From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We all have philosophies which form the basis for our motivations and what we do with our days. Everyone has their own philosophy of life; every institution has a philosophy... but for most of us, those philosophies are unexamined and more or less automatic and instinctual.
Think about your water kettle. When you heat the water and you see the transition from water to gas, not all water molecules are converted at once. The same happened in the world economy. Since this transition was associated with such a fantastic increase in income per capita, those societies that took off first increased their gap from the rest of the world tremendously.
Capital has poured into San Francisco and the Bay Area but the growth hasn't distributed itself beyond the top percentile of the community. If you are in one of these companies, you may have a stable and survivable life in the Bay Area, but if you're not? You're going to have to make some incredible trade-offs.
Our body is a community of cells, in which each cell occupies a place appropriate for its tasks on behalf of the whole. Cancer cells, however, are rogues that trespass aggressively into other tissues. Metastasis is what makes cancer so lethal.
One of the undoubted triumphs of racism is how difficult it is to have an honest conversation about it.
Dehumanizing the victim through the internet has enabled people to commit crimes and not worry about their conscience.
All three of these causal forces manifest to such a degree of intensity as they do today. They have always been present but have not had this degree of intensity and not all at once. That's what makes this a particularly dangerous moment.
The systems we now use exist at a scale that's actually hard to comprehend as human beings. On Facebook, you are one of several billion people and at that scale, it's easy to become a number, or simply a wallet.
All inequality is not created equal. An intersectional approach shows the way that people's social identities can overlap, creating compounding experiences of discrimination.
We have the power of knowledge- for example to save the whales. The whales are obviously not going to save us. We need to have solidarity among humans, that the big problems we are facing, that affect all of humanity and we all equally have the responsibility to do something about it.
Hope is the only choice I have. What gives me hope is that people are able to find love and humanity in their hearts in spite of everything that is happening here in Ukraine.
Population aging is evidence that we've been doing a lot of things right. We're confident that if we have children, they will live long lives as well and we've never had those trends before in all human history.