Klaus Schwab and the Men Who Molded Him (Part Six)

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light” - Plato

While for most of us, a world of injectable microchips, DNA databases, state-mandated gene therapies, and minds uploaded to the cloud might sound like a dystopia too hellish to fathom, at its core, transhumanism is (or at least, likes to present itself as) an ideology rooted in liberation.

Of course, this is not ‘liberation’ in the traditional sense. If anything, the technological advances which have made this worldview viable have also provided government and corporations the ability to surveil and curtail our behavior right down to the chromosomal level – a power which the last two and a half years of COVID tyranny have shown them disturbingly eager to wield. By now, we should all shudder to think how the same institutions responsible for lockdowns, mask mandates, and compulsory vaccinations would exploit the level of control afforded by a biomedical police state; nevertheless, according to their transhumanist cheerleaders, this looming digital serfdom is but a small price to pay in order to free ourselves from the shackles of biological constraint.

In some respects, their argument is hardly revolutionary. Ever since our ancestors first chiseled stone into more effective weaponry and later with the refinement of the wheel, mankind has sought to use its unique capacity for rational thought to transcend the limits of our physical form. This aptitude has facilitated everything from the domestication of animals to the development of the written word; from the invention of the printing press, gunpowder, and the compass to the creation of satellites, hydrogen colliders, and nanobots. But no matter how rigorously transhumanists might promote their doctrine as the inevitable next step along this trajectory, what is becoming ever clearer, at least to those who’ve been paying attention, is that the algorithm-ruled society they espouse has been planned by, and for the sole benefit of, a shadowy and unaccountable class of elites.

And at the head of this class – or perhaps more accurately, the man appointed its spokesperson – is the now infamous Klaus Schwab. As many readers are likely aware, the video above shows the World Economic Forum chairman fielding a question about how long it will be before brain implants, one of his organization’s flagship proposals, at last become a reality. Speaking in his careful but competent French, Schwab assures the interviewer:

"Certainly in the next ten years. And at first we will implant them in our clothes and then we could imagine that we will implant them in our brains, or in our skin. And in the end, maybe, there will be a direct communication between our brains and the digital world. What we see is a kind of fusion of the physical, digital, and biological world.”

Naturally, this is not a genuine prediction. Although Schwab and his ilk may like to market themselves as vast geopolitical mega-minds, oracles whose vision extends far beyond that of the bewildered masses, in truth, the only reason they can convey such certainty while making these prophetic proclamations is because they are the ones in the process of implementing them.

Over the course of this series, I have tried to piece together a portrait of Schwab by first examining the men known to have influenced him. In Parts One and Two, I focused on Klaus’s Nazi-collaborating father as well as a Brazilian archbishop often described as his “spiritual mentor”, while in the third installment, I turned to Henry Kissinger whose dual role as Harvard professor and member of the Council on Foreign Relations would grant his young German protégé access to the world of Anglo-American policymakers. Moving within these circles, Schwab soon found himself introduced to both economist John Kenneth Galbraith and archetypal futurist Herman Kahn, the subjects of parts four and five helping establish and then expand his fledgling WEF project. Still today, their voices can be heard echoing in each of the organization’s frequent multimillion-dollar PR campaigns, and yet by far the most resonant now belongs to a man heralded as the chief architect of, and intellectual powerhouse behind, Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Yuval Noah Harari - Copyright by World Economic Forum/Photo by Sikarin Thanachaiary

Yuval Noah Harari was born in 1976 to a secular Jewish household in the city of Kiryat Ata, Israel. The youngest of three children to Shlomo and Pnina Harari (a state-employed armaments engineer and office administrator, respectively), his intellect was apparent almost as soon as it could have been, his mother claiming her son was just three years old when he taught himself to read. Through the family’s collective effort to foster his potential, Yuval would soon enroll at a school for gifted children in Haifa, but even here, his mind proved exceptional. Upon completing homework assignments, Harari would often write a second less sophisticated draft so that his teacher might understand him, while at home, his favorite playtime activity was to construct huge maps of Europe on which he would enact his own century-spanning war games.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Yuval was a lonely child. This manifested most explicitly during his adolescence, a period of intense isolation and unhappiness which the historian now attributes to the repression of his homosexual tendencies as well as a growing disillusionment with his early right-wing nationalism. Given this shift, Harari was more than a little relieved when an undisclosed health problem permitted him to defer Israel’s mandatory military service and so, aged just seventeen, he took the opportunity to study History and International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, his progress ultimately earning him full exemption from the army. It did not, however, do much for his social skills. Being so much younger than his classmates and riddled with a litany of anxieties, the cripplingly awkward Harari found it impossible to form any meaningful relationships, alienation prompting him, albeit briefly, to seek solace in the observant Jewish life.

With no religious revelations dawning before graduation, Yuval would embark on a Doctorate of Philosophy at Jesus College, Oxford. At the time, he was hopeful England might represent a new chapter in his life, but unable to adapt to either the British climate or culture, the troubled student this time endeavored to alleviate his melancholy by meeting men via online dating sites, setting himself the target of one new sexual partner a week. His studies were considerably more fruitful. It was during his time at Oxford, after all, when Harari first encountered the writings of Jared Diamond - an experience so transformative he would later describe reading Guns, Germs, and Steel as a “kind of an epiphany in my academic career. I realized that I could actually write such books.”

He most certainly could. Although Harari had already penned three previous works on the topic of military tactics and history, it was only with the release of his forth that he was to become recognized as an intellectual of enormous public appeal. Published in Hebrew as A Brief History of Humankind, the book quickly became an Israeli best-seller, yet it was not until it was translated into English and re-titled Sapiens that Harari was to find himself catapulted into bona fide international stardom. Constituting a sweeping saga of our species, this by-product of his many lecture notes is an enterprise of staggering scope and ambition, charting humanity’s journey from its humble Paleolithic beginnings all the way to our current, uncontested dominion over the planet.

More groundbreaking still is the lens through which the author views it. Conventionally, history has been regarded as the study of human will and decision-making - a narration of the events which have defined our passage through the millennia. But Harari begs to differ. It might even be said that Sapiens signifies the emergence of a new breed of historian altogether, one who sees our transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer, from tradesman to inventor; from architects, engineers, and philosophers to astronauts, app-designers, and theoretical physicists, as exclusively a biological process, itself nothing more than an unimportant footnote within the wider molecular dance of the universe. From Harari’s perspective, our lives have no intrinsic meaning, no overarching purpose, and are certainly not guided by any teleological laws - the entirety of human achievement instead defined as a series of incremental changes punctuated by bursts of rapid civilizational advancement and immense, senseless catastrophe.

And in an era of reductionist thinking and smug, unbounded Scientism, this stance has found an enthusiastic readership. Going on to sell some 23 million copies, Sapiens has become the undisputed standard-bearer for modern commercial non-fiction, yet for all the praise Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama might lavish on it, neither is the book bereft of criticism. Arguably the most well-founded is that the success of Sapiens’ owes more to the mastery of the author’s storytelling than to any profound historical or philosophical insight it contains. Certainly, few could deny that Harari is an engaging wordsmith, his subtle wit and breezy, accessible style enabling him to paper over not just an assortment of highly dubious scientific claims, but also some nakedly unhinged conclusions.

The reader is no doubt familiar with some of his more unsettling soundbites. But while Sapiens might not strike the same gleefully psychotic chord evident in so many of Harari’s speaking engagements, often the book does appear to betray, far more than mere scholarly detachment from his subject matter, but rather a genuine antipathy toward it. An outspoken vegan, the writer reserves the most vitriolic passages of Sapiens - a work characterized by its moral impassivity - to deride our species as “ecological serial killers,” going so far as to label the Agricultural Revolution “history’s biggest fraud” as well as likening the modern meat industry to the Atlantic slave trade. Suffice to say, Harari’s view of humanity is far from a charitable one, this ill-concealed contempt rather clouding the solutions he proposes in Homo Deus.

Continuing on from the cliffhanger ending of Sapiens - which maintained that, after 70,000 gluttonous years atop the food chain, mankind’s demise might well be imminent - Harari’s more modestly successful follow-up asserts how we might stave off this impending, self-inflicted extinction by embracing a technocratic future. Or as he puts it:

“In seeking bliss and immortality humans are in fact trying to upgrade themselves into gods. Not just because these are divine qualities, but because in order to overcome old age and misery humans will first have to acquire godlike control of their own biological substratum. If we ever have the power to engineer death and pain out of our system, that same power will probably be sufficient to engineer our system in almost any manner we like, and manipulate our organs, emotions and intelligence in myriad ways.”

There are, Harari posits, three means of achieving this. The first is through genetic engineering, whereby scientists might effectively squeeze millions of years of evolution into just years, days, or even minutes, by bypassing the meandering, often dead-end avenues of natural selection in favor of a more direct route charted by our own intelligent design. The second, the literal merging of man and machine, has long been the playground of the most speculative minds within science fiction, while Harari’s third proposition ventures still further into the incomprehensible - eternal life ensured, not by any religious or spiritual awakening, but rather by uploading human consciousness onto cloud storage services such as Google Drive or Dropbox.

Despite the fact that Homo Deus may have failed to replicate the culture-shifting popularity of Sapiens, Harari’s status as an intellectual rock star remains undiminished, allowing him to negotiate a remarkably favorable contract at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Here, he teaches just one semester per year, condensing his three classes into a single weekday – an ideal scenario for someone still plagued by the shyness of youth. Indeed, such is Harari’s lingering social unease that he actively eschews gatherings of more than eight people, choosing to instead spend most of his time at home in Mesilat Zion, a small village located some thirty minutes southeast of Tel Aviv. This he shares with husband and agent Itzik Yahav. Heading a twelve-person team charged with arranging the author’s frenetic publishing and speaking schedule, Yahav is the oft-overlooked hand behind Harari’s success, having helped transform his spouse’s work into a graphic novel, a children’s book, as well as a currently-in-the-works TV drama.

Much of these efforts fall under the banner of “Sapienship”, a joint venture the couple describe as “a multidisciplinary organization advocating for global responsibility.” Focusing on the threats posed by nuclear war, ecological ruin, as well as technologically-induced upheaval, Yuval and Yahav’s activism is guided, quite expressly, by the principles of dataism. This term was first coined by New York Times columnist David Brooks to identify the theory that upholds raw, uninterpreted information as the singular expression of truth: everything from quantum mechanics to the beauty of a sunset codifiable as a common, universally comprehensible language. Needless to say, the cultural and political implications are colossal. In much the same way that AI can track our online behavior in order to recommend media we might like or products we would find useful, dataists argue that human wellbeing might be drastically improved by entrusting it with far more intimate decisions, Harari foreseeing a time when we outsource choices such as which career to pursue, who to marry, and how many kids we should have, to the dispassionate, numbers-driven wisdom of The Algorithm.

It is not difficult to see how this future aligns with the one championed by the World Economic Forum. Although there is no record of Harari’s first meeting with Schwab (as far as this researcher can tell, there isn’t even a photo of them together) what we do know is that Yuval originally received an invitation to Davos back in 2017 - an invitation the historian turned down on the basis he was unimpressed with the other speakers. It would seem testament to the value the WEF placed in Harari’s allyship that this offer was again extended the following year, a slot between Angela Merkle and Emmanuel Macron this time included to sweeten the deal. Suffused with the technocratic musings and genocidal navel-gazing which has become his calling card, the author’s subsequent speech has been greeted with near wholesale revulsion by the few segments of society still attentive to such matters, and yet among his audience of bankers and billionaires, Harari’s ideas were so favorably received that he would return to Davos in 2020, not merely as a guest speaker, but in the role of Schwab’s chief advisor.

Since then, the WEF’s rhetoric has become palpably more despotic. When once the pinnacle of Schwab’s aspirations was to commandeer the world’s financial systems in the name of ‘stakeholder capitalism’, what we have witnessed since Harari entered his orbit, has been this megalomaniacal fantasy being fleshed out into an actionable blueprint for the total enslavement of humanity.

By now, even the tripled-vaccinated are beginning to notice. When once, scarcely a few months ago, our warnings of approaching digital IDs, central bank digital currencies, and carbon-based social credit systems were likely to be met with knee-jerk Pavlovian mockery, little by little, both establishment politicians and mainstream propagandists have begun pitching these proposals as the only practical solutions to the problems they and their globalist paymasters have helped precipitate. Regrettably, it is only a matter of time before they start doing the same with the tenants of transhumanism, and when that day comes, our civilization will at last discover whether it retains enough of the dignity and fortitude which has sustained our species throughout its history, or whether we will walk meekly and without resistance, into the deranged, anti-human world planned by Klaus Schwab and his golem-ish little henchman, Yuval Noah Harari.

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