The Fiction Engine: A History of Mankind Through Shared Myth

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. >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. >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. >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.

Pages: 100, Paperback, Independently published