Opening paragraphs...............

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.  Every person, group, and nation has its own tales and myths.  But during the twentieth century the global elites in New York, London, Berlin, and Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world:  the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story.  The Second World War knocked out the fascist story, and from the late 1940s to the late 1980s the world became the battleground between just two stories:  communism and liberalism.  Then the communist story collapsed, and the liberal story remained the dominant guide to the human past and the indispensable manual for the future of the world - or so it seemed to the global elite.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  21 Lessons for the 21st Century