Humans are ‘Hackable Animals’: Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari, a World Economic Forum luminary, claims that humans are ‘hackable animals’. He is a man with dangerous ideas and friends in high places.
“We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls. We are now hackable animals.”
Welcome to the nihilistic worldview of Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian and history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Harari’s Scientific Paganism
Gay, vegan and raised in a secular Jewish home, Harari is a Davos darling — a World Economic Forum agenda contributor who spoke at the globalist body’s annual summit in both 2018 and 2020.
Rumours that Harari is a top advisor to Klaus Schwab are unconfirmed, but the professor’s ideas have undeniably shaped Schwab’s dystopian dreams for a transhumanist future.
Curiously, one of the wellsprings of Harari’s insights is Vipassana meditation, a pagan practice he has enjoyed for two hours daily since 2017.
Harari’s God-complex and ‘prophecies’ about the future of humanity makes him a perfect fit among the disciples of Davos.
He has infamously claimed: “History began when humans invented gods and will end when humans become gods”.
Beloved of Gates, Zuckerberg and Obama
Harari unpacks his atheistic omens about man’s ascendence in his celebrated 2016 book Homo Deus (‘God-Man’) and a swathe of other bestselling publications, including children’s picture books.
Vocal fans of Harari’s books include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama.
Beloved of the media, Harari has written for The Guardian:
In order to survive and prosper in the 21st century, we need to leave behind the naive view of humans as free individuals — a view inherited from Christian theology as much as from the modern Enlightenment — and come to terms with what humans really are: hackable animals.
What Does Harari Mean by ‘Hackable Animals’?
What Harari means by his ominous pet phrase ‘hackable animals’ is no mystery. During a 2020 interview, he explained:
Some governments and corporations for the first time in history have the power to basically hack human beings… By this I mean that if you have enough data and you have enough computing power, you can understand people better than they understand themselves, and then you can manipulate them in ways which were previously impossible.
For Harari, this futuristic ‘problem’ comes with a built-in solution:
In such a situation, the old democratic system stops functioning. We need to reinvent democracy for this new era in which humans are now hackable animals. The whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening inside me so whatever I choose, whether in the election or whether in the supermarket, this is my free will — that’s over.
On the one hand, Harari apparently laments the emerging power of elites to manipulate the masses as ‘tyrannical’. On the other hand, he spends most of his professional energy sowing the seed of this idea among the world’s elites, while offering little hope for the to-be-tyrannised masses.
Indeed, in Harari’s future of State/corporate mind control, one must ask: is there any difference between ‘reinventing democracy’ and ending it altogether?
‘We Just Don’t Need the Vast Majority of the Population’
As for the masses, in the mind of Harari a future awaits when they are no longer needed.
He says technologies like bioengineering and artificial intelligence are creating conditions in which “we just don’t need the vast majority of the population”. Rather than creating more opportunities for humanity, Harari believes “these technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people”.
Harari’s ideas might sound highfalutin. But they are also derided among academics. “He sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors,” according to Current Affairs. “He often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously,” writes another respected critic.
In truth, Harari’s main achievement has been to package populist, Hollywood-esque science fiction as futuristic fact to those hungry for power.
The dangerous part? If Harari’s hubristic hearers take him seriously.
Image via Brand Minds.
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Years ago a friend gave me Harari’s book, “Sapiens”. It was one of the worst written books I’ve ever read, and I just couldn’t finish it. It was an endless stream of question begging and reaching conclusions on the back of vague assumptions and vacuous Darwinian deductions.
I’ll never get back the time I lost reading as much of it as I did!
But these are the people who, if given enough influence, can be dangerous. So his ideas need to be shown to be the delusionary notions they are, because ideas have consequences. But I also have faith in the fact that societies simply do not function the way he imagines is possible, so they’ll never go anywhere.
Ben, thank you for this extremely balanced (in my view) of Harari. I would not ‘dismiss’ him as a ‘sensationalist’, but I do believe that the world is waking up to his kind and will increasingly refuse to comply with ‘their agenda’. Mind you, I think we need you to keep shining a light into the darkness to show people what’s lurking in there.
I think you make this guy out to be too much of a delusional crank that is derided by other academics. I don’t think this is so and he is very dangerous. From what I’ve read he is Klaus Schwab’s right hand man maybe even his boss. His work with AI is seriously disturbing stuff. We under-estimate this guy at our peril.