From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Most people we have worked with who have accomplished great things have an other-centred purpose, and that's never just 'make a lot of money…' – it could be to make women's lives easier, to close the inequality gap, to change the world, it's something which isn't strictly personal and selfish.
It's shocking how quickly this innovation [the internet] has become woven into the foundation of everything that we do. In just 30 years, the internet and the world wide web have gone from being generally unknown to consumers to being involved in every aspect of life, and necessary for almost everything. There is no healthy society without a healthy internet.
Ernest Becker proposed that we still worship, it's just that we worship money and political leaders or become members of cults, conspiracy groups or yoga! These are just different ways of dealing with death and anxiety.
We are very porous now, and it isn't just through neurotechnology, it is through all modes of technology that are designed to interpret and change our cognitive and effective functioning. So as I wrote this book, it is more of a call to recognise that in the modern era we have to expand our notion of liberty to include the right to cognitive liberty.
We have layer upon layer of novelty, and today we are in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change of the novelty we face is so fast that it has outstripped our evolutionary capacity to keep up.
poverty seems to be an aggravating factor in all types of violence
If we turned back the clock to 120 years ago, we wouldn't even be aware of many conflicts and crises when they occurred. It might take days before reading about a distressing situation in a distant land in a newspaper. This isn't to say we should ignore the suffering of others, but rather to understand these events within a larger framework.
When we're in this situation, under all these restrictions and lockdowns, our emotions have been dialled down. We can't spend our emotional energy on the things we normally would- like having friends over for dinner. We have to be good citizens, and music gives us a place to put that energy.
HIV prevalence among injecting drug users ranges from 20-40% in some countries, and more than 40% in many others. If we estimate the number of injecting drug users worldwide as 60 million, it means that around 3 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS because of this dangerous mode of transmission.
The first thing to do for our ecology is not to use less electricity, it's to cease buying things that are not useful.
The crux of the matter is, the human journey is fraught with challenges. It's frequently marked by pain, confusion, and a feeling of helplessness. Herein lies the allure of fiction—it provides what reality often withholds. Fictions grant us a semblance of understanding, a hint of control, and a sense of community during times of solitude. This makes misinformation appealing, as it fulfils these basic human desires: comprehension, control, and community.
People come to Glastonbury and can try out ways of living that can be rolled out across the country. It's a place where people come to be a part of something… something greater than the sum of its parts.