In his international best seller "Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind", the Hebrew University professor/author Yuval Noah Harari suggests the reason our Homo Sapien ancestors beat out other human species in the evolution game was because they possessed--as we still do today-- the ability to "think fictively", recognizing not only objective reality but also imagined ones that enabled them to cooperate in groups and drive their other-kindly "brothers" to extinction.
A good modern day example of a fictive entity is a corporation. It is conceptually composed of only a set of rules and guidelines on how and why it is created, but in fleshing out its presence it can produce a myriad of products or services, employ hundreds or thousands of people, and create handsome sums of wealth for a multitude of its share holders.
Money is another good example of fictive entity whose power derives purely from people's perceived value of it. If not "in God we trust" that greenback, my grocery shop owner won't give me the food I need and I won't give my used car to a total stranger, all for exchange of a few pieces of silk screened paper, and the Feds won't be able to print oodles of them to "quantitative ease" the economy to save it from tanking.
A political system is also a contrived, vanity affair of mankind. As an emperor likes to think he rules "all lands under the skies" (普天之下莫非王土), one of his lowly peasants may actually say "The sky is so high and the emperor so far away. I rise to work at dawn and set to rest at dusk, what's the emperor's power got to do with me?" (天高皇帝遠。日出而作日落而息，帝力於我何有哉).
Until the emperor establishes an effective national registration system and comes nabbing him for taxes and compulsory services.
Citizens of modern democracy turn the system on its head. They are less likely to be hypnotized by the notion of a great, benevolent government that can do no wrong--such a grand, fictive idea--than constantly questioning "where did my tax dollars go", and "what has my government done for me lately". They'd rather pay user fees than general fund taxes, given the choices.
How strongly people put their faith on their fictive belief directly affects the value of the fictive entity and the effects it creates. If enough people look down on the prospect of a corporation and dump its stocks it drives down the market value of that company. If soldiers are not convinced by the stories they are told to believe in their fighting, their morale drops and the battles and the war are lost. A democratic government can collapse in one day if a vote of confidence fails to pass through its house of representatives.
Religion can easily be categorized as one of the grandest fictive thinking of mankind. A shared story of a certain people weaved by an imaginative few and consumed by the weak, the needy, the ignorant, etc., from a secularist's point of view. But rather than calling religions fictive, let's say they are human efforts trying to pin down a universal mystery that is way beyond the capacity of their collective fictive thinking.
Buddhism is one religion that actually tells people to fahgettaboudit: All things, physical, mental, or emotional, living or dead, are illusory. Stop your misdirected cognitive endeavor, and you are one step closer. But that's not easy to do. Even John Lennon's Utopia-aspiring song "Imagine" that extols a world without heaven implores you to imagine such a no-more-fictive-thinking world, how ironic is that?!
Great people and entrepreneurs start their ventures with dreams, the flimsiest of flimsy fictive thinking. Yet by sticking to their visions and through hard work and smart execution, they make fictions into facts, dreams into reality, many times more real than a realist dares to imagine.
Is my past--like where I was born, went to school, people I know, etc.--fictive thinking, since they are just figments of things in my head that I can't touch or feel any more? No, because I have things other than those in my head to corroborate with: documents, photos, mementos, other people... But does that mean if I cannot find corroboration then my past was false or did not exist?
The Australian aborigines believe each person carries all his/her ancestors' history and experiences at birth, continues to build on that history and experiences during their life time, and returns them to the "dreamline" that originated from the beginning to the end of time. Not much corroborating evidence for that, of course, except that they seem to have an uncanny ability to detect illness of distant family members, and intuitive herbal medicine knowledge that seems to come from nowhere.
Am I dreaming a living or living a dream? Or are they really the same thing, living and dreaming?
Fictively, and really, I am done with this writing.
“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
― Albert Einstein
― William Shakespeare
"Faith means being sure of the things we hope for and knowing that something is real even if we do not see it."
― Hebrews 11:1
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