Lessons For The 21st Century From Yuval Noah Harari
The 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is one of the most recent works of Icelandic historian and writer Professor Yuval Noah Harari, who became famous for works such as Sapiens: From Animals to Gods and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow . His work has been translated into more than 40 languages and represents a new approach to today’s reality.
In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century , Harari provides a thought-provoking reading of the contemporary world. It basically indicates that there is currently open and very harmful censorship. Contrary to what has happened in the past, information is no longer prohibited, but is inundated with other information for society. In this way, questions of real importance are hidden.
Harari also tackles exciting topical issues, such as power, the role of great empires, immigration, nationalism, and more. The 21 lesson writing for the 21st century is divided into five parts, and each includes a group of lessons. Let’s see what these five blocks are and what lessons they give us.
Lessons for the 21st century : technological challenge
The first part of 21 lessons for the 21st century is devoted to the technological challenge. In this part, Harari includes four lessons, related to the current crisis of liberal values and the problems of new technologies.
The lessons are as follows:
- Disappointment: liberalism was imposed in place of fascism and communism. Freedom and its struggle have gradually lost value. There is now more skepticism and free stories
- Work: artificial intelligence is moving towards humans and in the future, many professions and trades will disappear. A “useless class” will emerge: people who do not know how to produce in this new context.
- Freedom: Big data is constantly watching us and unknowingly we have transferred the power to them to make decisions for us. The doors are open for a digital dictatorship
- Equality: Those who own the data also own the future. The power is in the hands of big tech companies, which in the future could run the world as they wish.
Political challenge
The second block of topics of the 21 Lessons for the 21st Century relates to the political challenge. This block is divided into different sections:
- Community: although human beings have bodies, virtual communities are increasingly present
- Civilization: currently, most of the world constitutes a single civilization. The differences are becoming more and more diluted
- Nationalism: Most of today’s issues are global, not national
- Religion: religions continue to play an important role as binders of shared fictions
- Immigration: Immigration is successful as long as the immigrant leaves their culture of origin. He goes from racism to “bodybuilding”
Lessons for the 21st Century : Despair and Hope
In this section, Harari emphasizes that humanity can stay afloat, as long as it remains calm and avoids irrational fears. To achieve this, it is necessary to consolidate secular values through their rational power.
The lessons are as follows:
- Terrorism: terrorism is oversized. Let’s not panic
- War: warmongering is gaining ground and human stupidity should also never be underestimated
- Humility: every person and every culture must understand that they are not the center of the world
- God: being a believer is not also synonymous with ethics
- Secularism: those who accept their ignorance are more reliable than those who claim to be bearers of truth
Truth
In this section, Harari talks about the importance of challenging prejudices and finding reliable sources to form our criteria. This block includes four lessons:
- Ignorance: you know less than the avalanche of information makes you believe
- Justice: Justice is not in abstract values. But in a reasonable assessment of the causes and effects of decisions and behaviors
- Power and Truth: Truth and Power only travel together for a time. Sooner or later power will also have to build fictions
- Science fiction: Brave New World is actually the most prophetic of all ever written
Lessons for the 21st Century : Resilience
The final section of the 21 Lessons for the 21st Century talks about the importance of recognizing that traditional stories no longer explain the world, but at the same time, no new story has emerged with sufficient capacity for it. ‘to explain.
Faced with this problem, let’s take these three lessons into account:
- Education: the aim of education is no longer to acquire information, but to develop the capacity to understand it
- Meaning: Life is not a story and it is important to learn to distinguish fiction from reality
- Meditation: the possibility of choosing always exists. But she’ll probably be lost someday
The lessons for the 21st century , as you can see, give us food for thought, to which there are no closed answers. They refer to the inflection points in the world today, which are worth taking the time to think about.
Our thoughts Mulholland Drive is a complex film, which leaves no one indifferent, and which essentially speaks to us about the nuances of our existence.
