Yuval Harari Thinks You're Useless
A Spiritual Atheist Has News for You: We Don't Need You Anymore
Yuval Harari has that sunken caved-in face look of a long-time vegan. Born on a kibbutz in Israel in 1976, Harari is probably the most influential man you’ve never heard of. A professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Harari is the odds-on favorite to take over the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2025 when Klaus Schwab retreats back into darkest recesses of the Black Forest, from whence he came.
Yuval Harari has always been an odd man even at the WEF, which is a gathering of odd men. He allegedly meditates for two hours a day, talks about the value of spirituality, but claims to be an atheist. He was never elected to any office, earned a doctorate from Oxford in medieval and military history, but writes books biology and science and genetics. He has no social media accounts. He and his husband (Harari is gay) run a company called Sapienship which is in the business of “social impact.” He has published a bunch of best-selling books that people like Barack Obama read, including Sapiens and Homo Deus.
He has been lurking behind Klaus Schwab for years.
Here’s a quote from the Yuval Harari: “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”
He states that artificial intelligence (AI) will create what he harshly calls “the useless class,” people who no longer play any meaningful role in the world. I would argue that it is fair and intelligent to talk about economic shifts brought on by technology, including AI, but Harari dismisses this by saying that most human beings will soon no longer serve any purpose. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—Harari welcomes this transition because he thinks life will be easier when fewer people can do all the work needed in the world, relegating the rest to robots, machines, and AI. And it goes without saying that when Harari talks about the “useless class,” he is not talking about himself or his WEF buddies.
He’s talking about us.
Despite the bonanza of these changes, Harari does concede that dealing with the useless class might pose a bit of a problem. He does not advocate genocide or anything like that. Rather, he recommends drugs and video games, and he advocates that big companies (not billionaires) pay taxes that provide financial support for drug-addled gamers. We may live as long as we do so quietly and cheaply.
Right now, Harari is the kind of weirdo you find on the TED talk circuit and he has a bafflingly shy, self-effacing presence on the stage. Yet he is the guru to the elites: Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and European publishing giant Axel Springer as well as the International Monetary Fund and other political luminaries regularly seek him out for advice. He paints himself as a rational scientist but he is more like a mentally ill storyteller. He is quick to point out he doesn’t want to predict the future, usually right before predicting the future.
Harari is tailor-made for the WEF. He was never elected to any office nor does he have the credentials to talk about the things he talks about, like the medicine, economics, or trans-humanism. Yet, like Greta Thunberg, his utter lack of credentials and education is viewed as a resume enhancement and not a deficit. WEF praises experts while listening to amateurs.
(Now if Harari wanted to lecture WEF on military history of the Middle Ages, he does have the credentials to do that. The trouble is, nobody cares.)
In an era when Darwin’s evolutionary theory is being continually and effectively assaulted, Harari is doubling down on what might be called genetic evolution, the idea that genes are everything. Genetic engineering, according to Harari (who has never studied genetics, as I mentioned earlier) will make us happier, less violent, and more productive (or maybe less productive if you’re part of the useless class). Harari thinks we should move forward by genetically altering human physiology, that’s how smart we are. Or maybe that’s how smart he is. In the age-old debate of nature versus nurture in human development, Harari comes down 99% on the nature side and 1% on the nurture side.
In other words, control the genes and you can build the race of people you want. This reminds me of a guy named Nimrod in the Bible (Tower of Babel).
Harari also talks about “the data religion.” He even calls himself a data-ist. In the data religion, the universe is just a bunch of data that ebbs and flows and computes. What makes a human greater than a chicken, per Harari, is that humans have more data, use more data, and process that data more efficiently than chickens. In other words, every living thing is just an algorithm.
While Harari has been portrayed as Klaus Schwab’s right-hand man at WEF and has even been called “Schwab’s brain,” he has no official position at WEF. In fact, more than once, WEF has had to issue statements that Harari does not work for them. That’s because Harari has a way of saying worrisome things.
One of the most worrisome things Harari has said and continues to say is that most of the world’s population is simply unnecessary. And by “most of the world’s population” he means you and me, not him and Klaus. This is based on Harari’s idea that people must be meanignfully plugged into the economic world, growing food, writing books, lecturing at WEF, or in the military to have value, and many jobs are just going to be streamlined or made so efficient that we do not need laborers. If a country doesn’t need a large army, why do we need so many people? So if your view of people is labor and cannon fodder, Harari may be your guy.
In the old days (1950s to 1990s), American politics was dominated by a push-pull relationship between Capital (money) and Labor (workers). Labor always wanted higher wages, better working conditions, more benefits. Capital, on the other hand, was always wanting more money, but it needed laborers to do the work to make the money. In this political balancing act between Capital and Labor, the Democrat party historically championed the working people (Labor) while the Republican part mainly supported Capital (since money could build more opportunities and more jobs).
As long as both Labor and Capital were necessary and important, the give-and-take of the system worked pretty well.
This all switched with Bill Clinton, although he didn’t cause it. He just recognized it. The world changed in the 1990s with the emergence of technology. Suddenly, nerdy people on the West Coast and the Eastern Poison Ivy League schools could amass enormous amounts of money by building computers, software, applications, and social media platforms. They didn’t need to build steel mills or power plants or set up factories to amass capital. You didn’t need huge investments (Capital) to make money, nor did you need much Labor. You could run a media outlet with a laptop—you didn’t need a printing press and a staff of hundreds. The two-teenage-guys-in-a-garage start-up became an icon of the era. A few smart people could set up and build a global company in a decade. See Google, see Facebook, see E-Bay and PayPal and all of the rest. Now the uneasy balance between Labor and Capital was kaputt. The capitalists didn’t need a whole bunch of workers to make money, they need a couple of smart guys in a garage. Labor became increasingly irrelevant.
Then factor in globalism. Sure, there are things we still need beyond technology— like clothing and antibiotics and cars. That could all be outsourced. We offshore these things. Did you know that literally no antibiotics are manufactured in the United States? We buy them all from China. Cars may be from Mexico. And when have you ever seen a clothing label that says “Made in the USA”? This was the second of the one-two punches that brought down Labor. Even food is grown elsewhere and shipped in. Labor was not dead, it was just offshore.
Clinton subtly swung the Democrat party away from Labor and toward Capital. It’s the reason that the Democrats today are no longer the party of the working class, they’re the party of the tech class and the elitist experts. Democrat supporters tend to be super-wealthy elitists, the Hollywood set, the techno-geniuses, and the inbred political class. Most billionaires vote blue, no matter who.
That left Labor at the altar. Jilted. Nobody loved them anymore. Enter Donald Trump, who despite his massive wealth, had a fundamental and sincere understanding of people who got dirt under their fingernails earning their daily bread. Maybe it was his years on construction sites, dealing with carpenters and plumbers and the guys who pour concrete. Populism emerged and Trump rode that wave. Trump cared about working people. MAGA became Labor, and Democrats (Capital) are trying to destroy us.
And so the political parties switched. Republicans today are the party of the working man (Labor) while Democrats are the champions of the elitists (they’re Capital, the “just-us” party).
Harari understands this shift but he talks about it coldly, without compassion. For a meditating vegan guru, he is curiously devoid of emotion. To Harari, not only is Labor dying, it’s time to come in for the kill shot. He envisions a world that is pure Capital which means fewer people.
Klaus Schwab took the WEF further than he ever imagined, but Klaus Schwab lacks the cold, intellectual calculation of a Harari. Harari is not just saying that Labor is increasingly irrelevant, he’s saying the people represented by Labor are “useless.” Humans have only one purpose: to be part of the data. If you no longer serve the machine, you no longer have purpose.
In fact, you don’t even have free will, according to Harari. You live and breathe and die and make decisions based on how your genes interact with the rest of the data around you.
It’s weird listening to Harari talk—he says the most horrifically evil things, but he talks like he is Mr. Rogers, just a gentle observer. It’s like imaging Gandhi mapping out of the Holocaust.
Of course, Harari is more like Greta Thunberg than Adolf Hitler. I don’t know why smart people at the WEF are so enamored of stupid people.