Harari: Swearing on the Bible is like swearing on Harry Potter
Yuval Noah Harari · a16z Podcast | Brains, Bodies, Minds ... and Techno-Religions · Jan 2, 2019 · at 5:58
Historian Yuval Noah Harari discusses how human social order relies on shared imagined realities, arguing that traditional religious texts used for legal oaths are mythologies.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And even when people testify in court, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they swear on the Bible, which is so full of fictions and myth and error. It's like you can swear on Harry Potter just the same.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Yuval Noah Harari
Harari: Superior algorithms will render democracy and free markets completely obsolete
“And once you have an external entity, An algorithm that knows me better than I know myself. This is the real turning point. This is the point when individualism as we've known, it doesn't make any sense when democracy in the free market become completely obsol…”
Harari: Corporations and governments will soon understand individuals better than themselves
“What we will see with regard to the individual is that at a certain point, external entities, whether it's corporations or whether it's governments, they will have enough data, especially biometric data, and enough computing power to be able to understand me b…”
Harari: Humanity is on the verge of creating inorganic life forms
“So after four billion years of evolution, of organic life forms, we are really on the verge of creating the first inorganic life forms, and if this happens, It's the greatest revolution in the history of life since the very beginning of life.”
Harari: Neuroscience shows there is no single authentic self
“Science now tells us that when you look inside, you don't find any single authentic self. You find a cacophony of different conflicting voices that Well, none of which is your true self. There is just no such thing.”
Harari: The breakup of the individual will collapse democracy and capitalism
“If in the 20th century, the big fear for individualism was that the individual will be crushed from outside, now the threat comes from the opposite direction. The individual will break up from inside, and then the entire structure of individualism and democrac…”
Harari: Neo-nationalism is a temporary phase incapable of solving global problems
“The present stage of neo-nationalism or tribalism, I think it's just a phase. It's a backlash against globalization, and the main problem, it doesn't have any solutions to the deep problems of the 21st century. All the major problems of humankind in the 21st c…”