416—From George Orwell to B.F. Skinner to Yuval Harari: The deconstruction of meaning and value as the root cause of the meta-crisis

The postmodern deconstruction leads directly to the death of our humanity — the rise of totalitarianism, either of Orwellian variety or the more benign Skinnerian variety.

Henri Matisse. Dance.

This is Part 3 of a series critique of Yuval Harari. Read Part 1 HERE , Part 2 HERE

Summary: In this episode, we continue our engagement with the postmodern position through in-depth conversation with Yuval Harari. We trace the deconstruction of value, meaning, and stories of inherent value from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four to B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity to Yuval Harari’s books as an uncontaminated and honest expression of postmodernism, and show that this deconstruction is the root cause of the meta-crisis and existential risk we are living through. It leads directly to the death of our humanity — the rise of totalitarianism, either of Orwellian variety or the more benign Skinnerian variety.

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Yuval Harari is unique in that he doesn’t pull the punch

There are two kinds of words — 

• words that come from the silence, 

• and words that cover up the silence. 

But even words that come from the silence need to be open to the depth of the Field of Value that lives in the silence. 

The silence is not the place of intelligence. It’s the place of consciousness. 

What we are here to do, in these nine or ten weeks together, is not to engage Yuval Harari’s thought. We are not interested in responding to Yuval Harari. Yuval Harari is, I’m sure, a very nice man. As I’ve said from the beginning, I am going to assume that he is operating in good faith. There is a bad faith argument about Yuval out there, which has quite a lot of support for it. I am not going to adopt that. I assume Yuval is a beautiful man operating in good faith. 

He is not a philosopher, and doesn’t set himself up as one. He is not a teacher emerging from a lineage, or creating a new lineage. He is essentially a populist historian, who took his world history course that he gave at Hebrew University, and he turned it into a great course. He did a great job. It’s a populist attempt to look at world history, and nicely done. It’s important. 

It is appealing to people because he is attempting to tell a story that is linked to different parts of Reality, instead of getting lost in professional deformation, when you interpret all of Reality through your own narrow discipline: if you’re a chemist, all of Reality is chemistry; if you’re a physicist, all of Reality is physics; if you’re a mathematician, all of Reality is math; if you’re a sociologist, then all of Reality is sociology, etcetera. All of these are true. Each of them is looking at a different dimension of the elephant and saying it’s the whole elephant. Yuval and I share the sense that we need a whole. We need things to relate to each other in a fundamental way. In order to make any sense of anything, we need to see how these things are connected. And we need to bring all disciplines together.

We are not interested in having a conversation with Yuval per se (although I look forward, Yuval, to actually talking, whenever we do, my friend), but Yuval is what we called an uncontaminated representative of the postmodern Zeitgeist — of what late modernity and postmodernity are saying. His list of endorsements from legacy institutions and legacy figures all over the world, who I’ve mentioned last week, is actually a little shocking. 

Yuval is unique though. He is unique in that he doesn’t pull the punch. He says it clearly. 

There is an entire school of thinkers who pull the punch; they obfuscate. Yuval doesn’t pull the punch. Steven Pinker at Harvard pulls the punch, generally. Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote Surveillance Capitalism, pulls the punch. Nicholas Carr, who critiques the tech plex, very severely and appropriately, in a book that he wrote in 2011 called The Shallows and in four books afterwards (my favorites are Utopia is Creepy (2015) and The Glass Cage) — he pulls the punch. He is a postmodernist. He doesn’t think that meaning or value are real, but he doesn’t want to acknowledge that. So, he pulls the punch.

Postmodernity ripped off the veneer of value

There is an enormous amount of cryptonormativity. The cryptonormative position is: 

• We pretend as though value is real. We take out a loan from early modernity or pre-modernity, we assume value is real, but then we tell you that it’s not, for an entire series of reasons, but then we assume that it is anyways. 

It’s this strange position that worked in modernity. You could get away with it in modernity — expressing the notion that value is not real, like David Hume did, for example, and then claiming value on the other side. I called this the common sense sacred axioms of value that live in modernity.

You could say, Okay, value is not real, let me explain to you all the reasons why it’s not, but then I am going to claim it anyways.

Thomas Jefferson did that, in the American constitution. Thomas Jefferson was deeply influenced by Epicurus. Epicurus, the ancient Greek pre-Socratic, lived in an age when it was just a given that value is real. It was a given that the gods are real, even if you don’t believe in the gods. Epicurus, if you actually follow his logic to its conclusion, is a materialist atheist. But you can’t be a materialist atheist at the time, several hundred years before the common era — and so, he pulls the punch. Epicurus himself probably wasn’t fully aware of the extent he was pulling the punch.

Jefferson was a deist. A deist is a way of saying, well, everything is God, but nothing is God. You talk about God all the time; God ‘wound up the watch’, but he is not really present at the banquet anymore. Jefferson is one of the framers of the Constitution, where they say, ‘we hold these truths (of value) to be self-evident.’

When you claim truths to be self-evident, you mean they are blatantly obvious. Well, if they are so blatantly obvious, and this is your founding document, why don’t you tell us where they are from? 

But you are actually not sure where they are from. You are not sure how to articulate them. You are involved in this contradiction: you have deconstructed value, yet you want to claim it — so, you make this move: we hold these truths to be self-evident.

The common sense sacred axioms of value mean you can deconstruct value and yet assume it. This lives deeply in modernity, but it explodes in postmodernity. 

• In postmodernity, the mask is ripped off. 

• In postmodernity, the veneer of value is ripped off. 

• In postmodernity — when you read Derrida, for example — there is this reduction of Reality to story, but the word just always modifies story. It’s just a story, and most of the stories that define Reality are fictional stories. 

They are not stories that express true value, because true value doesn’t exist. It’s not actually real.

That loan — the social capital of value that we borrowed from pre-modernity and early modernity, and we held the loan quietly in late modernity — postmodernity calls in that loan and explodes the hidden funding of culture that’s taking place through this loan, and says, actually, value is not real (and value and meaning are used interchangeably all the time). There is no ultimate inherent intrinsic value/meaning in Reality.

Harari, in dozens of passages, makes this point. He says, if you think that there is any meaning, it is a delusion. If you think there is a plotline to Reality, it is a delusion. If you think that you have some role to play, it is a delusion. (Delusion is his word.) If you think that any value is better than any other value, not true — because it’s not real. It’s completely contrived. Any thought like that you have is a figment of your imagination, and not in a good way. It is a fiction or a mere social construct (his words).

Let’s not be afraid to call it for what it is. I appreciate Yuval because he’s honest. He doesn’t pull the punch. That’s what’s unique about him. He is an uncontaminated expression of this postmodern moment, and he doesn’t pull the punch. He draws the conclusion.

Yuval is going to be our interlocutor. He’s going to be our foil to try and establish the New Story of Value, and to understand what do we need to establish in this New Story of Value, to actually be able to enact a story of value — 

• in which we can be filled with joy, 

• in which we can be filled with delight, 

• in which we can respond to the meta-crisis, 

• in which we can live our lives, and live a life well-lived, 

• in which we can speak to our children, and tell our children, this is what’s true and this is how we want to guide you and invite you into your life. 

Because what we tell a child, when we look at a child in the eye, what we are able to tell a child — honestly, and truly, and deeply — is what we know to be true.

The collapse of value is root cause for the meta-crisis 

Are there things that Yuval says that are great? First off, he is a great writer. Two, he is intelligent. In general, of course, there is much that’s persuasive and interesting in reading Yuval. There’s much that’s persuasive and interesting in reading postmodernity. Three, as I said before, I am sure he is a beautiful guy. 

But four is even more important. 

I have a longstanding argument with my colleague, Jordan Peterson. 

Jordan basically says, postmodernity is idiocy. He traces postmodernity back to Marxism, not completely incorrectly. There’s a lot of truth in that, because Marx’s point was, it’s all about power, power is the only true reality, and language and story are just covers for the drive for power. This is a fundamental Marxist idea, which was picked up by postmodernity. Peterson says, postmodernity is just bad news. That’s actually incorrect. Postmodernity is bad news, it’s true. But it’s incorrect in the sense that it’s true, but partial.

Postmodernity wildly overreached, reduced everything to just stories that are covers for power grabs. 

But postmodernity also did some really, really important things. Maybe in the last talk of this series, I’ll talk about the five or six postmodern insights that are absolutely correct, and Yuval is a good expresser of those, but here is just one of them. 

There are lots of stories that are bullshit. 

There are lots of stories that are fictions, and those fictions destroyed enormous amount of Reality. There were dimensions of religions and governments that told stories that were complete fictions, stories that were power drives or ways of imposing order. Those stories weren’t true, and those stories caused enormous damage.

We need to be able to find Reality itself, and free ourselves — disentangle ourselves — from false narratives and fictive stories that have dominated Reality. 

That was postmodernity’s point; that’s a brilliant postmodern point. That’s not Yuval’s point. He repeats that point elegantly, but that’s one of the core points of postmodernity. That’s what postmodernity is all about. That’s absolutely true; it is a partial truth, but it’s true.

This realization of postmodernity lives strongly at the leading edges of the interior sciences. It lives throughout an entire series of sources. Abraham Kuk is a very good example of an interior scientist who is deeply aware of that postmodern sensibility. He is a mystic writer, scientist, literary figure, political figure who died in 1938. But you see and feel realizations like that all through the leading edges of the interior sciences. Postmodernity really just picked up on that in a very big way, and brought them to the center, and did an important job bringing this to the center. 

We need, however, to be able to call out and utterly reject (to borrow Hegel’s phrase, negate) — we have to negate the fundamental fallacies of postmodernity (which Yuval expresses), because they are root cause for existential risk. They are root cause for the meta-crisis. Paradoxically, what Yuval and I agree on is the utter seriousness of the meta-crisis. Here, Yuval is unique and distinct. Many postmodern writers ignore the meta-crisis. Yuval wants to deal with it. He wants to engage it. I would actually view his work as an attempt to engage the meta-crisis. I think that’s actually what he’s doing, in a real way. I think that’s a great concern of his, and I share and feel him in that concern, and I think he feels us in that concern. 

In our book, First Principles and First Values, we’ve talked extensively about why the fallacies of postmodernity are the root cause of the meta-crisis. There is section in First Principles and First Values about the seven links between existential risk and the collapse of a shared Field of Value (see also Love or Die). I’m not going to go all the way into that right now, but just in a word:

• In order to respond to global challenges, we need global coordination. 

• We can’t have global coordination without global coherence.

• Global coherence requires global resonance. 

• Global resonance requires global intimacy. 

But there’s a global intimacy disorder. Why?  

The source of the global intimacy disorder is the failure to recognize each other in the intimacy of a shared Field of Value. 

If you have basically deconstructed a shared Field of Value and meaning — 

• then there is no conversation; 

• then you can’t create global intimacy, 

• and you can’t create global resonance, 

• and you can’t create global coherence, 

• and you can’t create global coordination, because you can only globally coordinate if you have shared ordinating values. 

Therefore, you can’t respond to global challenges — and every dimension of the meta-crisis is a global challenge. I’m not going to dedicate this week to that, I want to focus on an entirely new set of points, but that’s in the backdrop. There is a direct between the collapse of the Field of Value and the meta-crisis. I am not going to debate it anew here, but I’m going to take that as a given now. The collapse of value is root cause for the meta-crisis.

When postmodernity says that any sense you might think that meaning is real is a delusion, when Harari deconstructs the notion that there is any story of inherent value backed by the universe — that is exactly the cause for the meta-crisis, because if we can’t create a shared story of value, how are we going to cohere? 

But Reality is not merely the movement from simplicity to complexity. Reality is intimacy and evolution, or, more precisely, reality is the progressive deepening of intimacies.

Reality is conversation; we live in a Conversational Cosmos. (This is a topic I have discussed in depth with my dear friend and interlocutor, the philosopher of science, Howard Bloom, who was the first to introduce this term in its formal scientific context. Howard and I have evolved the term together in multiple vectors.) 

More precisely, Reality is the evolution of conversation. In the interior sciences, the word for Messiah — a utopian term — is rooted in the word Siach ‘conversation.’ Reality is the evolution of conversation. 

In that spirit, with great delight and honor, I invite Yuval to a public conversation, where we can have go at this and work some of this out — in a spirit of intimacy, and curiosity, and commitment to evolution. Perhaps together we can step out of some of the outdated and tired postmodern tropes, which appropriately deconstructed so much, but forgot the urgent need for a reconstructive project. Perhaps we can, with humility and audacity — just perhaps — evolve source code of culture and consciousness, which itself is the evolution of love. 

Direct line from Nineteen Eighty Four to Yuval Harari

If you can’t have a story of value which is going to respond to the meta-crisis, what do you do?

Here is the second thing that Yuval and I agree on:

We agree that story is the most powerful force in Reality, and that if you want to evolve the way human beings cooperate or cohere, you have to tell a new story. 

That is absolutely true. I’ve said it a thousand times. Yuval has said it a thousand times. We agree on it absolutely. If you want to evolve the way Reality coheres, you have to tell a new story, a better story. 

If there is a crisis of coherence, how do you deal with it? Both Yuval and us — Yuval and I, Yuval and our entire enterprise of CosmoErotic Humanism — we agree that the way you deal with a crisis of coherence is you tell a New Story.

But here’s the rub:

For Yuval, that new story is made up. It has to be. It can’t be a story of inherent value, because value is not real, because claiming that any meaning is better than any other meaning is pure fiction. This is a point he makes not once, not twice, not three times, not one text — in fifty texts! It’s a clear position that goes all the way through, so he has no choice but to say that a new story must be a made-up story, and the way we are going to cohere society is with a made-up story.

This is a big deal, because this road leads to dictatorship. 

There is a direct line — and I want to show this clearly — there is a direct line between George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four), and postmodernism. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book about totalitarian society. The phrase Orwellian (as in Orwellian society) has come to mean a dictatorship of a totalitarian nature. At the very, very core of Orwellian society is the utter deconstruction of story and the engagement in doublethink, self-contradiction that happens consistently all the time. That’s called doublethink in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell lived at the same time as B.F. Skinner, who wrote a book called Walden Two, about what I would call soft totalitarianism. It’s about placing reality in a hidden totalitarian box. Skinner called it an operant conditioning chamber, but it was popularly called a Skinner’s box. Skinner was at Harvard for six decades, and was the most prominent public culture figure.

Skinner got existential risk very clearly — very, very clearly. And Skinner’s hidden students at the MIT Media Lab (started by Alex Pentland), they also get existential risk very clearly. 

Skinner is basically saying is, Wow, I don’t want to go down that Orwellian road, the road of Orwellian totalitarianism. Skinner calls it negative reinforcement — all sorts of forms of torture, and what’s called the Ministry of Love in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I don’t want to go down that road, he says, I am going to go through positive reinforcement. I’m going to generate a society in which we invisibly control everyone. It’s invisible totalitarianism. At the end of his life, he viewed the worldwide web as the means for enacting an invisible totalitarianism. There is a book called The Friendly Orange Glow, by an independent scholar named Brian Dear, which is about the rise of the first systems of the web; the entire first chapter is about B.F. Skinner.

Both Skinner and Orwell are depicting a reality in which value is not real, so we can’t rely on value to cohere us. Skinner says, in his chapter on values in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, value (or the good) is just positive reinforcement. It doesn’t exist. He is very clear about it. Like Yuval, he doesn’t pull the punch. But Yuval and Skinner completely agree on existential risk, and we agree with them on that. We are aligned on that. That’s why it’s such an important conversation. 

Skinner, and Harari, and Pentland at the MIT Media Lab, and, paradoxically, critics of the Techno-feudalism like Shoshanna Zuboff — they all agree, really clearly, that there is no story of inherent value that’s real in the Cosmos. It’s all “just stories”, or “social constructs”, or “fictions” or “figments of our imagination”

Therefore, Skinner’s conclusion is: if I don’t want a top-down totalitarianism, I’ve got to create a benign, invisible totalitarianism, where everyone is controlled and manipulated (his word, manipulated), where their desires are shaped by invisible levers — just like rats and pigeons are controlled in a Skinner’s box. That’s the Skinnerian move. I believe that’s the move that Yuval is moving towards, but Yuval is actually sourced first in Orwell. 

What is Orwell saying? The way Orwell is portraying Reality is as follows:

In order to cohere Reality, Big Brother, or the brotherhood, or the party, or the Ministry of Love (which is the public face of the party) are going to create a story, which becomes the story. They are going to create a fictional story, and that story will become the story. 

Why is that true? Why does that story have to become the story? 

Because there are no other stories of value. There is no story of value to disclose — and so, the only way to control society is that the only people who get to create the story are the party. Only the party creates the story. No one else can create the story. 

There is no other story. 

And anyone who says that they are going to create a different story, even if they just believe it in their hearts, has to be crushed.

Love story stands against totalitarian fictitious stories

What would stand against that? What would stand against the crushing power of the totalitarian claim that all stories are fictions? 

A love story. 

When you are in a love story — whatever form it is, there are many varieties of a love story — a love story stands against that. In a love story, you are in your own story, and you are trusting your heart, and you are trusting your body. You are trusting your allurement — your intellectual allurement, your embodied allurement, your allurement to sense-making together, to talking to each other, your allurement to sensuality together. 

You trust your body. Your body becomes — in your heart — the field of feeling between the two cherubs above the Ark of the Covenant — the two sexually entwined cherubs, or the two sensually entwined cherubs, or the two intellectually entwined cherubs above the Ark of the Covenant. In the classical lineage tradition of Solomon — 

• that’s where the word of God comes from; 

• that’s where there is a sense of truth;

• that’s where there is a sense of a story that stands against totalitarianism.

That’s the story. It’s the love story. 

What’s Nineteen Eighty-Four about? 

It’s about a couple that has a love story, Winston and Julia, and they are madly in love with each other. The entire point of the book is that the Ministry of Love hijacks the love story. There are no love stories. Love stories don’t exist independently of the Ministry of Love, because the love story is the one story that could challenge the authoritarian claim — 

• that we own stories, 

• that all stories are fictional, 

• and the only story that’s true is the story that we made up. No other stories are true. 

That’s the claim. 

The love story stands against it. 

In the love story, I trust my body. I trust my heart. I trust my feeling. I trust my heartstrings. I clarify my feeling. I clarify my sensuality. I clarify my sense-making in the space between us.

And so, the entire apparatus of the party, embodied by O’Brien, who’s the interrogator in Nineteen Eighty-Four, has to crush the love story of Winston and Julia. 

The goal of the party is to ensure the betrayal of love, because that undermines the status or authority of the only story that could stand against the Ministry of Love. The Ministry of Love is hijacking all stories, including the love stories. 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, there’s this incredible scene, where Winston and Julia meet after they have betrayed each other:

It was by chance that they had met. It was in the park on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind. 

You get the description of the day? And then, they see each other. 

I betrayed you, she said baldly. 

I betrayed you, he said. 

She gave him another quick look of dislike. 

Sometimes, she said, they threaten you with something, something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so. Do it to him. And perhaps you might pretend afterwards that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it, but that isn’t true. At the time when it happened, you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself. 

All you care about is yourself, he echoed. 

And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer, she said. 

No, he said, you don’t feel the same.

That’s the goal of Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

Winston is not killed at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four. They talk about killing, but what they mean is they killed the old Winston, and they set him loose; they set him free because his love has been hijacked. He now loves only Big Brother. 

The love story itself has been hijacked. There is only the contrived story. No other story exists. 

That’s the great lie of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Actually, it’s not true. Actually, love is often as strong as death, as the Song of Songs points out, as the Solomon tradition points out. Often, we stand for love even in the face of enormous suffering, and we sacrifice for love. And even when the physical body appears to force what appears to be betrayal, even then love is not lost. 

The assumption — 

• that the human being is an empty mechanical vessel that can be molded, and shaped, and controlled, and made to move through the motivational architecture of a fictitious story, which is always, always more powerful than anything else because there is no true love story — 

— is a lie. That’s the great lie. 

Love is more powerful. The love story is more real.

But Winston and Julia are portrayed, in this story, as the betrayers. They betray the love, and the party is victorious, because the party now owns the apparatus of story.

The party sometimes wins victories in this lifetime. The Orwellian story is the party claiming victory by persuading Julia and Winston that they have betrayed love. But I would like to write a sequel to 1984, where Julia and Winston find each other again — either in this world or in the continuity of consciousness that, based on our best empirical information, extends beyond the borders of death (for example, the Whiteheadian scholar David Jay Griffin offers rigorous empirical analysis of this information).  

Skinner doesn’t disagree with that portrayal of culture as depicted by Orwell — that there is no story that’s real. But what Skinner says is: don’t use negative reinforcement, which is what the Ministry of Love uses in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He says, use positive reinforcement (in forty different passages). 

Positive reinforcement means: I’m going to invisibly control you by hijacking love stories, and making them banal. Call it Valentine’s Day. 

We’ll make love mean very little. 

You’ll say, I love you, but it won’t really mean anything. 
We’ll say, I love you, but we’ll lose connection to what it means. 
We’ll hijack romantic love as a tool of subservience. 

We’ll create a Skinner’s box in which everyone lives, and they respond to likes and views on the web, and they are moved through this strange and superficial motivational architecture, which is about the lowest common denominator of human beings being moved around and manipulated.

Human beings become, in Skinner’s phrase, observable and manipulable through the vehicles of the world wide web. 

Doublethink: repudiating morality while laying claim to it

What does the party do in Nineteen Eight Four? 

The party engages in doublethink. How does doublethink work? This is the deconstruction of story. 

Orwell has a bunch of descriptions of doublethink. I want to just read you two of them:

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them… 

And that’s often true about my friend, Yuval. He says things that are clearly not the case. Claims, which, if he were just being honest (and he is intelligent), he would realize, that’s not true; I just overreached, for example, in my deployment of science. It’s not true. 

… to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.

Did that spin your mind? It should have. It spins your mind. Even to read about doublethink spins your mind.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.... and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.

These are incredible texts; and you literally get that sense of Harari.

I’m just going to give you one simple example. 

Yuval is writing about free will. He writes an article in The Guardian (2018) about why the belief in free will is both an illusion and dangerous; free will is absolutely not real in any sense at all. Or, if you open Yuval’s book, Homo Deus, and you open it to the chapter called, The Time Bomb in the Laboratory. (page 329):

To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for freedom. There is no free will. The sacred word freedom turns out to be, just like soul, a hollow term, empty of any discernible meaning. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we human beings have made up.

That’s a big claim. Free will does not exist. That’s his consistent position.

On the other hand — and this is almost funny, if it weren’t tragic, and confusing, and doublethink — Yuval wrote a whole bunch of articles about the war in Ukraine, and the articles all began with, we have a choice here. Human beings have choices to make. And in his new book, Nexus, all through the book, even on the back of the book (where they summarize the book), it is all about the urgent choices we now must make.

I am a little confused, my friend. You just told us that choice doesn’t exist, in The Guardian and in Homo Deus. But then, your next book is all about the choices we need to make. And every article you write about key moments is about the human capacity to make choices. 

Hello! 

Do you think we are idiots? 

No, Yuval doesn’t think we’re idiots. But he is engaged in the doublespeak game, described by Orwell, 

repudiating morality while laying claim to it. This is the confusion here. That’s why it’s confusing. That’s why you can go back and forth. 

He seems to be standing for value in some way. But then he’s saying it’s not real. That is how doublethink operates to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.

One more example — and Yuval, this one is just for you. I don’t have time to unpack it more fully in this talk, but you will understand exactly what I am referring to as will the readers who are more familiar with your work.

In Homo Deus, you claim the authority of science for the claim that organism is algorithm. This claim is clearly not true; it was refuted, for example, by a leading scientist, Antonio Damasio. Stuart Kaufman’s thought may also be taken as a devastating repudiation of this claim, which you assert as a scientific given. But then, in your last book, Nexus, you spend the entire book implicitly distinguishing between organism and algorithm, clearly rejecting the dogmatic notion of Organism as algorithm. At the same time, organisms clearly have telos (goals); and yet, you assert with absolutely certainty,  which — again — you attribute to science, that  there are no inherent goals, no inherent telos, no intrinsic goodness anywhere in reality. It is all just fictional stories, or mythologies; it is all socially contrived and not backed by the universe.  

Yuval, brother, you are super smart, and this is sounding like doublespeak.  

Orwell and Skinner

Yuval is an incredibly accurate representation of this exact experience of doublethink, because Yuval recognizes — like we do, like the Orwellian Ministry of Love did, like B.F. Skinner does — that we are facing existential risk in a real way. 

Shoshana Zuboff essentially mocks Skinner in her book, Surveillance Capitalism. It’s a huge mistake. Skinner is not to be mocked. Jaron Lanier is a very good writer on the tech plex (he’s not a cultural historian, he’s actually an engineer) — he mocks Skinner, he just called Skinner creepy. Nicholas Carr in his book, The Shallows, mocks Skinner.

No, no, no, Skinner is not to be mocked. 

First off, he was a towering intellect, but he was also actually genuinely moved by existential risk. If you read C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book, The Abolition of Man, which is basically a critique of Skinner, although Skinner’s not mentioned by name, Lewis takes Skinner seriously in a way that Zuboff didn’t, and all the later writers haven’t. He understands that this is serious, and he gets correctly that Skinner is deeply concerned with existential risk. 

What are we going to do?

Basically, the Orwellian Ministry of Love is the form of totalitarianism that says:

• no stories are real, 

• therefore we have to take control of the narrative mechanism, 

• utterly crush any illusion of a story that could stand against it, 

• and we create the story, 

• and then we organize Reality through our created story. 

Skinner says:

• we organize Reality through invisible levers of control that create this illusion of a lowest common denominator story that you live in, and everybody’s happy. 

When you read Walden Two, you get a little bit of a sense of The Stepford Wives. In Walden Two — just like in Nineteen Eighty-Four — what is dismissed is Eros and sexuality. Walden Two is essentially a sexless book. It’s a book devoid of Eros as well. Sex models Eros, it doesn’t exhaust Eros. Eros existed for 12 billion years before sex. Eros is the force of ErosValue that coheres Cosmos, and sex is one expression of it.

There is only one figure in Walden Two that’s sexual in any way, whose name is Barbara. Barbara is the girlfriend of a guy named Rogers. Rogers is one of the two students of a guy named Professor Burris, who comes to visit Walden Two. All of Walden Two is a conversation between Frazier, who’s the founder of Walden Two (who represents Skinner) and Burris. And Burris has these two students with their girlfriends that come with them. One of them is Rogers, whose girlfriend is Barbara. Barbara is sexual, and her sexuality is what, in the end, leads Rogers away from Walden Two, prevents him from seeing the truth and sends him back to the rat race of society.

So, sexuality is presented as a siren song, which is in the way. In general, in Walden Two, teenage sex is strongly promoted, and having babies early — just to get sex and babies out of the way. Let’s not get disturbed by that, so we get on to the real business of being creative and happy in the world.

There is a complete sidelining and rejecting, throughout Skinner, of any sense that sex, Eros, or love is real. Skinner says explicitly, in Walden Two, love is but a positive reinforcer. Love is not real. So, just like the Ministry of Love, Skinner in Walden Two rejects the love story. 

Skinner was deeply aware of this parallel between him and Orwell. In 1984, he writes a sequel to Walden Two called News from Nowhere, in which Orwell fakes his death and comes to live in Walden Two under the name Blair. And there is a whole set of conversations between Blair and Frazier, the Orwell figure and the Skinner figure, and they both agree that love and Eros are not real.

There is a direct line between the Orwellian position and the Skinnerian position, both based on doublethink. In Skinner, it’s not exactly doublethink, it’s closer to euphemism. 

One of the classical features of Skinner and of the tech plex is euphemism.

For example, we are not trying to addict people, that would be insane. Why would we addict people to the web? That would be gross and repulsive. So, we never talk about addicting people, but actually the goal of the web is addiction. Nir Eyal, the kind of icon of Silicon Valley, wrote a book, early on (an uncontaminated book as well), where he tips his hat, like Harari does in our field, and the name of the book is Hooked. There is another book about how addiction takes place through the web, which is called Fear No Evil, I believe. Instead of calling it addiction, it’s called engagement. The idea is to engage customers. There is this notion of engagement.

There are about twenty five major euphemisms that define the web and cover up the move of control. For example, Pentland doesn’t talk about putting people in a Skinner’s box, he talks about turning reality into living laboratories. That’s his word for a Skinner’s box. It is not exactly doublethink, it’s Skinner’s form of the degradation of language. 

What both Orwell and Skinner share is the need to degrade language. It’s only the degradation of language, which becomes the degradation of story as story of value, that allows you to claim language and story as your own in order to affect control. 

That is what Yuval’s doing.

Are major cultural stories utterly fictional?

Here is Harari’s book for children. It’s called, Unstoppable Us. 

His question is, in this children’s book, how did humans take over the world? 

He is consistent in his children’s book. I was hoping that in his children’s book, he would pull the punch and tell children that, I don’t know, the good, the true, and the beautiful are actually valid, and have value, and are important. He doesn’t. Again, he is uncontaminated material. He is honest all the way in a particular way, even as he is completely intellectually dishonest, because that’s the nature of doublethink, but he is also honest. It’s doublethink.

Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World is essentially a restatement for children of what he says in Sapiens, Chapter two; and in the chapter called Storytellers in Homo Deus, and the chapter in Homo Deus called Human Spark; and in the last two chapters of a book called 21 Questions. 

And it’s all doublethink. 

For example, in 21 Questions, he talks about the three great stories of the 20^th century, whatever they are, and he says, none of those worked. He is correct about that. That’s a good historical overview. Clearly, we need a new story. That’s how he ends chapter one. It’s great. 

Then, when he gets to the end of the book, his last two chapters are basically a bad Buddhist Dharma talk. A vapid Vipassana Dharma talk. Sorry, Yuval. He basically says, Why are you lost in story? Story is not real. Stories are utterly, totally, and completely made up. 

Do you remember the clip from his interview with Lex Fridman, where Fridman asked, what’s the meaning of life? And Yuval said, the one thing it’s not is a story. It’s not a story.

Yuval gets existential risk, yet there are no stories of value to fall back on — so you have no choice but to make up a story. Yuval’s argument is that there are two kinds of stories. 

• There are a few stories that can actually convey truth. That’s obviously true. There are stories that convey some degree of truth. 

• But, he says, most stories in culture don’t. Most stories are utterly fictional, completely made up.

He says that we believe the major stories in culture, even though they’re not true. The fact that we believe a story doesn’t mean that it’s true. The story is made up, and yet you can get people to believe them. Does that sound like Nineteen Eighty-Four? It should. What’s his evidence for that? He quotes evidence, and everyone assumes he is right. He makes what appears to be, on the surface, a very powerful point, which is why Barack Obama, and Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos all endorse the book. This is the postmodern point.

He says, take the Catholic Church, or the Bible. Those are two examples he uses. 

The Bible gets so many facts wrong. The Bible claims that human beings emerged from Mesopotamia. But we know that humans came out of Africa, not Mesopotamia. So, this is a fictional story. Or the Bible says, when you engage pestilence, you’ve got to pray — but we don’t do prayer, we do penicillin, so, the Bible got it completely wrong. Thus, the Bible is wrong. It’s a fictional story, and yet everyone buys into it.

The second example he has is the Catholic Church. There are 1.4 billion people who are members of the Catholic Church. And just between us, do you really believe that she was a virgin? Mary? Or that Jesus was born of immaculate conception? That there was virginity postpartum? That’s what they call it in the formal doctrine. Do we really believe in virginity postpartum? There is a whole list of things, which are clearly fictions that were presented by the Catholic Church, and yet everybody, 1.4 billion people believe in some version of this.

He’s got lots of other examples. His point is, these are fictional stories, and people will absolutely believe in a fictional story, which is, again, the claim of the party in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s a little chilling. 

Is Yuval right? 

He is not. He is not. 

People don’t believe in these stories because they’re fictional. It’s dead wrong. He just got it totally wrong.

Stories as a superpower

Let me lay out the argument made by historians, which Yuval adopts well. 

Here’s the first part of the argument.

There was a world filled with many genuses, many types of human beings. For example, one of the types of human beings that lived 70,000 to 80,000 years ago were Neanderthals. When we were kids, you would hear your mother say about someone (or your father), he’s a Neanderthal, and that was not a compliment. The assumption was that Neanderthals were somehow subhuman, as it were. We now realize that wasn’t true. New anthropological evidence shows that the Neanderthals had great art, and fascinating sexuality, and deep rituals, and all that kind of good stuff. 

So, why did the Neanderthals disappear? Why did the Sapiens become so much more powerful than the Neanderthals? One possible answer is language. Homo sapiens got language, and language allowed them to communicate in a new way. There is a whole school of anthropology that says that language allowed them to hunt better. They could talk to each other, and prepare for the hunt, and share the different trails of the bison, and the antelope, and the deer. That’s possible, and there are some schools of thought that adopt that. And there are more powerful schools that reject that. Harari goes (correctly, I believe) with the rejection of that; he says that language is not just about sharing, communicating information about the hunt, which confers a survival advantage. Harari says, no, it’s about something much deeper. 

What is language doing? 

Language is giving us the capacity to tell a story. 

Now, this is very important. 

The argument is as follows. The reason the Neanderthals disappeared is because Neanderthals only banded together in small groups of people, because they didn’t have language with this storytelling capacity. Therefore, as the sociologist Robin Dunbar pointed out, you can only be intimate with about 150 people (that’s called Dunbar number). You can actually check that out yourself. It’s very hard to know more than 150 people, and have a direct relationship with them, and feel like you can trust them, that you know them, you can rely on their word — so that you have enough intimacy to coordinate together, to cohere together, to resonate together. 

Neanderthals could only coordinate, cohere, resonate at the level of the Dunbar number. But Sapiens — this is the argument of anthropology adopted by Harari — could cohere through storytelling. They became cohered not through knowing each other intimately; instead, coherence was generated because they all met in a shared story. That’s his big move.

If you have a shared story, you could have not 150 Sapiens, you could have not 50 Sapiens (like you had Neanderthals, which were between 50 and 150 maximum) — you could have 500 Sapiens humans, a thousand Sapiens humans, which meant that you have 500 times the fire power, 500 times the innovation power, 500 times the creativity power, 500 times the mind power. It’s a whole different world. Then you have 1,000 Sapiens. And then, you have 10,000 Sapiens in the Savannah, which are at different places, which all know each other. When there is a drought or a famine, you’re connected to this larger Sapiens community, you don’t get wiped out, you go and stay with your relatives as it were.

He is repeating this anthropological argument — he repeats it eloquently — that the capacity of having a shared story creates the sense of family, the sense of coherence, the sense of coordination that the Neanderthals didn’t have, even though — here’s the big point — even though the stories are fiction. 

That’s what he tells the kids in this book. The entire book is about this. I stayed up a few nights ago reading this whole book. He tells the kids, even though the stories aren’t true, nonetheless, our superpower is to tell stories. Our superpower is to tell stories.

We have this capacity that animals don’t have, and shouldn’t have — we actually have this weird capacity to believe things that aren’t true. 

Why? 

Because we want to cohere, so we are willing to believe this not true story, and to get intimate with each other through the story, because it makes us more powerful. Here, I am exploiting the part that Harari hides — that a story is an instrument of power. It coheres us, and it makes us more powerful, even though it’s a fictive story. That’s his point.

His point is, stories are not true. Most stories that cohere us are not true, but stories don’t need to be true to cohere us. It’s this strange mechanical blip in reality that stories have this cohering capacity. 

Why? 

Because we meet each other, and trust each other, know each other in the story — just because. We all know the same story. We feel this common bond of story. We have this shared family history, history as in his-story. 

That’s his move.

That is categorically not the case. That’s not how story works. 

What Harari misses is something essential about the nature of how intimacy is created through story.

Why stories cohere us

Let’s take the Catholic church story, or let’s take the biblical story. Harari says, well, these stories are fictions, and everybody is cohering and believing them. 

Not exactly. 

Let’s start with the Catholic church. 

Let’s be clear, I am not a big fan of the Catholic church.

The Catholic church is one of the most corrupt institutions that Reality has ever created, and has a shocking level of decadence and corruption. And — part of the story that the Catholic church is telling is freaking beautiful. It is telling a story about virginity, and innocence, and our ability to re-virginate, and to birth from this place of our innocence.

It’s telling a story — 

• about this force in Reality that loves us so crazy much — so outrageously! —

• about some dimension of Reality, the ultimate source of Reality that holds us in every moment, 

• that is willing to die for us on the cross — to get nailed to the cross for the sake of our liberation, 

• that I am so radically loved and held, 

• that there is some force in Reality that wants my liberation desperately. 

Or the Sermon on the Mount — this stand for justice, and for the orphan and for the widow, this story of true virtue, of true noble virtue. 

The Catholic story is filled with gorgeous resonant truths — and a lot of fiction. But the reason people resonate with the story is because we recognize ourselves in the story. I respond to the story because I recognize myself — I meet myself — in the story.

Now, I want to give an example. This is going to take us home.

So, what happened here? Why did everyone believe the music? 

You’ve got this square. Everyone is having their ordinary, somewhat dull day, filled with the normal pettiness, and contraction, and argument. And everyone’s doing what they do. 

And then, this music starts to gradually fill everything up. 

And what happens? Everyone is blown away. Everyone is blown out of their minds. Everyone responds to the music. Why? 

Because the musical value — the cadence of the music, the tempo of the music, the stops and the starts, the pattern of intimacy that’s created by music, which is part of the manifest universe — lives inside of us. Music is one of the features of the manifest, it is the interior mathematics of intimacy of Cosmos within the world of time. We participate in that music, so we don’t need someone to explain the truth of that music. The music lives in us. 

The reason that music changes us, and moves us, and shapes us is because we are resonant with the music. That’s why music is a form of in-formation. It in-forms us. 

Story is an information technology because story, like music, capacitates us to as it were march in unison. We get to march together because we recognize, we cohere to the musical value. There are values in music. There is musical value. It’s a particular quality, and we resonate with that quality. 

Just like there is musical value and mathematical value, there is ErosValue — moral value.

When we tell the story of Christmas, we are not cohering around a fictional story like a bunch of idiots, because maybe Santa’s not true. (I think Santa is true, just for the record. Just saying. I met Santa once actually, just between us.) We are cohering because we resonate with Christmas. I was raised as an Orthodox rabbi, and I love Christmas. I resonate with Christmas. I resonate as a Catholic with the Catholic church — and not because I am an idiot who believes in these dogmas, which are fictional, not just because there is this mechanical thing that we all meet in the story.

No, we are intimate in the story because we are having a shared Anthro-Ontological experience. 

We are having a shared experience of resonance. 

We look at each other, and we realize, oh my God, we are resonating together. 

It’s like when a family gets together, and nothing holds them together but the old jokes. And then, they find each other in the old jokes, they resonate through the old jokes. No, we resonate through shared feeling. 

There is this scene in the movie Pretty Woman (Richard Gere, Julia Roberts), and she is a courtesan, and he falls in love with her. It’s a love story, just like Winston and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

He is not sure if she is sophisticated enough for him, but he loves her. And they go to this very, very, very beautiful, subtle opera symphony. And he is crying, and he looks over, and she gets it even more deeply, there is a tear running down her cheek. As he looks at her, he realizes, oh my God, she’s having the same feeling that I’m having — and they are intimate because they are participating in the same feeling.

We resonate in a shared story not because there is a blip of a materialist Cosmos, which causes this mechanical mis-function (or function), which causes people world over to cohere around in-formation, to inform ourselves to resonate, to cohere through story. There is an enormous amount of evidence of that, and Harari is aware of the evidence. He cites some of it. The reason that we cohere through story is because in story we are intimate with each other because we are having a shared experience of value.

Intimacy is based on shared value. 

We are having a shared experience of value. We are having a shared experience of ErosValue. Richard Gere and Julia Roberts are watching the opera, and the tear is rolling down her cheek, and he realizes she’s feeling what he is feeling. 

That’s why sensuality is so powerful. 

That’s why making love together is so powerful. 

That’s why sometimes couples have this weird idolatry (weird, but rooted in something beautiful: when they’re involved in sexing, they have this desire to explode at the same time. Why? Because we want the intimacy of shared feeling. It’s not about orgasm. The sexual models Eros. You can have sex your whole life and never be intimate, and never have sex and be totally intimate.

The point is that in the shared explosion, or the shared tear, we meet in the depth of a shared intimacy. 

That’s one major reason why stories cohere us. Stories cohere us because we actually participate together in shared value. And it’s the same reason the Bible coheres people. 

The Bible doesn’t cohere people because it’s a fictional story that got some anthropological or medical facts wrong. The Bible coheres people because it speaks a language of prophetic justice. It speaks a language of beauty. It speaks a language of family, and family conflict, and resolution, and vulnerability, and agony, and ecstasy. We recognize ourselves. We locate ourselves. We participate in the story. We recognize each other because we understand that we’re actually participating in the same story.

This is true even if the story is in part fictional. The story may be, from a historical perspective, or even from an ethical perspective, a broken vessel (as the interior sciences call it). And naturally, there are varying degrees of brokenness. But there are also sparks of light to be liberated from the broken vessels. A story that becomes a great myth is not simply fictional, but also profoundly true as it liberates the sparks of Ethos and Eros from the shattered vessel.  

But there is also a second reason why stories cohere. Stories cohere not only around value but around anti-value. The orcs in The Lord of the Rings or the Nazis are not gathering around value, but around anti-value. This is a very subtle and essential topic that needs to be addressed deeply, but that is a the topic of a different conversation.  

There are shared stories of value because Reality is a story

Returning to our thread:

Now, everything we are doing becomes clearer. 

What are we saying? 

We are saying, in our work in the Centre: 

• There is a crisis of coherence. The meta-crisis of existential risk is a crisis of coherence. 

• We are calling it a global intimacy disorder.

• We are saying that this global intimacy disorder is based on a failure to articulate a shared story of value and meaning, and we point toward seven distinct links between the failure to articulate a shared story of value meaning and existential risk. In our book First Principles and First values, we talk about seven distinct links between the perceived collapse of the field of intrinsic value and the global intimacy disorder, alongside thirteen expression of the global intimacy disorder for which they are at least partially responsible. 

In the same book, we also engage the critiques of value that were well articulated by modernity and postmodernity and respond to them, articulating a key next step (what Derek Parfit was reaching for, but could not quite get there). At the very core of this step is the recognition that we live in an intimate universe. 

Let’s recap one of our key threads (we spoke about it in depth last week):

There is a Tao. It is an eternal Tao which is an evolving Tao; a ground of being and becoming which is itself a field of Value, prior to all becoming; an evolving eternity that generates evolution animated by eternity. 

This is but a fragrance of this reality realization and value theory; a fuller engagement with it is sadly beyond the scope of this conversation right now    

What we are saying is that value/meaning is real. And value is evolving. Yes, there are fictional stories that became tools of domination and abusive power, which need to be exploded. The postmodern explosion of power motives, and dominance motives, and false stories is good. We receive and integrate that postmodern insight. Both Yuval and ourselves shared that with postmodernity. 

But underneath all that, there are shared stories of value because Reality is a story. 

In other words, Yuval, you forget, my friend, to answer the following question: 

• Why is it true that story coheres us? 

• What is it about story that coheres us? 

Why don’t we have, I don’t know, why don’t we have jumping jacks? Why don’t we get coherent by riding bikes together?

I know these are bad examples, but the point is, why does story cohere us? 

Is it purely because we accrue more power as postmodernity implies? 

Or is there a profound shared intimacy as we recognize each other — anthro-ontologically — within the resonant field of value that is the story? 

Story is clearly rooted in great part at least in this second possibility. 

Story coheres us because the value of story — both the values that story holds and the value of story itself — live inside us. 

We’ll talk about this more next week, but Reality is a story. Reality has a narrative arc. Reality is a story of value, and that story of value lives inside of me. The value that story is telling lives inside of me, just like the musical value or the mathematical value does.

When there is a crisis of coherence, it is not enough to create a new infrastructure (for example, new tech to find bioweapons in waste water), and it is not enough to do new social structure (for example, new regulations). In some sense, Skinner and Pentland are all about new infrastructure and social structure. That’s the only thing that’s going to change us, they assert. They get existential risk and they say, we’re going to solve it through new infrastructure and social structure. But they’ve got no other move. 

Why? 

Because they are saying that there is no real story of value, so that’s not going to work. A true story of inherent value, with its capacity to arouse political and moral will, is what intrinsically evolves and coheres us at a new level — but it is simply not on the table for them, so they are left only with the totalitarian option, whether of the benign Skinnerian or more overt Orwellian variety, to make up and impose a fictional story. 

We are saying, there is value that is real — inherent to Cosmos. Value is evolving, and it is  backed by the universe. As such, there is a New Story of Value that is real and aligned with Reality — because value is real, and one of the values of reality is evolution so the story; the story of value evolves. 

Let me give an example.

Let’s say you have an intimacy disorder between a couple. 

• They’ve got to go back to their story of value, and, first, recreate their story of value. What’s the story of value between us? 

• And then, they might realize, oh, there is part of me that has been split off. There is part of value that has been split off. We need to deepen our story of value. 

• Maybe there is a dimension of my creativity that was split off, which is part of the value of who I am that hasn’t been on the table and hasn’t been recognized. Let’s bring that into the story. 

• Or maybe there are some really important fears of mine that haven’t been honored, and holding them in vulnerability and authenticity is a huge value that’s been split off. Let’s make that part of our story.

I deepen my story of intimacy by  expanding the full range and depth of value that makes up the story. And then, we tell this New Story of Value together, and so we create a new coherence in the couple. 

This is true for a couple, personally, but it is no less true collectively, for community and society. There is always something split off. 

The New Story of Value of modernity said, oh, wow, we have split off empirical methods of information gathering, and the scientific method itself got split off, and new ways of doing art got split off, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve got to bring that value into the New Story. Let’s tell a New Story of Value, which is going to create greater coherence, and new laws of science. And this story created all of the dignities of modernity.

When we are facing a meta-crisis, at a time between stories, we need to tell a New Story of Value because a story of value generates new coherence. 

Why? Because a story of value is always a story of ErosValue.  

We agree with Yuval on the need for a new story – and that a new story can re-cohere reality. But not a fictional totalitarian propaganda story, which is Yuval’s only choice because he had declared value and meaning to be but delusions. We need a real story of real value backed by the universe, which is a story of ErosValue. And Eros is always desiring deeper contact and greater wholeness — that is to say, greater coherence. Thus, a new story of ErosValue is naturally the inherent mechanism of the living mystery to generate new coherence at a pivotal moment of unprecedented existential crisis. 

Story as superstructure versus story as social structure

Now, let’s deepen it; let’s take one more step.

What is Eros? There is the interior science equation of Eros in the First Principles and First Values book, which is core to CosmoErotic Humanism: 

Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. 

What is that? Coherence. In other words, the Eros equation is an equation that demonstrates that Reality is always seeking greater ErosValue, which means greater coherence, deeper contact and greater wholeness.

Greater wholeness means the split off parts are now included in the story of value, so this New Story of Value creates more coherence. 

For example, la story of value in the medieval period was ethnocentric: I only love me and my tribe. Too much is split off. I’ve got to expand to world-centric, and then I’ve got to expand to cosmocentric and include the animals. 

Whenever something is split off, we get lost. 

Or let’s say, we are so “evolutionary” that we think we are always progressing, and we forget the very important deep value that the ancients have, and we split that off. No, we need to include that.

Nothing can be left off the table. No one and nothing is outside of the story. We’ve got to deepen our story of value, but it’s a story of real inherent value. 

One of the things that gets split off is in the postmodern story is the inherent value itself. 

It is split off because the academic world and its pallid versions of value theory dogmatically rejected the inherent nature of value, and sadly, this world is often fearful to challenge its own anti-empirical reductive materialist dogmas. 

The reality of value is split off. It becomes just a story — not a story of value — because value itself is seen as contrived. And if you believe there is any meaning to your life, Harari says, it’s a delusion. If you think value/meaning is real, it’s a fiction, it’s an imagined Reality. It’s a social construct. You’ve split off inherent value itself from the story of value.

If you split off value itself, then it’s all just a fictional story. That’s postmodernity’s position, well represented by Harari. That’s the position of Nineteen Eighty-Four. That’s why there is so much doublethink in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and that’s why there is so much doublethink in Harari — because value has been split off, so it’s just a story; and the story is fiction. 

That’s the position of B.F. Skinner in Walden Two, and later in his Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and his even later News From Nowhere, where he fictively meets Orwell.

And that’s the position of the MIT media lab and its founder Alex Pentland, as articulated in dozens of articles and his classic book Social Physics.  

And Harari is directly in this line. He says, it’s okay, because fictional stories will cohere reality. Fictional stories will cohere reality even if there is nothing true in them. That is a recipe for dictatorship. That’s frightening.

That’s why there are people who are afraid that Yuval is aligning with the less noble impulses of, let’s say, the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab, who speak in the language of turning reality into a Skinner’s box. Yuval becomes a little bit of their spokesperson, and people are disturbed, even if they  can’t quite work it out.

No, Yuval, you’re doing a little doublethink here. You’re telling us it’s all about story. You’re telling us value/meaning is not real; you are echoing postmodernity. 

And then, you are saying, hey, but here is the superpower. What’s our superpower? Our superpower is that we can cohere reality by fictional stories, or what you are also refer to as “nonsense” stories. 

And if there is a problem in Reality — he says this in all of his books — here’s the human superpower: We can just tell a new fictional story of value and meaning, and that story which will generate new cooperation. 

The human superpower is: people need stories, even if they’re fictional stories, in order to cooperate. But they can change the way they cooperate by changing the stories they believe. That’s why we are far more powerful than ants. We can change our fictional story, and impose it on Reality, and cohere Reality through a new fictional story. 

Welcome to Orwellian totalitarianism, or Skinnerian totalitarianism — you choose!

This is tragic. Indeed it is this emptying the world of a field of value which has the genuine capacity to cohere us through the context of a shared story of shared inherent value. This emptying out is underneath all of the more surface generator functions of the existential risk; it is is the root cause for risk to our very humanity, the death of our humanity — the failure to enact a world in which human freedom, and human choice, and human dignity are protected.

For Yuval, a new story is actually not a New Story of Value, not a new superstructure (Harris’s terms from Cultural Materialism). It’s a new infrastructure, a new social structure. We are saying, no, story is a form of superstructure . It’s a strange attractor. Because real value allures in a way that nothing else does. 

It is the playing of a beautiful symphony in a square in Italy, in which everyone begins to resonate with the music because the musical value lives in us. The story is not just a story, it’s a story of value. It’s a new superstructure. When there is a crisis of coherence, we need to tell a New Story of Value, which by its very nature is a story of ErosValue, and ErosValue generates new coherence.

But for Yuval, for Skinner, for Orwell, there is no ErosValue. It doesn’t exist. For them, the story is not a story of value, but a cynical manipulative structure of a domination, that imposes a fictional story in order to create coherence, taking advantage of this weird fluke of evolution that people weirdly cohere around fictional stories.

That’s a recipe for the death of our humanity. 

Stories are real. And value is real. And stories of value are real. Indeed, evolving stories of value are the ontological structure of an evolving reality. We have talked about this ontology of stories in some depth in prior conversations here in One Mountain. 

Stories generate coherence because God loves stories. When I say God loves stories, I mean stories are the nature of Reality. Reality is not merely its. It is bits of value, and particularly bits of storied value, all the way down the evolutionary chain, that generate its. Reality is stories. And it’s all story, all the way up and all the way down. That’s what we’re going to talk about next week.

This is Part 3 of a series critique of Yuval Harari. Read Part 1 HERE , Part 2 HERE

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Love Or Die: White Paper by Dr. Marc Gafni