Building Pyramids

A legal code, a royal lineage, a religious mandate — each of these takes what is actually raw power and dresses it as legitimacy, so that obedience feels proper rather than merely coerced.

The paradox Harari keeps circling back to throughout the book is that imagined orders become fully real in their effects, even though they have no existence outside shared belief. People genuinely build pyramids, pay real taxes, and accept real suffering because a shared narrative tells them this is the correct order of things. Even rebellions, he notes, usually argue within the same imagined language as the system they're rebelling against — a peasant revolt demanding a fairer king still accepts the idea of kingship itself.

Harari's example of ancient Egypt is illustrative: the pyramids required coordinating tens of thousands of laborers who never met each other, organized entirely through a shared belief in pharaonic divinity, an afterlife bureaucracy, and a social hierarchy that made the whole project feel not just possible but sacred. Remove the myth, and the same stones simply don't move.

Once you see this mechanism clearly, Harari argues, you start noticing it everywhere in modern life: money, national borders, corporations, human rights. None of these are physical objects you could hand to someone — they are all imagined orders that nonetheless coordinate the behavior of millions of strangers who have never met and never will. The stone blocks of the pyramids were heavy, but the shared idea that moved them was heavier still, and that same mechanism is still doing the heavy lifting in every large institution alive today.

To show how imagined orders work, Harari sets two famous documents side by side: the Code of Hammurabi from ancient Babylon, which ranked people into classes with different worth, and the American Declaration of Independence, which declared all men equal. Both claim to rest on universal truths; both, he argues, are shared stories that hold only because enough people believe and enforce them.