Time passed in the blink of an eye. Where there was once a castle, there is now a shopping mall. In the local cinema, *Monty Python and the Holy Grail* has been shown countless times. In an empty church, a bored priest is absolutely delighted to see two Japanese tourists and begins explaining the stained glass tirelessly, while the tourists nod and smile politely, understanding nothing. On the steps outside, a group of teenagers is watching a remix of John Lennon's *Imagine* on YouTube on their iPhones. John Lennon sings: "Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try." A Pakistani cleaner is sweeping the pavement while a radio nearby broadcasts the news: the massacre in Syria continues, and the Security Council meeting has ended without reaching any agreement. Suddenly a time tunnel opens, a mysterious light shines on one of the teenager's faces, and he proclaims: "I will fight the infidels and recapture the Holy Land!" Infidels? Holy Land? For the vast majority of English people today, these words no longer hold any meaning. Even that priest might think the young man is having a psychotic breakdown. Conversely, if a young British man decided to join Amnesty International and go to Syria to protect the human rights of refugees, today people would think he is a hero, but in the Middle Ages, people would think he was crazy. In 12th century England, no one knew what human rights were. You travel all the way to the Middle East, risking your life, and instead of killing Muslims, you actually protect a group of Muslims from being killed by another group of Muslims? Your brain must have a serious problem. This is exactly how history unfolds. Humans weave a web of meaning and believe in it completely, but this web will sooner or later be dismantled, until we look back and find it truly impossible to imagine how anyone could have sincerely believed in such things. In hindsight, joining the Crusades to enter heaven sounds utterly mad. In hindsight, the Cold War seems even crazier. Just a short 30 years ago, how could anyone risk a nuclear holocaust because they believed they could create a paradise on earth? And 100 years from now, our current beliefs in democracy and human rights may well seem equally incomprehensible to our descendants.
Homo sapiens rule the world because only Homo sapiens can weave an inter-subjective web of meaning: in which laws, obligations, entities, and places exist only in their shared imagination.