YouSaid · the spoken record

Roman Krznaric

lines on the record: 38
first: 2024-09-09
most recent: 2024-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“being committed to the values and vision that you have, even if the odds are against you, that we always have to act as if change were possible because it just might well be that our evolutioners of a species, the way we've changed, has been through acting against the odds. Do you think that or do we think that, you know, Gandhi and the Indian independence movement leaders and activists thought it was going to be easy to overthrow the British Empire? They must have thought it was impossible. I mean, it took them a long time too, right? But that eventually happened through many forces coming together, but including their collective action. So let's remember that power that we have when we are not one but many.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One third of the economy is a cooperative and steward-owned economy and one third of employment is in that form too. That's a place of five million people. So I find radical hope in these places. And going back to that idea, you know, I'm not an optimistic person. You know, I look through history and see greed and destruction and genocide. You know, I studied the genocide in Guatemala for seven years when I was a researcher in politics. So I recognized that that happens. And I do think we are on a course of ecological and technological self-termination. But I also look through history and see these moments of possibility, recognition that it doesn't have to be this way, that we have sometimes, not always, risen to those challenges and crises. And so rather than being optimistic, a kind of glass half fullness idea that everything will be okay despite the evidence, I'm a believer in radical hope by which I mean”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“us to forge that kind of more collaborative collective society. So we need to do this in the economic realm as well. I think one of the things I've seen that's very hopeful is the emergence of a new generation of cooperative and steward-owned companies that are not just owned by their shareholders, but the shareholders, the companies often owned in public trust or by community stakeholders. Think of the hiking company Patagonia, right, which has changed the way they own. So basically, as they now say it, that the earth is their only shareholder, they now have a fiduciary duty, not just to make money. Yeah, they've got to make a bit of money, but to also a duty to the planet itself and ecological and social impacts. And as more and more of these kinds of businesses emerge, I think that's also part of what changes the culture of cooperation. And there are deep histories of that too. The region of Amelia-Romagna in Italy, one third of the business”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“kind of way of thinking, and I guess as individuals, well, what's the first best thing we can do? Well, probably the first thing we should do is to think of ourselves not as individuals, you know, to try and, when we are acting as citizens, to try and act collectively in whatever way that is and to find a kind of joy in that where we can, whether it is setting up a street actually just a couple of weeks ago, we had a street market, which we organized through our local WhatsApp group, and we were meeting each other face to face in ways that we don't normally do. But you might do your communal action through being part of your school parents and teachers association. You might be lying on the street, you know, with your teenage kids blocking a road with a radical environmental movement, which is something that I sometimes do. Like I have done with my daughter, even though I like spending most of my time sitting in libraries, writing books. But of course we need the institutions around us.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that is the root question that is sort of a thread throughout the book and a dilemma throughout the book in a sense. You know, at one point I talk about the 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun, who wrote this book called The Mukadima, a kind of a treatise on history about what causes the rise and fall of civilizations. And he said, well, the key factor is what he called Asabia. And this is an Arabic word meaning collective solidarity or group feeling. And when that erodes, societies fall apart, it might erode, for example, because of inequalities in society. So how do we create that sense of the communal, the public, the collective values which can challenge our inheritance of hyperindividualism from the twentieth century which has been emerged from neoliberal capitalism, from the self help industry, from Freud to Oprah, which have made us ask ourselves or think that the big question of our time is who am I or who are you? How do we shift to that? Who are you?”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's certainly a case where one has to choose one's battles wisely. I mean, in fact, just next week I'm going to be in the Netherlands and I'm going to be speaking at the Dutch Parliament to Dutch parliamentarians about how they can rethink what their form of government looks like and what democracy looks like, how to make it much more long term. And one of the things I'm sort of advocating there is that they ought to have a new public position called a future generations commissioner. Looks at the impact of public policy on the long term, but that that future generations commissioner is informed by a citizens' assembly, ancient Greek style that holds it to account. And I think sometimes in their political moments there are spaces for these kinds of change. And I think this is one of those changes. Like the idea of the House of Lords becoming a House of Citizens in the UK, I think it would be a useful use of energy, I think, to try and do that. But it might be much harder to do something similar in the United States at the federal level, for example, right now.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More and more authoritarian governments and a failure of this system to deal with things like the climate crisis. We've had three decades since the alarm bells began to ring at Rio in 1992 with the ecological crisis. So why would you think that this is a system that's going to work and solve our kinds of problems? I just think it is too risky to stick to the old system of representative government. And now what do you think on this? You must have thought about this a lot, Adam.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About two hundred and fifty neighborhood assemblies where, in this case all men, but rich and poor could participate making local decisions, and then they sent delegates up to a commune level for bigger decisions than they had a federal assembly that met a couple of times a year to discuss defense and things like that. And there's no reason why we couldn't be taking elements of that today using digital tools like we have in participatory budgeting in some countries where in Paris or in Madrid or in Porto La Gra in Brazil where citizens can just vote directly on their phones of how to allocate parts of the budget. And that's kind of much more direct than our old representative system. So there are so many more ways of designing democracy. And I know this is a long answer, so I'll stop. But let me just say one more thing. Going back to your actual question, which is, you know, we are facing a time of democratic fatigue syndrome, you know, falling trust in government, the rise of autocratization.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, in the UK, I'm an advocate of saying, why don't we turn the House of Lords into a house of citizens, which is selected like a jury from random members of the public, and there's a debate that's about to happen in the Labour Party about what the reform of the House of Lords might be. The new government wants to change the House of Lords, but they're not really thinking about this kind of sortition. They want to have another kind of representative system. So that's one form of democracy. And then the other form of democracy, which has emerged historically, is what's sometimes called assembly democracy, where you have people participating at the grassroots in local neighborhood assemblies. And for example, in Switzerland in the 16th century, I don't know why I'd never taught this or learnt about this as a student or as a lecturer. There was this whole, basically a country within today's Switzerland called the Free State of Ratia. The best kept secret in the history of democracy where they basically had a kind of an anarchist form of government where they had”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea that public office would be members of public office would be randomly selected. And there's a long history of this in other cultures as well, in Indian indigenous cultures, in the Chinese Civil Service, random selection, like juries. And there's been a revival of this today in the idea of the Citizens Assembly, where Ireland, for example, about 10 years ago famously held a citizens' assembly on abortion, a very hot political topic where they selected about 100 members of society randomly selected but controlled for differences in gender and age and ethnicity and geography, and they deliberated on that issue, and they recommended there should be a referendum to change the constitution and that referendum passed. And since then, there's been an explosion of these citizens' assembly kind of ancient Greek style. It's quite amazing, but it's a much more direct form of political participation. And I'm a big advocate of that.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is a question that really resonates with me personally because I used to teach university courses and lecture on democratic history and theory and practice. And I remember when I used to do this, this is like more than 20 years ago. You know, I used to think that, well, democracy was representative democracy, this idea of electing leaders.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“which brings together families from Palestinian and Israeli families who have something in common, which is that they've all had family members killed in the conflict. And it brings them together for dialogue projects. And one of them they did some years ago was called the Hello Peace Telephone Line, where any Israeli could call a free phone number and they were put through to a Palestinian stranger who they could talk to for up to half an hour about anything. And the Palestinians could call a similar number and they were put through to Israelis and in its first five years of operation over one million calls were made on this Hello Peace telephone line. So I think these are the kind of projects that we need to kind of think imaginatively about how we can create kinds of dialogue, but in a way they are rooted in things like the coffee house conversations of the early 18th century.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We invite them to a meal, but we give them a bit of food. But we give them the main thing we gave them was not a menu of food, but a menu of conversation with questions about life on it. Like, what have you learned about the different varieties of love in your life? Or in what ways would you like to be more courageous? And the idea is like the opposite of speed dating. You talk not for one minute, but for one hour. And it was all about trying to find that common ground in a way going back to Hannah Arendt idea of how do we resuscitate common values. We try and find something that we share with another person, but also to recognize that we are all different as well. There's always a dance between similarity and difference. I think that is actually how we build empathy and mutual understanding. And then so I've been very inspired by those kind of projects, but there are so many really powerful projects around. I mean, one I became very interested in in Israel-Palestine that still operates today is an organization called the Parents Circle or the Bereaved Families Forum.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“through conversations amongst workers or across class about new ideas, about republicanism, about rights. You can go back to the Tom Pain and the Rights of Man, all sorts of things like that. How do we start doing that today? And Zelden founded this organization that I worked for for several years called the Oxford Muse, spelled M-U-S-E. And this is in the early 2000s. And the Oxford Muse was invented to create conversations between strangers. And so what we did, and my job, this is actually when I left being a political scientist, I left academia to do this. I started organizing these mass conversation meals in person, in different countries, in different cities and also where I happened to live in the city of Oxford in the UK, where we would bring together people from different social backgrounds, old and young, people from different religions, people from different cities, different departments in a company or in government, and we would sit them down with a stranger and we would give them not a menu of food.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's really great to bring up Hanar there and that idea of, you know, the table, the table disappearing, both sort of the physical tables and the digital tables, the community tables taken over by whether it's the diatribe of social media trolling and anonymous critique or the shopping centers where we're spending our timping rather than talking. How do we kind of revive a culture of conversation? And certainly I've spent much of my last 20 years trying to work in this area. In fact, I used to work with a historian of conversation called Theodore Zelden, who wrote a very powerful book in the 1990s, a big bestseller called An Intimate History of the Humanity. And one of his conclusions was one of the most fundamental ways to create change is through creating conversations across social divides. And while you're going back to what you said, he studied a lot the French Revolution. How did that happen? Well, that partly happened.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“ten conversations between strangers a day in those thirty thousand coffee houses there would be over one hundred million conversations a year. And I think this is part of a way of thinking about how do we revive democratic culture and conversation at a time of social polarization, the time of declining trust of institutions, political institutions, particularly democratic institutions. We need conversation with strangers to overcome divides. We need institutions.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Political philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who's actually still alive just, you know, he wrote his PhD actually about, you must have been in the, I don't know when, in the 40s, 50s would have thought, 1950s, about the impact of the London coffee houses on creating what he called the public sphere, a kind of a space for democratic culture and conversation to emerge. And that was really important in the rise of democratic rights and government in the 18th and into the 19th century. And then we can go to today and think about the coffee houses that you go to and that I've just been to my local coffee house this morning. Where are the communal tables? No, most people are sitting there with their headphones on or in front of their laptops on their phones, not talking to anybody. And if we were taking the lesson from the 18th century, we'd put the coffee tables, the communal tables back in those coffee houses. I mean, Britain, for example, has over thirty thousand coffee houses now. There's been an explosion like in the early 1800s.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just explain this briefly. If you went into a coffee house in 1700 in London, there were almost 2,000 of them at the time. It's a huge explosion of them. You'd walk in and you could, you know, for a penny, you could get yourself a cup or normally a bowl of coffee. And the place you probably sit down is at the communal table. Most of them had communal tables, and on the communal tables there were the pamphlets and periodicals of the time, so this is where the printing press was coming in. They provided the kind of reading material. You'd sit down, you'd read the latest pamphlets and periodicals and Broad Street papers, and you would have an opportunity there to talk with strangers because these were communal tables. And the coffee house again very strong historical evidence around this became a kind of place for the emergence of a democratic culture, for conversations about not just science and literature and business, but also things like antislavery or republicanism, and that's why the German”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and inflamed the wars of religion of the seventeenth and eighteenth century which killed tens of millions of people. So we already know that there's this history of a communication technology, the printing press in this case, which had a kind of violence that it engendered in the same way that we see happening with social media today, the polarizations that come out of anti-Trump, pro-Trump, pro-climate change, anti-climate change, polarizations emerging as we get fed the same news feeds on digital media due to the algorithms which are permeating our minds and our lives. But the other thing about the printing press, though, is that it didn't just have those negative impacts going back to the coffee house now is that as the coffee houses emerged in the late seventeen thirty, eighteen century, an invention of course which came from Turkey, what they did is they, in a way, used what the printing press offered, which was the printed word.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the coffee house is a really fascinating moment of emergence of a kind of social institution, particularly in Britain in the early 1700s. But in a way that the power of the coffee house to understand that you need to go back a little bit to the invention of the printing press. Because one of the things about the invention of the printing press in the late 15th century is when it started spreading across Europe in the 16th and 17th century, it actually created not just a spread of literacy and education, but also acute social and political polarization, because one of the things the printing press did is it enabled Protestant reformers like Martin Luther to use the presses to challenge Catholic authority to spread anti church, anti established church messages, and this very strong historical evidence that that use of the printing press by the Protestant reformers helped accelerate”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Generation upon generation not just in We need to, in my view, use examples like Edo to start opening out that public conversation about rationing carbon, rationing red meat, because I think those trictures are coming our way. Politicians, of course, don't want to touch them because it seems like an electoral nightmare to do so, and it may require a certain kind of rebranding, like looking at idea of personal carbon allowances. But again, I think, you know, the Edo period is one amongst many kinds of societies that can help us start that kind of conversation that we need to have, again, not trying to find a blueprint, but let's at least open up our imaginations to change.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“was happening there in Edo was they had a rationing of key resources like wood imposed through regulations and I think we need to think about that today in order to ratchet down our consumer demand because it's clear that it's very very difficult to achieve the kind of carbon emissions and material impacts or biodiversity loss impacts that we're trying to have today without actually reducing demand itself in some way and I think we're moving to a world where we're going to start having these conversations about rationing which of course has been brought in in an extreme times in the western world during the Second World War for instance in Britain in the United States but you know you've got economists today major thinkers like Thomas Picketty saying well actually maybe we need to be reducing carbon and using a rationing system personal carbon allowances there sometimes talked about and we can look back to Edo and say well actually those were operating for”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about it is just if you know you think about a standard smartphone which has over 50% of the elements of the periodic table in it, all those rare earth metals which is thrown away after less than three years on average. Well, if we had a kind of Edo mindset, we would not allow for the, or we would rapidly phase out the sale of those kinds of phones so they wouldn't be there on the virtual or the physical shelves, that they would have to use recycled materials, they would have to be modular by design like houses in Edo Japan where you could easily replace the batteries and the screens and things like that. And of course, there are phones around like that. The Dutch fair phone is one example, but I think just as, you know, we've banned products which are dangerous to human health, like asbestos, you know, we should be doing the same for planetary health and moving us towards a circular economy to do that. But I think the other thing is, as you mentioned there, that what else”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think this is also Edo, Japan's an important example because clearly it was a very different society than the one we are in today. It was basically a military dictatorship. It was a feudal, patriarchal society. So I'm certainly not saying let's repeat all of that. But if we're trying to take that circular mindset in today's world, I mean, I think one thing we should be talking about is how do we create sort of radically circular economies which are very low on waste, low on ecological impact. What can we take from what was happening in Edo? And I think, of course, we are trading with the outside world today, most nations, unlike Edo at Japan. So we don't have those artificial strictures on key resources. In fact, we have an overabundance of many of the most dangerous resources like single-use plastics and the petrochemicals behind them. So I think we need to regulate our way into that kind of edo economy. So the way I”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of urbanized ecological civilization, the kind of thing that so many people aspire to today. And I think it raises a question, okay, what if we wanted to bring that edonomics into the world today? How would we do it? What can we learn from that? And I think there are fascinating lessons in that very example itself”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Businesses in the city of Edo in the eighteenth century collecting candle wax to be refurbished that down and out samurai would be repairing old wooden umbrellas, that traders would come and pay you for your human waste and then sell it on as agricultural fertilizer. I mean, they also had a system of rationing of timber and they did mass plantation forestry as well. So you can kind of look back at that period and think, oh my God, I remember when I first came across this, I thought this was probably the one of the world's first large-scale examples of a”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then the Togawa shoguns were ruling, and one of the remarkable things about the city of Edo today's Tokyo in the eighteenth century was how huge it was over a million people, so much bigger than London or Paris at the time. But the other amazing thing about Edo in the 18th century was that it was what we were today probably call a circular economy, an economy where they reused, repurposed, refurbished and recycled almost everything. And that was partly because at the time Japan wasn't trading much with the outside world. So you had shortages of key resources like wood or cotton. And so therefore, you know, you might have a cotton kimono and when it started to wear out you would turn it into pajamas that you would wear at night, and then it would be cut up into nappies, and then those nappies would be turned into cleaning cloths and finally burnt as fuel. And there were thousands of circular businesses.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think sometimes when one thinks about things like our consumer capitalist culture, I shop there for I am culture. It almost seems like it's impossible to challenge us. The philosopher Slavosk once famously said, or at least allegedly said that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And when you look at that long history in Western Europe of rising consumer culture, the invention of department stores, the PR industry emerging after the First World War, you think, oh my God, we can't change this system. You know, when I go to my local shopping center, thousands of people packed in there, you know, seeming to have a good time shopping away, but also creating huge ecological footprints. So it's interesting that we can look at other parts of the world and see whole different forms of economies emerging and operating. So one of the things I do, as you mentioned in the book, is go back to Japan in the 18th century, the period known as the Edo period.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I agree with that, actually. And there are no recipes or no blueprints in history. I don't think there are any iron laws. I mean, what I've tried to do in this book history for tomorrow is to, you know, look at the past instead of doing what I think a lot of historians do and do really well is to look at the past for warnings from history, look at what went wrong, you know, how we shouldn't repeat colonialism or the lessons of interwar fascism. I've tried to look for kind of what went right rather than what went wrong to focus on the moments of constructive change where we have risen to challenges, we've tackled injustices, we've built cities and civilizations. And, you know, there, of course, I don't think there are always any clear patterns. But I think what we do see is the amazing capacity of human societies to actually to organize together to tackle problems, to rise to challenges through history. It doesn't always happen in the same way.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's not a pattern that is always there, but I think you can see that today with the way that more radical ecological movements are actually helping to shift the conversation, allowing the more mainstream movements. I mean, in the British case, you know, movements like Friends of the Earth or Royal Society Protection of Birds or rewilding these kind of things, they get a bit more airtime, I think, partly because of those radical flank movements. I mean, what do you think about that, Adam? What's your view?”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But back then we didn't, I don't think didn't have them as embedded in public culture and discussion, and so what ended up happening you had ended up having a bailing out of the banks, you know, the old system is still there. But I think part of that story of what makes movements play successful roles in these contingent circumstances is, as you mentioned, that the idea of radical flank movements that often what you need is there'll be a moderate movement, say, take the US civil rights movement under Martin Luther King Jr. That's the sort of the mainstream movement. But for them to be successful, you will often need a radical flank or more extreme movement in the 1960s case in the US, the example there being the Black Power movement, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, groups like that. And what they do is they make the moderate movement look a bit more palatable or reasonable by comparison. And that helps them get a foot in the door of political change.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“extreme temperatures across Europe or melting ice sheets, and the second element you need are the disruptive movements who can amplify the crisis which we've just talked about. And then the third element are visionary or powerful ideas, new models that can replace the old system, and Milton Friedman, who I don't quote very often once said that a crisis is an opportunity for change, but the actions that are taken to quote him depend on the ideas that are lying around. And one might say, well, look back at the 2008 financial crash, you had the crisis of the crash itself, which was extreme. You had the disruptive movements like the Occupy movement which spread from Zukoti Park in New York across to more than eighty countries within eight weeks, but I don't think we really had the new economic models then at the time, some of them we have around now perhaps some of the post growth models regenerative economics, donor economics, well-being economies, modern monetary theory, things like that.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's actually Ryan. It's really important to highlight the importance of contingency and that nothing in history is inevitable really until it happens. I remember my high school history teacher telling me that. And I think that's right. And I think that change, particularly constructive progressive change, often requires a rare combination of factors to come together. So I think going back to that issue of fossil fuel addiction or the civil rights movement in the US, towards the end of the book, I offer a kind of a theory of how change happens called the disruption nexus, which is the idea that imagine a triangle that each corner of the triangle has a sort of a key element required for bringing about transformative change. One is a crisis. You need some kind of crisis going on. It could be something like the financial crisis in 2008 or aspects of today's ecological crisis, wildfires in California.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and thirties in the time of the slave economy in Britain, it was, for example, that Great Jamaica slave uprising of eighteen thirty one. Too late to leave the fossil fuel crisis to the low flame of gradualism, we need something much more transformative.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“plowed and our economies are still so dependent on fossil fuels and when I listen to that I suddenly thought I've heard this before and I realized where I've heard these kind of arguments before were 200 years ago when British slave plantation owners and financiers were making exactly the same arguments because at the time Britain was still had a slave economy in the Caribbean seven hundred thousand enslaved people working on sugar plantations and those who ran that economy were saying yes we realize that slavery might be wrong but our economy depends on it so we can't end this too quickly we need to take decades to do it we need to be gradual and that's part of what prompted my thinking about this and then that raises the question well how do we create non-gradual more rapid change and I think you know there's a very strong historical pattern of the power of disruptive movements to create change back in the 1820s”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way I went at this question of how do we overcome our fossil fuel addiction, which is clearly something we need to do given that CO2 emissions of more than doubled in the last 30 years, there are no countries in the world that are reducing their carbon addictions or anything like the pace and scale required. Some are making progress, but most are not making nearly enough progress. So that raises a question of how do we get governments to take radical transformative action? Because I think what we sense now, I think most of us sense, is kind of an overwhelming gradualism. I remember being at a TED talk, actually, a TED conference a few years ago, and the former CEO of the petroleum company Shell was speaking, and he was saying that, well, you know, Shell, we recognize it as a fossil fuel crisis and we need to get off carbon, but we can't do this too quickly. We've got to be gradual about this, maybe be net zero by 2050, because otherwise the business will improve.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“finding fulfilling work or dealing with family crises, and this new book history for tomorrow is really about what history contlemas of public life as opposed to private life, hence those topics like how do we overcome our addiction to fossil fuels, how do we deal with risks from AI, how do we deal with threats to democracy and migration. So there has been a kind of an evolution for me, but more and more. I feel a kind of frustration with our politicians and policy makers for their historical myopia that they are so caught in the present tense they're dealing with the next opinion poll, the latest tweet, the next election, or they're crossing their fingers and hoping that technologies will come and deal with our civilization or crisis for us. And it seems to me there's a huge failure of imagination to recognize that to go forward, sometimes we actually need to look backwards.”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, so I guess I began my working life as a political scientist, as an academic back in the nineteen nineties, and at that time I very much believed that and I still believe that the way to understand the contemporary world is to understand how we got to where we are today. I wrote my PhD thesis about political conflict in Guatemala and the Civil War, but that seemingly obscure and indeed obscure topic was one that I couldn't really understand without understanding Latin American colonial history, for example. So since then I've been trying to delve into the past in various ways to understand the issues and crises of our time. Now back about fifteen years ago I wrote a book called The Wonder Box, which was about what history can teach us about the dilemmas of personal life. What can we learn from history about thinking about death or”
2024-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · Lessons from History on How to Tackle Today's Greatest Challenges, with Roman Krznaric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT