b'Every age has its purveyors of fiction and its packagers of fact, its Pied Pipers and its Cassandras, but the current epoch is the first to witness the imagination of a species bumping up against the limits of a planet. You dont have to be a perfume-loving novelist, an ecological economist or a Swedish schoolgirl to know. We are experiencing cultural and ecological disorientation on a scale for which history has not fully prepared us.There is ample evidence of all sorts that we need more than evidence of all sorts to make sense of things. More data wont do it; uncertainty grows as fast as knowledge. Information floods in, yet most of it is muddled, commodified, politicized. Facts, it seems, make lousy tea leaves. This is where myth comes in: Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the mythsby telling different stories. Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly. In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people. Consequently, ever since the Cognitive Revolution Homo sapiens has been able to revise its behavior rapidly in accordance with changing needs. This opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution. Speeding down this fast lane, Homo sapiens soon far outstripped all other human and animal species in its ability to cooperate. 2222 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari (HarperCollins, New York, 2015), p. 3273'