From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I don't think it's a coincidence that globally, we're having the biggest crisis of democracy since the 1930s. At the same time as we're finding it hard to focus and pay attention, we also can't listen to each other.
The miracle of capitalism is that if you have a central government trying to solve something, it will come up with one averagely optimal solution for everybody. And capitalism will come up with 10 different solutions to the same problem.
There's a delicate balance between making sure our values are encoded in these technologies as they come out- and not constraining them so much that we lose the technological race to other nations who don't hold our values.
A significant hurdle is the underestimation of our collective power. The fossil fuel sector and its substantial influence through lobbying and misinformation, spending $4 billion annually to challenge scientific consensus.
If you say 'I hate politics!' you are removing yourself from the public sphere, and are rejecting the ability to be a political subject. You are submitting yourself to a higher order, a powerful ruler.
organisations will often behave in international economic theatres (such as China) with the same operational processes and assumptions as their 'home' environments (such as Australia) with the assumed protection of the legal, political and other systems of their 'home' environments.
Complex societies needed repetitive rituals in order to get off the ground. Routinizing rituals makes deviations from the standard script easy to detect. And this means that when people step out of line, they can be sanctioned.
There's this sense that our institutions have failed us. The very rich generally pay lower effective tax rates than middle-class and lower-income individuals. There's a sense that the system is broken, the rules of the game are rigged.
We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take an economic hit of some kind… Or, we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives.
Corruption is a collective mindset, anchored around a cultural mindset that shifts to become tolerant to corruption, and increased levels of corruption. When we talk about corruption it's easy to think of it as governments, but for corruption to work- and to be effective- it has to contaminate all the bodies of society.
Historically, conflicts typically ended with the major players negotiating peace agreements, often including amnesties. The more brutal and involved in crimes a party was, the more significant their role at the negotiation table. This approach changed after the Second World War with the Nuremberg trials.
Today, policies are sold to us largely on the basis of fear, or fear mitigation: from immigration to climate change, from health services to defence. It's less about promoting a progressive vision of the future and more about playing to our fears of what might happen if we don't toe a particular line.