Yuval Harari: Bleak Is Back! And, Dystopian Dictatorship Is Cool!
Yuval Harari is a shallow thinking dogmatic materialist who swallows whole and uncritically the dominant pseudo-scientific paradigm of mechanistic materialist dualism, which of course is an extremely bleak view of the world, and he is also steeped in an equally uncritical post-modernist nihilism; and he tries to wed that sordid mess to Buddhism. But he represents bad Buddhism. If you want to understand Buddhist philosophy, read Allan Wallace, Ken Wilber, Alan Watts, Joanna Macy, Chogyam Trungpa or the Dalai Lama. If you want to misunderstand Buddhism, read Yuval Harari.
JTR,
April 22, 2021
Post-Script: If you want to know the core message and vision for humanity of Yuval Harari, listen to this. Bleak is an understatement. It is dystopian. He is openly calling for a global dictatorship – his words. This interview, by the way, is probably the most important thing you can listen to, watch or read this year, if not ever in your life.
Writings of J. Todd Ring 
April 22, 2021 at 1:38 pm
Celebrity gurus analyzed:
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April 22, 2021 at 2:55 pm
One relatively minor point that Yuval Harari gets wrong, and even though it is a relatively minor point compared to his giant errors of world view, it is still nonetheless of significance, and moreover, revealing, is his view of AI-driven cars, or self-driven, driverless cars. He, like Elon Musk, lives in a dream world. The planet we live on cannot support the 50 billion vehicles we now have – and it does not matter if they are electric or self-driving. How this eludes him is really quite shocking, or it would be, if we did not live in a society that is submerged in mass delusion. The amount of resources consumed and the pollution created in the production and building of billions of cars is alone enough to make them completely non-viable for the future of human transportation. We must shift to mass transit, including high speed wind energy-powered electric trains, buses, bicycles and walkable communities, and jettison the transportation model that is centred around *any* form of private automobile. He is completely out of touch with reality, therefore, and cannot be taken seriously. He is obviously a very shallow thinker, and not much of a thinker at all, if this self-evident fact escapes him. And that, as I say, is the least of his giant errors in thinking. This man, as intelligent as he may seem, is talking out of his ass, frankly, and should be dismissed by any thoughtful person.
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April 22, 2021 at 3:02 pm
Likewise, his view of the future of medicine and health care being taken over by AI is similarly delusional, and divorced from reality. His argument is based on an assumption that we will of course continue to radically underfund public health care, and given that gross systemic underfunding, which he takes as inevitable, when in fact it is a public policy choice which we could just as easily reject, he concludes that in the very short time allotted for a visit with a doctor, the doctor is severely limited in how effective he or she can be. The clear answer is to prioritize human health, and hence prioritize full funding for universal health care, so that doctors can take the time needed to give a fuller examination and a better response to the people. But this obvious solution also escapes his all-seeing gaze. So, on the future of health care, as with the future of transportation, he shows himself to be a completely shallow thinker who is out of touch with reality.
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April 22, 2021 at 3:09 pm
Thirdly, he seems oblivious to the very real and grave dangers of a society or a world of people who are linked up via continuous surveillance and pervasive scanners, including biometric scanners inside our bodies, which are wirelessly integrated into a globalized Big Data network. That could never go wrong. Has he ever read Orwell or Huxley? The dangers of abuse of such sweeping, historically unprecedented powers are vast, and grave in the extreme. But he seems to cheerfully dismiss them as non-existent. Again, he lives in a dream world, and not in the real world.
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April 22, 2021 at 3:19 pm
Fourth, his view of human beings is not only bleak, and dehumanizing, viewing people as machines, but is positively chilling, and flatly gruesome and ghoulish, I would say. Emotions are a disease, in his view – and, they can be managed, manipulated, and “cured” by an AI-driven Big Data complex that we voluntarily embed ourselves into via wireless internal biometric sensors and devices. And he seems to think that AI is going to drive this management of human emotion. Nobody drives the AI? Of course, someone, or some group of people, are going to control the AI which controls us. The obvious and undeniable conclusion is that it will be the corporate-state oligarchy which drives the AI, which programs the AI, and which uses the AI for the control of the people. Again, he lives in a dream world, and furthermore, his vision for the future of humanity is dystopian in the extreme.
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April 22, 2021 at 3:30 pm
He not only is dogmatically aligned with the now clearly dying and out of date, disproven and crumbling paradigm or world view of mechanistic, dualistic materialism, and he is not only radically out of touch with reality, and delusional, with regards to the realities of present and future transportation and health care systems, but he is a closeted supporter, or at least an unconscious cheerleader, for technocracy – which is simply another term for Big Brother style scientific fascism. There are people with dangerous ideas in the good sense – people who disrupt the standard narratives in order to bring a fresh perspective, and in order to shed greater light on what is really happening, what is real, and what we can do about it, and people who hold the dangerous ideas that things like freedom, human rights, equality and democracy, are values which should be preserved, and fought for, and upheld. He is not dangerous in any of those positive ways. He is dangerous because he spreads delusions, and worse, because he spreads delusions which are supporting the new global empire of corporate oligarchy, and what can only be
accurately or honestly described as a technocratic crypto-fascism, where the billionaire elite will rule the world, and the 99.99% of humanity who are not among the ruling elite, will be reduced to serfs, or slaves.
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April 22, 2021 at 3:41 pm
He argues – to make just one of these points more vividly clear – that there is an acute shortage of doctors in the world, because it takes a lot of time and money to train doctors. It never occurs to him that it is a political choice to chronically underfund public health care. We just gave the corporate elite another two trillion dollars in 2020, after giving them twenty trillion dollars following the global economic crash of 2008, which they created, and yet we are told that there is a shortage of money for health care. Anyone in their right mind can see we are being lied to. There was more than twenty trillion dollars available for the billionaire elite and their pet corporate empires, but there is no money to end poverty, to house the people, to pay for universal, well-funded schools, from kindergarten through graduate school, and there is no money for hospitals, clinics, or the training of nurses and doctors? Tiny little Cuba, which is a relatively poor country with a miniscule budget and miniscule economic means, by global standards, has been able to train so many doctors that they can and do send more doctors abroad to poorer countries than all other nations combined. The crisis in health care is a crisis of corruption at the very top – it is a crisis spawned of callousness and greed, and gross and systemic misallocation of funds. It is a crisis of extreme malfeasance, whereby trillions of dollars go to the already stratospherically rich and powerful, and only crumbs are left for the 99%. But Harari is oblivious to all of this. Either he is a conscious propagandist for the new global corporate oligarchy, or he is simply an idiot. You take your pick, but he is clearly one or the other.
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April 22, 2021 at 3:49 pm
And he cheerfully wants us to replace lawyers and teachers with AI. That poses no problems whatsoever! Replacing teachers with AI would mean stripping away any possibility for critical thought and independent thought in the education system – a problem which is already severe and grossly unacknowledged. Removing human beings from teaching and professorships would mean that total control over the education system becomes possible for the new global corporate-state oligarchy. There will be no room for dissent, no room for critical discussion. Forget about the subtleties of poetry, the humanities or the arts, forget about the stripping away of all creativity or innovation, we are talking about basics here – children, youth and adults will be subjected to a totally controlled system of indoctrination, rather than the sometimes ineffective indoctrination they now receive, and so, total control by the powerful and the oligarchs can be envisioned, and can be achieved. This man is either insane, or he is being paid handsomely for selling his soul and behaving as an intellectual prostitute to the ruling elite.
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April 22, 2021 at 3:51 pm
It is amazing to hear him talk. “We don’t have a crisis today of mass unemployment”, he says. What planet do you live on, buddy?
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April 22, 2021 at 4:00 pm
Further, he talks repeatedly and ominously about what he calls, “useless human beings”. He envisions AI taking over virtually all jobs, so that we have global mass unemployment. Now, if we are intelligent, and ethical, we will see that could be a form of human liberation – if we use automation and technology wisely and well. Human beings might be freed from much of the work that must be done – so, we share the wealth, and implement systemic job-sharing, which requires a radical redistribution of wealth, so that everyone can live with dignity and a good quality of life, because wealth is more equitably shared, and because work is shared, so that we can shorten the work week, first to 32 hours, then maybe 24, or less. But his oblique and repeated references to an inevitability of a sea of “useless human beings”, once again, feeds nicely into the global corporate fascist oligarchy, which is frankly neo-Malthusian: which means, the elite view the sea of humanity as being composed mainly of “useless human beings” – and that view is inherently genocidal.
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April 22, 2021 at 4:12 pm
But he comes to the crux at the end. What he says is in one regard true: he is right about one thing: having economic usefulness leads to having economic power, and therefore social and political power. When people become economically useless, they lose their economic, social and political power. And that, as Chomsky has said, is what has driven the big push toward automation over the past five decades, and what still drives it today. As Chomsky has said, technology – aside from toxic technology such as glyphosate, nuclear weapons or DDT, for example – is neutral. Technology can be used to empower and liberate and aid human beings, or to systematically rob, plunder, disarm and disempower human beings. Guess which approach the business elite favour. Automation and AI are being pushed, not because they will benefit and liberate humanity, but because automation and AI are being driven in ways that will disempower the 99%, and will therefore leave the ruling 1%, or 0.1%, as the ruling god-kings of the Earth. This is what we must resist, but in order to resist it, we must first understand clearly what the current agenda is, and what the alternatives are. Yuval Harari is one of the cheerleaders for global technocratic plutocracy – whether he is intelligent enough to realize it or not, and I suspect he is oblivious to it. He needs to be discredited, and his bleak vision, which fits hand to glove with the global corporate oligarchs’ vision and agenda, needs to be firmly and decisively rejected.
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April 22, 2021 at 4:53 pm
I used the term “closeted”, and I want to make it perfectly clear what I did and did not mean by that term. For the record, I have no problem with closeted gay people, or openly gay people, in case anyone was to read into my use of that term and suspect I was implying something that I was not. I am a firm advocate of human freedom. I believe people should be free to love whomever they choose, and free to live as they choose, so long as they are not harming anyone. I have no problem with people who are gay, straight, bi, trans, or whatever they choose to be. Nor is it any of my business. But I do have a problem with fascists – and most of them are closet fascists, since fascism is no longer fashionable to publicly display or announce. (Hitler was bad PR for the lovers of fascism, which in the 1920s and ’30s included the Western business elite and political elite, we should remember – and the same Western elite are now crypto-fascists.) I also have a problem with people who are unwittingly supporting or cheering for authoritarianism, technocracy or fascism – and sadly, that includes the great majority of liberals and the left in 2020/2021. Fascism is not cool, and it is not acceptable, and it matters little in practice whether you are a conscious fascist or an unwitting supporter of fascism: it still must be challenged, resisted, and defeated. I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, and not assuming the worst about people. We should presume innocence until proven guilty – that is a cornerstone of any free or democratic society. But it is clear that Yuval Harari is either consciously or unconsciously supporting the rapid move towards global technocracy, and a deeply Orwellian global corporate fascism. Is he a paid and conscious pawn, or an unwitting fool. I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and conclude that he is simply a useful idiot – an idiot who is useful to the ruling oligarchy – and not an intellectual prostitute, which many people frankly are.
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April 22, 2021 at 7:10 pm
To clarify further on another point: the crisis in health care is not due to covid, nor is it due to a shortage of money. It is caused by the gross and extreme misallocation of funds by and for the corporate business elite; and in the case of the US, that core problem is aggravated by a private, for-profit “health care” system, which is really best called a disease management system, which costs twice as much as the public health care systems of Canada, Britain and Europe. The problem is further aggravated by an extreme over-emphasis on pharmaceutical drugs, which are saddled with serious risks and often very serious and dangerous side effects, and which are far more expensive than either preventative health care, which should be top priority, or natural health care, which should be option choice number one in most cases and for the majority of ailments. We should be pushing risky and expensive pharmaceutical and surgical options only when safer, less invasive, and less expensive natural health options have failed – which, in a majority of conditions, they do not, but in fact work better, as well as safer and with far lower costs. But none of this is understood by the pop culture guru who is the all-seeing Yuval Harari, whose head is clearly somewhere other than on his shoulders.
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April 22, 2021 at 10:54 pm
Maybe my critique seems harsh, but I took my social graces from Winston Churchill, Malcolm X, Emiliano Zapata, and Bon Scott. Most people deserve courtesy, but anyone who supports fascism, I will cut down at the knees.
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April 23, 2021 at 2:33 pm
The best scientists and the best thinkers have viewed science and religion, not as contradictory or mutually exclusive, but as complimentary. That should be our first clue as to how to proceed. And to science and religion, I would add politics and philosophy and ecology. If, or when, we can combine and synthesize all five, then only do we begin to see things clearly, and in their greater totality and wholeness. And I would suggest that anyone who tries to cut off one or more of these five points of the star of our good guidance, not only lives with tunnel vision and a dim light of the mind, but is in very important ways, partially, or even, in some cases, wholly blind.
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April 23, 2021 at 2:38 pm
Frankly, I can only think of two people who have done that, who have pulled all five threads together, with clarity and depth and precision, as well as broadness, and that is Vandana Shiva and myself. I would, therefore, again, recommend people to read widely and deeply, and also, to make sure to include we two in your readings and your contemplations. And if you don’t like what we have to say, then you can disregard it, and you have lost nothing.
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April 23, 2021 at 3:21 pm
I think Ken Wilber and Rupert Sheldrake are right: the challenge of the 21st century – along with what should be obvious, which is ecological survival and stewardship, along with the creation of a mutually respectful, pluralistic, tolerant, free and and democratic society with a unity in diversity, and the defeat of corporate oligarchy and fascism – is to integrate our vision, to see the whole of life in more fullness, as well as more clarity. Both figures do a marvellous job of it, as truly gifted polymaths. Ken Wilber, however, with his extremely valuable four quadrant theory, profoundly misunderstands the outer collective dimension, or quadrant, which is the sociolgical and political. If you combine the philosophies of Ken Wilber with those of someone who has a deep understanding of history, sociology and political-economy, such as Chomsky, Kropotkin, Bertrand Russell, Rianne Eisler or Bookchin, then you are getting clarity on all four quadrants of human knowledge. That is precisely what I have done with my writings, in my books and essays, is to present such a synthesis. And that synthesis or vision is now greatly and urgently needed. In fact, it may well be an essential precondition for our survival.
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April 23, 2021 at 3:30 pm
Here is an example, a taste, of what non-shallow thinkers discuss, and how they think.
It should not be seen as sinful to engage with science, and philosophy, and religion. In fact, it should be seen as a sign of intelligence.
There are many paths up the mountain. And learning from one another should not be seen as a sin. We should remember that also. God does not fit into a shoe box that you can tuck neatly under your bed.
A rare few people are capable of discussing religion or spirituality on a high level, or in any real depth. A rare few can talk with depth of understanding about science. And a rare few can talk with depth of understanding about philosophy. Vernon and Sheldrake can do all three. And that is extremely rare.
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April 23, 2021 at 3:52 pm
Most scientists, and most people who subscribe to the dominant but dying paradigm of Newtonian-Cartesian, mechanistic, materialist dualism, who think of themselves as being scientific, really have very little to no understanding of philosophy, world religions, politics, or ecology. That they are largely blind, as well as being extremely dogmatic in their blindness, is therefore no great surprise.
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April 23, 2021 at 6:29 pm
Modern civilization, and especially modern Western civilization, is not civilized in any meaningful sense of the word. Thoreau’s poignant critique, in his magnum opus, Walden, is still relevant today, and more relevant than ever. In fact, modern civilization is a stumbling, demented juggernaut, seemingly hell-bent on destroying both the planet we live on, and ourselves. It is a sinking ship, a ship of fools, and a madhouse. In fact, it is worse – it is becoming a psychiatric prison; and the Dawkinites, the materialists, the mass media and the economists, and the pop culture celebrity gurus, such as Jordan Peterson and Yuval Harari, are the prison guards, and the orderlies who dispense the daily, obligatory and compulsory doses of soma, the admixture of opiates and hallucinogens’ that keep the people docile and deluded.
Break the spell. Break free. Free, your mind – and the world will also be liberated, set free, and healed.
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April 23, 2021 at 6:41 pm
Morality is not an encumbrance to be rid of, but a necessity for a sane society, and a sane life. Morality should be approached with the use of our natural intelligence, and not as docile obedient sheep, it is true; but that it is vital and indispensable to any society that wishes to be just, free, or even to avoid collapse, is not in question. Morality, when it is intelligent, or has any integrity or value at all, and is not simply a form of subtle coercion and imprisonment of minds, is based in universal compassion – which, as Schopenhauer said, is the (valid) metaphysical intuition that the self and other are one. Morality is based in compassion, or it is not morality at all, but simply a code of conduct for prisoners in a jail. And compassion is not only a matter of virtue: it is also a matter of basic intelligence, because it is a matter of enlightened self-interest. We are all interconnected and all things are interdependent. That means that an injury to one truly is an injury to all; and to harm another, is to harm oneself, whereas to help another, is to help oneself. But neither morality nor compassion are compatible with a world view that sees all living beings, humans and animals, plants and trees and ecosystems, as mere machines, objects, or things. In fact, the entire mechanistic, dualistic, materialist world view, which has dominated the modern Western world for the last 400 years, and which is now dominating the globe, is a world view which radically undermines both compassion and morality, and sows nihilism in their stead – and nihilism is the death of compassion, and the death of the soul, or at least its occlusion. We either, therefore, shake off and ditch the mechanistic-materialist world view, and ditch the high priests who uphold it, or our civilization will ditch itself, into the dark waters of the abyss. It is not too late, but we are fast approaching the edge, and the point of no return. We must break free now. Free your mind. The rest will follow from that.
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April 23, 2021 at 6:46 pm
All things are interdependent. This is why all the world’s religions teach the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you; and love your neighbour. And we are fast losing that most basic wisdom of our ancestors, our sages, and our own hearts. Awaken the people. Remind them of their own common sense. Reconnect them to themselves, and things will improve rapidly and greatly. Allow the growing alienation from one another, from nature, and from ourselves to continue, and we are doomed.
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April 23, 2021 at 7:01 pm
I have sworn upon the altar of God an eternal hostility toward every form of tyranny over the minds of man. And that includes an eternal hostility toward every form of illusion or delusion which imprisons the minds of man – including the delusions that are spawned, promulgated and perpetuated by the high priests of pseudo-science, economics, and neoliberal or technocratic fascism, consumerism and nihilism, and the illusions spawned or perpetuated by pop culture gurus such as Yuval Harari, and his fellow acolytes of delusion.
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April 24, 2021 at 2:37 pm
We must distinguish, in the philosophy of science, the methodology of reductionism, from a dogmatic metaphysical assumption which is the patadigm or world view of materialist reductionism. That is the key to rescuing science from the quasi-scientific high priests who call themselves scientists, but who deserve not the term.
Reductionism has been a tremendously powerful tool for generating knowledge, but reductionism alone, if it is not integrated with a vision of the whole, becomes a form of blindness and tunnel vision, which becomes a sickness of the mind, and a spiritual disease of the society; which leads, not only to the erosion of meaning and joy, but also of ethics, conscience and compassion, social cohesion, understanding and wisdom, until, at last, the society, so blinded, finally destroys itself. That is exactly the predicament of the modern world.
Reductionism is in essence the breaking of the world into pieces. It isolates, fragments, separates and divides. We know ever more about the pieces, but we see less and less of reality when we focus solely or excessively on the pieces.
Reductionism is thus the mental process of disconnecting things in our minds. That can give us a kind of laser-like focus, and some partial understanding of the pieces, but reality is not a mere agglomeration of pieces. Reality is not composed of pieces at all, in fact. Reality is composed of systems within systems, wholes within wholes within wholes. It is fine to break things up in our minds into little pieces in the methodology of reductionism, but if we cannot then put the pieces back together again, and reconnect them in an integrated whole, then we have so fragmented our vision that we become not only blind, but destructive and insane.
Our power is great, but our wisdom is non-existent, or at the least, forgotten and eclipsed. Wisdom was something we shoved into the cellar, then forgot was there, or even existed, until at last, most people don’t believe that such a thing as wisdom has ever existed, or could exist at all. We have become blind to our blindness. We are dwellers in Plato’s cave of shadows, and our high priests of science tell us marvellous things about the patterns of shadows on the cave wall; but we know nothing of the reality behind the shadows, and we have come to believe that the shadows are all that exist. We have so lost touch with reality, that anyone who tries to reconnect us with reality, we automatically consider to be insane, and so we fight against him with all our strength. We have traded wisdom for knowledge, and we are finding that, in truth, we have lost both in the bargain.
If we understand the fingers but not the hand, then we do not even truly understand the fingers. If we confuse the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself, then we understand nothing. If we understand, or think we understand, the molecules or the brain, but do not understand the nature of being and the mind, then we will understand nothing of our true existence, or of life itself.
The challenge in the modern world, therefore, and it is the underlying fundamental challenge, is to put the pieces back together again, to reconnect all things in our minds and our vision, as they are eternally and primordially connected in reality. If we fail to make the reconnection, then we will simply perish as a species, because our fragmented knowledge will have become a blindness that drives us over a cliff we cannot see, and finally destroy us.
Reconnect.
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April 24, 2021 at 2:54 pm
The modern world runs on machines, and all machines are based on machine-like thinking, which is what reductionism is. Machines, and the machine-like thinking which creates all machines, are powerful tools, but if we do not learn to master our machines, our tools, our thinking and our own minds, then the machine of modern society will devour our humanity, our world, our society, our lives, and all life.
We must reconnect ourselves to one another, to nature, to ourselves, and to a vision of wholeness, or our fragmented thinking, our fragmented minds; otherwise, our fragmented being, minds and lives, and our fragmented society, will strip away all joy, meaning, richness, conscience, compassion and wisdom, turning us first into sad and weary slaves, and hollow shells, and then, finally, to dust.
Reconnect.
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April 24, 2021 at 3:09 pm
The old paradigm, which is still the dominant, reigning paradigm or world view in science and academia, and which is mechanistic, dualistic materialism, is in its death throws, and is breaking down. We are moving, as a first step, towards an ecological world view, and a rejection or transcendence of the mechanistic world view. That is the paradigm shift, or revolution of science, consciousness, culture and the mind, that is underway now.
The old paradigm views the universe as a machine, and views people and animals and all living beings as machines. But living beings are organisms, not machines, and the ecosystems in which we are embedded, and without which we cannot live, are organisms, not machines, and the universe, or cosmos, itself is better understood as an organism, and not a machine.
Keep the machines, if you like, and keep the machine-like thinking that creates them, but let us now relink and reconnect our being, minds and vision to the wholeness of things, or our future will be dark in the extreme.
Reductionism as methodology is useful only to the extent that it is embedded within a vision of wholeness. We will now, in the 21st century, either reconnect with just such a broader, deeper, clearer vision, or we will terminate our own species.
Reconnect.
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April 24, 2021 at 3:22 pm
Chomsky echoes Kant, and they are both right: any society that is premised upon the delusion that private greed yields public good, that people and other living beings can and should be treated as objects to be exploited, harvested or extracted, is a society that will sooner or later destroy itself – and we are now racing fast, headlong toward that cliff. But if people, animals, ecosystems and living beings are not to be treated as mere objects for our exploitation, but as living organisms which have value in themselves, then we must, of necessity, jettison the old and dying world view that sees all beings as mere machines. That this is an inescapable and unavoidable conclusion, should now be becoming clear to us all.
To live in peace, or to live wisely or well, and by now, to live at all, requires that we honour the other, as well as ourselves; and that requires that we view nature, ecosystems, plants, trees, grasslands, forests, fields, oceans and rivers and ponds, human beings and animals, as something much more than simply objects and things. We must, in short, regain a deep respect and compassion for life and living beings, and that requires that the old world view must die.
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April 24, 2021 at 3:25 pm
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April 24, 2021 at 3:40 pm
I have a deep and profound respect and compassion for Life, and for all people, all of nature, and all living beings. That is why I will passionately and fiercely protect and defend them to my last breath. And that is why I will be ferocious with the corporatists, the fascists, and the nihilists – because I value and cherish all people and living beings profoundly. What we do not need, as Chogyam Trungpa said, is idiot compassion. Idiot compassion, as Trungpa said, is believing you must be gentle at all times.
Gentleness is best, as a general rule, yes, most definitely; but there are times to be firm, there are times to speak up, there are times to be bold, there are times to be brave and to be strong, and there are times to be fierce, and as ferocious as a lion. Such a time is now. Remember, Jesus did not drive the money-changers from the temple with mild words and a wilted piece of leaf lettuce, but with a whip.
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April 24, 2021 at 4:02 pm
If you combine and synthesize the philosophies, vision and writings of Spinoza, Kant, Chomsky, Kropotkin, Bookchin, Joanna Macy, Allan Wallace, Ken Wilber, Thomas Paine and Joseph Campbell, then you get a new vision for humanity which can guide us well, not only to survive, but to thrive, through the 21st century and beyond. That is exactly what I have done in the three books and 500 essays I have published. I would urge people to read these philosophers and thinkers, and to read these three books of my own, and now. We need a new vision, and we need it urgently.
Let the new renaissance begin.
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April 24, 2021 at 4:30 pm
Nietzsche was utterly insane, but he was right in one thing, when he remarked, “The ego – our last article of faith.” This is the crisis of the modern world: it is the crisis of disconnection and alienation. And Jung was right when he said that the ego, though it can be, at times, a useful servant; it makes a terrible master. And the egocentrism of the modern world mirrors the atomistic, reductionist mind-set, which underlies, and misinforms and deludes, all of modern society. As with the ego, we must now dethrone reductionism; for it too, is a useful tool, but a terrible and destructive master, which threatens us all.
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April 25, 2021 at 5:53 am
Reconnect: here are a few of many ways that we can do that. Reading deeply and widely, slowing down, simplifying and takng time for reflection are also among the most important things we can do. Make time. No excuses. Prioritize!
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April 26, 2021 at 1:14 am
Vastly more precious than gold, is knowledge. And vastly more precious than knowledge, is understanding. And vastly more precious than understanding, is wisdom, which sees into the heart of being. But wisdom means nothing, and is not even wisdom, if it is not based in compassion. This, is the key to the new renaissance – this, and this alone.
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