Deborah DeGroff
November 7, 2022
UNSTOPPABLE US: HOW HUMANS TOOK OVER THE WORLD
(THE GOSPEL OF HARARI FOR CHILDREN)
Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took over the World, by Yuval Noah Harari, was released October 18, 2022. It was published by Bright Matter Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House. This book is marketed to children from 10-14 years.
The front book jacket begins with:
THE STRANGEST TALE YOU’LL EVER HEAR . . . AND IT’S A TRUE STORY!
Is it?
Who is Yuval Noah Harari and why has he become so influential? What is his message? Does his heavily-marketed new book for children echo the same sentiments he so adamantly feeds his adult audiences?
Prof. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Sapiens: A Graphic History. His books have sold over 40 million copies in 65 languages, and he is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today. [Click here to read the complete bio on Harari’s website.]
Harari was a keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in both 2018 and 2020. His speeches and interviews on various media platforms are watched by millions.
Yuval Noah Harari is not shy about stating his beliefs. In a nutshell, in Harari’s gospel there is no God, no soul, and no freewill. Once these pillars are accepted as truth by his followers—many of whom are in positions of power—the next step will be deciding the fate of billions of people who are no longer necessary in a future world that consists of Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, and Transhumanism.
Harari’s book, Sapiens, was endorsed by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Barak Obama.
Christopher Carbone wrote the article, “Humans Will Eventually Merge With Machines, Professor Says,” for Fox News in July 2019.
“It’s increasingly hard to tell where I end and where the computer begins,” Yuval Harari, a professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told the audience at the Fast Company European Innovation Festival this week. “In the future, it is likely that the smartphone will not be separated from you at all. It may be embedded in your body or brain, constantly scanning your biometric data and your emotions.”
. . . Harari continued: “If we told our ancestors in the Stone Age about our lives today, they would think we are already Gods. But the truth is that even though we have developed more sophisticated tools, we are the same animals. We have the same emotions, the same minds. The coming revolution will change that. It will change not just our tools, it will change the human being itself.”
In his speech at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Harari informed his audience that:
Automation will soon eliminate millions upon millions of jobs . . .
Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past humans had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited.
Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system.
. . . And what will happen to politics in your country in twenty years, when somebody in San Francisco or Beijing knows the entire medical and personal history of every politician, every judge and every journalist in your country, including all their sexual escapades, all their mental weaknesses and all their corrupt dealings? Will it still be an independent country or will it become a data-colony?
When you have enough data you don’t need to send soldiers, in order to control a country.
. . . If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data, you can hack my body and my brain and my life, and you can understand me better than I understand myself. . . . You know more about me than I know about myself. And you can do that not just to me, but to everyone.
A system that understands us better than we understand ourselves can predict our feelings and decisions, can manipulate our feelings and decisions, and can ultimately make decisions for us.
. . . But soon at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people. We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals. That’s what we are.
. . . In the coming decades, AI and biotechnology will give us godlike abilities to reengineer life, and even to create completely new life-forms. After four billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection, we are about to enter a new era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design.
Our intelligent design is going to be the new driving force of the evolution of life . . . [Click here to read the speech]
Chris Anderson, head of the TED media group, interviewed Harari in August of 2022. Anderson commented that Harari strongly recommends meditation. Harari responded that he meditates for two hours each day and that he does the Vipassana meditation which he learned from S.N. Goenka.
And . . . my yearly vacation is to go on a long retreat of between say 30 days and 60 days i just came back last month from a 60 day meditation retreat. [Click here to listen. This begins at 45:20.]
During this interview, Harari tells Chris Anderson that he isn’t against technology as it “can bring enormous benefits to humanity as a whole.” He continues that he “met [his] husband online in one of the first dating sites for LGBT people in Israel in the early 2000s.” [Click here to listen. This begins at 40:29.]
Yuval Noah Harari holds great influence with many people in positions of power. Up until recently, this audience has consisted of adults. Now, Harari is introducing his message to children.
Autumn 2022 will see Harari venturing into the world of children’s books for the first time, with the pre-teen series Unstoppable Us. Here, he tells the unbelievable true story of humans – our all-conquering and insatiable species—in a way that is accessible to kids. The series will be published in 4 immersive volumes, featuring full-colour illustrations by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz, starting with Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World
Harari includes a Timeline of History at the beginning of Unstoppable Us.
He begins with 6 million years ago with a picture of an upright creature that is a cross between a human and an ape. The caption reads that this was the “last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.” He follows with a jump to the 2.5 million years ago mark in which he states that “Humans evolve in Africa.” The Gospel of Harari (hereafter GoA) moves forward another half-million years with the “[e]volution of different kinds of humans.” By 400,000 years ago, “Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East” and 300,000 years ago, “Sapiens evolve in Africa.” 70,000 years ago, “the Sapiens leave Africa in large numbers.” 35,000 years ago the Neanderthals are extinct and “Sapiens are the last surviving kind of human.”
“Planet Earth was once ruled by many different animals . . . But now we humans rule everything: the land, the sea, and the sky. . . . The only reason lions, dolphins, and eagles still exist is because we allow them to.” He concludes this introduction with, “AND it’s a true story.” (xv)
Chapter 1 teaches the children that millions of years ago, we were just ordinary animals who ate worms and climbed trees to pick fruit. Until humans learned to make tools, the other animals weren’t afraid of them.
Harari explains that when kids wake up in the night frightened that there are monsters under their beds that this is simply “a memory from millions of years ago . . . [when] monsters . . . sneaked up on children in the night.” His example is of a lion coming to eat the child. (4) This idea is repeated in the closing of his book.
Next, the humans invented fire.
“A single weak human with a fire stick could burn down an entire forest in a matter of hours, destroying thousands of trees and killing thousands of animals.” (9)
Now, the humans could cook their food. As a result, “humans started to change: they had smaller teeth, smaller stomachs . . . and much more free time.” (9)
Harari expands on this by stating that some scientists “suggest it was cooking that made it possible for the human brain to start growing.” (10)
Once they started cooking . . . humans could spend far less energy chewing and digesting and had more energy to feed big brains. Their stomachs shrank, their brains grew, and people got smarter. (10)
In the next chapter, the children learn that “our planet was actually home to many different kinds of humans.” (13)
Harari introduces the Floresians and follows with the “bigger-brained” Neanderthals, and the Denisovans. However, according to him, the Sapiens eventually killed off all of these “ancestors.”
