WHO CARES?

 

A friend sent me an article on Yuval Noah Harari, of which here are some excerpts (emphasis mine).  This has set me off on a rant which I've added at the end. 😊 

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(LifeSiteNews) – Yuval Noah Harari is rightly regarded by the thinking population as one of the most dangerous intellectuals alive. 

[I]n Harari’s eyes, we are no higher than the animals, and the “vast majority” of the world’s population is now unnecessary…  Harari believes in what is understood to be a fundamental tenet of cultural Marxism: There is no truth, only power.

… While he acknowledges there is an objective scientific reality, Harari has openly rejected the existence of objective values… in a recent interview... [h]e said that human rights are “not a biological fact,” but a “story we have constructed.” 

“It was a very good story…But it’s also dangerous to confuse a story we have constructed in a particular historical setting and think that we can just apply it to any other historical period…”

“We need to differentiate two types of power in history. You have the power over objective reality, like to build bridges, or cure diseases, or building an atom bomb. And then you have the power over humans and their subjective feelings, their imagination, making them believe in something.”

[T]hose in power can manipulate society’s values to their own ends, and with no such thing as objective values — including human rights — society is enslaved to the arbitrary ideas and whims of its rulers.

In 2018, Harari wrote, “… 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.”

“As a species, humans prefer power to truth… 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.”

Considering Harari’s position as adviser to the head of the World Economic Forum, which has massive government and corporate influence, we should further ask: What does this statement by Harari say about himself, and the WEF?

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Harari is following the scientism of the West to its logical conclusion. Once you accept scientific materialism - that there is an objective, knowable world, separate from mushy, human sentiment - as your guiding principle, then everything else follows that Harari and the WEF advocate.

Let’s start by being clear about one thing: values and objectivity are mutually incompatible. You cannot, to quote CS Lewis, get an ought from an is. That is, you can't derive value from supposedly external, independent facts. 

Which raises the second, far less obvious but absolutely critical point: facts are not separate, external realities.  That Harari is apparently comfortable with belief in the independent reality of ‘biological facts’ suggests that he hasn’t fully examined his own assumptions.  Facts are formulations of collective experience; that is, of shared values. All of them. Some experiences – biology, bridges - are more durable than others, but the means by which they are all elevated to the status of ‘facts’ is broadly the same: we agree about them. That, folks, is about all there is to it.  Any belief in a solid, independent world ‘out there’ is just that – a belief. It isn’t an external, objective fact at all. Everything is belief. Consequently, everything, not just human rights ‘stories’, but also biology and bridges, has value, and is in fact composed of value.

‘But no!’ I hear you indignantly cry. ‘The world is independently real!’ Forgive me, but you have absolutely no way of knowing that.  All you know and all you can ever know is your own experience, locked away inside a totally black, totally silent prison – your skull. What you filter and interpret as externally originating ideas and values become part of your belief system in the same way as your presumed knowledge of biology and bridges. What is fact, and what is fiction? Only you can decide... with a little help from your friends, real and assumed. That entire, shared view is an agreement about what exists. That a factual world exists independent from you is a theory, only hardened into fact by repetition of yet more experience. Objective fact is nowhere to be found. This has to be understood for once and for all, or, frankly, we're doomed to the nightmare world of power hungry globalists, driven by their faith in the dead hand of an objectivity whose only principle is 2+2=4. 

To Harari’s human rights ‘stories’ we must therefore add everything that’s tangible. It all has to be made sense of – our language itself reveals what’s actually going on. The degree of ‘truth’, then, is a reflection of the integrity of those inventing the stories that describe experience. The only test of truth is sincerity in the process of negotiating agreement about the nature of ‘facts’. Truth and facts are therefore inseparable - are you listening Yuval?  Determined with integrity, with sincerity, truth confers authority.  Thus determined, authority in turn confers power. Those who crave power are not thereby exempt from the obligation to uphold the truth! It is in the very nature of the social contract that they must have integrity. However, whether they do in fact uphold the truth is a matter of faith, for their integrity depends on their honour – something Harari would no doubt also deny the existence of.  If they dismiss moral responsibility (as Harari allows) then they are forthwith and by definition disqualified from office, except that of course their amoral philosophy permits them to pretend whatever the public wants to hear, in order to gain and hold the power they crave. 

This is the Existential Dilemma: Who controls the controllers? As Voltaire remarked, ‘If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him.’  But no; we have free will - another attribute Harari denies, as if lying were beyond our control.  

What, then, are lies? They are deliberate, cynical distortions of and departures from shared beliefs about what is true. If those in authority, those who have earned our trust, dishonour the social contract, how would we know? Understanding the core importance of upholding agreed truth for the proper functioning of human society, one comes to appreciate the nature of evil.

It is of the utmost importance to the integrity of our shared world view that we each honourably express as accurately as possible our interpretation of it.  Harari’s belittlement of the ‘stories’ created by agreements based on human needs is a reflection of the impoverishment of his spiritual outlook. The importance of the ‘facts’ generated by social agreement is not diminished one iota by not being objective. Why? Because it is the only way there is to map reality. That’s how we do it!  Reality is not an external thing. Reality is nothing other than what we believe as a result of shared experience. 

The community agreement a nation imperfectly forges over time as its history is a collective myth - its culture. Its crimes are airbrushed out, creating an ideal both to be proud of and striven to uphold – another value to which Harari is apparently deaf and blind.  Myths are guides to community behaviour. Myths are not lies. They are authentic belief structures. Distorting them in order, as Harari suggests, to exercise power, willfully violates the integrity of a naturally evolving process. That is a moral transgression, which you can only entertain if you allow yourself to believe, like Harari, Schwab, Fauci, Gates, Tedros, et al, that morality is less real than anything else your brain processes. Theirs is the belief that if the powerful hold up five fingers and call them four then four it is – until it’s six. Or if they say that there’s no difference between male and female, then the difference evapourates, unless and until it’s ok to again recognize two sexes… or three, or thirteen. The agreements laboriously built out of shared experience become the malleable possessions of the powerful - mere administrative conveniences. This is nothing less than the deliberate creation of dystopia.

Having assumed the existence of an independent, objective world, and therefore the arbitrary nature of what's important to us, Harari uses his error, call it Error, to conclude that lying - manufacturing myths out of whole cloth - is permissible, because the will to power is the only endeavour worth pursuing.  Thus God is not truth, but power.  In this way the entire, rich, evolving structure of human existence loses its moral integrity, reduced to a pack of lies dictated from above - and connived in by a compliant public, now bereft of organising social values, willing to go along to get along. Once limited to local massacres, the globalization made achievable in a high tech world now entertains the genocide of humanity as  both technologically attainable and logically permissible.  

We're inseparable extensions of the universe, which is unequivocally the Good, but we’re indoctrinated into thinking that we're not, and consequently behave as if nature's a rag to wipe our arses with. Nature does not lie. In fact nature is truth; the two words are synonymous.  Harari declares that whatever exists is by definition natural, yet he seems to be proposing a total departure from truth, and therefore from nature. And indeed one of his solutions for disposal of us useless eaters is that we be fed a constant diet of virtual reality. That is where we're headed, right now, with Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset.

Where then can we find truth? Durable as has been their way of life, and closest to nature, from a Western perspective there's something a bit unimaginative about primitive peoples. Though pregnant with significance their art is as static as their technology. Yes, the spare economy of primitive carvings and paintings is affecting, but our restless modern imaginations crave constant stimulation, and this can only be supplied by endless invention. This restlessness needs examination. It conceals a fundamental inability to be happy.  And of course it's relentlessly tickled by the consumerist advertising of an economic model that requires perpetual growth to sustain itself. All this on a finite planet - a recipe for the cataclysmic disaster that is at last almost upon us, and which the elites hope to survive, merely to continue their rapacious plunder, but now served by robots and unencumbered by the rest of us, as alienated as ever from the nature they (and we) have fatally dismissed. 

The adult obsession with immortality as physically achievable infinite durability is another clue to our subject-object alienation. Immortality does not mean living forever! Immortality is the apprehension of the eternal present; the here and now. 'To hold infinity in the palm of your hand' to quote William Blake (Auguries of Innocence). Children have this capacity, whereas we adults spend our lives futilely seeking to recapture it in ersatz externalities. Here's a key verse from William Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality - 

 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And Cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,—

He sees it in his joy:

The youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's priest.

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended:

At length the man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day. 

Tennis pros, aikido masters, actors, athletes, dancers, scientists looking at or through their instruments, achieve their flashes of brilliance by being temporarily ego-absent. Afterwards they may attribute that exhilarating moment to some personal achievement, but the discipline that enables their success is actually self-abnegation. Self-aggrandisement, if it occurs at all, comes later, an artifact, a useless appendage, to which their devotees will pander. But they themselves, if they ponder the matter, will realise their creativity came from they know not where.  They were inspired; they were blessed with insight. They were momentarily egoless.  This is the message of the Zen master, of Meister Ekhart, of Socrates. But not of Harari!

And this is where we're all headed, whether we like it or not: the complete relinquishment at the end of life of all the evanescent but seductively engaging tinsel we valued. Though power may come our way, our task is not to chase it, but rather to achieve detachment before we fall off the twig!  Modern society seems designed to thwart this realisation with a constant flood of distractions, coupled with the commercial glamourisation of our egos through the Achilles heel of vanity.  And now Yuval Noah Harari is attempting to drive the last nail into the coffin of spirituality for humanity as a whole by eliminating the quest for truth altogether.

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Pablo

27 August, 2022