21 Lessons By Yuval Noah Harar
21 Lessons from the State of the World is one of the latest works by Israeli historian, author and professor Yuval Noah Harar. We are talking about a writer who has become known to the world thanks to , among other things, Sapiens: A Brief History of Man published in 2011 and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow published in 2015 . Today, his works have been translated into more than 40 other languages in addition to Finnish, and they represent a new approach to current reality.
In his latest book, 21 Lessons from the State of the World, Harari describes the modern world, which requires reflection. In principle, he states in his book that today we are practicing censorship, which is both overt and very harmful. Unlike in the past, information is no longer banned, but floods with the knowledge of society as a whole. In this way, in reality, important things remain hidden.
Harari also addresses pulsating themes such as power, the role of large states, immigration, and nationalism. The 21 lessons on the state of the world are divided into five different sections and each of them contains a group of different lessons. Next, let’s look at what these five parts are and what lessons they refer to.
The technological challenge
The first part of Yuval Noah Harar’s book is dedicated to the technological challenge. In this section, Harari has included four lessons related to the current crisis of liberal values and the problems posed by new technology.
The lessons he shared are as follows:
- Frustration. The story of the Liberals was built over fascism and communism. Freedom and the struggle for it have gradually lost their value. There is more skepticism in modern society and easy stories are coming up more and more.
- Job. Artificial intelligence is displacing people and in the future many professions and job descriptions will disappear. A “useless class” emerges, that is, people who don’t know what to produce in that new context.
- Freedom. Macro-information constantly monitors us and we have inadvertently transferred power to it to make decisions for us. The doors have opened to the so-called digital dictatorship.
- Equality. Those who own knowledge also own the future. Power is in the hands of big technology companies that would be able to rule the world at will in the future.
A political challenge
21 lessons from the state of the world, another topic related to the political challenge. This topic is divided into the following sections:
- Community. Although people can find the body, virtual communities are becoming more widespread.
- Civilization. Currently, most of the world is one and the same civilization. The differences between civilizations are widening more and more.
- Nationalism. Most of the current problems are global, not national.
- Religion. Religions continue to play an important role, for example, in unifying shared fictions.
- Immigration. Immigration is successful as long as the immigrant abandons his or her native culture. Modern society is moving from racism to “bodybuilding”.
Despair and hope
In this third part, Harari points out that humanity can stay afloat as long as it remains calm and avoids irrational fears. To achieve this, it is necessary to combine worldly values with their rational power.
In this case, the lessons of Yuval Noah Harar are:
- Terrorism. The fear of terrorism is exaggerated. We should not be afraid of it.
- War. Militaryism is becoming more common, and human stupidity should never be underestimated.
- Humility. Every person and every culture needs to understand that they are not the center of the world.
- God. Belief is not synonymous with ethics.
- Secularism. Those who accept their ignorance are more trustworthy than those who declare themselves bearers of the truth.
Truth
In this section, Harari talks about the importance of combating prejudice and finding reliable sources to form our criteria. This section contains four lessons:
- Ignorance. You know less than what that avalanche of knowledge makes you believe.
- Legal. Justice is not based on abstract values, but on an assessment of the causes and effects of decisions and behaviors.
- Post-truth. Truth and power go together only a small distance. Sooner or later, power has to build fictions.
- Scientific literature. Aldous Huxley’s book The Brave New World is the most prophetic of all the works written.
Perseverance
In the final section, Yuval Noah Harari explains how important it is to recognize that traditional stories no longer explain the world, but at the same time, no new stories have emerged with enough capacity to explain it.
There are three lessons to be faced with this problem that we need to consider:
- Training. The goal of education is no longer to acquire knowledge, but to develop abilities to understand the knowledge learned.
- Importance. Life is not a story, and it is important to learn to distinguish between fiction and reality.
- Meditation. The opportunity to choose still exists, but it is likely to be lost. Let’s watch it.
As we can see, Yuval Noah Harar’s 21 lessons on the state of the world give us reflections for which there are no single and true closed answers. They point to various turning points in our present world that are worth stopping to reflect on.
