What if the most powerful forces in the world; money, nations, laws, human rights don't actually exist?
Not as a philosophical riddle. As a literal, verifiable, history-changing fact.
A river spirit and a mortgage-backed security have more in common than you think. Both are inter-subjective realities, things that exist only because enough people agree they do. Neither is made of atoms. Neither can be touched or weighed. And yet both have determined, with absolute authority, who lives and who starves, who goes to war and who stays home, who is a person before the law and who is property.
The Fiction Engine is a sweeping, provocative history of the one adaptation that made Homo sapiens the undisputed master of the planet, not tools, not fire, not superior intelligence, but the uniquely human capacity to believe in things together. And to build entire civilizations out of those beliefs.
Across four gripping parts, Samuel M. Goldstein dismantles the comfortable stories we tell about human progress:
- The Agricultural Revolution was not a triumph, it was history's most consequential trap, and wheat was the one who set it.
- Money is not an economic tool, it is a social technology of trust so powerful that Roman and Carthaginian merchants traded through the very wars their armies were fighting.
- Religion never died, it secularized. Humanism, with its sacred texts, its temples, and its inquisition, is a faith that simply won't admit what it is.
-The Scientific Revolution's most radical idea was not a discovery about the universe. It was a discovery about knowledge itself, the audacious decision to institutionalize ignorance.
- Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are not just technological challenges. They are the first serious threat to the category -the human being on which every inter-subjective framework civilization has ever built is based.
Goldstein moves with the narrative confidence of Yuval Noah Harari and the analytical precision of Jared Diamond, drawing on evolutionary biology, cognitive science, economic history, and philosophy to tell the story of what we are, how we got here, and what we may be about to become.
Along the way, he asks the question that underlies every chapter: If the realities that govern our world are fictions we invented together, what does that mean for the fictions we are inventing now?
The Fiction Engine is for readers who want their assumptions challenged, their history reframed, and their understanding of the present permanently disrupted. It is for anyone who has ever wondered why we cooperate, why we fight, and why -alone among the animals - we cannot stop believing in things that aren't there.
