Yuval Noah Harari: Free Speech, Institutional Distrust, & Social Order | Making Sense #386

you've all know Harari thanks for joining me again it's good to be here again in in you know in a real space together yeah this is you are my first interview in this studio which uh is auspicious because we share so many interests we have struggled for years to talk about meditation and you think we might get there this time I'm determined at least to say at least something about meditation this time yeah well it's there's so much going on in the world that it's uh it's always a challenge to get to that to connected

we can talk about nral and meditation I think there are many links there worth exploring as counterintuitive as that sounds yeah if meditation is not related to the world and to the to reality it's it's worthless that that's true yeah I guess I well I feel like I'm I'm perhaps selling our audience short in thinking that they don't have the bandwidth to think about it given all the chaos and given given your expertise that is so relevant to so much of the chaos um you just mentioned nasrala so the the time we're recording this it

was just announced that that Israel killed Hassan nasrala Who's the who was the head of hisbah which we'll talk about uh perhaps in so I want to focus what you've done in your recent book Nexus which is wonderful and here um and perhaps you can say what how how this relates to your two other big books sapiens and homodeos what is how do you view the project that you've so it it starts basically where sapiens and homodeos ended uh in sapiens I I covered how this insignificant Ape from a corner of Africa took over the

world and in homodeos I explored what could be the potential future of of us and of our products and Creations here on Earth and uh next to Stout with a key question about both the past and the future which is if humans are so wise why are we so stupid like you know we've reached the moon and we split the atom and we can decipher DNA but um we are on the verge of destroying ourselves in so many different ways it could be ecological catastrophe it could be a World War a nuclear war uh we

are producing uh the most powerful techn ology in history AI which might quite easily get out of our control and enslave or or destroy us and we know all that and yet we keep doing it so what's happening and so many mythologies and theologies throughout history said that the blame is that something is wrong in human nature that we are flow deeply flowed and I don't think that this is the right answer I think that the problem is not in our nature the problem is in our information if you give good people bad information they

make bad decisions it's it's as simple as that and uh so then the question becomes why are we flooded with bad information why is it that after thousands of years of of history of developing you know sophisticated networks of information and and and and communication our information is not getting any better I mean at the present moment you can say that humans have the best the most sophisticated information technology in history and we are losing the ability to even talk with each other and and to listen and to hold a reasonable conversation so so what

what's happening that that's the key question of Nexus and it explores um the history of information and and of information Networks it takes another look at history but from the Viewpoint not of of humanity but of information and for instance I look at uh on Nexus looks at the history of democracies and dictatorships not as we usually think about them as different ethical systems that believe in different ideals but as different information networks and how information flows differently in a democracy in a in a dictator ship in a dictatorship you know there is one Hub

where where all the decisions are being made so all the information flows to and from that single Center and H democracy is a distributed information system in which decisions are being made in many different places and much of the information never passes through the center like if you think about United States so you have the center at washing in Washington but so many decisions are made elsewhere like here in in in Hollywood in Los Angeles and um most information never passes through the center and you can think about the historical struggle between democracy and dictatorship

in terms of uh different models of information flows yeah I want to pass over that ground again because what you're saying is pretty counterintuitive and it it's very interesting so because people think about democracy and dictator ship as this kind of binary that are just categorically distinct and you're placing them on a Continuum of information flow yeah yeah and and um there I mean so so let's let's add here this what what you call the naive view of of information because it's that there's a sense that more information is an intrinsic good right and then

we're getting this now with with the people who are running our social media regimes the idea that if you could just let all ideas Collide and remove every point of friction from the flow of information and amplify anything however a market or the Dynamics of any internet business chooses to amplify it uh there's it's just the principle you know people have these phrases in their minds you sunlight is the best disinfectant right so let's just expose everything and we're going to be fine right and any effort to steer this information flow is by its very

nature Sinister it is it is it is edging us toward the totalitarian side of this information Continuum so how react to that b this is this is so naive this is so disconnected from reality from history uh you think that you flood the world with information and the truth will just rise to the surface it won't it will sink to the bottom information isn't truth most information is junk um it's like thinking that more food is always good for you the more you eat the more healthy you will be that's the same thing no I

mean yes you need some food to survive but if you just keep eating it will not be good for you especially if you keep eating junk food and uh the world basically needs an information diet and you know the truth is a subset of information and a very small subset because the truth first of all it's it's very costly if you want to write or to produce a truthful account of something of the Roman Empire of the economic crisis whatever you need to invest a lot of time and effort and money in looking for evidence

and factchecking and analyzing like I don't know if you want to know something that happened in the Roman Empire so you know he historians they they go to university to study for at least 10 years before they become professional historians you learn Latin and Greek and how to read ancient handwriting and how to do these archaeological excavations and even if you found a document from the Roman Empire and you know Latin and you can read it maybe it's just propaganda just because Caesar says that the enemy had 100,000 soldiers it doesn't mean they actually had

100,000 soldiers so how do you evaluate information so the truth is very costly fiction on the other hand is very cheap you just write the first things that comes to your mind the truth is also uh very complicated or often it's complicated because reality is complicated whereas fiction can can you can make it as simple as you would like it to be and people tend to prefer in most cases uh Simplicity over complexity so this is another disadvantage so you're you're pointing out there an asy asymmetrical relationship between truth and fiction absolutely which redounds to

the advantage of fiction in this friction-free environment and and and with the third advantage of fiction that the truth is sometimes not always but the truth is sometimes painful you know from the personal relationships that we often don't know want to know the truth about how we treat uh the other people in our lives this is why we need to go to therapy for many years to to acknowledge the reality you know all the way to entire nations or entire culture if you run for elections in the in the US or in Israel or anywhere

else and you just tell people the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth I mean an Israeli politician who would just tell the truth about the Israeli Palestinian conflict is not likely to gain many votes that way you need at least some dose of fiction of Mythology to make it more attractive more pleasant for the voters well it's already so unpleasant I I've shuttered think what the truth is but we'll get there so so the truth is is it's costly it's complicated it's sometimes painful fiction is cheap it's simple it you can make

it as attractive as you'd like it to be so in a completely free market of information truth will lose you have to tilt the balance in favor of Truth by building institutions like courts like newspapers like universities like research search centers that uh make the effort to produce and to protect the truth and when people attack these institutions they often they often claim that they are liberating people from the Yoke of these Elite institutions and conspiracy and so forth but but no when you destroy all trust in these institutions you're Paving the way for dictatorship

if uh Society needs institutions and uh democracy works on trust but if you destroy all trust the only alternative left to hold Society together is with Terror which is what dictatorships do so this is the game of many would be dictators they systematically destroy all trust in the institutions that are are our main access to to truth and knowledge and then when all these institutions are are are gone um then the only alternative left is a dictatorship so so what would you say to someone who says that the institutions have proven themselves to be untrustworthy

right so we have the capture of the most elite in academic institutions certainly in the United States by a kind of woke moral Panic right you have Hamas supporters not only among the students talk about that and I have a lot of criticism of my own kind of disciplines and institutions that I'm sometimes you know I'm you hear things for people went to study history for 10 years and then they come up with the most simplistic views of reality that so what so but so let's take let's stay at the 30,000 foot level the experts

in many institutions have heaped shame upon their own heads in recent years but the reaction is not to destroy the institutions I mean this is why we need two things first of all we need several institutions not just one so they keep each other in check I mean the the basic assumption is humans are fallible institutions are composed of humans so all institutions are fallible they can make mistakes they can be captured they can be corrupted and therefore you need several institutions to keep each other in check so if one institution is really corrupted you

can go to the courts or you can expose it in newspapers or or in other Media or whatever and secondly every institution needs a self-correcting mechanism this is the sign of a good Institution that it has mechanisms inside the institution to identify and correct its own mistakes this is again a key difference between democracy and dictatorship dictatorship has no self-correcting institution there is no mechanism in Russia that can Expose and correct Putin's mistakes but democracy is all about self-correction that you know the basic mechanism of Elections is that every four years or so you can

say oh we made a mistake let's try something else but of course H uh every this every mechanism like this is itself fallible elections can be rigged like we just had elections in Venezuela and the Venezuelan people said okay we made a mistake with Chavez and Maduro let's try something else but because Maduro is in power uh he rigged the election he said no no no I won and this is also of course very very relevant to what's happening in in the upcoming election in the United States because the greatest danger for a democracy in

a democracy you give power to someone to four for four years on condition that they give it back and there is always the danger what if they don't give it back so giving power to somebody that you have good reasons to suspect that he will not give it back very dangerous so again elections are not enough you also need free media you also need free courts now people ask okay so what if all these institutions are corrupted then bad luck I mean nothing is perfect if all the institutions of your Society has been corrupted and

taken over and all the self-correcting mechanisms are are are disrupted dysfunctional very bad news Society collapses uh hopefully we don't reach that point and it's very important to uh uh try and the solution is not to lose trust trust one of the key problems I see today in the world is that you have an extremely cynical view of humans and of human societies spreading both on the right but also on the left this is something that the the the extreme left and the extreme right agree about they have an extremely cynical view of humans and

of reality they say that the only reality is power that all social interactions all human interactions are actually power struggles that all human institutions are just conspiracies to gain power that journalists scientists historians judges politicians these are just conspiracies to gain power whenever somebody tells you something you shouldn't ask is it true because nobody cares about the truth this is naive they would tell you no this is a power play who benefits who benefits whose privileges are being served whose interests are being served this is something you hear from marxists and from trumpists this is

something that Donald Trump agree with KL Marx at least on that that everything is just a power struggle and if you think like that all trust collapses and the only thing that is left standing that can remain standing is a dictatorship which indeed assumes that everything is just power now the the important thing to realize is this is not just extremely cynical this is just wrong people are not these power crazy demons that care only about power even powerful people really care about the truth at least some of them well even I would just add

I totally agree with you but I would add as a footnote to that cynicism even if the if the if the cynical take were true people's incentives are not perfectly aligned so even in a rivalry of people seeking power the kinds of conspiracies and collaborations and and orwellian uh you know star Chambers uh rarely exists the way populists imagine right it's just you can't get you you take you take uh I truth what was that you take Elon Musk and Donald Trump you know um two people with a very high opinion of themselves yeah and

with not necessarily the same goals in in life and in the world even if they can Ally themselves for some time around a certain common interest the long R it will be very very difficult to keep this Alliance yeah yeah to say nothing of the people who would who are not aligned with them so there there's a fascinating tension between the the self-correcting mechanism that would deliver truth and the self-correcting mechanisms that would deliver order there's this trade-off between truth and order that you describe in the book yeah let's let's cycle on that for a

minute okay that's that's very important because and if we think about human societies really as information networks so the question is what do these networks produce and to function they need to produce two different things not just one they need to produce both truth and Order A system that just ignores the truth completely will collapse it will sooner or later encounter reality and will collapse but also a system which is only interested in the truth will not be able to maintain order because it's easier to maintain order with fiction and with fantasy and with mass

delusions so so so let's take a concrete example yeah but I just I want to just uh capture people's uh confusion here so we just spoke about that the the tension between truth and fiction as though fiction were by definition invidious and and and something to be cancelled what you're saying now is that we need certain Fiction it's you can't be purely truth seeking M fiction is very efficient in creating order and the the main thing is that it's complicated to maintain a human society it's complicated because you need to balance two things that are

pulling in different directions you need to balance truth with order there's lots of trade-offs yes and and I I'll give I I'll give one example of of of how it works think for instance that you want to produce an atom bomb so let's say that you are Iran and you want to produce an atom bomb you need to know some facts about the world it's essential if you just ignore the facts of nuclear physics you will not be able to produce an atom bomb it's as simple as that on the other hand to produce an

atom bomb just knowing the fact of physics is not enough you need millions of people to cooperate on the project if you have a single physicist she is the most brilliant physicist in history and she knows that E equals mc² and all the secrets of quantum mechanics and whatever she cannot produce an atom bomb by herself working in her garage or something you need people to mine uranium you know thousands of kilometers away you need engineers and workers to build the nuclear reactor you need people to produce food so all these workers and physicists have

something to eat how do you get millions of people to cooperate on the project if you just tell them the facts of physics E equals mc² now now get on with it it doesn't work so what so just because E equals MC square we should Now work on building this atom bomb no this is where ideology and mythology and fictions come into the picture um you usually convince millions of people to work on a project together by telling them some ideology or some ethology and here the facts don't matter so much if you try to

build a very powerful ideology and you ignore the facts your ideology is still likely to explode with a very very big bang uh and in most cases in history the people who are experts in uh Nuclear Physics for instance get their orders from the people who are experts in Shiite theology or in Jewish theology or in communist ideology or in Nazi ideology um it's uh the people who are experts in the truth usually get orders from the people who are experts in order and this is something that that very often scientists and and and you

know uh Engineers don't understand that they work I don't know on AI and they think that the scientists and the engineers will decide what to do with it but no once you produce this very powerful technology because you know the facts about the world then you will get the uh uh people who are expert in mythology and theology coming in and telling you you thank you very much for producing this very powerful technology now we will decide what to do with it is there a truly benign and wise version of this because what you seem

to be describing is is a yet another reason for cynicism and distrust yes so this is this is important now it's very hard to create large scale societies without any fictions even money is a fiction even you know think about what is the last thing that still holds American society together what is the last thing that Republicans and Democrats still agree on it's the dollar and even this is under attack you know from cryptocurrencies and so forth but almost the last story that still holds the place together is that everybody agrees on the value of

a dollar which is just a fiction fictions are I just sorry I just want to drill down on this a little bit because I think I think we hit this in a previous conversation there's something a little confusing about your use of the word fiction here because fiction in in any kind of context where we're talking about the truth sounds intrinsically portive right so like this is f there's truth and there's Fiction it's notor you're talking about conventions so something that's conventionally conr comes out of the human imagination and not from reality I mean the

value of the dollar is purely an imaginary reality exactly the paper the dirty and most dollars are not even paper they're just digital tokens in computers they have no objective value yeah they have value value only in our imagination in this sense the do construed reality yes and another big question comes so um so so is is everything just a conspiracy is everything just a fiction and the key thing is that fictions can be extremely valuable and positive provided you acknowledge they are fictions uh I I don't think that the dollar is a bad thing

I don't think that uh the fictions holding Society together are a bad thing as long as you acknowledge the reality that this is a man-made imaginary thing and this is important because then you can correct it then you can make amendments in it let's compare two texts that are Foundation texts for holding Human Society together the Ten Commandments and the US Constitution I have a preference both are fictional in the sense that they came out of the human imagination but one text refuses to acknowledge this reality and the other text is fully honest about it

so the Ten Commandments they start with I am your lord God this text it claims to be written by God Not By Any Human which is why it contains no mechanism for correcting its errors and if some of our listeners are outr errors in the Ten Commandments what could possibly be be wrong with don't kill and don't steal I don't think I have those listeners you you give me too much credit yes but maybe for the one or two are still left out there notice if you read for instance the 10th Commandment that it endorses

slavery right uh the tenth commandment says that you should not CET your neighbor's house or field or slaves which uh implies that God is perfectly okay with people holding slaves it's just God doesn't like you like it when you covert the slaves of your neighbors no these are his slaves don't covered them now because the text doesn't recognize that this is the creation of the human imagination there is no 11th commandment which says well if you discover something wrong in the previous ten commandments by a two3 majority you can vote on changing commandment n number

10 no mechanism so we still have the same text from the Iron Age until today now the US Constitution it's also a foundational text which give instructions for people to how to manage their society it also came out of the human imagination it's not the it's not an objective reality it's also in this sense a fiction uh but it is honest it starts with we the people we the people wrote this text and because we are f human beings maybe we made some mistakes like endorsing slavery so we also include in this text a mechanism

to amend it to identify and correct its own mistakes it's not easy but it can be done and it has been done um so fictions can be extremely valid we need them we cannot have a large scale Society without them but they should be honest about their own fictional nature which gives us the ability to identify and correct our mistakes so the mistakes of our ancestors but there's something intrinsically conservative about this picture because it's admitting that something is a fiction or or a convention is not to say that you should um want to revise

it impetuously right absolutely it's very good that that very few people try to rethink the convention about whether to drive on the left side or the right side of the Road on a daily basis right because you we it's an arbitrary decision it's clearly arbitrary but it's it's crucially important that we all once we've decided that we not keep rethinking it yeah um and there are many things like that and so this this distrust in institutions that what has grown so corrosive is the sense that the appropriate response to each of the errors however embarrassing

they have been of late is to break fully with the institutions and in some sense reinvent civilization on your own you find some place to stand where you can reboot from and that actually seems to be I mean obviously there's there's a populist uh version of this which we can talk about I think we should talk about populism but this this message seems to be coming from on high I mean you you mentioned Donald Trump and Elon Musk as as Prime offenders they're Prime offenders on this very point they they they so distrust in our

institutions on on such a fundamental level and at such scale that it's coming from the right and from the left it's it's the populist position it's the Marxist position let's destroy the old world and create a new world in its place this is in the international in the in in the in the he how do you call it of of of Communism uh and it's also on on the populist right and you know as a historian I tend to be conservative in in the Deep sense of the word in the Buran sense of the word

I mean what you saw recently all over the world is the suicide of conservative parties that they abandoned the conservative values and became revolutionary parties like the Republican party today in the United States is a re is a revolutionary party revolutionary in the yeah no not just that it says that you know all the institutions are rotten they cannot be reformed we just need to destroy all of it and start again which I mean people can say this is true this is false let's leave that aside but just look at the structure of of it

it's this is what revolutionary parties look like they say things are so corrupted things are so out of order that the only thing left to do is to destroy all the existing institutions and start from scratch which is was the leninist position the Bolshevik position a 100 years ago and now it's the position of many so-called conservative parties that the the the traditional Insight of conservatism is that yes institutions are flowed institutions can be corrupted but it takes generations to build a functioning Society a functioning institution humans don't really have the capacity to understand the

full complexity of reality and to invent a perfect Society from scratch it just can't be done every time we try to do it it leads to disaster even worse than the things that we try to to to to to to correct you cannot create a perfect Society so move more slowly be more respectful of the existing institutions and traditions they need correction they need Amendment they need Improvement but just destroying them completely and starting from scratch I mean you have hundreds of years of kind of previous Corrections from real things that happened in history that

are baked into the system be very careful before you throw all of it out and try to start from scratch okay so what do we do about social media given that picture what what advice do you have for um the correcting the obvious pathology we see here if you could give advice to Elon Musk or or Mark Zuckerberg I mean one thing two things corporations should be liable for the actions of their algorithms and uh only humans have freedom of speech Bots and algorithms do not have freedom of speech and they should never masquerade as

humans so these are the two main things that that are needed that are to to correct social media so they're Publishers these platforms should be viewed as Publishers abs and their algorithm the tuning of the algorithm is an editorial Choice absolutely but this is strange to think about it but but one of the first jobs that was fully automated was not taxi driver it was not textile workers it was editors news editors it's amazing to think about it it was automated the job that once belonged to Lenin and musolini is now being done by algorithms

I mean Lenin before he was Soviet dictator he was editor of a newspaper uh iscra and musolini also he rose to power from being editor of the newspaper Avanti so this was like the promotion SC the promotion lder editor of a newspaper dictor of the country and this is is for a good reason I mean the editors of of news they sit at one of the most important Junctions in society they shape the conversation they decide what people would be aware of what people would be discussing and uh this is what some one of the

most important positions in society and now it's been taken over by algorithms because again in in iscra it was Lenin who decided what would be the top story of the today what would be the main headline and on Facebook it's an algorithm deciding what is at at the top of your feedback of your of your news but both of those sound bad so if you're going to give people a choice between Lenin and an algorithm they're going to take the algorithm so no the thing is that in not in a dictatorship in a democracy newspapers

and other news outlets are liable for their decisions like if the editor of the New York Times decides to publish some conspiracy theory of fake news at the front page of the New York Times he cannot hide or she cannot hide be behind the argument but free speech there are some people who believe it's true so I put it on the front page of the New York Times no your job as editor is not just to put something random there or something that would please people your job is to fact check and to take responsibility

for these decisions and to make sure that if you publish something on the front page of the New York Times you better be sure that uh uh this is accurate and this is responsible and if you don't know how to do it then you're in the wrong job and what again I would tell to you know to Facebook to to Twitter to Tik Tok I be very very careful before you censor human users I mean if if a human user decided to publish even a lie even a fake news even a conspiracy theory I would

be extremely careful before I shut down their account or or send those them but if the if my algorithm as the corporation then decides to promote this particular piece of fake news or this particular conspiracy theory this is on me this is on the not on the user the promotion it's the amplification not the fact that it exists on the network in the first place because they can't possibly prevent billions of pieces of content arriving every day right so they can't they can't guarantee that there'll be no malicious lies or even child pornography on their

on their Network and they it's the same way that you know people send letters to the New York Times every day so it's not that the position of the job of the New York Times to send of them but don't publish them on your front page unless you're sure that you did you know and sometimes okay sometimes you make mistakes but still your job is to fact check and to to think about about the the the the implications of this story and then take a very responsible decision about what you choose to promote the other

thing is that social media should Reserve freedom of speech to human beings not to Bots and to algorithms and in particular uh uh we should ban fake humans counterfeit humans if a bot pretends to be a human we should know about it like if you see the some story on Twitter gains a lot of traction a lot of traffic and you you think to yourself oh lots of humans are interested in this story this must be important I also want to know what everybody's talking about and you also start you click on it you also

start commenting on it but actually the entities that at least originally pushed this story to the top of the conversation they were not not humans they were Bots working in the service of of Putin or whoever this is wrong we should not have fake humans shaping the human conversation you know and democracy is a conversation imagine it as a group of people standing in a circle talking with each other suddenly a group of robots join the circle and talk very loudly very persuasively they pretend to be humans and you don't know you can't tell who

are the humans and who are the robots so the conversation breaks down to be clear you're not against bots of various kinds you you just think they should be declared as Bots absolutely again if if if you have a medical bot and you want to consult with that bot about some medical condition I mean soon we'll have ai doctors with capabilities far beyond human doctors I'm not against that they can improve health care dramatically they can help provide better health care for billions of people uh but when I talk with a non-human entity I want

to know that this is a non-human entity that I'm not talking with the human being they are welcome to join the conversation on condition that they don't masquerade as humans so so what you're arguing for essentially and I think this is a phrase you use in the book that we need Our Benevolent networks that have a fiduciary responsibility to their users yeah it's a very old principle I mean we don't need to invent anything new in this respect like if you think about your doctor or your therapist or your accountant or your lawyer uh for

centuries we already had these regulations and understanding that they have access to extremely private information to potentially explosive information about us that could maybe ruin our life and they have a fiduciary duty to use use that information only for our interests except in very extreme circumstances when there is a crime or something but our doctor for instance cannot take my personal information and sell it to third parties for profits and the same principle should hold uh with our relationship with the high-tech Giants I mean they should have the same responsibilities how how do you think

about this tradeoff between efficiency and inefficiency in that inefficent inefficiency sounds like it's a bug but as you point out in the book there are places where it's a feature because it is it's a b workk against totalitarianism and yet we want a certain kind of efficiency so as to be able to find malicious actors and terrorists Etc so um how do you view that in a in a in a reasonably well-functioning democracy that has institutions that are error correcting both with respect to truth and with respect to order how would you if you could

get your hands on the on the dial of efficiency how would you tune it I mean that's the Democratic conversation we avoid the extremes and find the middle path and you're bound to make mistakes so uh uh keep correcting your mistakes it's not like there is a Magic Bullet that solves it once once and for all right um so you know what is the right level of surveillance what is the right level of immigration you know this is what we have the democratic debate for for if you go for an extreme position that uh you

know humans have a a a a right to immigrate to anywhere they like in as as as huge as numbers as they like this is completely completely unfeasible open borders yeah so again how many immigrants a country want to absorb uh and under what conditions let's discuss different people have different views I don't think that people who want a more uh uh strict immigr policy this immediately turns them into fascists and Nazis and similarly people who want more lenient immigration policies less restrictive that doesn't turn them immediately into traitors who want to destroy the country

um let's have a conversation and try this policy and try that policy it should not be a kind of allout war between good and evil and the same goes for the level of surveillance and the same goes for the level again of free speech I mean in all these cases we need to find the middle path and it's difficult and we need to start with the assumption that we are not infallible and that other people might have good ideas about these questions okay so let's take this General framework that you've sketched in your book and

look at a few Uh current events so we have uh I'm there really is too much to talk about but we have the the US election we have the ongoing war in Ukraine we have the ongoing war between Israel now on uh at least two fronts um Israel and her enemies um let's start with the US election how do you view uh our circumstance here I mean there has been Ian we really are the the poster child for a lot of the dysfunction you describe uh more generically in your book I mean there there's just

a uh a pervasive sense that uh I think I think social media is is doesn't fully explain it but it certainly has Amplified the problem there's a pervasive sense that we have we've lost the capacity to speak to one another about rather fundamental issues and we're just hurdling toward some political catastrophe here so we have we have an election which however it goes it's quite plausible to imagine that half the country won't believe the results right given given what has happened in recent years so how do we pull back from the brink here so historically

there are two big dangers for the survival of democracies and you can see both of them now in the US one big danger is uh what we discussed earlier democracy is this system when you give power to a person to a party to try out some policies [Music]