U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates
(LifeSiteNews) — Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book about our posthuman future is a manifesto of absence. It is curious that a prophet of novelty would bring little new, but on closer inspection this emptiness is what passes for the deeper meaning of Harari’s output – and that of his sponsors at the World Economic Forum
Harari is better known for his earlier works of speculative fiction such as Homo Deus and Sapiens, in which he also re-imagines mankind in his own likeness. A childless homosexual who has described Jesus Christ as “fake news,” he has also written a series of books for children.
His work is promoted by the World Economic Forum and many of the liberal-globalist leaders partnered with its posthuman agenda as a signpost of the future of humanity. Educated in history, his profile is that of a sort of visionary of the technological society. His personal habits – no smartphone, daily “meditation” – are gently satirized by The Atlantic as the curated persona of a self-styled guru much beloved of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
Yet on closer examination, there is nothing there. This is the profound center of the posthuman cult which Harari champions. His last book, Sapiens, began with a description of the Big Bang – a triumphant celebration of the supremacy of nothingness beloved of all those who seek to recast God in the image of man.
The new book – Nexus – continues Harari’s habit of asserting as real things he has not seen outside his own imagination, combined with observations found elsewhere. Perhaps his most bold claim in Nexus is that, according to Harari, people are really no different from machines, and so we should not be concerned about the penetration of human nature by artificial intelligence and its algorithms.
What is so easy to overlook in the overblown prose of books like Harari’s is that they are best understood as one man’s image of the world. Harari is not describing us, but himself. The acme of his “spiritual” life is the attainment of emptiness, his thinking – such as it is – expressed in the sort of writing which reminds the reader of a chatbot. Harari says in Nexus that “most information is not an attempt to represent reality.” For statements like this, he is considered to be among the “world’s leading intellectuals,” which at least proves his point – if only about him.
Despite not being a scientist, he identifies as one, attacking the Christian faith as the assembly of belief by the choice of the Catholic Church, against the “error correction” of “science.”
To him, of course, Christ is a mere fiction, as presumably is the impact of following the science into lockdowns, masking, and the widespread acceptance of the so-called “vaccines.” The basis of the scientific method in Descartes was the application of doubt, but there is no evidence of this in Harari’s carefully curated image of the world – as predictable in its contents as the Instagram feed of almost any other celebrity.
Harari warns that humanity is conjuring an “alien intelligence” in its experiments with AI. This could be said of Harari himself, who sees “nothing good” has come out of humanity in his earlier books and that, unlike him, we all believe in mere “fictions.”
He speaks for the sort of person who thinks they are better, and best fit to decide our futures, because of what they think about themselves. What people like Harari think of humanity is also nothing new. The argument for despotism is older than Plato, which is the rule of a self-appointed expert elite that knows what is best because it believes it knows better than you. Harari’s work is a restatement of the idea that the wisest should rule. What is new here is that the “wisest” now talk in the robotic voice of an automated telephone queue.
His insight resembles the superficially convincing output of a machine. His is a soulless verdict on the nature and future of mankind. He likes to say modern man has surrendered meaning for power. His manifestos for meaninglessness have certainly empowered his bank account and his public profile, but he supplies no evidence that the large scale subtraction of meaning from the lives of modern men has enhanced their lives. Most of what he says is a statement of belief: his own.
The meaning which has been surrendered by modernism is meaningless to Harari. Modernism, through the 20th century religions of man, promoted empowerment through the organized dismantling of the traditional natural order. The order envisioned in the 21st century, presented in Harari’s Homo Deus, is the sunlight of celebrity shining on the nothing new. Men have dreamed of displacing God in the act of creation since Pygmalion.
Harari’s celebrity and wealth cannot be explained on merit, as his ideas are neither novel nor afford much explanatory power. Regardless of whether you like him personally, his notions are not new and do not add much to the social algorithm.
Harari is not a scientist, but a historian. He is a historian of a myth of human nature which begins with abiogenesis – the creation of everything from nothing, by nothing.
What makes us human, according to him, is a consciousness which came from nothing and which Harari claims it is leading us into it again. As the New Scientist pointed out, Harari’s big idea that human civilization was the product of shared imaginings, such as “gods, states, money and human rights,” came from Terry Pratchett, a writer of comic fiction.
This new book, Nexus, is about how information is transmitted and how this affects our politics and society. His ideas about social and political institutions also read like the machine-generated content programmed by progressives, like most AI chatbots in fact are. Harari’s warning in Nexus that technology may disrupt “democracy” is only a danger to those who consider the current system of government by globalist media desirable.
Some of his ideas are ridiculous. “Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans,” he states, which is as bald a contradiction of basic reality as can be made about our current system, whose main policies endure with depressing immunity to the electoral cycle.
He asserts that most information is fiction, but also states it is “the most basic building block of reality,” leaving reality itself a mere figment to be manipulated. This is the disorder of the Godless made flesh, and its claim is circular. If you deny reality beyond words and images, then your ideas about it cannot be falsified. This is the highest form of nonsense, and it is presented as wisdom.
The global ambition of Harari’s sponsors is notably absent from his summary of the information systems he finds in history. The vast “censorship industrial complex” which rules us is notably absent from this enlightened analysis of the information system which shapes our present and future lives. He cites a 2022 study on “bots” on Twitter, but ignores the fact that former Israeli intelligence agents are shaping content through the use of automated accounts on the platform today.
Tellingly, Harari states that such people who dislike being ruled by ideological bureaucracies are simply ignorant. His appeal to the would-be masters of the world such as Gates and Bezos is obvious. Yet his observations about the more obvious dangers of AI are made elsewhere, and Harari presents no solutions to any of them.
READ: Yuval Noah Harari warns against AI’s ‘ability to manipulate people,’ pretend to be human
The danger for people like Harari is that they may lose control, not that the machines may replace us. After all, says Harari, humans are simply programmed like machines themselves.
Harari’s work is itself reminiscent of an algorithm: a formula composed of human input, formalized in the language of the enlightened. He speaks as if to children, having no children himself, which accounts for the condescending tone.
It is fitting that a man whose destiny is designed by Davos would talk as if from a mountaintop. What he says is not as important as what we see when he says it: he is a prophet of novelty, saying nothing new, but in a way which is presented as pioneering. Of course, the future he promotes is the same despotism as imagined by all those in history who thought themselves superior by virtue not of virtue, but because of their thoughts. Harari’s logic is circular, his assertions based on his beliefs, which are stated as facts against the “fake news” of Christ, and of the culture and civilization He inspired whose replacement is the mission of the Men of the Mountain.
Harari ‘s voice is like a recorded message from a service no one wants. His view of humanity is his view of himself: there is nothing to discover inside man, and he is essentially identical to a robot.
This point of view is the chauvinism of those convinced of their own ascended wisdom. The problem with Harari is he wishes to be taken seriously as a prophet of human destiny. Aside from the fact that the prophet of novelty is saying nothing new, his mission is to export his emptiness to all of us who know no better than the nothingness he believes is the birth of reality.
U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates