Moose

This is what I’d call ‘creative nonsense’ aimed at sensational self-marketing, quite ironic given the claims. While entities like money, nations, and corporations don’t exist in the same way that physical objects like trees or rivers do, they are not fictional, they are social constructs or abstract tools that are very real to facilitate cooperation, economic systems, and governance. Money, for instance, governs economic transactions, affects resource distribution, and drives global markets, its effects are deeply embedded in our reality. The claim that the “most powerful forces in the world are fictional entities” is intellectually dishonest characterization because all these social constructs had arose out of human necessity to organize large groups, enforce laws, and manage resources, expand economic activities, enable technological advances and cooperation between billions of people. It’s not their fictional nature that gives them power, it’s the collective belief and institutional structures that maintain them. Moreover, this nonsense view dismisses the sophistication of animal societies. Many animals display complex behaviors, social structures, and even forms of cooperation and communication that blur the line between “objective” and “fictional” realities. Ants, for instance, organize into colonies with roles and behaviors that resemble human institutions like governments or economies. Dolphins and primates use communication systems that indicate social cooperation and knowledge transfer. The only thing Harari correctly identifies is humans’ capacity to create these abstract entities or tools through which we organize objective reality. As such, they are no less “real” for being conceptual.

Well it’s that time of the year again—time to reflect on the insane shit people said on here. Thread of my fave tweets of 2022: