By Brandon Smith
Perhaps this is an overly broad generalization, but I feel it is an almost universal observation that there is something intrinsically annoying about academia. The source of this annoyance is up for debate, but I believe it stems from the image academics project versus the reality of their motives and intent. Your average academic will say that some people find them distasteful because they are “so smart,” and this makes others envious. I would say it’s the opposite — the average academic is actually quite ignorant but brandishes a false image of being a genius. This is why I often refer to them as “academic idiots.”
Fake intelligence and faux wisdom gnaw at people’s nerves, and the average person is not as dumb as academics think they are.
At the top of the fraudulent academic totem pole are what I would call the “academic philosophers”; people who pontificate regularly on the meaning of life while living the most charmed lives one can imagine. These are people who in most cases come from upper class backgrounds. They have been provided for every waking moment of their existence. They have had every door opened for them by someone else on the path to success and have experienced little to no struggle or suffering in the whole of their time on this Earth. And yet, they somehow deem themselves expertly qualified to comment on the human condition.
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It should come as no surprise that the ideas these academics develop tend to deny concrete realities. They seek to pursue agendas that are fanciful at best and would be ultimately destructive if ever applied in the real world.
I find this to be common with many philosophers, not just today but throughout history. The venerated Plato was such a person; the youngest son of wealthy aristocratic parents who did very little in early life but ponder. The trials surrounding his friend Socrates aside, Plato never abandoned the notion of elitist rule over society. Plato’s Republic is a shrine to the elitist model, imagining a world governed essentially by academics — people born with superior intellectual abilities and who were destined to rule over the rest of us as benevolent demigods.
It’s a fascinating coincidence that supposedly objective elitist academics always conclude that they are the best equipped people to manage society.
The academic class is not entirely naive, however. They have realized over time that their sales pitch of an intellectual priest class and Utopian pyramid schemes are not very effective, and they have opted to switch narratives. The new narrative is one of inevitability; the inevitability of socialism, the inevitability of globalism and the inevitability of algorithmic automation.
In other words, globalism will be the apex social structure and artificial intelligence will govern the daily machinations of that structure, regardless of what the public wants. They won’t rule the world directly, but their ilk will create the algorithms and the policies that will rule the world by virtue of social and technological evolution.
An example of the elitists of which I speak is Yuval Noah Harari. His editorials are getting a lot of play in the mainstream media lately and they focus on the necessity of globalism as well as the need for humans to quickly adapt to technocracy lest they find themselves obsolete. Harari is a prototypical academic philosopher, regurgitating old concepts of aristocracy and feudalism thinly veiled in futurist imagery. His arguments are the type that other academics absorb and endlessly parrot as if they are profound.
For those not familiar with the ideas behind futurism, I suggest reading my article ‘The Meaning Of Good And Evil In Perilous Times.’ To summarize, futurists consistently endorse the notion that old methodologies must be erased to make way for new methodologies. Traditions and ideals of the past are considered a prison which holds humanity back from progress and a better tomorrow. They believe that the solution to the imbalances and tragedies of today is to aggressively dismantle the existing system and rebuild it in a new and original way. This includes morals and guiding principles, which they see as stifling and relative.
Futurism was founded in the early 20th century in Europe with sister groups in Russia and is considered a precursor to early socialist movements including fascism and communism. To be clear, there are no new ideas under the sun, only old ideas with a new spin. Socialism precedes globalism, which is one of the oldest ideas; the idea of total empire.
Like most modern academic philosophers, Yuval Harari displays futurism and globalism in spades. His close association with the Carnegie Council for Ethics In International Affairs, once known as the Church Peace Union which helped push Woodrow Wilson into involving the U.S. in WWI and helped promote the establishment of the U.N., makes this clear.
He is an adequate model for my debunking of what these people often refer to as the “liberal world order,” which is just another brand of futurism. As a reference point I am using two of Harari’s articles, one published for the Guardian on the future of automation and the “world without work,” and the other published for the Rothschild owned magazine The Economist on the need for globalism and the end of nationalism and tribalism. I will be summarizing his arguments and views, but I welcome readers to examine his articles linked above.
Let’s get to it…
AI will replace most humans… and this is a good thing
This is becoming a mainstay narrative from the globalist establishment and their academia for a number of reasons. The argument that AI dominance is an inevitability is much like the argument that globalism is an inevitability; both are based on self-fulfilling prophecy.
Harari imagines what he calls a “world without work,” a development only 20-30 years in the future in which algorithmic machines replace human beings as the primary source of labor. There are two sides to this piece of propaganda; first it is meant to frighten the public into demanding centralization and global governance. Without global governance and a “universal basic income,” AI will make most people without technological savvy into instant paupers, which he labels “the useless class.” And here we see the trick.
As I outlined in my article ‘The Real Reason Why Globalists Are So Obsessed With Artificial Intelligence’, globalist entities like DARPA, the U.N. and the World Economic Forum have been highly aggressive in pushing AI to the forefront of the mainstream and have engaged in promotional campaigns to counter public distrust of the technology. At the same time, these globalist organizations have been arguing that without their increased oversight, AI could be abused by nation states or could destroy whole economies.
So, globalists tell you that AI dominance is an inevitable consequence of progress while they expend vast sums of capital and man-hours to make their prediction a reality. They then tell you AI will be a threat to your livelihood and your children’s livelihoods. Then, they tell you that the only answer is to give them more power to regulate the problem that they created.
The second part of this propaganda is the claim that the dangers of AI could be turned into Utopian benefits. If the “world without work” is the stick, then universal basic income is the carrot. The fantasy promise of futurism goes back to the early days of communism, and always includes a tomorrowland where all people will live a leisurely existence; a society where all necessities are provided without labor. Usually flying cars and floating cities are offered in there somewhere….
Harrari insinuates in his article for The Guardian that sloth is a natural state for most of mankind, and that the majority of people would remain mentally comfortable with having no purpose in life as long as they were given a virtual existence as a means of distraction. He cites the example of basement dwelling adult-children that, if allowed, subsist on their parent’s generosity and a life in video games. But rather than pointing out that it is destructive to encourage such behavior, Hariri asserts that it should be the mainstay of our society.
What Hariri ignores is a key issue in why many people settle for such a life. It is not necessarily because they enjoy being part of the “useless class”; many of them desperately want to find a sense of purpose and accomplishment as this desire is ingrained in the psyche of most people at birth. It’s just that they have no idea how and have lived in an environment that seems designed to impair their independence.
I would note that elites in aristocracy for centuries exploited the crutch of universal basic income as a means to control the behavior of their children. The progeny of elites were often treated as property, and were kept in line through infantilization and income dependence. For these children, following a personal dream or setting out on one’s own was almost unthinkable because they had been isolated from any and all practical skill sets. To walk away from the system was to invite poverty and potential death.
So, the plan is this: Prevent people from becoming self-reliant, become their only source of income, then lord over them using that income as if they owe you like a child owes a parent. Hariri is calling for this kind of control measure for the entire world.
Human experience is all in our heads and means nothing
Much like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Hariri’s “world without work” relies on opiates, but in this case, the technological opiates of virtual reality. He claims that this is nothing new, and that humans have long participated in virtual reality games through their participation in religion as well as the acquisition of property. I fail to see the logic in his comparison, and it appears that he uses the odd tangent merely as an opportunity to wander into an unoriginal atheistic and socialistic rant.
However, this rant does give us more insight into another globalist propaganda meme, which is that all experience is a matter of perception and that all conclusions are relative, including moral conclusions. I have written dozens of articles on the issue of globalism and moral relativism and why it is built on lies and disinformation. I feel it is one of the most vital debates of our era or any era because it determines the survival of our humanity.
For someone who sees all experience as a pointless game that people make up to entertain themselves until they eventually die, Hariri sure seems overly concerned with how we are all governed while we LARP our way through existence. If there is no point and there is no design to the universe or humanity, then why seek to centralize control over the game at all?
Of course, this is elitist nonsense, and I’m not sure that they even believe the garbage that they are selling. As I’ve noted in past articles, numerous scholars have presented considerable evidence of inherent human psychological qualities, including inborn conscience and moral compass, as well as archetypal dualities which give us the inherent gift of choice. From Carl Jung, to Joseph Campbell to Steven Pinker, etc.., REAL scientists and researchers have undertaken decades of experimentation, data collection and observation to support their conclusions.
This is something that academic philosophers like Hariri have no concept of. They think that if they state a viewpoint with enough arrogant bravado this is all they need to solidify it as fact.
The reason why globalists in particular are so fond of the relativism narrative is because in vindicates their behavior in the pursuit of their centralization goals. This behavior is usually based in an “ends justify the means” approach and is contrary to our inherent voice of empathy and conscience. If human experiences are all a matter of perception and delusion, then how the elites abuse or subjugate other humans to subsidize their own virtual reality hardly matters.
Globalism good, nationalism bad
Global centralization is called many things by elitist academics: The new world order, the multipolar world order, the global reset, the global commons, the liberal world order, etc. Globalists spend most of their time attempting to repackage the marketing behind globalism to make it more palatable to the masses. This is usually a dishonest process because it requires them to falsely attribute the failings of globalism to free markets and nationalism.
Hariri makes a point to proclaim the “liberal world order” a success in improving the planet over several generations economically and geopolitically, but then argues that nation states are beginning to “undermine” that stability. We also constantly hear from globalists that “capitalism” is the cause of most of the world’s ills, yet the truth is socialist-style interference has created corporatism and the oppression of free markets for the past century. So, globalism saved us from free market capitalism, but capitalism is destroying everything? How can both things be true?
This is the overarching script of the globalists today — That globalism works, nationalism and independent economies don’t, and to take a step backward is suicide. That is to say, they consider the “populist” movements of today a suicidal step backward.
What academic elites like Hariri gloss over are the numerous problems our world suffers today because of interdependency. He proudly observes that any nation that attempts to function outside of the globalist system would fall into economic disarray but doesn’t acknowledge that in 2008 the world fell into disarray exactly because nations were far too interdependent, with trade mechanism so ingrained that the collapse of one major economy dragged down the next which dragged down the next. This was a cancerous weakness triggered by globalism, not isolationism or nationalism. And, it is a weakness that persists in 2019.
Yet, the solution is always the same — more globalism. The lack of self-sufficiency and redundancy in national economies is not something that should be celebrated, but something that should be rectified. It does not have to be that way; globalists made it that way.
Fooling the masses into loving globalism
As Harari notes in his article for The Economist, creating a “global identity” in which the masses replace loyalty for a nation or tribe with loyalty to their species and to the Earth need not be difficult. All that is required is a common enemy, and what better enemy than the threat of nuclear war, the threat of climate change, and the threat of artificial intelligence?
The use of external threats (some of them fabricated) to herd the public toward an intended mindset is the bread and butter of elites. Man-made climate change stands as a fabricated threat consistently debunked and the data exposed as rigged to present predetermined findings. AI is a threat which globalists have actively engineered (DARPA being a primary source). The threat of nuclear war has existed for decades and I hardly expect global elites to dismantle such weapons once they get their clutches on global government.
And here we discover the underlying fallacy of Hariri’s debate and the globalist position in general. The elites conjure terrible visions of what will happen if nation states and tribalism are allowed to endure, but the disasters they predict, including war, genetic tampering, weaponization of AI, mass immigration crisis, economic collapse — all of these things are being caused by globalists already. And, there would be absolutely nothing stopping them from continuing to cause such problems in the future if they get what they want, which is total global governance.
I fail to see why globalist institutions should be considered more trustworthy than national governments or local tribes. Hariri is an Israeli professor who has obviously benefited from the tribalism of that culture while at the same time admonishing it. Globalists act as though they are loyal to humanity, but they are really only loyal to their own parasitic ideology, and their own tribe — the globalist tribe.
To elevate globalism to something more akin to a religion than just a political philosophy, Hariri pulls one last classic Utopian apparition from his bag of tricks; the promise of godhood. This idea is featured more prominently in his books than in his articles, but it reaffirms the suspicions I discussed in my article ‘Luciferianism: A Secular Look at A Destructive Globalist Belief System.’ Namely that globalism rests on a foundation very similar to luciferian ideology, and that globalist technocracy is motivated by the obsession of narcissistic sociopaths to become godlike.
They sell this future to the public as a lure, but I’m guessing that the liberal world order will not be gifting the “useless class” with deity status. As in every elitist vision, only the elites get to be rulers and gods. The rest of us get to be cogs in the machine, if we are lucky, and deemed expendable if we are unlucky.
