 The question is, how did we come from there to here? Now that is a great question. That is a fantastic question, both for a historian and a philosopher to answer. That is a fundamental question and it relates, I think it will relate to human nature. How do we get from being insignificant as a species, a weak, pathetic, biologically, physically, materially, pathetic creature to dominating the world around us? This is a fundamental question. It is a key question. It is an important question and it sets up this talk. And I think how you answer that question is going to determine so much of your beliefs about the world, from politics to aesthetics to ethics to deep down philosophy. How did we turn ourselves from insignificant apes minding their own business in a corner of Africa into the rulers of planet Earth? A ruler is a planet Earth. I wouldn't use that language. Usually, we look for the difference between us and all the other animals on the individual level. We want to believe, I want to believe that there is something special about me. Notice, he's setting this up, right? We usually look for something individual, about at the individual level, something that is distinct about human beings at the individual level. And his answer is going to be, no, that's not what makes us a unique animal. It has nothing to do with us as individuals. About my body, about my brain, that makes me. So superior to a dog, or a pig, or a chimpanzee. But the truth is that on the individual level, I'm embarrassingly similar to a chimpanzee. And if you take me and a chimpanzee and put us together on some lonely island and we had to struggle for survival to see who survives better, I would definitely place my bets on the chimpanzee. Now, this is important because this is, this is the key to the whole issue. So we are no different at the individual level than chimpanzees. There's no difference between us and chimpanzees. That is his argument, at the individual level. And he's saying if you put a chimpanzee and a human being on a desert island, on an island where there's nobody else, the chimpanzee is likely to do better than the human being. Now, it's really, really important. It's really, really important to think this through. Is that true? Is that true? Because how we answer that question is gonna determine a lot about our view, is gonna tell us a lot about our view of human nature, our view of what mankind is and is capable of doing. And what are the characteristics of this individual human being that we are discussing? So what is gonna determine? What is gonna determine whether you are gonna do better than a chimpanzee on a desert island? How are we gonna come to the conclusion? And what does better mean? Does better just mean sheer survival? Now, my best response to that question like this would be, well, wait a minute. First, it depends, it depends. It depends on the desert island. Is the island one that is friendly to chimpanzees? For example, it has the kind of food that chimpanzees eat. Is the island environment an environment in which chimpanzees thrive? And if it is, then the chimpanzee is gonna do fine on this island. But if the island deviates from an environment in which chimpanzees thrive, if the island does not have the kind of food that chimpanzees have evolved to eat, if the island does not have the kind of environment that is hospitable to chimpanzees, and don't ask me what kind of environment is because I'm not a biologist, then the chimpanzee will probably die, will not do well. Indeed, if there's an island about a mile away, that is hospitable to a chimpanzee, but the island where the chimpanzee is is inhospitable to the chimpanzee, the chimpanzee cannot get to the island that's hospitable to him. He is gonna stay on the inhospitable island and die or at least suffer in his life. On the other hand, take a human being and put him on a desert island. The human being would evaluate his surroundings, would establish what the food supply is, what he is capable of doing. If there is an island a mile away that is more hospitable, he can build a boat and go to that island. If his diet has to change from the diet he is used to, he can adapt to that diet. He is not dependent on what nature provides him, he changes his environment to suit his needs. Human beings, what makes it possible for human beings to survive and indeed why in the end they rule is their ability to use their minds, to use reason, to use the abstract nature of their cognition to adapt their environment to their own needs. They can build a boat and escape from the island. They can cut down a tree and build shelter. Imagine if the island, for example, is in a very cold place, then the chimpanzee would die. The human being would not. He would light a fire. He would build shelter. He would kill the chimpanzee and use his fur as clothing. Maybe another animal, not the chimpanzee, whatever, right? That's the difference between a chimpanzee and a human being. The difference between a chimpanzee and human being is not the size of the brain. It's not of physical characteristics. It's not ability to climb trees. It's the fact that human beings have a conceptual faculty. It's the fact that human beings have the capacity to reason and the chimpanzees cannot. The chimpanzees do not reason. The chimpanzees are dependent on the evolutionary content of their DNA to give them answers to the questions of survival that face them. They cannot innovate. They cannot create. They cannot change the coding. They cannot change the programming. They are stuck. They are stuck. They don't understand the world around them. They just accept the world around them. Human beings understand the world around them and then change it. Change it to suit their needs. Change it to make it possible for them to survive and to thrive. Now this is fundamental to understanding what is the problem with everything Yuval Harari writes. What Yuval Harari does is reject what it is to be human. He rejects Aristotle's identification, that Aristotle made, that man is the rational animal. And he rejects the precondition for rationality, which is for you all. There's gonna be a whole talk now about why humans run the world and not once, not once. Not once will Harari mention reason. Not once will Harari mention free will because he doesn't believe in either one of those. No once will he mention abstraction or cognition or concepts. Now, how can you understand human history? How can you understand how we got to where we are today? How can you understand why human beings run the world? Without understanding what is fundamental about human beings. Chimpanzees have all the knowledge they need encoded in their DNA. And again, if that knowledge does not match the reality in which you put them, they will die. Human beings do not have that knowledge encoded in their DNA. They must discover. They must use their mind to discover knowledge. Now, we will see in a minute how Harari's view of what knowledge is. Now, you'll see here how somebody's attitude towards epistemology, towards the theory of knowledge, towards how we know what we know and whether we know anything is key ultimately to everything, including their politics. And we'll see that as we go because there will be political implications to what he is saying. All right, here we go. Not on myself. And this is not something wrong with me personally. Yeah, it is. I guess if they took almost any one of you and placed you alone with a chimpanzee on some island, the chimpanzee would do much better. Now, notice that people are nodding. I mean, this sounds good, but this is complete and utter nonsense. Complete and utter nonsense. And this is the problem with so much of modern day intellectuals. They are not challenged. They're not challenged. They are just accepted. And when they give these simple kind of examples, everybody nods, and it seems like, you know, this is okay, this is reasonable, and they go on. But it's fundamental ideas like this that shape everything and shape the world in which we live. The real difference between humans and all other animals is not on the individual level, it's on the collective level. Ooh. Now you can see where this is going and you'll see where it will go. It's what we do in groups that matters, not anything that's identifiable quite individual. Humans control the planet because they are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly. And in very large numbers. Now that is true. That is true up to a point. Yes, we can work collectively in large numbers and flexibly, but why? Now we'll get his explanation for why, but why? Well, because we can think as individuals, because we can conceptualize as individuals, because we can abstract as individuals. And as a consequence, we can communicate, communicate with very large beings. Now, human beings are in a sense social beings. There's no question about that, not collective beings. Collective is something different, but we are social beings. But we are only social beings because as individuals we can think abstractly as individuals we can reason and then we can trade with other human beings whether at a spiritual or the material level. We benefit from other beings, other human beings, and hopefully they benefit from us, otherwise they won't interact with us. And that's the sense in which we are social. So it is true that we can collectively communicate in very large groups, and it is true that we are very flexible. But the key to that is, what's really important about it is that individual's ability to reason which makes all of that possible. Now there are other animals like the social insects, the bees, the ants that can cooperate in large numbers, but they don't do so flexibly. Their cooperation is very rigid. There is basically just one way in which a beehive can function. And if there is a new opportunity or a new danger, the bees cannot reinvent the social system overnight. They cannot, for example, execute the queen and establish a republic of bees. Now notice everybody's gonna laugh at this. They cannot establish a republic of bees, but there's something insidious about this example. There's something insidious about his whole line of thinking here. What he's basically saying is that we are fundamentally like bees, essentially like bees. That if we're gonna evaluate human beings, we need to compare us in a way to this collective of bees. And he's not getting to the root of why is it? Why is it bees can't create a republic? Well, because they can't conceptualize. They can't think. They can't reason. So they can't come up with an abstraction with this republic. And there is no meaning to their being individuals because there was no meaning. There's no thinking. Bees don't think. Bees just act. Bees can't change their programming. Bees can't change their own destiny, if you will. Communist dictatorship of worker bees. Other animals, like the social mammals, the wolves, the elephants, the dolphins, the chimpanzees, they can cooperate much more flexibly. But they do so only in small numbers. Co-operate is a big word here. Now, you'll see the examples of cooperate and think about what that compare that toward human corporation, even in small numbers, looks like. Fundamentally different. But again, you're not gonna hear that from him because he's rejects the fundamental nature of what human beings are. The cooperation among chimpanzees is based on intimate knowledge, one of the other. If I'm a chimpanzee and you're a chimpanzee and I want to cooperate with you, I need to know you personally. What kind of chimpanzee are you? Are you a nice chimpanzee? Are you an evil chimpanzee? Are you trustworthy? If I don't know you, how can I cooperate with you? The only animals that can combine the two abilities together and cooperate both flexibly and still do so in very large numbers is us. Notice that he is ignoring the idea that human beings, even in small numbers, can cooperate in ways that a chimpanzee could never cooperate. Can do things in small numbers that chimpanzees cannot do. Even hunter-gatherers, which were small in numbers, could do things that chimpanzees could not do. For example, they could build sophisticated tools. Ultimately, they could even build the beginnings of agriculture. They could have art. They can do cave drawings. Chimpanzees cannot do any of that. Even in small groups, human beings can do things chimpanzees can't. His argument is it's only the size of the group, ability to do this over large numbers. Which makes us, in a sense, superior. Sapiens, one versus one, or even 10 versus 10, chimpanzees might be better than us. Not true. Not one versus one, not 10 versus 10. By no criteria, a chimpanzee is gonna be better than us unless it's in a particular environment, in a particular context, that is suited for chimpanzees because they can't change, and we can. But, if you pit 1,000 humans against 1,000 chimpanzees, the humans will win easily for the simple reason that 1,000 chimpanzees cannot cooperate at all. And if you now try to cram 100,000 chimpanzees into Oxford Street, or into Wembley Stadium, or Tiananmen Square, or the Vatican, you will get chaos, complete chaos. Just imagine Wembley Stadium with 100,000 chimpanzees. Absolutely. Complete madness. Funny. In contrast, humans normally gather there in tens of thousands, and what we get is not chaos. Usually, what we get is extremely sophisticated and effective networks of cooperation. All the huge achievements of humankind throughout history, whether it's building the pyramids or flying to the moon, have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Now notice, that is complete nonsense. So yes, it's true. You can't build a pyramid without lots of people. You can indeed fly to the moon without lots of people cooperating. But the guy who came up with a math that made it possible to fly to the moon, did it alone. Now, it's true. His math was based on people who discovered mathematical truths before him. But he did it alone. He did not do it in massive groups. Indeed, you cannot, through cooperation, actually discover anything new. You cannot, through cooperation, alone, get to the moon. Somebody has to discover the physics, the math. Somebody has to do the work to design, to coordinate, to construct, to build, to make. And those are individuals. There is no new knowledge that is gained by a group, by a collective. Newton did not get together with a thousand people and come up with a theory of motion, which was necessary to get man to the moon. Even a massive building project is not possible without an architect designing it. Now, the architect might work in a group. The group is not massive, it's not large, it's small. Like, that small chimpanzee group that chimpanzees are so good when they're small. But a large group, small group, but it's the individual who makes the architect to possible. And the engineer, the architect does it and then somebody has to give it to the engineer. And the engineer has to design to make sure that it can actually stand. No large group can engineer a building. Individuals engineer a building. Maybe not one. Maybe one does this part of the building and somebody else does another part of the building. But it's individuals. Again, and this was true of Bunny Sanders that I did yesterday. They have this capacity to say stuff that kind of, yeah, that kind of makes sense. We built the pyramids together. We send a man to the moon. It's large group cooperation. And there's a fundamental falsehood at the bottom of it. And unless you stop and think about it, unless you stop and analyze it, then you can get caught up in this. And you could go nutting the archimpanzees in a stadium. That's funny. They can't build the pyramids. But we, we can get together as a large group and we can build the pyramids. And every human achievement he says, every human achievement he said was a group effort. Like Michelangelo's David, a group did that. Really? Now it's true. Somebody taught Michelangelo, but that was one-on-one cooperation, not cooperation of large groups. Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel, one of the amazing things about the Sistine Chapel that Michelangelo painted is he painted it alone. Alone. No people to go up there and do, you know, like other painters who had, they were parentheses, paint some of the colors and do some of the figures. No, he did it alone. So, no, it's absolutely not true. Not true that human beings do everything. All human achievements are large-scale corporations. Indeed, that is a complete false it. All human achievements are the product of genius, are the product of individual genius. And then that genius cooperates with others in order to build something, in order to make something. But it is the individual genius that makes it possible. Without the individual, the corporation is meaningless. We're back to being chimpanzees. Without individuals thinking for themselves, discovering new truths, we are back to being chimpanzees. We are back to the chaos. All right, let's keep going. Think even about this very talk that I'm giving now. Who's doing the thinking, the group? There's a collective consciousness above the theater that people are thinking through. No, it's individuals that are thinking. Standing here in front of an audience of about 300 or 400 people, most of you are complete strangers to me. Similarly, I don't really know the people, all the people who have organized and worked on this event. I don't know the pilot and the crew members of the plane that brought me over here yesterday to London. But did you do anything by yourself? Did you think about this speech? Did you construct this speech? Did you practice this speech? It is true that you need other people. There's massive benefits to cooperation. One needs other people in order to take that knowledge and share it with other people. Communicate it to the world. But all of this is based on some starting point and that starting point has to be knowledge in your head that you came up with as an individual. But if you negate the individual, then only disaster happens. And of course, he's negating reason. He talks about thinking, but what does thinking even mean to him? If there's no for you all and there's no mention of reason, then what does thinking mean? I don't know the people who invented and manufactured this microphone and these cameras. Now he's being pro-capitalist. Yes. It's called, you know, Anaswath called it the invisible hand. Yes, the cameras are there when you need them because of the beauty of capitalism, because the ability of prices to coordinate productive activity and to get the cameras to the right place at the right time, because somebody is paying for the cameras to be there. Somebody is paying you to speak. Somebody, some individual. Now it's true. All of it is cooperation, cooperation of individuals. Coding what I'm saying. I don't know the people who wrote all the books and articles that I've read in preparation for this talk. And I certainly don't know all the people who might be watching this talk over the internet, somewhere in Buenos Aires or in New Delhi. Nevertheless, even though we don't know each other, we can work together to create this global exchange of ideas. But there is no working together. The people watching this are not working with him. They are listening. There is no exchange of ideas. There was a suction of ideas. This is something chimpanzees cannot do. They can't. They communicate, of course, but you will never catch a chimpanzee traveling to some distant chimpanzee band to give them a talk. Is that because... I mean, this is the funny thing. So about elephants. But why don't chimpanzees in their local little group give talks? Yes, no chimpanzee can travel to a faraway group. But do they even give talks among small group chimpanzees? No, of course not. Why? Because chimpanzees can't abstract. Chimpanzees can't hold abstractions. There's nothing to talk about. All there is is the mechanical material reality of the world right now. Right now. And this is, unless you understand the difference between a chimpanzee and a human, you're off or anything else that might interest chimpanzees. No, cooperation is, of course, not always nice. Now notice that interest chimpanzees, chimpanzees are not interested in anything except the next thing in front of them because they can't abstract. So they can't plan. They can't strategize. They can't think. All the horrible things humans have been doing throughout history and we have been doing some very horrible things. All those things are also based on large-scale cooperation. Prisons are a system of cooperation. Slaughterhouses are a system of cooperation. Concentration camps are a system of cooperation. Chimpanzees don't have slaughterhouses and prisons and concentration camps. Now, suppose I've managed to convince you, perhaps, that yes, we control the world because we can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. He hasn't convinced me. I don't know about you guys. The next question that immediately arises in the mind of inquisitive listener is how exactly do we do it? What enables us, alone of all the animals, to cooperate in such a way? It's interesting. So we start with this massive observation about cooperation. He misses the essential, that is the role of the individual. And now he wants to explain this cooperation. Now let's see how he explains it because this is the key, right? How do you explain ability to cooperate on such a massive scale? The answer is our imagination. Not reason, not conceptual ability, not knowledge, not abstraction, but imagination, ability to imagine things. This is called the primacy of consciousness and philosophy. Our whim, our fantasies are the key to corporations. We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values. So we come up with stories. We come up with fictions. We come up with stuff, whatever it happens to be, unconnected to reality, unconnected to truth because there is no truth, just stories, imaginations. And we motivate everybody around those stories that we imagine. And if we can get everybody to believe in the same story, then cooperation happens. But what if the fiction is false? What if the fiction is unsuited to reality? What if the imagination is just, you know, pretend unconnected to truth and reality? Wouldn't we die? Well, that's too difficult a question right now. It's just, we've got stories. We've got imaginations. And that's how we get everybody coordinate. All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality. A chimpanzee may say, look, there is a lion. Let's run away. Or look, there is a banana tree over there. Let's go and get bananas. Humans, in contrast, use their language, not merely to describe reality, but also to create new realities, fictional realities. Now, this is a key epistemological point. This is the crux of the philosophical problem. And why he doesn't think there's such a thing as reason and has no ability to conceptualize an individual. Animals deal with concrete. They see things out there, and that's all they can deal with. Human beings have this capacity to reason, have the capacity to take concrete and form abstractions. They can see a chair and they can form an abstraction called chair, which includes under it all the chairs, all the concrete chairs that exist in the world, that ever have existed and ever will exist in the world, under one concept called chair, which is an abstraction. And they can take it one level above that. They can take it to furniture. We can see chairs. We can see tables. We can see cabinets. And we can create a concept that includes under it every chair that's ever existed and will exist, every cabinet that has existed and will exist, every table that has existed and will exist, under one abstraction called furniture. And you can go higher and higher on the level abstraction. Always that abstraction is connected to reality, at least if your epistemology is healthy. Always is it connected to some concretes in reality. But we can conceptualize. We can abstract. We can form concepts and therefore we can reason, integrate, see truths, see commonalities, see differences, integrate, and ultimately we can understand the rules of nature and change the world around us to fit our needs. But what he is doing is rejecting the notion of abstraction. Abstraction to you, Valhari, is storytelling. It's imagination. It's fantasy. It is fiction. It doesn't actually exist. We'll give some examples in a minute. It doesn't actually exist. There is nothing. There is no furniture in the world. There are tables and chairs, particular tables and particular chairs. You can't even abstract beyond that. But there's no furniture. Never mind household goods. There's no... There cannot be anything other than the concretes. The only thing that exists for you, Valhari, which is true, the only thing that exists are the concretes out there in the world. But to him the only thing that is true, the only thing that is true that has reality are the concretes out there in the world. Our abstractions of fantasy are made up. So when we talk about anything to do with politics, politics is of course a massive abstraction, related to specific concrete relationships between human beings in a particular context from which we ultimately induce the concept of politics. But to him politics is just fantasy. It doesn't exist and therefore you can come up with any politics. There's no right politics or wrong politics. This is just what's convenient. What's a story we have told people? What's a story that is convincing and what is not a story that's convincing? Now, Ayn Rand puts this succinctly. She says, yeah, abstractions as such do not exist. They are merely man's epistemological method of perceiving that which exists. That which exists is concrete. So he's right that that which exists is the concrete. But we have the cognitive ability to abstract from it and it doesn't turn those abstractions into fantasy. Abstractions are the way we relate to the things that exist. It's man's unique form of knowing. It's man's unique form of using his mind. Without it, we cannot exist. What is what is to abstract? Again, to quote Ayn Rand. It's the act of isolation involved in concept formation, informing our concept, is a process of abstraction. That is a selective mental focus that takes out or separates a certain aspect of reality from all others. Isolates a certain attribute from the entities possessing it or a certain action from the entities performing it. In other words, a proper abstraction is always connected to the concretes from which we abstract it. She also writes the higher animals are able to perceive entities, motions, attributes, and certain numbers of entities. That's what he's talking about. But what an animal cannot perform is the process of abstraction, of mentally separating attributes, motions or numbers from the entities, separating them out. It is said, it has been said, that an animal can perceive two oranges or two potatoes, but cannot grasp the concept of two. The concept of two doesn't exist in reality. It's two of what? And what Harawi would say is the very concept of two is just an imagination. It's just made up. It's just fiction. It's a story. Now that has massive consequences because it divorces man's conceptual ability. It divorces man's thinking. It divorces man's use of his mind and his use of his basic means of survival from reality. He basically says our mind and reality are unconnected. A way in which we relate to the world is unconnected to the actual reality of the world. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broods.