Yuval Noah Harari

A few did, but most didn't.

And they became, many of them, kind of upright citizens of, at least in West Germany, of a liberal democracy.

The stories, you know, the mind can hold onto them with kind of extreme force and violence, but then let them go.

Because ultimately, again, it's a story.

It's not the laws of physics.

It's not a law of biology.

It's just a product of the human mind itself, you know, which is very good news.

People sometimes imagine that humans fight, you know, like wolves or chimpanzees over food.

This is hardly any war in history was really about food.

Certainly, you know, you look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It's not about food.

There is objectively enough food to keep everybody alive between the Mediterranean and Jordan River.

It's not even about territory.

Even though it's one of the densest places in the world in terms of population density, objectively, there is enough land to build houses and schools and hospitals for everybody.

It's about the stories that people have in their minds, which they hold with tremendous force, but which are ultimately almost nothing.

And under certain conditions that we don't really know how to create, people can let go of these stories.

So you have these people who, you know, they constantly read all these conspiracy theories and fake news and so forth, and they don't trust anybody.

They don't trust the government.

They don't trust the traditional media.

They don't trust science and the universities.