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Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate ways. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things – for example about the sources of your own power – that will anger allies, dishearten followers or undermine social harmony. Scholars throughout history faced this dilemma: do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments – whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins or communist ideologues – placed unity above truth. That’s why they were so powerful.

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A German woman has been sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison for selling her young son on the darknet to abusers, in a case that has horrified the country and raised questions about its child protection services. The 48-year-old woman and her partner, 39, a convicted paedophile, were convicted of forced prostitution, rape, sexual and physical abuse, humiliation, bondage in almost 60 separate identified acts. The partner was given a 12-year sentence. Six other men, including a Spanish man, a Swiss citizen and three German men who had paid the couple to abuse the boy, now 10, were given sentences of between eight and 10 years. The court in the south-western city of Freiburg heard that the abuse had been going on for two years. The mother had threatened her son with foster care if he reported it. The paedophile ring was operated like a business from the town of Staufen, near Freiburg, where the couple lived. Abusers are believe to have paid up to €10,000 (£8,950) a time to abuse the boy. The couple, identified only as Berrin T and Christian L, admitted to the court that they had sold the boy to numerous men and that they had abused him themselves. They received slightly reduced sentences for passing information to investigators enabling them to pursue other perpetrators. Others on trial included a 44-year-old German who was given access to rape the boy but was prevented by the mother from carrying out his wish to kill him.

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As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it – and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it. Therefore, if you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens. Better try your luck with chimps.

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If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. In fact, false stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. If a big chief says “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west”, loyalty to the chief is not required in order to applaud him. But if the chief says “the sun rises in the west and sets in the east”, only true loyalists will clap their hands.

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Many people assume that if a particular religion or ideology misrepresents reality, its adherents are bound to discover it sooner or later, because they will not be able to compete with more clear-sighted rivals. Well, that’s just another comforting myth.

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Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro and perhaps the most accomplished media-wizard of the modern age, allegedly explained his method succinctly by stating that “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth”. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

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Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively.

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For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter “p” does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, “F” stands for “P”, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

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Russian nationalists can excuse this lie by arguing that it served a higher truth. Russia was engaged in a just war, and if it is OK to kill for a just cause, surely it is also OK to lie?

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I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it fake news in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath). Note, however, that I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion. Just the opposite. For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s toolkit. By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible. They inspire people to build hospitals, schools and bridges in addition to armies and prisons. Adam and Eve never existed, but Chartres Cathedral is still beautiful. Much of the Bible may be fictional, but it can still bring joy to billions and encourage humans to be compassionate, courageous and creative – just like other great works of fiction, such as Don Quixote, War and Peace and Harry Potter.

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Government efforts to promote cremation over burials have had disastrous results before. In 2014, when Anhui province set a deadline for the use of cremation over burials, six elderly residents killed themselves before the date.

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When you no longer want to eat something tasty, you can taste the real flavor of whatever you are eating.

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During the second world war, IBM supplied the Nazis with technology used to help transport millions of people to their deaths in the concentration camps. The American technology company leased punch-card machines through a German subsidiary for the purpose of tabulating a population census, which allowed the Nazis to identify and track the movements of Jews all the way to the gas chambers. So helpful were IBM’s machines that Hitler awarded a special medal to the company’s CEO, Thomas Watson, in recognition of his services to the Third Reich.

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Galling though it might seem, May and Trump are at last asking the right questions. What are modern armies for, other than self-promotion? What should be the future of the Nato alliance? Might soft power, plain-speaking and even realignment prove a more helpful path to peace? The present tension with Russia is largely due to Nato recklessly pushing its border eastwards after 1989. To assume that the US’s nuclear umbrella would always cover this advance was unwise. Yet to pretend that a British deterrent is a substitute for an American one is absurd. If armed conflict erupts in Europe, it will be over messy borders and disputed strips of territory. Washington will not commit great armies to Europe merely because a Moscow tank has arrived in a Russian-speaking Baltic town, any more than it did in Ukraine. No serious person can anyway imagine Nato fighting a massed confrontation with Russia in central Europe, let alone at the behest of an Erdoğan of Turkey or Orbán of Hungary. The lesson of history is that Europe has to live with Russia, good or evil. If it goes to war, Russia wins.

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The patent application describes a system where an audio fingerprint embedded in TV shows or ads, inaudible to human ears, would trigger the phone, tablet or long-rumoured smart speaker to turn on the microphone and start recording “ambient audio of the content item”. The recording could then be matched to a database of content to allow Facebook to identify what the individual was watching – like Shazam for TV, but without the individual choosing to activate the system.

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The villain of the piece is a mysterious entity known as the Screenslaver, who hypnotises people and controls their minds through TV screens. In a monologue, the Screenslaver rails against the very passivity Incredibles 2 is catering to: “Superheroes are part of your brainless desire to replace true experience with simulation … Every meaningful experience must be packaged and delivered to you to watch at a distance so that you can remain ever sheltered, ever ravenous consumers.” Whoah there! This is a dangerously valid point. Quick! Get to a fight scene!

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Google returns almost 600m results to the question “What is the ideal body shape?”. And many of those results, rather than address the anxiety behind the enquiry, attempt to answer the question. The problem is, in doing so, we fitness advisers perpetuate this mass insecurity. Such an inquiry reveals a desperate lack of self-acceptance that should surely be addressed rather than indulged. The human body is highly engineered for optimal function. It is not an ornament. There is no perfect weight. If the pursuit of a healthy-shaped body could be promoted as an internal goal rather than an external one, we might see that our aesthetic rewards are a natural occurrence of a healthy, balanced lifestyle; and perhaps, this way, we can encourage a healthier mindset for young people to aspire to.