From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Three years ago, we were managing 20 cases, but today, that number has escalated to 70. Since our inception, we've dealt with nearly 500 cases. Hostage-taking is an ancient practice and will persist for a long time. This training initiative has developed significantly over recent years, ensuring proper care and attention are afforded to these cases.
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.
Democracies are not very good at long term planning in general and population ageing is the utmost long term planning.
The single greatest deficit that Europe faces today is not a budget, current-account or trade deficit… but a growth one. With stronger growth, a lot of these problems would be quite a bit easier to handle, if not to resolve.
Apartheid did not develop because of 'race'. Instead, race was used to justify the domination/exploitation of Apartheid. Once you understand the order, the mechanism, you understand the purpose.
We are now living with a great deal of uncertainty, which will increase. As a society, we have to be prepared for threats we cannot conceive, we must build resilience not just in developed countries, but particularly in conflict areas.
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.
While the crisis made the problems of the euro-structure clear, they were present long before. Indeed, the euro helped create the crisis: for the markets seemed to have vastly overestimated the extent to which the single market/single currency had reduced risk (another example of market irrationality), leading to excessive lending to the afflicted countries.
I personally want to throw up every time I hear some completely senseless and baseless statement like 'we need more of Europe, not less'. It means nothing, and those slogans simply drive people crazy – It goes to show the intellectual vacuousness of the people who say them.
Telecommunications has connected India- and has brought about openness, accessibility, connectivity, networking, democratisation, decentralisation and as a result- social transformation.
Most people do not realise what will happen when they cross the divide- they've already accepted a story about who's on the other side, and have already decided that the other is frightening, delusional and dangerous. In truth, we are all confused. This era is nothing if not confusing. We all see some things with clarity, we all see some things upside down, and we all have blind-spots.
For every example I could give you of regulations causing problems, I could give you two of regulations creating opportunities. I think this notion that regulation is causing problems is a real red herring.