Posted on 02/01/2024 12:24:18 PM PST by Heartlander
What happens when nihilism is taken to its logical and philosophical conclusion?
“Human rights are just like heaven and like God. It’s just a fictional story that we have invented and spread around. It may be a very nice story… but it’s just a story. It’s not a reality.”
So says Noah Yuval Hariri, a historian and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of Homo Deus (“Man God”), along with many other bestselling publications, including children’s picture books.
Harari is a World Economic Forum agenda contributor and rumored advisor to Klaus Schwab. Among his highbrow fans are Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama.
Harari’s chilling quote above comes from a TED Talk he gave almost a decade ago but that has been making the rounds on social media recently and garnering millions of views and thousands of negative comments.
Here’s some more context to what Harari said in that talk:
Many—maybe most—legal systems are based on this idea or this belief in human rights. But human rights are just like heaven and like God. It’s just a fictional story that we have invented and spread around. It may be a very nice story; it may be a very attractive story—we want to believe it. But it’s just a story. It’s not a reality. It is not a biological reality. Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, Homo sapiens have no rights also. Take a human, cut him open, look inside. You find the blood, you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don’t find any rights. The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented and spread around.
Klaus’s top adviser tells us where things are headed. pic.twitter.com/Y3UxCJWvcx
— Epstein's Sheet. 🧻 (@meantweeting1) January 19, 2024
The full video can be viewed here, but be warned: There is no redemptive story arc; no happy ending—either in Harari’s TED Talk or his nihilistic worldview.
Harari couldn’t sound more assured in his assertions that both God and human rights are fictional.
But his remarks are just that: assertions. Harari is asking us to believe him but offering no evidence for his assertions.
Worse, he is exposing the dangerous and nihilistic logical endpoint of this worldview. Namely, that if there is no God or higher power, then even the most fundamental moral boundaries that the vast majority of human nations have subscribed to are null and void. No moral evil is ultimately out of bounds in a world without a higher power or objective moral foundation. Not terrorism, not pedophilia, not murder.
Not only that, but if God is fictional and human rights are fictional, then so is mathematics, reason, and love, not to mention human meaning and purpose.
Noah Yuval Harari faces a predicament known as the is-ought problem—and it’s not the first time he has stumbled on this point, as previously highlighted by Intellectual Takeout.
A perennial of secular philosophy, the is-ought problem is that without a higher power, there is no way to cross the threshold from what is in the world around us, to what ought to be.
Specifically, in the realm of morality, unless there is a moral standard that transcends human cultures, we could justify many terrible deeds as our human tastes shift from one era to the next. Moral relativism might be a convenient framework for people who want to live without moral restraint, but over the long haul, it has no power to hold people or civilizations back from the most wicked deeds imaginable.
While many secular philosophers see this as a problem, Harari promotes it as some kind of triumph. So did his intellectual antecedents—men like Friedrich Nietzsche. The horrors of the 20th century loom in recent history as examples of what this line of thinking can justify.
What of the argument that human rights are secular, not theistic?
Actually, human rights, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and similar documents, have distinctly Christian origins.
According to the University of Notre Dame’s Iain Benson, “The major proponents of human rights as it was developed and codified in the twentieth century were themselves Christians—people like Jacques Maritain from France and Charles Malik in Lebanon.”
Nick Spencer, author of The Evolution of the West, agrees. He says, “In the sense that the Declaration of Human Rights doesn’t draw explicitly on any religious doctrines of course it’s thoroughly secular, but if you lift the lid you find an awful lot of Christian workings underneath the bonnet.”
So while Harari, an atheist, might gleefully credit atheism or nihilism with “freeing” us from the obligation of human rights, what he actually does is the opposite.
It’s a reminder that if human societies are to function at all—if nations are going to hold themselves and each other to any moral framework—we need to believe in something. The question is what that something will be. Will we rise to the morality that founded our civilization, or will we submit to the forces that seek to destroy life and liberty?
Yes. When a person believes they will not be held accountable, they can become monstrous.
Every philosophy that goes against reality eventually pushes to absurdity.
Absurdity eventually becomes evil.
One might say that evil is absurd. The ultimate absurdity.
,,, that's where I stopped reading this.
So if someone shoots this idiot he shouldn’t be charged with murder.
Wonder if this fool has thought that through.
The little kids that go to my church have better moral sensibility.
“rumored advisor to Klaus Schwab” Rumored? Nothing further this idiot writer says deserves any attention.
I think so. Maybe exception on the case of the followers of Marcus Aurelius.
Human rights have their origin in pre-Christian natural rights and natural law as developed in Greek and Roman philosophy.
Human rights also are present with some variations in other religions, such as Hinduism, and in various schools of philosophy.
Human rights do not depend on monotheism.
At that TWT link the guy continues by saying “states and countries are just stories. A mountain is real. You can touch it. But a country is just a story.”
paraphrasing because it is not worth my time to get his exact quote right. The guy is just another leftist schmuck with a useless opinion.
This is an evil demon masquerading as a human. It is no coincidence that the most prosperous societies recognize important human rights. When people become just animals the result is always bad for the supposed elites as well as the people. What we have here are evil men who have risen to the top and now seek justification to carry out their evil ends. It will turn out badly for them too.
We need to give this guy to Hamas. Then we will see what he thinks about his rights or lack thereof.
C.S. Lewis covered this bullcrap in The Abolition of Man: this guy's skepticism isolely for use on other people's values and morLity.
... Harari is a World Economic Forum agenda contributor and rumored advisor to Klaus Schwab. Among his highbrow fans are Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama."You should have stopped reading at "Harari."
,,, that's where I stopped reading this.
Harari’s primary purpose is to sell books.
His secondary purpose, along with homosexuality and veganism, is to deny God in mankind’s development, which would otherwise deny homosexuality and veganism, as well as his other beloved leftist shibboleths.
“Is Nihilism the Logical End of Atheism?”
yes
Well, most certainly, in a few short years, he will not have rights. As he will be compost. Wonder why he bothers philosophizing about anything.
His relationships with his country and with the university that employs him should be re-evaluated.
,,, never heard of Harari before this article. Familiar name of the Zimbabwe capital, albeit a different spelling.
You’re better off that way... Few years back, Harari got the, uh, “metropolitan,” book reviewers all excited with his history of mankind, “Sapiens,” which supposedly rediscovered modern man’s true origins, but merely attempts to shift blame from God to revolutions in farming and science, only with inevitable self-destruction, the result of religion and capitalism, lest we save ourselves from ourselves with brain implants and socialism. They love him at Davos.
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