Harari on coping with the Trump eraーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS
With his unpredictable behavior and rhetoric, President Trump has thrown the world into disarray. Uncertainty looms over the global stage. Ivar Noah Harrari, historian and author of the global bestseller Sapiens, has helped millions understand modern society through the lens of history. NHK since November, NHK has held two ex exclusive interviews with the Israeli academic. We asked how the world should prepare for a new era under Trump. Uh ideally the strongest nation in the world which is the US should assume a leadership role and as a leader try to bring people together, try to bring humanity together. Unfortunately the policy of the current administration is doing exactly the opposite. But unfortunately um what we see is growing division and growing growing distrust between countries between nations. They imagine their country as a kind of fortress which should be completely separated from everybody else. The question is how do these fortresses manage their relations and solve their disputes? In the 1930s, after the Great Depression, the United States imposed steep import duties to protect its domestic industries, prompting other countries to follow suit. This accelerated the fragmentation and shrinking of the world economy. Countries including Japan and Germany felt cornered. Fortislike mindsets led nations to set high tariffs creating the conditions for the economic instability that set the stage for World War II. We shouldn’t think that oh we are in the same situation as the 1930s. There are many differences but still the the basic principle remains that trade wars worsen relations between countries. They erode trust and this can lead eventually also to war. Inevitably, every fortress would like to have more territory, more security, more prosperity at the expense of the neighbors. So if two fortresses clash and you don’t have any international laws, you don’t have any universal values. So how can you manage the relations between the fortresses except by war? Today, politicians around the world who advocate putting their own countries first, like Trump, are gaining momentum. Populism, marked by criticism of existing political systems and rejection of immigration, is winning support from the public. Harari analyzes this global populist trend in his latest book. The most novel claim populists make is that they alone truly represent the people. Hari says populists believe all human relationships are power struggles. Whether it’s the courts, the media, universities, or scientific bodies, they imagine these institutions are conspiracies for grabbing power. A key feature of conspiracy theories is they oversimplify reality. Harrari explains that these simplified narratives can sometimes lead to tragedy. Drawing on a historical example, Hexenos from the late middle ages to the early modern era. Witch hunts spread across Europe. Maleu’s Malficaram or the hammer of witches became a bestseller of its time as a guide book for identifying and killing supposed witches. Witch hunts driven by widespread claims of black magic led to the torture of many and the execution of an estimated 100,000 people. Hammer of the witches said that actually there is a global conspiracy led by the devil, led by Satan with hundreds of thousands of witches spread all over the world. And um they told all kinds of very sensational stories killing children and things like that. uh which you also see today of course in social media the same kind of of conspiracy theories. The truth is often painful. There are many things we don’t want to know about ourselves about our nation. Uh and fiction in contrast can be made as pleasant as flattering as you would like it to be. Um so in this competition between truth which is costly and complicated and painful and fiction which is cheap and simple and flattering. Fiction tends to win in this era of global uncertainty, the Trump era. How should we move forward? What you really learn from the long-term history of humanity is the amazing human ability to build trust. Because a 100,000 years ago, humans lived in tiny bands of just a few dozen individuals and could not trust anybody outside their band. Today, we have these huge networks like nations of millions of people that trust each other. The most important mechanism is a the self-correcting mechanism. This is how every child learns to walk. Like small children, the ability to admit that there are things I don’t know or that I make mistakes. That a self-correcting mechanism is not correcting somebody else. This is easy to see the problems of somebody else. It’s a system which is able to identify and correct its own mistakes. Ultimately, it all depends on trust between humans. Reena, it’s amazing how the concepts of community and trust have been uh present throughout human history. Right. True. But Harrari also said that the history’s only constant is change. In the end, how humans respond to shifting times is key to the finding a way forward, right?
Historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the global bestseller “Sapiens,” speaks to NHK about the rise of populism, exemplified by the reelection of Donald Trump as US president.
#usa #politics #security #europe #wwii #fake #analysis
More stories on the US: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/tags/3/
Please subscribe HERE: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSPEjw8F2nQDtmUKPFNF7_A?sub_confirmation=1