world of inter-subjective realities

After pondering over the highly insightful thoughts of famous historian and author Yuval Noah Harari through his books ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Deus’, a concept that utterly fascinated me was that of realities. While we may not really think about it so much as we go about with our daily lives, but the world today and even in the past has been controlled mostly by realities that are inter-subjective. If this sounds novel to you, it is perfectly understandable. Realities can be dichotomized into objective and imagined. Objective realities are tangible and exist whether we believe it or not (for example, gravity exists whether people chose to believe in it or not - the apple will always fall down). On the other hand, imagined realities exist only in the imagination of the human minds and its existence depends on whether a person chooses to believe in it or not. Some of these imagined realities are inter-subjective i.e. it is forced into existence as multiple people believe in it and in a way appears as objective reality. A key illustration of inter-subjective reality is money. If we were to analyze money, a 2000 rupee note does not intrinsically have any value as it is just a piece of paper but its value arises from the fact that over a billion people in the country believe that this note has value. If in a hypothetical scenario where all the people suddenly chose to believe that this note does not have any value, it can no longer be used a means of transaction. This is precisely what happens with demonetization : when the government decrees that a particular set of notes will not be accepted anymore, the value of those notes vanishes in thin air. Laws, corporations, nations and religion work in the same way : they are not objective realities but are actually imagined in people’s mind and they have objective value only when multiple people chose to believe in it. Unlike objective realities, inter-subjective realities can be altered or even disappear if a different story can be told and believed by people. The ability to effectively tell stories and thereby cultivate various inter-subjective realities have played a pivotal role in allowing humans to cooperate in larger numbers and accomplish massive feats (technological and economic advancements) across the years as compared to other species, but it has also had some negative consequences (nationalistic and religious warfare)