is not. It corrects the misreading that calling something a social construction makes it unreal, citing German hyperinflation in 1923, when worthless bills were burned in stoves. Drawing on Frans de Waal's account of chimpanzee politics at Arnhem Zoo, the chapter argues even complex animal politics rests on personal acquaintance, unlike human institutions that bind strangers you'll never meet. It closes with Rwanda in 1994, where colonial-era identity papers turned a shared story about ethnicity into mass killing.