From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Imagine Martin Luther King walked into your foundation. Would he pass muster? He would not get a dime out of most contemporary foundations because he would say, 'honestly? This work will take years, people are going to die, I'm not sure how it will turn out.'
Power is seized with the gun and maintained with the pen. Controlling public opinion through propaganda and misinformation is the most critical task of an authoritarian power.
So much of silence is about perpetuating the status quo, reinforcing what someone or dominant groups within an entity or organization have deemed appropriate, good, polite. Being different inherently exposes you to vulnerability; you're pushing against everything that the forces of mimicry urge you to do, which is to conform.
The future is baked into the population of today, and that makes it very convenient for looking at the next couple of decades as our future soldiers are today in nursery school, and our future retirees are entering college.
You can go and build a schoolhouse in any village or community, but it will do nothing without impassioned and brilliant teachers. In many ways, the teacher is more important than the building because a good teacher can teach anywhere.
we even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don't have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys….
Our economic measures aren't wrong, they're incomplete. Smith noted that a successful economic system is one where everyone who participates can flourish. That's not about equality of outcome, but about the fact that everyone has the ability to flourish, equality of opportunity.
I made a principled decision that none of my wealth will be passed on as inheritance, that my capital will work for philanthropic causes. In other words, philanthropy is the reason I make money.
Fear isn't just a neurophysiological phenomenon; it's also socio-cultural. We're enculturated to fear; it's something that we inherit, acquire, and learn – which implies that there is possibility of 'unlearning' our fear.
So many of us think that we don't have power as individuals; and that makes us unwittingly complicit. Every time someone doesn't do the right thing in any given situation, it allows that situation to go on longer, and in that way, there's complicity – and that's dangerous culturally, and dangerous to our forward momentum as we try to move towards being the free people we're meant to be.
One of the psychological effects of that is it can blur the boundaries between self and group and create this feeling that you are the group, and the group is you. And this obviously has the capacity to promote quite strong forms of pro-group action.
In order to fix bias you have to admit to them, you have to admit they exist and bring them out of the shadows. Then you can call them out.