What allows humans to cooperate in groups larger than kin groups is fiction. Trying to understand the mechanism of these stories and how people adopt, reinforce, and spread them is useful to understanding the motivations of the individuals that form these cooperative groups. Cooperative fictions are what social scientists call inter-subjective. They are not observable phenomenon but instead exist between the space of human observation. They have no utility to a single ape. It is only because a group of animals agrees on them that they exist at all. Think of language. The word that symbolizes any object (or action for that matter) is quite arbitrary. Its usefulness comes from all group members agreeing that sound "banana" represents the long yellow fruit.
We swim in a medium of overlapping inter-subjective realities constantly. They are the most powerful forces that shape human behavior. It is precisely because they are so interwoven into human consciousness that most of us don't even notice them in day to day life. Its goes beyond what languages a human speaks, to what nation they think they are from, local gender norms, to a "Christmas" song in a local shop, to a street sign with a clear meaning to a driver that would be chicken scratch to some hypothetical alien anthropologist observing human activity. These inter-subjective realities can compete with each other (think the difference of opinion currently about the sovereignty of Hong Kong) or reinforce each other (the laws of the United States are written in English, enforced by police granted a monopoly on violence, and paid for by taxes all as part of a bigger system.)
Focusing on language for a moment can be useful to see just how different human story-telling is from other animals. Birds, for instance, also make sounds that have biological meaning. A certain birdsong can be interpreted by other birds as a mating call or a warning of danger. This is most certainly the origin of language in apes as well. However, humans don't just have words for sky and hunt. We also have "God", "Latino", "October" and a million other concepts that quite frankly we just fabricated. The trick is in getting other apes to not only also believe that it is October 11th, 2019 but to also then convince others of that same "reality". Using the date as an example helps illuminate the usefulness of these conventions. It doesn't matter much whether you call it October 11th or Day 237 or had a system based on colors, the seasons, or whatever. Once people all agree on some arbitrary designation that helps them coordinate their behavior in a way they simply couldn't without this little trick. Of course wild salmon return to same spot each year for mating but to my knowledge no naturalist has observed a species with a concept of "tomorrow" or "next year for Halloween".
A point worth stressing here is these inter-subjective realities change quite rapidly but the human that believe in them see them as iron clad. This is a feature for the system even if it lends a touch of myopia to any given human. [We will talk more about how ISRs coerce their members into compliance but that deserves its own post.] It helps an ISR spread if its devotees know with certainty that their God is the one true God or that this land is most definitely Blahblahland all the way from the ocean to the Great River. The Catholic Church owns land, art, and money. This seems normal to us even though the Catholic Church is just an idea. The religion that underpinned the society that build the Pyramids also was the owner of those structures. That religion has no current practicing members. Just as we can see our languages change over time with new slang, grammatical structure, and words leaving the lexicon its also possible to witness big changes in the dominant ISRs and make some guesses to the causes.
One last point is to stress that ISRs are not just some small trick of human evolution but are the dominant forces of our world. Nations, religions, and companies don't grow old and die like mere mortals. They hold all the wealth, command the biggest armies, develop the best technologies, and have almost all of the power.
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