Paul Gosselin (29/6/2023) -> French

Up until quite recently very few people except an intimate circle at the World Economic Forum had ever heard of Yuval Noah Harari, nicknamed the "prophet of Davos"... Harari is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of several books. Taking in consideration his position in the World Economic Forum and the access this gives him to some of the most powerful people in the planet, Harari is not someone you should take lightly. While Harari is of Jewish origin, it is clear that he rejects the entire Judeo-Christian school of thought. In a conference (2023) on artificial intelligence and the future of humanity, he went so far as to assert that it would be time to replace the Bible with a new sacred text written by Artificial Intelligence. Obviously, such a proposal immediately raises the question: WHO will control such an AI, inevitably becoming a powerful propaganda tool? Only the lobotomised would believe that an AI application of this kind could be "neutral" regarding ideological and religious issues. But then, if one needs to develop a religion for postmodern technocrats, it's only logical that one should consult an Artificial Intelligence oracle. And like many other AI propagandists, Harari carefully erects a bogus “mystical aura” around AI, claiming for example that we "don't really understand how AI makes its decisions". Of course this bogus mystical aura is useful for instilling respect in the masses for AI bots, respect that will be very useful for an elite seeking to establish AI as an instrument of propaganda and manipulation. Harari also claims "AI will eventually be able to understand us better than we understand ourselves". This is a very interesting concept for a neo-totalitarian regime, enabling/justifying total subjugation of the masses (because AI knows better than we do ourselves what we really need)... All bow down to the AI... In a 2018 interview with the New York Times Harari added that if we don't understand the power of AI, democracy could become a banal emotional puppet show[1].

Furthermore, in another interview Harari went so far as to prophesy that humanity is doomed to extinction within the next century (Andrew Anthony 2017):

I think that Homo sapiens as we know them will probably disappear within a century or so, not destroyed by killer robots or things like that, but changed and upgraded with biotechnology and artificial intelligence into something else, into something different[2]. The timescale for that kind of change is maybe a century.

Additionally Harari copy-pastes the Davos view that there are "too many humans on earth"[3]. The interview (below) with Janine Abbring, recorded in 2022, gives insight into Yuval Harari's personal life and his ideological motivations.

Feb. 19th, 2022 interview with Yuval Noah Harari VPRO documentary (Janine Abbring speaks to Yuval Noah Harari in Tel Aviv.)

Among the issues discussed during this interview, Harari can't avoid serving up some LGBT+ propaganda[4]. Harari argued that (59: 29 min.):

“If homosexuality was against nature, it just couldn't exist. Things against nature are, for example, driving faster than the speed of light. You don't need human rules against them, they just can't happen – it's impossible.”

Yet, boiled down to its essence, Harari's argument is that if something exists in nature, it is therefore unquestionably legitimate... This is a very common argument[5] (among relativists) in Social Anthropology. But Harari's argument neglects a significant issue, as one should be aware that you could use the SAME logic and the same argument to defend and legitimise absolutely anything, absolutely any abomination known to Man. For example, read through this free-style paraphrase of Harari's comment:

“If genocide was against nature, it just couldn't exist. Things against nature are, for example, driving faster than the speed of light. You don't need human rules against them, they just can't happen – it's impossible.”

Thus applyting Harari's logic to genocide legitimizes genocide. And to genocide one could add human sacrifice, slavery, execution by impalement and who knows what else? All these things exist and/or are attested by history and some by archaeology. Note that Harari never bothers to prove that human nature is completely parallel to the natural world (which obeys its laws)... Where are the laws of human nature? What are they ? What is their foundation? Who established these laws? Harari does not bother to examine any of these questions. Absent such proof, Harari's claimed parallel falls apart.

So what about the Marquis de Sade?
I know, I know, I'm getting there... It's just that Harari's argument about the legitimacy of homosexuality is not new. It reminds me of an exchange I had a few years ago with a British atheist. Here is the full text of that exchange:

Moral Absolutes: An Exchange with Atheist Paul Baird and Paul Gosselin (Samizdat - 2010)

On moral issues, Baird's perspective is close to Harari's. The exchange begins with Baird stating:

Ok, my worldview is that
1) absolute truth does not exist
2) absolute morality does not exist
3) absolute laws of logic do not exist[6].

In response, regarding the issue of morality (2nd point), I suggested Baird examine a statement made by the famous Marquis de Sade about the relationship between men and women. In his Philosophie dans le boudoir de Sade stated (1795/1965):

If then it becomes incontestable that we [men] have received from Nature the right indiscriminately to express our wishes to all women, it likewise becomes incontestable that we have the right to compel their submission, not exclusively, for I should then be contradicting myself, but temporarily. It cannot be denied that we have the right to decree laws that compel woman to yield to the flames of him who would have her; violence itself being one of that right's effects, we can employ it lawfully. Indeed! Has Nature not proven that we have that right, by bestowing upon us the strength needed to bend women to our will?

Since Baird shares De Sade's materialism, I asked him whether he accepted or rejected De Sade's assertion about male-female relations, and if he rejected it, I demanded he explain (as a matter of logic...) on what BASIS he rejects this assertion. Read the exchange and you'll see whether Baird's answer is convincing or not[7]...

The basic problem is that the legitimisation of LGBT+ propaganda proposed by Harari (in his interview with Abbring) is based on the SAME logic as the Marquis de Sade's observations regarding men and women. Inevitably, therefore, this will lead Harari not only supporting LBGT+ propaganda, but also to support the Marquis on the issue of relations between the two sexes. How can such a conclusion be avoided? Who knows, it may be that Harari finds the Marquis de Sade's bed quite comfortable...

The rejection of Moral Absolutes
In his short, masterly text, The Abolition of Man (1943), CS Lewis observes that the rejection of an absolute moral law (which Lewis calls the Tao) by modern and post-modern elites (such as Yuval Harari) allows the establishment of a class of neo-totalitarian technocrats that Lewis calls the Conditioners. Once this step is taken, we are faced with a class of rulers who give themselves TOTAL freedom to determine (for themselves and for the masses) what is right and wrong. Lewis provides us with a unique glimpse where such presuppositions can take us (1943/1978: 37-38)

In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao — a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education. The conditioners have been emancipated from all that. It is one more part of nature which they have conquered. The ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them, something given. They have surrendered—like electricity: it is the function of the Conditioners to control, not to obey them. They know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce. (...) The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the human race. They are the motivators, the creators of motives. But how are they going to be motivated themselves?

In the hands of Davos neo-totalitarian technocrats, Artificial Intelligence is very likely to become an extraordinarily powerful tool for propaganda, manipulation and control of the masses. Who knows if the Davos sect hasn't already put in place a class of neo-totalitarian Conditioners aspiring to get their hands on all the extraordinary manipulative (and brainwashing) power offered by Artificial Intelligence? Reflecting on the repercussions of Artificial Intelligence, in the same interview with Janine Abbring, Harari (somewhat inadvertently) provides a chilling insight into the power over the masses to which Davos Conditioners rather transparently aspire (63 : 25 min.)

“It depends what we do with it. (...) that is the thing about hacking humans. Throughout history, dictatorial governments always wanted to hack human beings, to be able to know what you think, what you feel. Youi know Stalin gives a speech. Everybody smiles and claps their hands, but Stalin wants to know what you really think. They didn't have the technology [to know what people really think]. Now the technology is there. And it's not just...it's all the time. In the Soviet Union, the KGB couldn't follow you 24 hours a day. They didn't have enough agents. Even if they had an agent on you, the agent would write paper reports and somebody, a human being needs to read. It's impossible to analyse all this. Now with AI and smartphones and sensors and cameras and microphones and all that, you can literally follow everybody 24 hours a day. You don't need need human agents, we carry the agent in your pocket [cell phone], and you don't need human analysts to go over the data, you have AI. So for the first time in history it is possible to follow everybody all the time and follow what's happening under the skin and to hack [manipulate] humans. (...) To get to know you better than you know yourself.”

The American biology professor William B. Provine appears to have given serious thought about such matters and offered the following blunt observations on the ethical implications of Darwin's materialistic origins myth (1990: 23):

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin's views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That's the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. What an unintelligible idea.

Pursuing materialist logic to the end, the Marquis de Sade made a telling remark about murder (1795/1965: 329-330):

What is man and what difference is there between him and other plants, between him and all the other animals of the world? None, obviously. Fortuitously placed, like them, upon this globe, he is born like them; like them, he reproduces, rises, and falls; like them he arrives at old age and sinks like them into nothingness at the close of the life span. Nature assigns each species of animal, in accordance with its organic construction. Since the parallels are so exact that the inquiring eye of philosophy is absolutely unable to perceive any grounds for discrimination, there is then just as much evil in killing animals as men[8], or just as little, and whatever be the distinctions we make, they will be found to stem from our pride's prejudices, than which, unhappily, nothing is more absurd.

Well it turns out that Harari does in fact endorse views VERY much like those of the Marquis. But judge for yourselves. In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Harari makes the following claim:

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.

A Piece of the Puzzle that doesn't quite fit...
In course of his interviews, Harari is careful to present himself as a classic atheist. Speaking to a Western audience Harari claims to have been brought up by atheist parents and to have rejected 'the Bible at an early age. We can assume that before an audience in Israel, Harari would instead claim to reject the Tanakh (what Christians call the Old Testament). Such assertions would probably go down well with his university students or colleagues, but with a wider audience in Israel this might provoke criticism. In any case Harari is quite insistent on his profile as a classical atheist. Here is a hilarious and useful quote provided by Shawn Vandor (2020)

I found Harari both compelling and annoying: compelling because he brings serious attention to often overlooked topics such as the ethics of biotechnology, which I also find to be critically important; annoying because he seems to peddle in the same postmodern games we've been fooling ourselves with for a generation or more now, claiming, on the one hand, nothing really matters, humans are just apes, traditional stories are nothing but "myths," and myths are just an ancient form of "fake news"—all the while asserting his own authority in narrating his own all-new anti-metanarrative metanarratives. He's like a car salesman who's convinced you that cars don't really matter, they're just figments of our imagination. And by the way, he'd like to sell you a new car.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Harari offers a grand metanarrative for people who A) have an aversion to metanarratives, and who B) don't know enough to know how or why some metanarratives are more meaningful than others. The sleight-of-hand is disingenuous: Harari asserts himself as a timeless, placeless objective observer without bias, while at the same time asserting a fairly unexamined, particularistic, subjective perspective regarding truth, the world, and the truth of the world, in which expertise, objectivity, and data are given a priori privilege over imagination, subjectivity, and creativity.

But there's a piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite fit with Harari's classic atheist profile, as from the very first minute of the Abbring interview, Abbring exposes the fact that Harari has the habit of taking, every year, a two-month break where he does a kind of "spiritual retreat" where he cuts himself off from computers and the internet and doesn't talk to anyone for two months (not even his homosexual spouse)! You might wonder how he supports himself financially during this long period of inactivity, but since he's been doing it for quite a few years, one can deduce that such a break in his activities isn't a financial problem...

But with these "spiritual retreats" we have an element that does NOT fit the classic atheist profile at all. If Harari does NOT believe in the Jew's, Christians or Muslim's God, then one wonders WHO or WHAT he is communing with? Unanswered questions... To this suggestion, a contact replied:

Who's talking about communion? It may well be a time of meditation, of emptiness, of isolation (like monks).

This suggestion is indeed plausible. On the other hand, Harari does make a point of establishing his profile as a classical atheist. Logically, this profile does NOT really fit with all the time and energy he puts into his annual “meditations”. TWO months per year, every year! While one would expect such behaviour from a New Age guru, this is NOT common among hardcore atheists.

Such a detail suggests that beneath his classic atheist persona, there lurks 'something else'... Perhaps the time will come when this 'something else' will be exposed for all to see.

Here's a related anecdote. In the 1970s I met a professor at university who was at the time a fervent Marxist, haranguing students to join the struggle against capitalism. Some twenty years later, I met him (after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall) and discovered that he had abandoned communism and converted to the postmodern belief system, which had led him to become interested in the occult and astral voyages... He had become a kind of shaman... This leads me to believe that a convinced atheist would be shaken to the core if he were to see a clear supernatural/occult phenomenon with his own eyes....

It's possible that Harari is one of those who have taken this step[9]...

Time will tell.

References

-- (2023) A.I. Could Rewrite the Bible and Correct Religion, Says Professor and WEF Member "In a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct. Just think about a religion whose holy book is written by an A.I." (Caldron Pool - 13/6/2023)

-- (2024) The Demiurge of Technocracy. (Blueapples on X - Bombthrower - 9/10/20224)

ADL-TABATABAI, Sean (2023) WEF Says 'Emotionless AI' Will Replace World Governments by 2030. (The People's Voice - 14/6/2023)

ANTHONY, Andrew (2017) Interview : Yuval Noah Harari: 'Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so'. (The Guardian – 19/3/2017)

BRACKPOOL, Lewis (2022) Yuval Noah Harari is possibly one of the most influential members of the @wef , but who exactly is he? (X - video, 1 minute - 28/7/2022)

CHUNG, Cynthia (2023) Through A Glass Darkly Inscrivez-vous 21 Why H.G. Wells' World Brain and Yuval Harari's Hackable Human Will Not Succeed: A Study on the Abolition of Man. (Through A Glass Darkly - 6/4/2023)

CHUNG, Cynthia (2023) Why HG Wells' World Brain and Yuval Harari's Hackable Human Will Not Succeed. (Rising Tide Foundation - YouTube - 61 minutes - 14/6/2023)

DMITRY, Baxter (2023) WEF Orders Govt's to BAN The Bible and Issue 'Fact-Checked' Version Without God. (The People's Voice - 13/6/2023)

DMITRY, Baxter (2023) WEF Declare 'We Are Gods, If You Stand In Our Way, You Will Die'. (The People's Voice - video, 7 minutes - 17/8/2023)

DMITRY, Baxter (2024) WEF Tells Americans 'Your God Given Rights Are a Fiction'… 'You Will Be Happier as Slaves'. (The People's Voice - video, 10 minutes - 25/1/2024)

HARARI, Yuval Noah (2018) On the Future of Humanity. (The New York Times – video, 3 minutes - March 19, 2018)

HARARI, Yuval Noah (2020) Read Yuval Harari's blistering warning to Davos in full. (World Economic Forum - Jan 24, 2020)

HUFF, Ethan (2023) Yuval Noah Harari says “non-organic entities”[12] and “emotionless algorithms” will soon dominate Earth – in other words, AI TAKEOVER is coming soon. (NewsTarget - Jun 13, 2023)

HUXLEY, Aldous (1937/1965) Ends and means : an enquiry into the nature of ideals and into the methods employed for their realization. Chatto and Windus London 335 p.

HUXLEY, Aldous (1958/1990) Retour au meilleur des mondes. Plon [Paris] 155 p.

KRAYCHIK, Robert (2022) WEF Adviser Yuval Harari: 'We Just Don't Need the Vast Majority of the Population' in Today's World. (Breitbart - 10/8/2022)

KRAYCHIK, Robert (2022) Yuval Noah Harari: 'Climate Change' May Lead to 'Technological Noah's Ark' for 'Elites. (Breitbart - 12/9/2022)

KRAYCHIK, Robert (2023) WEF Creep Yuval Noah Harari: Humans May Need to 'Relearn How to See and Walk' in 'Virtual Reality' Future. (Breitbart - 9/1/2023)

LEWIS, C.S. (1943) Abolition of Man. (English, PDF, Canadian public domain text)

LEWIS, C.S. (1943/1978) The Abolition of Man: Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools. Collins Glasgow 63 p.

MARTIN, John D. (2023) Yuval Noah Harari Unintentionally Endorses Natural Law & American Exceptionalism. (Salvo #65 - June 2023)

MCBREEN, Kelen (2022) Video Thread: The Most Sinister Globalist You've Never Heard of. (InfoWars - 15/3/2022) -> discussing WEF guru, historian and author Yuval Harari

MCBREEN, Kelen (2022) WEF's Harari: Hand Over Power to The Technocratic Elite or Die. (Kelen McBreen - InfoWars - 12/9/2022)

MUEHLENBERG, Bill (2024) On Yuval Noah Harari : We must be aware of Harari's brave new world. (CultureWatch - 31/1/2024)

PROVINE, William B. (1990) Reply to: Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism. First Things, November First Things no. 6 October

SADE, Marquis de (1795/1965) Marquis de Sade: Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom & Other Writings. (Translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse) Grove Press New York 755 p.

URBANSKI, Dave (2023) AI can create a 'new Bible,' influential author declares: 'In a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct'. (The Blaze - 9/6/2023)

VANDOR, Shawn (2020) A Fatal Inconsistency in the Work of Yuval Noah Harari: Campus Week: The bestselling historian, philosopher, and darling of Silicon Valley is missing something about our scholarly search for truth. The Tablet - 14/9/2020

ZEN ANALYST (2023) Yuval Noah Harari on AI at the Frontiers Forum -- Speech Transcript. (The Compounders - 14/5/2023) -> paywalled...

Videos

New Religions of the 21st Century | Yuval Harari. (Talks at Google – YouTube – video, 83 minutes – 8/2/2015)

Yuval Noah Harari on the Rise of Homo Deus. (Intelligence Squared – YouTube – video, 91 minutes – 15/9/2016)

AI and the future of humanity | Yuval Noah Harari at the Frontiers Forum. (YouTube – vidéo, 41 minutes – 14/5/2023)

Notes

[1] - Which would be the fulfilment of one of Aldous Huxley's “prophecies”... (1958/2007: 393-394)

Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and increasing overorganization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."

Personally I am inclined to believe we have already arrived at the scene described by Huxley...

[2] - A view that recalls some of the genocidal projects put forward by the leaders of the NICE which appears in CS Lewis' apocalyptic sci-fi novel, That Hideous Strength (1945).

[3] - No, this is not a joke. One would expect, however, that the person speaking would exclude himself from those deemed "in excess". To get a better grasp of the views held by the prophet of the Davos sect one could read through the two following articles.

WEF Adviser Yuval Harari: 'We Just Don't Need the Vast Majority of the Population' in Today's World. (Robert Kraychik - Breitbart - 10/8/2022)

Un conseiller du Forum économique mondial affirme que la planète n'a plus besoin de la “ grande majorité ” de la population. (Emily Mangiaracina/LifeSiteActualités - Les moutons enragés - 16/8/2022)

A thing to keep in mind is that Harari speaks for some of the most powerful people in the world today, people with great influence in politics, economics, medical science, the courts and in media.

[4] - In my view, there is a political objective behind the transgender ideology that has been so massively propagated in the West in the last few years. This political objective has to do with the fact that if you can bring a society to the point where it is confused about an issue as basic as one's sex, then very likely you will be able to get such a population to believe ABSOLUTELY anything...

[5] - Though of course this argument is used very selectively, that is when ideologically useful as a weapon to attack certain moral claims.

[6] - Yet Baird's argument itself requires logic to sort out it's implications...

[7] - The remainder of the exchange quickly goes on to other unrelated issues.

[8] - Sade certainly isn't a guilt-ridden creature; he has absolutely no interest in moral hang-ups. Perhaps Harari may agree with Sade's concept of moral conscience. Regarding murder, Sade states (1795/1965: 332):

Let us deign for a moment to illumine our spirit by philosophy's sacred flame; what other than Nature's voice suggests to us personal hatreds, revenges, wars, in a word, all those causes of perpetual murder? Now, if she [Nature] incites us to murderous acts, she has need of them; that once grasped, how may we suppose ourselves guilty in her regard when we do nothing more than obey her intentions?

[9] - Such considerations lead me to believe that with Harari and the Davos sect, we are dealing with a group of individuals comparable to the NICE [National Institute of Coordinated Experiments] appearing in CS Lewis' apocalyptic sci-fi novel, That Hideous Strength. In this novel, the NICE is a elitist secret society (with initiations like Freemasons) which counts in its ranks politicians, scientists, journalists, university profs, policemen and occultists...

Hideous Strength is available free in the Samizdat Ebook catalogue.

[10] - “non-organic entities” = demons ??? Selling the First Lie: "You shall be as gods..."