The Arc Of Yuval Noah Harari

And his covenant with Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum

Apr 28, 2022

Politicians and oligarchs climb aboard Noah’s narrative
The late anthropologist David Graeber holed the agenda below the waterline
Showing that ‘useless’ jobs serve the purposes of finance capital
He demolished the pillar of ‘surplus’ people and the need for depopulation
Weather and shortages are being manipulated to make a myth come true
It may be a cult - it may be Plato’s shadows on the wall - designed to confuse

“And then the big political and economic question of the 21st century will be: what do we need humans for? Or at least. What do we need so many humans for?”
— Yuval Harari at the World Economic Forum.

(3,700 words or about 16 minutes’ read).

Harari’s masters aim to splinter your concepts of identity, will and consciousness

Apr 28, 2022

It’s not clear when he began using his middle name Noah. If he used it at all in the early years, it was just the initial, N.

Certainly it added a weighty, apocalyptic tone as the Israeli history professor progressed from niche topics like medieval warfare and the ritual power of “Kabbalah” to become the public intellectual face of The Great Reset.

Why should one care? — because Harari sails as close as the public is allowed to the thinking of those who are charting the future of the world.

Perhaps you don’t blame the powerful for Covid, the lockdown, for vaccine side-effects, for the impending insolvency of Medicare and Social Security, dislocation of supply chains, planned obsolescence and pollution, for the fraud that is recycling dumped in the third world, for overestimating Green energy’s capacity and calling it too soon, for agricultural policy and food shortages, or for the money printing that has made the rich richer and unleashed inflation upon the rest of us — all of which long predate the war in Ukraine.

Even if you insist these disruptions are coincidence, you must note that from the start politicians declared Covid an “historic opportunity” to Build Back Better — along with the other “cascading crises of our era” as president Joe Biden put it in his inaugural address. We can already see there are winners and losers — and perhaps a plan. Harari has inherited the task of justifying why some win and others lose.

If a Great Narrative is needed to justify the tumultuous change afoot — the WEF held a conference of that name in Nov 2021 — it is better sold to the public by a cheeky chappie such as Harari.

Matronly health ministers have already told us there will be no return to normal. Prime ministers and presidents rap out the phrase, “a new normal,” a nebulous formula made not-much clearer in The Great Reset of the World Economic Forum (WEF), to which Harari is a top adviser.

The great conversation-stopper is, “they wouldn’t do that.” Harari tells us why “they” just might.

Noah’s animals

Waves of crisis overwhelm us. Is it the climate, carbon, competition for resources, the sudden threat of plague, the need to vaccinate everyone against everything despite natural immunity having girded humans for millions of years; do we have to stop using oil and gas right now, how much of the food crisis is man-made, and is the population really at bursting point?

Do these risks necessitate the surrender of liberty, freedom of association, movement and speech, independence of thought and action, and the primacy of conscience?

Harari’s retort is that we never had any of the above: they were chemicals or illusions.

He makes some acute observations: the power of imagination is what sets us apart from other animals. He punctures “da science” reminding us that it is not lore or dogma and is open to manipulation. He goes beyond the post-modern or woke crowd who dismiss everything as a “social construct,” observing that we imagine in order to modify society for the better, not to be bound by preconceptions.

Yet Harari soon drives his flock into a dead end by a narrow view of imagination. What he imagines is determinist and sometimes seems close to nihilism.

The conservative or religious-minded commentariat has gone kayak bananas on the rapids at his comment that free will is an illusion, that everything is just electrons and chemical juice, and that AI is effectively going to replace consciousness.

They poke valid holes in his argument that because, he claims, God is an illusion, humans can be gods. Is Harari merely forgetful or inconsistent, or is he pagan? (he says he personally follows Buddhism.)

Harari plays word games, appropriating the phrase Intelligent Design, which was first used by Christian Creationists to expose the holes in Big Bang, chaos theory and Darwin’s theory of evolution. His version of intelligent design is merely a formula, an algorithm, the calculation of inputs and outputs.

Above all, he engages in provocation, talking of “useless, worthless” people. Perhaps the shock is intentional. Beyond selling lots of books, lies a fault in his thinking. [1]

He presents the problem of people who cannot adapt to the future he imagines. Yet he offers no philosophical justification for why we should go there.

If humans are capable of imagining a society, why should they imagine one in which the vast majority is surplus to requirements? What is the point? He simply answers: there is none — conscience is chemical, God is an illusion and free will is finished.

Cryptic speakers

If governments, corporations and their owners wanted to speak plainly they would do so. There would be a lively debate in the press about the direction society is surfing upon these waves of crisis. The press might even be curious about the origin of said crises, and how they seem to serve vested interests.

There would be honest attribution of cause and effect, rather than rolling up two years of calculated disruption and laying it at the feet of “Russia, Russia.”

The American scholar of technocracy Patrick Wood has shown by textual analysis that the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, of 1992, is really a cover for commercial exploitation; enabling pharma and biotech to profit from genetic manipulation and the patenting of life.

That phrase we hear all the time, “sustainable development,” is less about protecting the environment — and more about modifying the genes of plants and animals including humans so that they can be patented, monetized and owned.

You can get into numerology, like the former Director of the IMF Christine Lagarde, and note that “new normal” equates by four different systems of gematria to “depopulation.” [2]

We the people have been left to scry hidden intentions, which are exposed haphazardly by whistleblowers: behavioural modification, psychological manipulation and “nudge units” — the agents of an unprecedented surveillance state. The press and social media (owned by the same institutional investors) treat the public like a wayward horse that must wear blinkers lest “disinformation” lead it to bolt off the prescribed path.

Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker, of Harvard, says politicians trade in banal realities — taxes, the use of force and war — yet they use more qualifiers than philosophers who deal in “concepts about concepts.” Their language serves as a get-out clause to avoid accountability.

Mischief is afoot. Word salad rules the day — see the Wikipedia entry on the Reset. The media ridicules any effort to probe the code by which politicians act in lockstep.

Harari is a worthy thinker, a valid voice, he should be one among many. Yet the fact that he is praised so effusively by politicians, and elevated by those behind them, should serve to warn us that he is being positioned for a purpose.

Fame in publishing, like everything around us, is illusory and corrupt. Lavish contracts have long been used as illicit campaign financing, bribes, payoffs and money laundering. The bestseller lists are manipulated. What you read from the bookshop, whether in fact or fiction, is as controlled as anything you hear on the television news. You are being sold a bill of fare. [3]

Ghost of Graeber

Yuval Harari portrays himself as a “gentleman amateur” — in the way the rich once dominated sports by flaunting their lack of professional prowess and demeaning those who could not afford to play week-long tournaments for free.

He admits that he did little research for his bestseller Sapiens (2011) and just used his “10,000 feet view” — his lofty intellect — to see what lesser humans could not.

There is every reason to believe that compared to 90 per cent of politicians, Harari justly deserves his reputation for intellect and talent. There is no suggestion that he writes to order — unlike the practice of much university research nowadays. Yet his ideas serve the express policy of the digital-financial-petro-pharma complex which has adopted him.

Harari’s ideas also contain within them the seed of their own demise.

The late anthropologist David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), was a powerful, contrary voice. Unlike Harari he was an original, a celebrity of his own making and truly a freethinker. He was an anarchist, a founding member of Occupy Wall Street and, above all, ungovernable, like Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test.

Graeber’s work destroys the pretext that the infotech and bioscience revolution is suddenly confronted by a surplus of humans — and thus he demolishes the central pillar of the depopulation agenda: that there is a problem of billions of useless eaters which must urgently be addressed.

Since Graeber died suddenly in September 2020 (after Mullis in August 2019) it is Harari who is left to dominate the discussion on the future of work as a top adviser to the World Economic Forum’s executive chairman Klaus Schwab, rather than the better-qualified Graeber whose research was more relevant, targeted and profound. [4]

That is not to say that Harari profited from the demise of a rival — only that his prominence owes to the same people who can demolish the careers of others.

Graeber argued that much of the population has long been engaged in “make work” — unproductive activities that justify the dominant position of the financial and political elite.

When I had my first introduction to economics in high school in the 1970s, the problem the teacher posed was what workers would do with their spare time when industrial productivity advanced: with 15-hour work weeks the task of government would be to build enough leisure centres and dance halls.

Ernst Schumacher had just published Small Is Beautiful (1973). Such was the influence of the book it was taken for granted that the economy should serve the needs of human development, education and the local, from the village up.

Instead, Schumacher’s idea of sustainable growth was hijacked by the most powerful owners of oil, minerals, the banking system and the media — and the inversion of the environmental movement began.

Why? Because the owners favour concentration of ownership, centralization of control, elimination of competition and ultimately oligarchical collectivism.

Concern for the environment, for pollution, despoliation, over consumption and planned obsolescence had to be diverted and derailed. So we got climate change — first cooling, then warming — purposely irrational for deceptive reasons. [5]

As for those 15-hour work weeks, they didn’t dare give the people that much leisure. So even as the industrial base of Western countries was dismantled and shipped abroad the time the worker had to clock in and out stayed the same.

If the principal forces destroying the environment were examined rationally, the owners would be holed below the waterline. Moreover, their cultish, naïve, linear, Malthusian, zero-sum projects would be exposed — from geoengineering to depopulation.

As a result, inversion is necessary. All must be turned on its head.

The inversion of what's natural is “part of the plan” — whose plan; who knows? — but it aligns perfectly with parallel projects around the UN, Agenda 2030, the Club of Rome, the Biodiversity Convention, bioelectronics and neuroscience.

Instead of appropriating Intelligent Design, Harari could have coined his own slogan. He is a competent author and this borrowed phrase does not fully capture his vision anyway. It seems his intention is to subvert this particular concept: what many religious people consider to be the natural order of things.

Assault by inversion

His attack is not on religion per se. This is no intellectual dog fight of the atheist vs monotheist variety. It is intended to undermine people, to confuse and confound, so they can be herded into the future.

There are many visions of this future but only two things at its centre: ownership and control.

It is evident that the monetary and banking system is changing. The person in the street may think cash merely turns digtal, and welfare into basic income: that is how it's sold to the public — as a matter of convenience — it goes much deeper.

If one had to pick one key change, it is how value is measured: worth is no longer weighed by outputs but inputs; not in the creation of value through labour but by the resources you use, the veritable space that you occupy.

You will own nothing because ownership has passed to others. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, all genomes are tracked and valued. If those genes are modified using CRISPR technology, those genes are patented and owned.

For this transfer of ownership to take place, the people have to be disabused of the concept of Nature and the natural as something owned in common or given by God.

That is exactly why Yuval Harari has repurposed the concept of Intelligent Design and it suggest he is on board with an agenda.

Yuval Hurrah

Harari’s official photos do the Rodin thinker pose with fist clenched under chin. He is a great talker and his clarity is perhaps informed by his Buddhism and meditative skills.

Historian Theodore Roszak recognized decades ago the tendency of each age to see creation through the eyes of its own technology. This was the conceit of the clock — the Enlightenment thinkers saw the universe as a timepiece and, if they believed in God, he was the great watchmaker in the sky.

Today we compare the body with a computer. Warnings of those such as Roszak are ignored. He deserves to be quoted at length, particularly his observation that the central ideas that underpin our society are based on experience and moral vision, not research or a body of facts.

“At the time the computer was gaining visibility on the social scene in the late 1940s there was a breakthrough in biology: the discovery of DNA... Researchers took the cybernetics information-transfer technology as a model for DNA. We now know that may not be adequate... Out of that came the image of DNA as a bio-computer and all of this lent credibility to DNA as an information processing mechanism. As we know DNA is the secret of life, it was like saying information is the secret of life.
“As of the 1950s the Great Watchmaker became the Great Cosmic Programmer and it became conventional for people to talk of their thinking as being programmed... This is nothing but an image or a paradigm or a model and it might not be adequate.” [6]

The declaration, “All men are created equal,” contains precisely no information. Yet it is one of the crowning declarations of humanity.

Even great discoveries start as observations, insights and theories, not by putting bits of information together. Later they may find information that corroborates the idea.

As of Apr 2021, The Guardian was still pushing the broken analogy: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? [7]

Ideas generate information, not the other way around. Information is the lowest level at which the mind functions: looking up a telephone number, buying a plane ticket. That is why such functions have been computerized.

“The idea that we are information processing machines has become an unchallenged matter of fact. Yet information processing is a very small part of what the brain does.”

He points out that in politics the veneration of polling leads to the regurgitation of information, when what is lost is debate. Theodore Roszak named one of his books, The Cult of Information (1994).

Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning (2018), says Yuval makes the same assumption, ignoring biology which does not distinguish between hardware and software: a neuron is not different to the information it transmits. [8]

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio states in The Strange Order of Things (2018), Harari’s assumptions are “not scientifically sound” and his conclusions are “certainly wrong.”

Anthropologist Christopher Robert Hallpike reviewed Yuval's book Sapiens and considered it "infotainment."

Another anthropologist Avi Tuschman acknowledged Harari’s “freethinking scientific mind” but also his “fuzzier worldview hobbled by political correctness.” [9]

A neutral view of Yuval is found in the New Yorker where he admits that he did no original research for his blockbuster book Sapiens.

“There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I’m not an archeologist. I’m not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research… It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.”

John Steppling in his Aesthetic Resistance podcast takes a similar critical view of artificial intelligence:

“AI has done little that is remarkable save for automating most industries and rarely has such automation benefited anyone other than the owners of these industries. The truth is that automation has reduced the quality of life globally. Nothing has been made better by automation since the washing machine.”

And it speaks to another aspect of the contemporary psychology of advanced capitalism and that, as he says:

“The ruling class is every bit as indoctrinated as the poor. In fact, no doubt more indoctrinated. And all one has to do is listen to, say, a Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and social theorist, to grasp the level of unreality operative in the corridors of power.”

Being a pop-historian is nothing new. What is different is the use to which Harari is being put by the syndicate behind the World Economic Forum.

Ivan Illich warns in Disabling Professions (1977) that occupations are structured to control our lives and that the limitations on human creativity are ultimately imposed by the very owners who now tell us we’re “useless.”

“Some of my most vivid memories of growing up in Detroit in the early 1950’s are waking up at five in the morning to see my grandfather off to his job at the mammoth Ford Rouge plant… We were assured that hard work could raise this standard yet higher by providing us with even more “needed goods”.
What TV was not telling us is that after a certain point higher consumption could mean a lower quality of life: more automobiles to carry workers farther and farther to meaningless jobs; TV to reproduce a wasteland in colour rather than in black and white, suburban homes to provide an escape from congested cities on even more congested freeways.
In the process we lost the ability to walk, communicate with each other, and to live in a community instead of a subdivision. In short, human activities have become fragmented, unrelated to one another and, most importantly, disjoined from living itself—they have become commodities. No one in industrial society suffers more from this fragmentation than industrial workers. We pay a double price: we sacrifice our lives on the job to obtain demeaned leisure.”

Only a cult demands uniformity. Only zero-sum thinking imagines a finite amount of goods or people can exist in the world, in which one person's gain is another’s loss.

Robotics, whether mechanical or AI, does the same. It provides diminishing returns, so that the first mover grabs market share, but by the end less wealth is generated, because each subsequent installation of robots yields less efficiency, saves less money.

This fosters the trend to monopoly as we see with Amazon and the big box retailers. Once they, and their owners, have cornered the world’s resources, does wealth remain? Wealth is a tussle between at least two people for a thing. If no one else wants it, or has access to it, or can afford it, is it worth anything?

Once robots have destroyed the consumer — and Harari seems to get rather excited at the prospect — there will be no consumer market, no demand, and all that oil and minerals and cobalt and gold won't be worth squat.

Noah’s ark

What is the connection between an Internet that has replaced the exchange of knowledge with entertainment, real users with bots, the real with the fake, and the world Harari imagines in which robots will dominate humans and the consumer society will cease to exist?

The answer may lie in the symmetry of the replacement of knowledge by clicks. You will be clicking away so that your energy and data can be mined.

With clickbait we realize we have overpaid, even if only with our attention. This is how you know the fourth industrial revolution, like all revolutions before, is going to eat its children.carefullycarefully

Yuval seeks to be the arc of the Great Narrative. He has launched himself on sea of controversies. He is a captain chosen carefully for the job, with the necessary defensive personal paraphernalia by the standards of the zeitgeist: and therefore impregnable.

He is probably quite congenial. But it seems his role is to justify oppression by bowing down and taking it. “You will have nothing” is sailing into the territory of “you will be nothing.”

Yuval may serve to rally the faithful — but like Old Mother Hubbard when he gets to the cupboard, we discover it’s bare.

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