I've never been impressed by Harari's work. After all these years, Harari still seems unable to grasp that ideology does not flow in a single direction from storytellers to scientists. The relationship is circular. To claim that "stories control facts" is, ultimately, a mistake. What is striking is how... much of his framework rests on an extraordinarily fragile dualism. He assumes that there are brute, pre-conceptual, neutral facts simply waiting to be discovered, and that the nuclear scientist, to use his own example, is merely an executor of objective truths, while the storyteller is the true holder of symbolic and narrative power. That reflects a remarkably naïve understanding of how ideology actually operates. Scientific facts do not exist independently of interpretation. They emerge within conceptual frameworks and established scientific practices. There is no such thing as a pure accumulation of facts. Harari's position remains captive to a distinctly Rousseauian form of political naturalism. It assumes that human nature is inherently rational and fundamentally good, only to be corrupted by external narratives. Ultimately, Harari portrays science as a privileged mechanism of self-correction that, unlike religion or political ideology, merely eliminates error without ever producing ideology itself. That is profoundly naïve, AGAIN. To claim that science stands outside ideology is itself an ideological claim.show more

Guilherme Gomes Santos

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