Nationalism vs Globalism by Yuval Noah Harari

Video :- Inspirational Journey/Youtube

I think the basic thing that happens is that we have lost our story. Humans think in stories and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories. And for the last few decades, we had a very simple and very attractive story about what's happening in the world. And the story said that, oh, what's happening is that the economy is being globalised, politics is being liberalised, and the combination of the two will create paradise on Earth, and we just need to keep on globalising the economy and liberalising the political system, and everything will be wonderful.

But 2016 is the moment when a very large segment, even of the Western world, stopped believing in this story. For good or bad reasons -- it doesn't matter. People stopped believing in the story, and when you don't have a story, you don't understand what's happening.

The old 20th-century political model of left versus right is now largely irrelevant, and the real divide today is between global and national, or global or local. And you see it again all over the world that this is now the main struggle. We probably need completely new political models and completely new ways of thinking.

In essence, what you can say is that we now have global ecology, we have a global economy but we have national politics, and this doesn't work together. This makes the political system ineffective, because it has no control over the forces that shape our life. And you have basically two solutions to this imbalance: either de-globalise the economy and turn it back into a national economy, or globalise the political system.

At first sight, it's quite surprising that there is a very close correlation between nationalism and climate change. I mean, almost always, the people who deny climate change are nationalists. And at first sight, you think: Why? What's the connection? Why don't you have socialists denying climate change? But then, when you think about it, it's obvious -- because nationalism has no solution to climate change. If you want to be a nationalist in the 21st century, you have to deny the problem. If you accept the reality of the problem, then you must accept that, yes, there is still room in the world for having special loyalties and obligations towards your own people, towards your own country.

But in order to confront climate change, we need additional loyalties and commitments to a level beyond the nation. And that should not be impossible, because people can have several layers of loyalty. You can be loyal to your family, and to your community, and to your nation, so why can't you also be loyal to humankind as a whole? Of course, there are occasions when it becomes difficult, what to put first, but, you know, life is difficult. Handle it.

I think what we are seeing is the immediate human reaction: if something doesn't work, let's go back. And you see it all over the world, that people... Almost nobody in the political system today, has any future-oriented vision of where humankind is going. Almost everywhere, you see retrograde vision: "Let's make America great AGAIN," And you go to Russia: Putin's vision for the future is basically, ah, let's go back to the Tsarist empire. And in Israel, where I come from is: "Let's build the temple again." So let's go back 2,000 years backwards. So people are thinking sometime in the past. We've lost it, and you say: "OK, let's go back to the point where I felt secure and start again".

I don't think this can work, but a lot of people, this is their gut instinct. For many centuries, even thousands of years, patriotism worked quite well. Of course, it led to wars an so forth, but we shouldn't focus too much on the bad. And this worked in many places around the world. But in the 21st century, technology is changing all that in a fundamental way.

All people in the world are living alongside the same cyber river, and no single nation can regulate this river by itself. We are all living together on a single planet, which is threatened by our own actions. And if you don't have some kind of global cooperation, nationalism is just not on the right level to tackle the problems, of whether it's climate change or whether it's technological disruption. All the major problems of the world today are global in essence, and they cannot be solved unless through some kind of global cooperation.

It's not just climate change, which is, like, the most obvious example people give. I think more in terms of technological disruption. If you think about, for example, artificial intelligence, over the next 20, 30 years pushing hundreds of millions of people out of the job market, this is a problem on a global level. It will disrupt the economy of all the countries.

Looking to the future, it's not the Mexicans or Chinese who will take the jobs from the people in Pennsylvania, it's the robots and algorithms. So unless you plan to build a big wall on the border of California, the wall on the border with Mexico is going to be very ineffective. No matter what happens in universities and laboratories, and there, there is already an intense debate about it, but in the mainstream political system and among the general public, people are just unaware that there could be an immense technological disruption; not in 200 years, but in 10, 20, 30 years; and we have to do something about it now, partly because most of what we teach children today in school or in college is going to be completely irrelevant to the job market of 2040, 2050. So it's not something we'll need to think about in 2040.

We need to think today what to teach the young people. For me, maybe the most important question, both as a scientist and as a person, is how to tell the difference between fiction and reality, because reality is there. I'm not saying that everything is fiction. It's just very difficult for human beings to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and it has become more and more difficult as history progressed, because the fictions that we have created: nations and gods and money and corporations, they now control the world. So just to even think, "Oh, this is just all fictional entities that we've created," is very difficult. But reality is there. We should start really with the biological realities of Homo sapiens.

And biology tells us two things about Homo sapiens which are very relevant to this issue: first of all, that we are completely dependent on the ecological system around us, and that today we are talking about a global system. You cannot escape that. And at the same time, biology tells us about Homo sapiens that we are social animals, but that we are social on a very, very local level. It's just a simple fact of humanity that we cannot have intimate familiarity with more than about 150 individuals. and everything beyond that is really based on all kinds of imaginary stories and large-scale institutions, and I think that we can find a way, again, based on a biological understanding of our species, to weave the two together.

- Yuval Noah Harari

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