From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Digital technology and instant news cycles, together with the aggressive marketing of fear-mitigating products and services, are certainly driving fear in contemporary society. Today, fear is closely related to the problem of misinformation and disinformation, and to the erosion of trust in political institutions.
It's naïve to think that financial markets are not part of the battlefield.
We can't only rely on consumers making individual choices. If you switched your energy to someone who told you they are selling you 100% renewable energy, that's great, but it doesn't shift the energy system to renewables. You need to have energy markets that are designed to encourage investment into renewable energy.
We have to have a conversation about how data can empower or oppress us- we have the opportunity to re-imagine this, it's not a deal that's been done, and it's not too late to imagine a different way of organising, regulating, collecting, contributing and benefiting.
Only a handful of diplomats and governments are prepared to put the global good before the national interest. Seldom is it the case for any diplomat that they put the global good high up on the agenda; in my career I've seen it very rarely.
When individual countries hit a crisis, they've got 2 options, they can either look after themselves (at the cost of their neighbours) or they can create rules which they (and everyone else) will abide by, which requires institutions.
The internet has had a tremendous positive impact because it's the most democratised and decentralised medium ever known. Along comes the internet, and it changes all that, it puts the power of communication in everyone's hand, at least everyone who can afford access.
If history has taught us anything, it's that women rarely win anything without a fight!
The polarising EU referendum brought much of this to a head. Let me be clear: I do not, by any stretch, feel that people that voted to leave the EU were racist- but it's clear that UKIP, EDL, and their peers realised the power of the race card, and played it to their advantage.
There has been a pathetic failure of governments to invest in educating people about the rights that they hold and enjoy; I suspect because if people knew their rights, they would claim them and put the governments of the world under pressure.
I am in favour of quotas and targets. I think affirmative action works, and we've had affirmative action in the opposite direction for centuries. So sometimes we have to shock the system. We have to do it to normalise things, to get to a tipping point and then let the system just takes care of itself.
Since citizens' militias are anachronistic, gun owners now use the second amendment merely to defend individual gun ownership, as if that somehow offers protection against tyranny. A reckless, right-wing Supreme Court has agreed with them. As a result, gun ownership has become perversely linked to freedom in the vast gun-owning American sub-culture. But, instead of protection of freedom, Americans nowadays are getting massive bloodshed and fear.