Why Fiction Trumps Truth

We humans know more truths than any species on earth. Yet we also believe the most falsehoods

By Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian and the author of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

"When it comes to uniting people around a common story, fiction actually enjoys three inherent advantages over the truth. First, whereas the truth is universal, fictions tend to be local. Consequently if we want to distinguish our tribe from foreigners, a fictional story will serve as a far better identity marker than a true story. Suppose we teach our tribal members to believe that “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.” That makes for a very poor tribal myth. For if I encounter somebody in the jungle and that person tells me that the sun rises in the east, it might indicate that she is a loyal member of our tribe, but it might just as well indicate that she is an intelligent foreigner who reached the same conclusion independently of our tribe. It is therefore better to teach tribe members that “the sun is the eye of a giant frog that each day leaps across the sky,” since few foreigners — however intelligent — are likely to hit upon this particular idea independently.

The second huge advantage of fiction over truth has to do with the handicap principle, which says that reliable signals must be costly to the signaler. Otherwise, they can easily be faked by cheaters. For example, male peacocks signal their fitness to female peahens by sporting an enormous colorful tail. This is a reliable signal of fitness, because the tail is heavy, cumbersome and attracts predators. Only a truly fit peacock can survive despite this handicap. Something similar happens with stories. 

If political loyalty is signaled by believing a true story, anyone can fake it. But believing ridiculous and outlandish stories exacts greater cost, and is therefore a better signal of loyalty. If you believe your leader only when he or she tells the truth, what does that prove? In contrast, if you believe your leader even when he or she builds castles in the air, that’s loyalty! Shrewd leaders might sometimes deliberately say nonsensical things as a way to distinguish reliable devotees from fair-weather supporters.

Third, and most important, the truth is often painful and disturbing. Hence if you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. An American presidential candidate who tells the American public the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about American history has a 100 percent guarantee of losing the elections. The same goes for candidates in all other countries. How many Israelis, Italians or Indians can stomach the unblemished truth about their nations? An uncompromising adherence to the truth is an admirable spiritual practice, but it is not a winning political strategy.

Some might argue that the long-term costs of believing fictional stories outweigh any short-term advantages in social cohesion. Once people get in the habit of believing absurd fictions and convenient falsehoods, this habit would spill into more and more areas, and they would consequently make bad economic decisions, adopt counterproductive military strategies and fail to develop effective technologies. While this occasionally happens, it is far from being a universal rule. Even the most extreme zealots and fanatics can often compartmentalize their irrationality so that they believe nonsense in some fields, while being eminently rational in others."