The stories that provide us with meaning and identity are all fictional, but humans need to believe them. So how to make the story feel real? It’s obvious why humans want to believe the story, but how do they actually believe? Already thousands of years ago priests and shamans discovered the answer: rituals. A ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real. The essence of the ritual is the magical spell “Hocus pocus X is Y!”
Yuval Noah Harari
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
