"On Sunday, 9 February 2020, the New York Times reported that Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, had been on its nonfiction best-seller list for 91 weeks. At the centre of this book is an idea. It is that, sometime between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, we humans who had previously discovered how to make stone tools and fires, invented... stories...
"...Our next step, as humans, Stanovich suggests, is not just a revolution but a rebellion. We humans have become the first genetically engineered vehicles that do not need simply to be controlled by genes. By thinking, by imagining possible futures, by making plans, by cooperation with others, in some aspects of life we can choose for ourselves what to do. Although we are robots of our genes, to think and to choose for ourselves has become our collective rebellion. We have started to direct ourselves, and not just in such matters as birth control.
"And how do we do that? It may be helped by writing and engaging in fictional stories, about possible states of our human world. So in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke asks Tertius Lydgate: "What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?" (Ch. 72, p. 789)."
This is from my favorite blog: ON FICTION
Read the full post HERE