From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In the case of Brazil, one of the most important things is the huge ethnic and cultural mixture which makes us a country with dynamism, vibrancy, and the ability to understand the psychology of other nations.
I think the biggest technological innovation that will impact Wikia – and the Internet more broadly – is the continuing progress we are seeing in reducing the costs of communication technology, such that it will reach the entire planet in relatively short order. Just think about what happens when the next billion people come online, and the next two billion after that.
I've described celebrities as being 'double agents of the patriarchy,' and whilst things are getting better- and language is changing, we are still not always calling out those who fat shame or age shame women.
Our contemporary society uses this statistically insignificant variation to support the 'reasoning' behind cultural, social, economic and political practices that cause hundreds of millions of people, every day, to face discrimination.
The first one is to believe in the 'otherisation'. The otherisation states that anybody who is looking at the world through their lens is on one group, and everybody outside of this world view is another. And they are different and separate.
We have learned that the things that matter are not the physical, and material things. What matters in life is hope. Tomorrow is not a given, and we must be happy about small things and we must seize the day.
We must fundamentally change how we see children - not as objects of charity, but as individuals with rights, with potential, with the power to transform our world.
Doing something which has a social purpose gives you the motivation to overcome the hurdles and obstacles that you will meet along the way. It gives you that inner strength when you're doing something and you know it's making a massive difference.
The scale of our damage on the animal world is unimaginable. We inflict pain and suffering on wild and domestic animals. We take away their wild lands and habitats, we use them to test our medicines and they're affected by climate change, pollution and many other aspects of our world. We are the master race. We are the creatures who impose our will on virtually everything that lives and breathes. It's deeply shocking when you start to think about the scale of it.
Being able to trust is actually what makes us human. It's a very innate thing. And often, distrust and mistrust are learned behaviours that start to set in around the age of four.
The crux of the matter is, the human journey is fraught with challenges. It's frequently marked by pain, confusion, and a feeling of helplessness. Herein lies the allure of fiction—it provides what reality often withholds. Fictions grant us a semblance of understanding, a hint of control, and a sense of community during times of solitude. This makes misinformation appealing, as it fulfils these basic human desires: comprehension, control, and community.
a doubling in crime increases the Gini coefficient by 3% to 4%