414—Our Friend Yuval Harari Got It So Wrong & Why It Matters: Introduction

The postmodern story — if not replaced by a New Story of Value — will be the source of our demise.

Vincent Van Gogh. Country lane with two figures. 1885.

Summary: This episode is an introduction to a series of talks engaging Yuval Harari’s ideas. It is incredibly important, because his position is not just his; his books are a pure expression of the postmodern Zeitgeist, and that’s why they are very popular. These ideas claim to be grounded in science, but they simply hijack the authority from mathematical equations that work to support a made-up Universe story based on faulty assumptions. More than that, these ideas are the sprouting seed of the meta-crisis. The postmodern story — if not replaced by a New Story of Value — will be the source of our demise.

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The unbearable joy of gravitas

It sounds pretentious nowadays to say that anything is important. 

In the old world, we claimed importance for so much that wasn’t important. And one of the insidious influences of the wry skepticism of late modernity and postmodernity (which often becomes cynicism) is that claiming anything is important is suspect. 

There is something wrong with you if you are claiming that something is important. It’s some kind of inflation, and probably you should go back, and do some early attachment work, and figure out what compensation you’re doing. We have lost a sense of our own importance. 

Importance means gravitas. 

Gravitas means gravity. 
Gravity means it’s heavy. It has weight. It’s heavy, and it matters. 

There is a tragedy to heaviness, but the tragedy only comes from the fact that life matters. 

Heaviness stands against what Milan Kundera calls, famously, the unbearable lightness of being.

There is a beautiful Hebrew word, kal. Kal means lightness. But in the sense of kal, it’s superficial. It refuses to go deep. It’s lazy. 

What prevents me from depth is usually laziness. And lazy doesn’t mean you don’t work; you can be a workaholic and be lazy. Lazy means: I am not willing to challenge the givens that I’ve established, which allow me to comfortably navigate my life. I am in my comfort zone. I won’t challenge that comfort zone. I’ve become comfortably numb (Pink Floyd), so I never let go of the old structures. 

• I never shatter the icons. 

• I never become an iconoclast. 

• I never become Abraham. I never set out (Chapter 12 of the Book of Exodus) on the journey to the promised land because I am trapped in my yesterdays. 

• I am trapped in my winning formulas that have allowed me to get through life.

• I am trapped in my old scripts of desire that have allowed me to somehow navigate and cover the pain and the emptiness. 

I need to be able to cut through that. I need to get to depth. I need to get to gravitas. 

In gravitas, there is joy. There is great joy in gravitas: I get to the depth of things, and it’s important.

What we are doing here is important. It really matters. It matters ultimately. It has ultimate significance. 

It would have ultimate significance even if we failed —  if we were tilting at a windmill like Don Quixote, and we failed, and we were unable to accomplish the goal of One Mountain —  

• We were not able to evolve the source code of consciousness and culture. 

• We were not able to articulate the New Story, and make it part of the fabric of the next stage of humanity. 

• We were not able to birth the New Human and the New Humanity. 

• We were not able, as Barbara Marx Hubbard would say, to become personal expressions of Conscious Evolution, and therefore cause an evolutionary shift and up-leveling, which would respond to the meta-crisis and enable us to create not just a better tomorrow, but a tomorrow. A tomorrow where there are human beings, who are actually being human in the best, and most beautiful, and most subtle, and most profound sense of the word. 

Even if we failed at all of that, the attempt would be unbearably significant, and filled with joy, and celebratory. We are celebrating even as we are ecstatically trembling. We would make the attempt with full power, with everything. 

But I think we actually can succeed. I think we have a really good shot at this. 

And what are we trying to do? 

The framework for One Mountain, just in a word, is Love or Die. That’s the framework. 

It is the realization that — 

• either we participate in the evolution of Love, and tell a New Story of Value, and up-level what it means to be a human being, 

• or we will, quite literally, die. We will experience the second shock of existence — the realization of the potential death of humanity, or the death of our humanity.

It is the realization that only a New Story of Value, a new vision of what it means to a human being, can respond to the meta-crisis and change the vector of history. The only way history actually changes is when a new story generates new interior technologies, new ways of being — when our current ways of being are about to destroy us (see What is One Mountain? What we are doing here, Part 1 & Part 2).

• We need new ways of being. 

• We need a New Story of Value from which to generate Reality. 

• We need new structures of consciousness. 

• We need, quite literally, to evolve the source code of culture and consciousness. 

You might think that’s ridiculous and absurd, but actually it happens at key junctures in history (which is why we often talk about the Renaissance). 

It is daunting, but it’s doable. 

It’s doable if we step up and we say, “I’m going to play. I’m going to play.” 

We need a critical mass of people to go from homo sapiens to Homo amor 

By the way, if there were no meta-crisis, we would be doing the same thing. Because we would need to live as full human beings and be in our story of transformation, and be in our story of full realization, full potency, and full joy, and full ethos, and full Eros. 

We would be doing the same set of studies in order to live lives that were worthy, and gorgeous, and beautiful, and not dead, and empty, and desiccated, and broken. We would have to do that for our own personal and communal lives. We would be writing the same Story of Value if there was no meta-crisis. The only thing is that with the meta-crisis, this is the last chance — at least within this iteration of the world story, within this dimension of Reality. 

There are other dimensions of Reality. There is no question about that in my heart, mind, body. But within this dimension of Reality, at this moment in history —  

• The human story will either deepen, and transform, and bloom, and we will create the most good, true and beautiful world that we can. (We already know that those worlds live. We can feel them in our bodies. We yearn for them because we imagine them, and our imagination is real.) 

• Or we will be lost in our myopic, business as usual, narrow lives, each of us trying to work our lives — some of us doing New Age transformations, and others ayahuasca journeys, and another this, and another that. And other people will be deep in their win/lose metrics, more public prism, but basically everyone is going to be in their own very narrow circle. We won’t become Homo amor. 

We won’t be able to have a critical mass of people that emerged as Homo amor, like it happened in the beginning of modernity, when a critical mass of people went from egocentric consciousness to world-centric consciousness. Now, we need a critical mass of people to go from homo sapiens to Homo amor.  If we don’t have a critical mass of people who become Homo amor, and this doesn’t become part of the new source code of Reality, if we don’t evolve the source code itself, we will go down. I am quite sure of that. So, it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal.

This is not a dire warning, and yet it is. 

We said last year, we’re not doomers. We have mad hope for the future. Hope is a memory of the future. We are articulating a memory of the future, but we are not deniers. 

We’re not doomers. We’re not deniers. We’re talking about the dawn of a new era, of a new story of human desire, and human possibility, and human potency. That’s what this is about.

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
Value is real. Value can be distorted. Clarification of value is
the great purpose, passion, and joy of life.
Story is real. Story can be distorted. Clarification of story is the
great purpose, passion, and joy of life. 
All stories are Stories of Value. 
Only a New Story of Value will protect the trillions of unborn
lives and loves that will otherwise be lost to existential risk. 
So it really matters.

Yuval Harari is a pure expression of the Zeitgeist

I want to give you the context for what we are going to do in the next bunch of weeks. 

Once in a while, a person comes along who is an expression of the Zeitgeist. 

They are not sharing new philosophy; they are not philosophers per se. They’re not sharing a new set of ideas. They’re not evolving the source code. (And of course, most people don’t evolve the source code. That’s not a critique. That’s totally fine.) 

But they become a mouthpiece, an uncontaminated reflection of what the Zeitgeist is about. 

A figure like that who has emerged over the last fifteen years is a gentleman named Yuval Harari. 

Now, Yuval and I don’t know each other. I’ve discovered recently we have a bunch of mutual friends. My son actually took his course at Hebrew University and said he was completely lovely. He probably watched my television show in the Middle East when I was in the Middle East, and probably was aware of that, although I’m not sure.

When Yuval published his first book, Sapiens, in which he is unconsciously reflecting the late modern and postmodern Zeitgeist, he has emerged as a kind of modern sage, which is exactly what’s so problematic. He’s an unconscious mouthpiece of that Zeitgeist. He brings together a form of secularized Buddhism and an extreme form of reductive scientism.

I want to really engage with you, Yuval, my friend, in the next three weeks or so.

To begin with, I know there is an entire set of demonizing threads about Yuval online. There is a whole thread about Yuval being an agent of the World Economic Forum (which is portrayed as per se evil; I don’t think the World Economic Forum is per se evil, although I think it’s extremely problematic). But Yuval is depicted — and I understand why — as an agent of ‘the forces of Empire.’ Yuval is identified with the legacy institutions of the world today, with Silicon Valley and with the classical legacy structures of Western society. 

In some sense, he is their myth bearer. Although he didn’t create any of the myths, he was raised on them. They are not his field of expertise. He is not a philosopher, but he is a very good popularizer. He is a pithy popularizer.

He was at Hebrew University. His specialty is a very narrow discipline, the art of warfare. I’ve read about half of his doctorate, and it’s actually great. And then, he came to teach at the university and they said, “Hey, you got to teach the general course, the world history course,” which of course no one wants to teach in university, because you don’t get any credit for it or you can’t really publish from it. But Yuval is by nature more of a generalist, which is beautiful. (I am too.) He kept doing research. He gave this very popular, and beautiful, and great course. And his husband, Itzik Yahav, said to him, “Let’s publish these notes.” And they did — first in Hebrew, and then it got published in a bunch of languages, and it became a sensation in the world. And then he published another book called Homo Deus, and another book called 21 Lessons. And he has a book out now called Nexus. 

I don’t want to fault him for the work. He is expressing the classical assumptions of postmodernity. But I think that his assumptions — the assumptions of postmodernity, as he articulates them — are the single most damaging, destructive, undermining causes of future human suffering. Suffering at a level that the suffering caused by religion, which Yuval so readily mocks, will seem minuscule, simply because of the new technological capacities.

I want to say it clearly: all of this is not to demonize Yuval. On the web, he gets demonized as this conspiratorial agent for world domination, who is operating in terrible bad faith. 

I don’t believe Yuval is operating in bad faith. I don’t know him in that sense. But the issue is far more insidious if he’s not operating in bad faith, that is, if he believes it. And his beliefs, again, are not just his — but rather what Professor Haim Soloveitchik, who’s a great medievalist, calls uncontaminated material. He is a naive representation of a certain current of thought, which he doesn’t try to hide in any way, because he assumes that it’s a given, that it’s true. So why would you hide it?

And so, it is disclosed. It is out in the open.

It is not by accident that Barack Obama says, “Wow, this is a great book.” And Bill Gates says, “Wow, this is the big book.” And Jeff Bezos, Amazon, “This is the big book.” And I could go on and on, and list forty or fifty major formulators, much more than influencers, but the key pivot figures. Because he is articulating cogently what they are already thinking.

The postmodern ideas are the seed of the meta-crisis

Now, Yuval is dead wrong. 

He is dead wrong pretty much at every level, but he is also half right. 

That is to say, everything he says is exactly half right. It represents a deep position that actually exists in the interior sciences. He would make a point that’s half right, but then the second half imbibes the postmodern Kool-Aid, and articulates sets of ideas that undermine the very ground that we walk on. 

These ideas are the seed, the sprouting, blooming seed of the meta-crisis. 

This particular class of thinkers and popularizers are interfacing with all the leading echelons in the world today, and policies are being formed based on that. And these policies will, I believe, lead directly to either the death of humanity or to the death of our humanity. Paradoxically, Yuval himself is aware of existential risk, but doesn’t see any relationship between the postmodern discourse that he is articulating and the existential risk.

Yuval is telling exactly the story that will be the story that sources our demise. 

The reason Yuval is telling the story is because he is rejecting the old religions. There is a lot of legitimacy in that. 

He is caricaturing the old religions, in part correctly, but only in part. There are deeper strains in the old great wisdom traditions that need to be liberated and woven together. He is also caricaturing science. He is framing the old religions in their most shadowed, broken, destructive form — and then he is caricaturing science in its most exalted, noble, integrity form. He is comparing the highest vision of science with the lowest vision of religion. 

There are two lines of development, religion and science; within each line, there are different levels. What he is doing is a level/line fallacy. There are different levels of religion — there are primitive religions, there are broken forms of religion, there is a more exalted, nobler, deeper religion. The different levels of religion roughly correspond to different structure stages of consciousness and developmental thought. 

But there are also different levels of science — 

• the medieval science, which comes from a certain structure, which did information gathering in a particular way; 

• the beginning of modern science; 

• the science of late modernity and postmodernity. 

There are also different levels of honesty and integrity in science. You have scientific studies that are honest and real, but some are funded by corrupt institutions that are seeking to commodify science for its ends. There is cherry picking that happens in scientific studies all the time. There is distortion of data that happens all the time. Anyone who lives in science knows that. But science in general is making this claim of pristine objectivity, while religion is darkened, medieval, regressive blackness. 

Religion has low levels and high levels, and science has low levels and high levels. But Harari is comparing the highest level of one line (science) to the lowest level of the other (religion). That’s a level/line fallacy. 

Yuval might say, if he was here now, “Well, what do you mean? Religion has caused all of this damage. Religion is a disaster, it’s caused all these terrible religious wars. It’s a horror.” 

Okay, that’s true. Religion has caused many, many religious wars. Whether they were caused by religion, or religion was a guise for ethnocentric nationalism is unclear. Did Genghis Khan kill 50 million people for religious reasons? But sometimes religion was not just a fig leaf, but the motivational architecture of some wars. That’s absolutely true.

Yuval might say, “Well, science has brought us all these good things, and religion has done this terrible thing.” 

I don’t think that’s true. All of the wars of the 20th century, for example, required the internal-combustion engine. All the wars of the 20th century were fought on the platform of new technologies. We were not fighting with the muskets of the Civil War. We certainly weren’t fighting with the weaponry of the famous thirty years war centuries ago in Europe. We weren’t fighting with the weaponry of the opium wars in China. We were fighting with an entirely different level of weaponry. We were fighting with the weaponry developed by a morally neutral modern science.  New kinds of weaponry of every kind, which ultimately climax in nuclear weaponry, in 1945. And the level of death, and destruction, and mangled bodies, and generations destroyed by these modern technologies exponentially dwarfs all of the deaths in all the previous generations.

That’s just true. That’s science. The amount of people in the world today is directly due to science, but you also have objectively more suffering in the world. It’s definitely not fair to say, “Oh, religion did bad stuff, and science is doing good stuff.” That’s ridiculous.

The line/level fallacy is just one of the fundamental fallacies in the way Yuval impacts the world. And again, this is not about Yuval per se, so Yuval, brother, if you’re watching, sweetness, big hug. But when you are speaking to the world, and you are participating in forming the fabric of culture, you can’t say a lot of things that you say. Not because they are true but shouldn’t be said, but because they are wrong. They are based on sloppy and shoddy thinking of an unforgivable kind. And when I say unforgivable, I don’t mean that in a harsh way. But hey, we got to do better, my friend.

Can you tell your child that loving them is a fiction?

I am deeply aware this is all very abstract, so I want to play three clips. It’ll take about six or seven minutes. I want to just open up the space, and we’ll pick up next week, but I want you to get a sense of the problems first. We just listen deeply, and we’ll start looking at them again next week.

One more. This is not a clip. This is a very short, just one paragraph from Yuval’s book, Sapiens.

Why is everybody buying it? 
Why is that compelling? 
Why has this dude sold 20 million books? 

He is talking about the nature of epistemology itself. He is talking about the nature of the real. 

He has done his best. He was a wise, well-read generalist. He’s trying to gather knowledge from every place in the world, and he basically says, “Okay, human rights are not real.”

He is talking about the nature of Reality: 

• Biological reality is real. 

• Human rights are not real. 

That’s a big claim. That’s a very big claim to make. 
That claim is absurd. It is the sloppiest, most shoddy, bad thinking you can imagine. 

And yet, Barack Obama is saying, “Great book, everybody! Great book! This is awesome!” Bill Gates, “Great book. I’m going to build my Gates Foundation based on this.” Mark Zuckerberg, “This is great.” Wow!

Can you imagine if a hundred years ago a writer wrote a book that would say, “Human rights are a fiction”? 

He says, there is no meaning whatsoever to human life. It doesn’t exist. If human subjectivity were to disappear, it would not be missed. Love. Commitment. Loyalty. Integrity. Eros. Poignancy — all of that is essentially irrelevant. There is no meaning to it whatsoever, and if you think your love has any meaning at all, it’s a delusion. 

It’s a great thing to tell your kids, don’t you think?

If you can’t tell this to your kids, it’s a lie. Anything that an educator can’t share directly with children, and have it bloom the lives of children, is a lie. 

We don’t need to bloom the lives of children with propaganda. 
We bloom the lives of children with depth of truth. 

You can’t look your children in the eye and say, me loving you is a lie, it’s a delusion. And your living with integrity doesn’t matter. It won’t be missed one way or the other. It’s irrelevant in the universe. If you can’t look at your child and say that, then why are you saying it to the world so it should be repeated to everyone? 

And now you’re running a bunch of children’s books. You’re actually making an educational move. You cannot claim, “Oh, I’m an ivory tower philosopher. I’m not an education guy.” No, you are writing a series of children’s books; yo are encoding this in children’s books.

What are you thinking, my friend? You want to save children from the blighted dogmas of an ignoble religion? Well, that’s a good idea, I am with you on that, man. 

But can you look a child in the eye and tell them love is all a lie? And if you can’t, why are you telling the world that?

Yuval is reflecting the mainstream dogmas of science

I am going to stop here. We’re going to continue next week. 

It’s not just a Hebrew University issue. Hebrew University, where Yuval teaches, is the Israeli reflection. He is reflecting the Zeitgeist at Hebrew University. But Hebrew University is just the Israeli subset of this culture all over the world. The point is that this position is a universal position. This is not Yuval’s idea. This is Yuval reflecting where the world is. 

Yuval is assuming that science’s story is accurate. All the stories are not accurate, but science’s is — because of course what he is claiming is that science is not telling a story; it is just giving you facts. 

That’s not true. That’s a lie. 
Science is, on multiple levels, telling a story. 

The reason why science was effective was because science made things that worked. Mathematical equations put people on the moon. Oh, that works, so it must be true. 

Well, that tells you that the mathematical equations were saying something true, in the sense that it was an accurate reflection of some dimension of Reality. That’s absolutely correct. 

But what science did was much more than that. Science didn’t just work out mathematical equations. It also tells a story about the nature of Reality, and deceptively hijacks authority from the mathematical equations that worked in order to validate the story it is telling. For example, when science assumes that Reality is only matter, that matter is the core of Reality and that consciousness is just a byproduct of matter — that’s a story; it’s a made-up story.

Yuval is reflecting the mainstream dogmas of science. He views himself as expressing the  scientific viewpoint. His view of science is that — 

• science says that there is no free will; 

• science says human rights are not real; 

• science says human subjectivity and love itself would not be missed in the cosmos. 

Whoa! Whoa! That’s a story! Science has nothing to say about that. That’s a story that’s told by the scientific community.

Yuval has the audacity to say all the other stories are not real, but this story, which has no empirical validation whatsoever, is true. And the implication is, if you don’t think that story is true, there is  something wrong with you. 

He is penetrating Reality with a made-up story — a dogmatic story that’s claimed by science, by hijacking authority from equations that work, in order to make a storied claim about Reality. 

And Yuval is saying, “That story is not to be debunked. It can’t be challenged. But all stories are not true.” 

Do you begin to get the level of unimaginable confusion? 

But it’s not Yuval’s confusion. This is not about Yuval. Yuval is a helpful window into the Zeitgeist.

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