A relative of mine recently emailed me and other relatives to ask a philosophical question: Does it matter whether people actually believe the tenets of their religious faith?

I wrote back with a response, which went something like this: Our beliefs and the stories we tell are extremely important. These cannot be discounted as superfluous aspects of a religion. They are important because they affect our real-world decisions. How we think about things matters.

Not long after that, I read the masterpiece Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari, in this book, delves into this topic in a much more comprehensive way than I did. The book helped to clarify my understanding of this philosophical point.

Stories and beliefs have a childlike reputation, as if they are merely tricks to get us to fall asleep; but therein lies their incredible power. Because, as Harari explains, the tricks work: and we are lulled into a world where everyone gets along under the magical umbrella of the story.

He writes: “Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined.” Humankind is the only species that uses language to tell stories about things not present in the immediate surroundings. My chickens can make a distress call that means “There’s a hawk nearby!” But they cannot make a sound that means “That’s the same hawk we saw yesterday, but different from the one we saw the day before that,” or “That hawk is beautiful, look at those marvelous feathers,” or “That hawk was sent by a great and powerful god!”

Humans can say such things, and through language and myth they are able to build large societies of strangers working together under the same belief systems. Harari calls a belief system an imagined order. And he explains that religion is only one of many spheres in which people use stories and beliefs to foster cooperation. Here’s an interesting passage from the book:

“An imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population—and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces—truly believe in it. Christianity would not have lasted 2,000 years if the majority of bishops and priests failed to believe in Christ. American democracy would not have lasted almost 250 years if the majority of presidents and congressmen failed to believe in human rights. The modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism.”

Harari points out that unless you are a true cynic, you believe in at least one, and probably many, imagined orders. The true cynic, he explains, is not apt to cooperate with anyone. In the cynic’s mind, all that talk about religion, patriotism, human rights, finance, politics, romance, and so on is just so much B.S. The true cynic will conclude that it’s better to sit alone with one’s home-brewed beer, cherry tree, and shotgun and try to enjoy life before it’s all over.

But then Harari points out the flip side of this. If you’re not a true cynic and thus do believe in something, it’s ultimately impossible (if you decide to go down that rabbit hole, which may or may not be advisable) to prove the truth of your cherished imagined orders. They are likely, upon logical scrutiny, to evaporate into nothing. This is where the word faith comes in.

And so, as Harari explains, because we have faith in the existence of the monetary system, we can have booming economies, home mortgages, business loans, and one-day Amazon deliveries. Because we have faith in the existence of our countries, we can have complex societies that provide schools, police, libraries, mail service, defense, unemployment benefits, and scientific research. Harari does not try to claim that these things are necessarily better than what humans had originally in their hunter-gatherer state; but he does explain that there’s no going back.

(In order to go back to a pre-imagined-order state, we would have to get everyone to agree to do this together. Otherwise, those with an imagined order would simply cooperate and trounce those without. But the only way to get a large group of people to agree to do something is through an imagined order.)

And so, Harari provides a somewhat tragic but interesting and ultimately, I think, correct answer to my relative’s philosophical question. It is important for people to actually believe something if they are to form a cohesive group of strangers—one that’s not just an accidental encounter of isolated cynics who are unlikely to cooperate. Of course, a few members of a religious group, nation, or financial market can be cynics without the whole operation falling apart. But the majority must believe—especially, as Harari explains, the leaders and the enforcers.

Are you a believer or a cynic?

Just as the illustrator of these Parisian women of the late 1800s wearing fashionable hats did a brilliant job of capturing the nuanced variety of the attire, Émile Zola did a brilliant job of capturing nuances of the nineteenth-century female experience in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise.

Moreover, as in his descriptions of large versus small businesses, the themes he describes are universal—and astoundingly applicable to the world today. Take, for example, this description:

“She could not go downstairs to buy a candle . . . without feeling a warm breath behind her, and hearing crude, insulting remarks; and the men pursued her to the very end of the dark passage . . .”

Replace “candle” with “pizza” or another modern consumable, and . . . #MeToo, anyone?

Oddly, the description on the back of my paperback copy pretends that the male big business owner is the protagonist. The description does not mention the actual protagonist—a woman—at all! This, along with the omission of the word “Ladies'” from the title, makes me suspect that the marketer of this edition was trying to scrub it of its female-oriented qualities. Do books about men sell better than books about women? At least the photo on the cover accurately depicts the content: a young woman in a fancy dress stands behind a counter, assisting two female customers in even fancier attire.

In any case, without a doubt, this is a book about women. It’s a book about women and consumerism; women and beauty; and women and manipulation, sex, and power. It’s a book about relations between women and men and between women and women. It’s a book about intelligent women and frivolous women; about women who abide by the dictates of society and women who abide by their hearts and minds.

Somehow, through the amazing and very human powers of observation and imagination, Zola, though a man himself, has captured some important truths about womankind. I won’t give them away here. I will note, however, that the protagonist is wonderful. She has her faults, as do we all, but she also has many admirable qualities. On the whole, I think you will love her. I hope you get the opportunity to meet her one day!

What different metaphorical hats have you noticed twenty-first-century women wearing?

Here is a strange and, when you think about it, disturbing fact about our culture: Girls are more often, and more openly, encouraged to do “boy things” than boys are to do “girl things.”

Can it be a good thing—for our personal relationships and for society—for females to grow up with an awareness of and appreciation for males, without the reverse occurring?

A few weeks ago, I was gift shopping for a boy in kindergarten and his younger sister. I bought three books with male protagonists, thinking that both of them could read and enjoy the books. I shied away from the books with female protagonists, thinking that only one of them would appreciate those.

And then I read the Washington Post article What are we teaching boys when we discourage them from reading books about girls? This article says it perfectly. It is one of the most profoundly important articles I have read this year. It’s not a long article, but every sentence is a gem. I urge you to read it.

How wrong I was in that bookstore! And I consider myself an open-minded person! Ach! I am upset with myself, but the situation is easy to rectify: I’m going to go back and buy the kids three more books—with girl protagonists.

In what ways has society changed since the Stone Age, and in what ways is it exactly the same?

The protagonist of the novel Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata confronts this question upon meeting a dissatisfied young man. The young man believes that society is—and always has been—deeply flawed:

“Nothing’s changed since the Stone Age. It’s just that nobody realizes that. . . . If you ask me, this is a dysfunctional society. And since it’s defective, I’m treated unfairly.”

In this little rant, the young man argues against the common belief that it’s better to be living in modern times than prehistoric times. Nineteenth-century scholars divided human history into three ages. The Stone Age was followed by the Bronze Age, which was followed by the Iron Age. These ages roughly correspond to groups of humans using stone, bronze, and iron tools—but they also refer to a transformation from hunter-gatherer bands and tribes to the formation of city-states practicing agriculture, animal husbandry, and various trades, with accompanying changes in cultural and religious practices and beliefs. These ages occurred in different world localities at different historical times, and in different ways. Popularly, the idea of the three ages is associated with progress—and this implication is what the young man argues against.

An alternate view, one that the young man does not mention, is that the world has not progressed over the ages, but deteriorated. Many cultures and religions have a tradition of believing that the creation of the earth was ideal, and that a Golden Age lasted for a time thereafter, whereupon things got worse and worse, culminating in the banal depravity of today. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod wrote that the Golden Age regressed into the Silver Age, which progressively regressed into the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age, and the Iron Age. The metals in this worldview—which correspond not to tools but, metaphorically, to the quality of people’s lives—become less and less valuable as time passes. (Though, oddly, the name of one of these ages is not a metal at all!)

The young man’s view is negative and self-defeating; but in one way at least, I agree with him: I do not believe that the passage of time has resulted in a society that is better in every way. I also do not believe that it has resulted in a society that is worse in every way. Society has many facets, and that’s why it’s fun to ask (so I’ll ask it again!)—in what ways has it changed, and in what ways has it stayed the same, since the Stone Age?

Hair styling. Nail painting. Clothes and accessories shopping. Laser treatments. Balancing on heels. Cosmetic surgery. Shaving. Tanning. Dermal fillers. Walking up stairs in a long skirt without tripping. Dieting. Make-up application. Botox. Walking down stairs in a short skirt without flashing anyone. The list of things people do for beauty goes on and on.

In the book Perfect Me, Heather Widdows argues that both women and men worldwide are experiencing increasing societal pressure to do more than ever for the sake of exterior appearance. She notes that women are expected to do more, more costly, and more time-consuming beauty tasks than men. But she also points out that the problem does not end with inequality:

“The problems with the increasing demands of beauty are not just that they are demanded more of one gender than another but the nature of the demands.”

In other words, keeping the beauty standards of women the same while ramping up the beauty standards of men will not result in a better world. The beauty standards are already troublingly high, Widdows says. She calculates that if a person spends 20 minutes a day on beauty between the ages of 15 and 75, that adds up to almost a solid year of beauty-related tasks over a lifetime. Furthermore, she notes, studies have shown that the average woman in the U.S. and U.K. spends about double that daily amount of time.

And then there is the monetary cost of all this beautifying, as well as the opportunity cost of all the things people could spend their time and money on instead. So we’re all on an accelerating roller coaster, unable to jump off without real-world consequences, but also struggling to hang on.

In what ways do you bend over backwards for beauty? Is it worth the time, money, and opportunity cost?