Just knowing the facts is not enough | Yuval Noah Harari @bigthink

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Storytelling has always been important.

[00:00:02]From the Stone Age to the 21st century, whenever a large number of people are trying to cooperate on something, whether it is to hunt a mammoth or whether it is to build an atom bomb, just knowing the facts about the objective world, about objective reality, is not enough. If you want, for instance, to build an atom bomb, you need to know some facts about physical reality. You need to know that e = mc². If you try to build a bomb and you ignore the facts of reality, the bomb will not explode. But just knowing facts is not enough because in order to build an atom bomb, you need millions of people to cooperate on the project. You need physicists to write complicated equations, but you also need miners to mine uranium in distant places around the world. You need engineers and builders to build the reactor and the other facilities. And you need farmers to grow potatoes and rice and wheat so that all the physicists and engineers and builders and cleaners and plumbers in the nuclear facility will have something to eat. If they have to go themselves and grow potatoes and then come back to the reactor to do all their experiments, it won't work. So you need really hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people cooperating on that.

[00:01:34]If you just tell them the facts of physics that e = mc², this is not going to motivate anybody to cooperate on this project. And this is where storytelling comes into the picture. What really motivates people, it could be religious stories, mythologies and theologies, secular ideologies like communism or capitalism. and it's always the people who are experts in storytelling that give the orders to people who merely know the facts of nuclear physics.