If you stripped away our skyscrapers and our satellites, what remains of humanity is our obsession with story. A dog sees a tree and sees a tree; a human sees a tree and sees a totem, a source of lumber, a family's history, or a symbol of life itself.
Reality for a human is rarely about what is; it is about what things mean. We live in a layer of "intersubjective reality." Money is just paper, but because we all agree it has value, it moves mountains. Nations are just lines on a map, but because we believe in them, we die for them.
This ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers based on shared myths is our superpower. It allowed us to build the Pyramids and the International Space Station. But it is also our curse. When our stories clash—when my "holy truth" meets your "objective fact"—the friction produces a heat that has burned cities to the ground.