From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Every nation is dependent on every other to shore up the system, and there are few (if any) instances where a country is fully shielded against the default of another.
If the role of government is, as Thomas Hobbes put it, to stop life being nasty brutish and short because humans unregulated are at each other's throats, then government has to step up to that plate now and start rethinking what it can do to ensure cohesion in societies where you will always have disagreement.
The ice is neither left nor right, it is neither Republican nor Democrat, it is simply melting. The consequences of the sea ice melting are enormous and will be felt everywhere from Texas to China.
British identity is profoundly tied-up with Europe and vice-versa.
Society feels broken because society is broken. When the most powerful nations in the world are spending billions of dollars on ways to kill each-other, and a fraction of those resources on ways to heal each other, we're broken.
For me, freedom is living outside social norms, realising that power structures are an illusion and realising that the rules we put on ourselves and others are also illusions. Freedom means that we realise that we don't subscribe to illusions, and free ourselves from dogma.
It was the brainchild of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfwitz. They picked Guantánamo as they believed it was beyond the reach of all law. Obviously United States law, but also international law and beyond that the Geneva Conventions. It was picked purposely to be a legal black hole where the United States could bring people for interrogation purposes.
I felt that civil discourse in America was breaking down, with people splitting into two warring ideological camps. Meanwhile, the real issues we face are far more subtle, nuanced, and complex. I believed society needed what I call a contempt-free zone.
The law is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve justice. When the law fails to deliver justice, we must be willing to reform the law, not abandon the pursuit of justice.
Society feels broken because society is broken. When the most powerful nations in the world are spending billions of dollars on ways to kill each-other, and a fraction of those resources on ways to heal each other, we're broken.
The Chinese government has realised that to fuel capitalism, an atheistic, communistic, civil-religion will never propel growth. They realise that their system, frankly, will not support the growth or creativity to create the new technologies and companies that are necessary.
We can see, therefore, that sovereign debt has a systemically important role in the stability of the global economy, the economies of individual states and even the very peace of a country. To be able to then treat this as a market instrument- while appropriate at a time when capital flows were gentile and considered- is clearly not when we can write $2 trillion or more from an entire economy in a matter of seconds.