Yuval Eat Ze Bugs and I Don't Care If You're Happy
Yuval Harari and the Left's Pursuit of Stupidity
Yuval Noah Harari is part of a dying breed. The committed atheist. His website announces on the first page, “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”
He’s hardly a godly specimen himself. He looks like somebody who just got released from the gulag: bald, emaciated, with big yellow teeth, and haunted sad eyes. He’s the guy Central Casting would send over if you wanted to film a movie about hostages. He is the kind of person you want to give a sandwich and tell him things will be all right.
Harari is a curious guy. He’s an Israeli citizen and professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, yet he is an ardent and celebratory atheist who believes that humans not only evolved themselves into existence, we will soon evolve ourselves out of existence. He sees evolution as a “directed process,” but he can’t explain the intellectual lapse of seeing evolution as being directed. By definition, evolution has to be random. But he sees it as directed and he sees us as nearing the off-ramp.
He’s written a bunch of books, the most famous of which is called Sapiens. It’s one of those best-sellers that nobody you know has ever read. He pontificates on everything from artificial intelligence to climate change to public health to war. This Thursday (9/12) he’ll be at the Big Bang Health conference in Berlin. The conference is for all sorts of business-to-business enterprises, but Harari will be addressing the crowd on medicine. Sometimes he’s involved in other things, he’s one of those guys who feels qualified to do everything.
Harari is a busy man. You can see from his website that he’ll go anywhere to talk to anyone about anything, as long as he’s recognized as the expert. The reason that Harari is of interest to Ricochet Cafe is not because of his keen intellectual insights or his utter lack of scientific rigor or scholarly integrity, but because lefties listen to this guy. He’s the closest thing the left has to a pope. Picture him stepping out on a balcony wearing a funny hat and blessing the assembled masses. Actually, he’d be more likely to spit on the assembled masses. He’s a fond promoter of eugenics and very much disappointed in the human race.
Harari is a member of the World Economic Forum and he jets from place to place to promote his writings (some on climate change) and various other hare-brained schemes. For instance, he predicts humans will be gone in 100 years and robots will populate the earth. He is a vegan who mediates two hours a day because it helps him think. He rambles on about technology and universal basic income and vaccines and Medieval military strategy. There is no subject on which this guy is not an expert. The daily national newspaper of Israel, Haaretz, calls him “a know-it-all.”
But the lefty elitists fall on their faces in front of this guy. Mark Zuckerberg has sought out his counsel and sat in rapt attention at his feet. The International Monetary Fund consults with him about global economic policy. A very large and reputable scientific publisher (Springer Verlag) has asked him to help direct their business by allowing him (who has never been a publisher) to explain future trends on the publishing industry. Barack Obama said Harari’s works have given him “perspective” on the Egyptian pyramids.
I guess it’s efficient for the left—why would you need multiple experts on various subjects when you can just get one guy who can be your expert on everything?
Those who have delved into his work report that Harari is sort of the Jordan Peterson of the New World Order. Peterson, in case you don’t know, is the Canadian pundit who produces lots of podcasts expounding on a bunch of boring stuff but making it seem interesting. The boundary between spell-binding and tedious can sometimes become quite thin with Peterson. But Peterson is essentially a man who acknowledges God, loves people, and is relatively conservative in his appreciation of values such as freedom of speech.
With Harari, it’s clear he’s an elitist, and his storyteller mojo is very obvious. Harari’s main gift is spinning a yarn, crafting a narrative, and stitching together a few factoids to delight and amuse the extreme lefties. He’s been called a sort of “left-wing populist” because he popularizes science and history and all the rest to tell a story for the lefty crowd. In case you haven’t noticed, lefties are not particularly smart or well read, despite what they would tell you. For years, Harari lurked in the shadows and got away with all manner of intellectual crimes against the truth, but more recently, he’s being criticized for the scholarly quack he is. He’s not a scientist or a clear thinker or an objective observer. His work has been reviewed—even in sympathetic journals—as being riddled with factual errors. He’s a guy who makes stuff up.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
The problem is not with storytellers. We need them. We love them. Hollywood, in its glory days, was full of great storytellers. The problem is that Harari is a storyteller who tries to pass himself off as a scientist or a scholar or (even worse) a visionary. He wants to tell the global elitists a story so they can run the world based on his crackpot notions.
This scrawny guy is worth around $1M to 15M, likely due to his book sales and his commitment to doing speaking engagements anywhere on any subject. (Online reporting as to his net worth varies from $1 to $15M.) There is literally nothing he doesn’t feel qualified to pontificate about. However, it has long been my observation that overconfidence is a self-correcting condition.
Harari got his PhD at the University of Oxford in 2002 writing about military strategy in the Middle Ages. He teaches at a university. He is gay and married to Itzik Yahav, who is also his manager. And he’s the A-lister above all A-listers if you’re part of the New World Order.
He is a prominent member of the World Economic Forum where he lists his occupation as “philosopher.” That’s sort of anachronistic, like he’s a modern day Socrates. It makes me picture him in a toga with a bunch of bay leaves on his head. But we all know, when it comes to togas … John Belushi wore it better.
Harari runs a business called Sapienship, which is described as a “social impact company” that sees its goal to “advocate for global responsibility” by working on initiatives “in the fields of entertainment and education.” That’s enough of a glimpse into Harari’s way with words to see what this guy is about. It’s like the old Seinfeld show “about nothing.” It makes me wonder if he doesn’t have a Vice President at Sapienship in charge of mumbo-jumbo, who might work in their Department of Rigamarole.
The problem with Yuval Harari is not that this guy is scamming a living off of a bunch of dopey books and hare-brained schemes, the reason Harari is so dangerous is that the lefties adore him. They read those books, they go to his talks, they ask him questions. They seek him out to find out how to run the world. They consult with him. They listen to him.
His latest book is called Nexus and it purports itself to be a history of information networks of humanity from the Stone Age to Artificial Intelligence. It’s just 528 pages long, which seems sort of short to offer such a comprehensive history.
Now this isn’t to say that Harari does not come up with some occasionally interesting insights, but then again, so did Frank Zappa.
The book Nexus was criticized by atheist magazine Reason (generally friendly to other atheists) for diminishing the value of freedom of speech and its role in the scientific revolution. Harari was also criticized for how he described the fall of the Roman Empire (Harari says they had weak information networks). And over and over, Harari exalts the role of the “expert class,” the elitists who simply have to do everything to keep the world going for us poor huddled idiots who are fodder for their machine and should be depopulated as soon as possible.
It goes without saying that Harari loves eugenics and considers that life has no real meaning, but sometimes he veers toward Buddhism saying we just need to detach from thinking that life has meaning. In his native Israel, the daily newspaper Haaretz has called him a “know-it-all.”
It would be hard to find a human being with more sheer contempt for humanity than Yuval Harari, and that’s another reason why he’s dangerous. He’s embopdies what lefties value. One of the things Harari most disdains is Q and the anons, which he wrongly writes about as “QAnon.” He claims that QAnon is just proof that non-elitists are dumb. He also comes down hard on problems that are “created by information” and problems that are “made worse by more information.” In other words, the problem isn’t the problem—the problem is that people might be telling the truth about the problem.