The hubris of Yuval Noah Harari

 August 4, 2022

I want to point to a pair of dangerous, as in dangerously hubristic, ideologies that are animating the unsettled panic of our contemporary moment. Slavoj Zizek has been working himself to the bone to expose these perverted ideologies and bring them to the surface, above the blasé confusion of all this postmodern trash we are passing off as "food for thought" right now. I have nothing categorically against postmodernism as an aesthetic, but it can be used well or fallaciously, and overall the theory, or even trumped-up "philosophy" passing off as legitimate thought, is very lacking in what has been produced in English. Yuval Noah Harari is an example of this delusion.

Mr. Zizek has been talking for so long and with such sophistication about this that he needs some recognition for talking us into the modernity that we are actually living in. Let me try to give him some of that recognition by dispatching his foes, or at least acknowledging that he has dispatched those foes. 

The first of the liars is Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote some books about how Nature doesn't care about us, and humans should be the end of all thinking. I picked up one of his books in Vietnam, and it disgusted me in the way that synthetic flavorings and petroleum waste products disgust me.

How would I describe the essence of Mr. Harari? I would call it a sort of "basic bitch millenarianism", the type you can see all around you from "basic bitches" that decided to open the News app on their phone or check CNN.com every now and again. This is a stage in the awakening if you actually work at it, but only for some types, and if you deescalate from there, you end up in a sort of "stupid paranoia", if I may use bad words, that is exemplified by people obsessed with the scandals that are non-scandals, like for instance "Gamergate". So I don't blame the standard "basic bitch millenarian" as long as they exit that half-awake stupor to a healthier attitude.

But I do blame Mr. Harari for profiting off of making these neophytic personalities out to be more sophisticated than they are. And the reason he's doing it is simply explained once you accept that he's acting like someone with the answers that he doesn't have for himself. He's pissed off at "Nature" because the efforts to plant crops in the desert of the Israeli-occupied West Bank isn't going well. Why does that operation need a propagandist? Because it is stolen land.

I also want to point to the home run that Mr. Zizek hit when he pointed out that so-called "deep ecology" is a stumbling block of classical human hubris. Trying to understand everything about ecological systems leads only to pretending that you understand it, in a classic hubristic lie. 

But all thanks to Mr. Zizek for choosing to debate on the issue of "Nature" and expose the egos that are speaking about it at a distance, as if separation from it was the key to appearing objective, and then to hide irrational propaganda behind a fake rational distance, and even a play act of being a thinking person.

"Nature" has become an important concept for actual modern popular philosophy and sensibility – but the theory on it is all bullshit when it's operated at a significant distance. Saying you understand all Nature would mean you exist in all Nature all the time. And saying that you exist apart from Nature is an absurdity. The same useful question is "and what have you been doing that you would say so?" Not breathing air and eating food, and, have you never been outside? Nature is not something to theoretically examine as a philosophy apart from acknowledging that you are a part of it, and to say you are apart from it, is totally absurd, as in, ridiculous.