Well, you got me at the title. Okay. All right. Even if youre not a history buff, in these scary unprecedented times its incumbent on all of us to look back to see where weve been and how we got here now. And hopefully some perspective of where were going. This sixyear investment produced a global history of the human journey, which takes us from the stone age to the virtual age. Mr. Ansary proposes the history of the story were telling one another, since theres no single circle of story tellers, there must be many world histories. This dramatic journey asked us all, these asks us in all interwinding narratives, actually inform us on one single big story of our planet and if so, what might it be . The book explores links and Ripple Effects that stitch the fabric of history. Theres a lot of pivotal moments. Has anybody finished reading it . Because its just came out. Okay. Well, you dont count. Okay, you dont count. [laughter] all right. Okay. Its columbuss describing the banks in europe and drew the entire world into one great global drama. Kirkus writes of the story to mean an afghan american, San Francisco based author draws nicely on his experiences of life in the different worlds of islam and the secular west to help readers understand the outcomes of overlapping narratives. He examines the role of interconnections and development of everything from board games to belief systems, science, and multinational corporations. A wellwritten and valuable take on the diverse narratives that have helped shape Human History. Of course, we know him from other things, right . How many people have read his other books . Okay. Are a good crowd here. Okay. Proceeding this publication, there have been five other books. Road trips, games without rules and often disrupted history of afghanistan, destiny history of the world through islamic eyes and then a work of fiction, the widows history a historic fiction that takes place in 1840 in kabul and west of kabul, and east of new york. His memoir pub published in the wake of the 9 11 crisis, and chronicles a bicultural life and hes also written, i was surprised about this, six book series for children. So in your free time. [laughter] i dont know what youre doing, but being here tonight is really really a joy and lets put our hands together for this amazing man. [applaus [applause] so i have two mics here. Is this the way it goes now . And this is cspan, i dont know which is which, im going to do the best i can. So, anyway, you know, i did write childrens books and although ive been working on this book, i say for six years, i remember maybe the origins go back a little further. I remember when my presently 36yearold daughter jazz manipula manipulate jasmine was eight, you do the math. I not only wrote childrens books, but told her stories and made them up on the spot and i had the idea then that im going to write a childrens history of the world. I said jazzy, im going to write a history of the world. And she wrinkled her brow, daddy, didnt they already write that one . Now i want to say that not only did they write that one, but even though ive written one here myself, i myself actually wrote another one earlier. [laughter] so, its really true that i have been thinking about this for a long time. And the way ive been thinking about it, i think i can trigger off from this, the past six years ive been working on this, and people say what are you working on . And i say the history of the world. And they go, no, what are you working on . It doesnt improve when i say its a history of the world from the big bang to right now and the a common comment is, it must be 40,000 pages long. Thats the whole point. Thats why there was the history for the childrens books. And this is shorter than the history of afghanistan that i wrote. That doesnt only reflect the fact that afghanistan is more complicated than the entire world [laughter] it goes right to the point. If youre going to undertake to write the history of the world from the big bang to right now, clearly youre going to leave some stuff out so now, what do you leave out . And what do you leave in . And why do you take something out and why do you leave something in . There has to be some principle of inclusion and exclusion. And im going to suggest that for me the principle is that youre including everything that tells the story and youre going to leave out stuff that gets in the way of seeing the story. So the question is, where do you find the through line for a story of Human History . Ill leave the big bang alone for right now, right now i really am thinking of humanity. And so, around the time that i first started seriously thinking of writing this book, as she knows if shes here, i went back to afghanistan in 2011, when i grew up afghanistan was like a synonym for the world remote. If you said remote and afghan had the same meaning. And kabul, im not headed to remote now, thats not happening now. I landed in kabul, theres the wrecks of former soviet tanks and then big indications of american presence, theres buildings, cars everywhere and it feels kind of like paris and new york, different flavor, maybe grungier, one of those cities. And maybe remote isnt in kabul. Youve got to leave the city to fine what used to be here. So with some people, we got in a car and we drove, i think it was about eight or 10 hours and we got to the Central Highlands of afghans, where the buddhas used to be that the taliban bombed out of existence and you know, there was nothing. Whats there now is some buddha shaped holes in the mountain. Theres a town there, a somewhat substantial town. So my friend said, no, were not stopping here, theres a place further down the valley, its called the valley of the dragon, well go there. So we drove along, drove along and somewhere along the way in this desert, im looking up and i see a little glistening of white line on a little mud village thats clinging to the hillside there. By that time weve kind of run out of road and were following the tracks of earlier vehicles and going up to this Little Village, we dont see much, you know, maybe theres some tracks, but its that feels like maybe this is remote. So im saying what is this little glistening white line . I asked for a binoculars and what i see up there is a satellite dish and im like well, how do they what do they do with a satellite dish . Operate a television. What are how did they operate a television, theres no electrical lines coming in. Well, theyve got solar panels. How do they get solar panels . Theyve got a motorcycle and they go where theres solar panels. How do they pay for any of this . A lot of times theres opium grown here and opium is kind of as good a currency of gold in a sense because infinitely sub divisible and pay for small things with a little bit of opium and it doesnt decay, you can store it, its there next year. What happens with the opium . Well that goes to taz stand, uzbekistan and processed into more refined versions of the drug and goes across turkey, al baena, europe and probably some of it comes to San Francisco. So im like, oh, okay. So there is some kind of a network here that connects me and San Francisco, this Little Village up there in the valley. And, but i say what could they be possibly watching on that thing . Well, theres lots of programming out of kabul in fact the most popular show right then was afghan star. Some of you probably know what afghan star is. How many dont . Okay. So afghan star, singers all over afghanistan compete, you know, and they thin out to a playoff championship sort of thing and then finally one person is by cell phone vote of the audience chosen the winner of the year and thats the afghan star. Obviously cloned off of american idol, which was itself cloned off of british pop idol. So now, wait, british pop idol, afghan star, american idol, and you know, at that same time im just browsing around, reading information and finding that that time, that year, anyhow i was told that 80 of the childrens toys used by sold to kids for that year were made in china and china, one of its products was inexpensive motorcycles that was made just for the market that im looking at in that valley. So at that point i thought back and i said, all right, 50,000 years ago i didnt put a date on it, but way back before villages and cities and all of that stuff, the human animal on the planet existed as small bands of relatives, basically, and they were probably not much bigger than 180, 200 people. And they lived in no fixed spot, roamed around and foraged and hunted and probably knew other bands of relatives in their areas where they kn nomadicly migrated, so if thats the beginning, lets start there and then this is where we ended up is the planet is one intertangled spaghetti of human lives, anything that happens to any human or that any human does anyplace, might have Ripple Effects that goes out and has some effect on somebody else, anywhere else on the planet. And on that planet, theres no place left thats un, you know, thats unaltered by our presence. So, i thought, okay, thats maybe the trajectory. We could take that as a trajectory or a through line. Thats when i started writing this book and in the course of thinking about it and exploring it, and thinking about how this ever increasing interconnectedness took place, what ive gradually sort of dawned on me that and its obvious, but im going to say it anyhow, the interconnectedness did not just evenly spread out, you know, it wasnt like were living in a still pool of water and little ripples and just, thats not how it is. You know, human the human world consists not of still waters, but lots of whirlpools. And each whirlpool is some group of people that are talking to each other, but not that much to somebody else. And in the end, i thought, well, okay. So, theres three things that are at play here. Everybody lives in some environment and everything they do has something to do with how they get what they need out of that environment, whatever it be and repel whatever it is out there that might hurt them. As humans, always from the time we were able to say okay, this is the human species, we did it with environment and tools. Theres one other thing, the third part of the whole story. Some of you started reading this so i dont know if i should read the beginning here, but ill go ahead and read from chapter one here. One day in the fall of 1840, someone in france, searching for a buried treasure they heard about when their dog robot suddenly scurried into a depression made by an uprooted tree and pawing at something. The teenagers rushed over, no, it wasnt an old treasure chest, it was a small dark opening in the ground so they did what teenagers do, what i myself might have certainly done at that age, they squeezed through the opening to see where it led. They had flashlights with them, which was a good thing. The whole went down a long way before opening at last into a cavernist room, and there flashing their lights on on the wall, and 15, 20 feet bigger than life paintings of buffalo, deer and other animals rendered gracefully and realistically in black, red, oaker and yellow. Theyd found one of the worlds most spectacular gallery of paleolythic art. Theyre still being found in hundreds of sites from pain, to libya to indonesia. In many cases the paintings in the given cave were made over the course of thousands of years. People were coming there to paint generation after generation. But the oldest of them were made about 40,000 years ago, and the odd thing is, those earliest paintings were already quite sophisticated and then i go through some examples, but, you know, the thing is, it isnt like you turn up examples of crude beginnings of doodling and then thousands of years later that people have learned how to make a kind of a have aingly animal. No. We were not that much distinguishable from neanderthals and other bipedal primates that we shared the planet with. Humans took an up tick and raises the question, what happened, what caused that, something must have happened about 40 to 50,000 years ago. What was it . Okay. My proposal is, we came into true language and true language is not the ability to make words that mean something. You know, my cat raul knows 10 or 15 words. You know, theres one word that he knows which means food and he says it and then he gets food. And cocoa the gorilla using sign language actually knew a thousand words or somewhere this that range and cocoa could say things like ice cream. And crows can make up new words for things that appear in their environment they can make up a word among crows, that bastard that hurt one of us, caw, caw, farmer brown coming. Words are pointing, and theyre really not at the, you know, at a significant level theyre not different than pointing. What im talking about when i say true language is vocabulary embedded in grammar and syntax. What i mean is words can stop referring directly to things in the world and start having a relationship with other words, and let me just say a little about that. The meaning is not relationship to something in the physical world, its their relationship to other words. Developing language meant we could start using words as if they were the objects named. Words could then separate from things of their own, once that happened a whole world of words could form parallel to the world of things. Two language users could enter that world and interact within it as if it were the world itself. Picture two guys talking, one says lets meet for lunch tomorrow at that taco place on courtland and the other says, im game, so what time . About noon . Nothing in their physical setting corresponds to any of the words these guys have spoken. Tomorrow, lunch, noon, what could they point to . Nothing. And those are not even the most distinctive distinctively linguistic of their utterances. At, of, they only exist in the world. When we acquire true language we graduate beyond words that cause had your buddies to run and salivate. We have sounds that conjured up in our fellow humans imagination the whole world. When two guys talk about getting tacos tomorrow at noon, theyre not only interacting in a world theyre each imagining, theyre imagining the same world. If they werent, they wouldnt both show up at the same place and time tomorrow. Thats the truly incredible thing. Theyre imagining the same world. And i will, you know, drive it home by saying here we are wherever we are, 40, 50 people. Were not experiencing the material physical world directly, were experiencing a model of the world that we share and we think its the same world and you know, in the course of human cultures developing, you can trace how, for example, people who lived on the nile river, because of the way the nile is, its this wonderful waterway protected from all over things, the Sahara Desert that way, another desert that way and big cataracts of water falls that way. So its the 600 miles of a river that feeds the soil all along it and that river is a current that just steadily moves north and over that river is a breeze that constantly blows south. So, whoa, if anyplace along that river, you put it in the water and put the sail down going north, put the sail down, south. No wonder all along that river emerges a monolithic and sort of homogenous civilization. Ill not go into, but go over to mesopotamia and its a different river. People are there because they can grow crops there. Their culture is different there because their idea of the world is tuned into the environment in which theyre living. In this river, you know, read the book, its a different kind of river, in china, a different kind of river. So, in these various environments there are world views building up and when i speak of world views, to a large extent, what im talking about is when people are talking more to one another than they are to others out there, whoever they may be, their stories recirculate and reinforce and weave together until they not only have a narrative. They have a sort of meta narrative. A story of the world that they all kind of feel themselves to be living in and situate themselves within. And the history of the world to me, one of the things that you can see happening, and therefore, one way in which you can construct a single whole story out of it, is by looking at the way these imagery worlds, im just going to call them that, these imagined, these worlds that are collectively constructed, communally inhabited, but experienced as kids. These Little Things start someplace and then as the groups expand, the worlds expand and some point they run into an expanding world view from some other place and then those overlap and then theres things happen. Not necessarily fighting though. You know . When you have people who are okay buying different world views and they become aware, there is someone else over there, they have a whole other way of thinking about the world. One other things that happened, curiosity, whats going on over there . Im going to keep the fire warm, im going to talk to those guys. Did they speak a different language . I cant talk to them. So theres that thing that happens or sometimes two groups trade and you know, they form a relationship that way or sometimes, one group wants what the other group has and then there might be some fighting. So if you look at the history of the world, you see this constant expansion of these i dont want to call them bubbles. Theyre sort of like clouds of identifies that are coherent internally and they have a structure and grow and overlap and sometimes they clash and sometimes theyre one bigger narrative and i would say that, you know, these narratives, even when they interweave, the ghosts of them stay in the bigger narrative that form. So what we have today is a planet on which, you know, it doesnt matter if someone is living on the nile river and someone is living on the mississippi, location doesnt matter anymore, these narratives can be anywhere in the world and theyre all overlapping at the same time and what were negotiating is is how to figure out, what is a big story that were all inside of. Ill add one more thing before i okay. And maybe i wont add one more thing. [laughte [laughter] i will say this, you know, a narrative we share with other people how we hang together as a coordinated group that is able to cope with the environment that consists of the unknown out thereness of it all. And the narrative that we share with other people is sort of like a social self. And a social self implies a social other. Theres a self and theres always other out there. Self and other is not necessarily warfare, you know. Self and other is just a condition of humanity. If there is a sense that theres not going to be enough, you know, resources are thin, someones going to have to be excluded from the dinner table. Thats when it becomes more the case that people start looking around and saying, who am i not going to share with if it comes to that . And i think these narratives or to put it another way, culture is the significance of it is that is how people sort when the violence might be coming because of resources, or the other possibility, the violence might be coming because the narrative, we are living in, is growing incoherent and it doesnt explain whats going on anymore. And now people are at a loss has to how to construct an identity, living in not a coherent constellation of ideas, but in a chaotic, you know, cloud of ideas. And at that point its possible you might see people clustering into smaller constellations so it makes sense so it could be somebody they know inside that cloud. And thats another thing that were doing here. When ive been presenting this book, like i did an interview in portland when i went at a Radio Station called me and to my kind of like bafflement, they werent interested in the big bang or any of the stuff i just talked about, they kind of said so what does it all have to do with the impeachment of trump . [laughter] so it does, actually. Thats the lens through which you can understand things. Have two examples. Narratives have independent ideas that are connected and have to reinforce each other, and ideas themselves can disconnect and be part of a different narrative. When two are available and have means for those interpreting their experience and thats a narrative beginning to form and im going to look at the idea of gun control, you know, the yoid that idea that they should be regulated or whatever that question is. And so, lets say the gun thing is one idea and that gun thing is tied to we have a constitution index and a second amendment, you know, everybody can have guns, and everybody can argue, yeah, it says wellregulated militia and you can or you cant, and its the constitution whether it fits in or not. And quite separately from that, another idea has been forming over the last 10, 20 years and the other idea has to do with the federal government and eventually, im going to say government in general, but the federal government, the idea that the federal government is not us, its the other. And you know, when the guys took over the Bird Observatory or the Bird Sanctuary or whatever its called, are you guys aware of that in oregon, the mallard bird thing. They said this is our land were taking it back. Hey, it was a national, you know, set aside for birds thing so presumably it belonged to all of us. But these guys were saying all of us is not a lot of people out there. All of us is us guys who are here. And if you have the idea that federal government is the other and other floating idea, people should have an attractive force between the two ideas and one narrative would be that we live in a country thats by the rule of law. When we talk about whether guns should be controlled or not or prohibited or whatever, we can assume within that narrative that we have a shared invested interest in a society for people who are interested in shooting each other. So we want to think about, okay, this is a guaranteed right, how do we guarantee that right and yet preserve the thing we all want, which is a Harmonious Society in which people arent getting killed or massacred. For that, if thats the way youre thinking about it, its pretty obvious that assault rifles is like, obviously, that doesnt fit the narrative, but what if gun control is an issue thats within this other narrative which says that the government is somebody else and we will some day go to war against them. Now, the idea that nobody should prohibit us from having guns has a different meaning in that narrative. And in that narrative, when you think about gun control, it makes perfect sense to say, you cant control us from having assault rifles that can pump out 50,000 bullets a minute because the government has bigger stuff. You know, we should be able to defend ourselves, not against criminals, against the government when that time comes. Im not saying thats a fullfledged narrative that exists right now, but the makings are there and it could, you know, it could come into existence. The other thing that guy in portland asked me about was immigration. And the border wall. And im going, well, you know, we talk about it a lot, but if you look at the question of the border wall through the lens of narrative, a lot of things get clarified and you know, in my experience, the border wall proposes as a solution to the problem, was a curious thing because there wasnt really a problem until the solution was proposed. And then once that proposal was on the table, were going to build this big wall. You know, a lot of the conversation then suddenly not suddenly, but gradually accepted that theres a problem and how can we and so the people who were against the wall are saying, the wall is not a way to solve this. Theres other better ways. But, you know, i mean from that point of view, if there really were a problem with people from, immigrants coming into the country with drugs or something, the wall is like what they did in 2000bc in mesopotamia. Its an absurd idea. If you look through the lens of narrative, then i would say more or less immediately that the wall is a metaphor and as a metaphor, its the embodiment of a story. Its part of a narrative. And that narrative is, the anxiety that youre feeling, that im feeling, that were all feeling is because the other is out there and coming and theyre going to do these things as they come in. Theyre going to bring drugs, theyre going to bring crime, take our jobs, do this, that. So i think there is a lot of free floating anxiety in the society for lots of reasons. And you know, ill toss in as some of the factors, the economy of the world is going through such a seminal change that i think nobody knows what theyre going to be doing 20 years from now or 10 years from now. So thats something. The technology is changing the social relationships between people in such a way that its like completely apocalyptic changes. And gender relations and you know, traditions of how you build a family or any of that stuff. Theres a number of these things that are happening right now and people are anxious that they dont recognize the world that theyre in and they dont, they recognize less the world they imagine theyre going to be living in a year or two years from now. But those kinds of problems are ones that nobody can actually, as a single human being, its like what do you do . Where do you how do you its easy to just be helpless in the face of that. Now here comes a guy attacks the anxiety idea to something you be build. That now is like people are not all people, i would bet not many people in this room, but i could be wrong, but not me, anyway. But a lot of people for them, its like, all right, now its been physicalized and thats an expression of how i feel and thats an expression of and you know, that theres something you can do to stay safe. I would say that once that story, the germ of it exists and the germ of that story is us in here are threatened by them out there, and we need a wall to separate us. Thats, you know, thats the basic narrative. Once the germ of that idea exists, now, i might read a little more here. Once the germ of that idea exists, it can easily then attract other ideas to itself to grow more robust, that narrative. Among them being some of the other has already gotten inside, so, we have to clear out the other from in here. Now you have the potential of some real problems. Let me get into this sort of thing you can see the patterns of this sort of thing happening in history and in various places and various contexts. One of them would be, i would say, what happened after the crusades. And what happened during the crusades and after the crusades. Let me see if i can find it. All right. So you know, when the crusades started, europe was this place where everybody lived in some local spot and hardly anyone ever went 100 miles from home in the course of their whole lifetime. There was a lot. When the crusades started, this was a project that drew people from all parts of this very fragmented europe and they found themselves bumping shoulders with others and you know, and what they experienced was this marvellous thing and people spoke different ways and used different coins, but you know what . Were all on the same side and were part of a great project. The crusades opened european christian sensibilities to as parts of a single social whole. As they streamed to the holy lands they brushed up i said all that. Theyre on the same side. But same side required that there be at least one other side. The more binary the two sides, the stronger the identity shared among europeans. They didnt have to do any actual crusading to feel pride of ownership in the heroic quest. Just as one tonight have to play only they went to fight and everyone through there was an east to go to and a war to fight and the crusades gave the concept of europe by knowing the single thing they werent, these Diverse People came to a stronger sense of some single social whole they were. A new social constellation was gaining definition now. An identity shaped by the otherness of the other gains coherence, and as they took it back, the crusades didnt end, they shifted to europe and there turned inward. In 1231 the Catholic Church created a judicial organ, the judicial inquisition and spot the impurities right away, in france, they were two movements of religious revivalists who claimed that poverty and selfdenial were essential features of christian life. Any bishop in luxury could see how sacrilegious that was. Encouraged by the inquisition the king launched against both heresies, crippling one and wiping out the other entirely. Later they determined witchcraft as a contamination, tens of thousands of witches were found and burned at the stake most of them elderly husbandless women. The inquisition pressured people accused of witchcraft to name other witches thus ensuring that the campaign to wipe out witches would never reduce the supply of witches. It was important that the supply not shrink for the emerging constellation needed witch hunting to help construct itself and you know, then a more extreme version of the inquisition came to, you know, came into existence in spain. It was the spanish inquisition and thats the place where the crusades for europeans actually succeeded. It failed in the west and they took constantinople but in spain, the christian armies of ferdinand and isabela, they drove the muslims out and they turned the Iberian Peninsula into a christian kingdom and then they set up the spanish inquisition and they had pretty much run out of muslims because they had fled, but there was one trace of otherness left there in spain and it was the jews. And so they the spanish inquisition really focused on hunting down jews and then and what . Because if you concerted if you forced the jews to convert, youd be out of jews so who was the other that you could have as the force that was, you know, solidifying yourselfness . So thats where and when a theory kind of developed or began to develop that the jewishness was not a set of beliefs, it was a it was blood, some blood quality and that no matter what you said you believed, you couldnt eliminate your jewishness, you couldnt become, like you couldnt become short lie claiming to be short. Short is what you are. Then it became a question of mathematically calculating what percentage of your blood made you a jew if you were the product of a jewish christian marriage. And you know, that idea getting into the narrative, it never died. You know, its popped up again and again and in european history. Im going to stop there and just ask, do you guys have any quick questions . I guess were almost out of time . Have some questions and first of all [applaus [applause] 50,000 years. If youre going to ask a question, these gentlemen from cspan will be coming close with some boom over you, so just to let you know, dont be scared. So questions . Right there. I feel very threatened. [laughter] whats your vision of the future given everything that youve talked about . Well, my vision of the future, two things that i would say about it is we dont know what the future will be, so theres that part. From what i can see now, theres currents that are running and some are running in the direction of saving us from ourselves, and some are running in the direction of destroying us, and you know, i think its a race between the two, maybe more than two, but the directions that people are going into. And you know, technology is one of the problems of the age to me. The social impact of technology, but you cant deny that technology is like also solving problem after problem. It really is. So we dont one of the Things Technology is doing is, its making sometimes alarming advances in the direction of replacing our parts with machinery. You know . And we could go into a long thing on that. So, there is but even apart from that, you know, if you think about algorithms and how theyve invaded our way we do things so that were always encountering some curated, you know, version of ourselves when we go to buy. We buy things we bought before, et cetera. So, the machine of the ages, digital devices and we ourselves are becoming digitized more and more. So theres a blending occurring between technology and humans. At the same time, we are running out of were gobbling up the resources and our way of life is creating changes in the planet that looks like that just might be an extinction event going on. I want to just throw out there that if this happens, it isnt that were going to destroy life on earth. No, well destroy human earth on earth. Life is tough, life is still going to be there, its going to change to something else, well be gone if anyone cares. I do, id like us to stick around, but theres kind of a race going on between yeah. Bring the boom in. Havent read the book yet, just got it. But it seems like were talking about tribalism and sometimes your tribe is 200 people and then it could be a clan, and then it could be a nation state and then it could be world and then in times of stress, people seem to pull it back. How do you see tribalism playing into this whole thing . Well, you know, i think that tribalism is one word for it and when i speak of narrative, im speaking of the same thing in a way. Why i guess i shy away from calling nation states tribalism is because tribes is a thing. There are tribes so if we borrow that word we dont have anything left for tribes that arent nations or states or whatever. And each form of these social entities that are capable of forming intention and carrying out plans and its their own plans and we individuals are just doing our parts to make the whole thing work. Thats bigger than exactly tribes because, for example, corporations are one of these things, too. You know, people can come to a corporation, leave a corporation. Every person in a corporation can be replaced by other people and yet the corporation is still the same corporation. So its not those individuals. Theres some structural element that keeps that thing in existence as itself and i think that a narrative like that, and i have lots of different words for this thing in the book. Social constellation is one of them, narrative, whatever word you use for it a narrative like that is similar in nature to a biological organism in that it has a propensity to operate in such a way as to continue to exist and to continue to pro per and grow if it can. If you look at how people behave within a narrative you kind of see how that works, but you have to read to book to see what it says about that. Yes. First of all, i want to you mentioned at the beginning theres a great documentary by werner, the forgotten dreams, but what you mentioned today reminded me of something i read 10 years ago or 15 years ago. Countries long ago, people had to have something to hold onto so telling us what we are long to hear, but the corporations are controlling for the last 20 years because like if the markets crash and in the east, it will affect Ripple Effect around the world so right now were feeling right now were playing like this whole china and u. S. Game kind of, but actually its just like because thats the simplest form of people to understand whats going on, okay. There wasnt a question so i think you needed more to bring it together. Okay. A question . I was wondering like a group of people have to have an other that they persecute in order to keep their identity intact . No, no, i want to stay thats not what im saying, that can happen. The mere fact that a group has a self dont mean to needs to persecute some other. I wondered if you were saying that that was inevitability. No, no, we can move beyond that and part of it is we have little groups and those are inside of bigger groups. You know i just want to toss out one final metaphor here. You know, a human body is well, let me let me just put it in the bluntest way. A human body is a bag of skin filled with living cells that are organized as organs, so you wouldnt want those organs to vanish and just be one big bag of human cells, it wouldnt work that way. We dont want to all of us be the same. We are parts of smaller things that are parts of bigger things, which are parts of bigger things and we have to keep striving to see ourselves not only as just our social identity, our social milieu, but to see how were reacting to bigger social milieus, bigger social selves. Thats what im saying. Yeah. I was wondering, you mentioned the identity of curiosity, that to me is a big thing because then it kind of helps to counter act the fear of the unknown. If youre curious, youre looking out for it. Whereas when you talk about anxiety, its more of a with inward psychologically. Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, all of Human History, these two processes have been going on simultaneously, sometimes more, sometimes the other. One process is, were always sticking our tentacles out and exploring, whats out there . Whats out there . And were also periodically closing ranks and saying, theyre coming, theyre coming, look out, lets get together. You know, bring out the swords and we have to be ready. So both of those things are always going on and sometimes its more of one and sometimes more of the other. So how does the narrative, this narrativebased argument account for the phenomenon that people, huge, great quantities of people will follow a single leader right off the cliff . Is there a tippingpoint where the insanity stops just get away and lets him go off the cliff and starts over or is it not the leader, its a cohesion and some random charismatic or not creature takes the reins . I think its a combination of the two, now . I think one ingredient is the incould herence of the current narrative and the other ingredient is someone who spots a way to supply the missing pieces so that all of this incoherence, all of these random bits of dust floating around form up into, ill say it now, constellation. Theyre still all out there, but they somehow add town a meaning. That can be good, it can be bad. I dont think that, lets say a hitler causes naziism, its sort of like the naziism is grows out of the circumstances that are there and then the ideas that people are putting out there as to what is, you know, what is my explanation of all of this and someone says this, and someone says that. And then it comes to a point where its close to a tippingpoint. I wont go into it too much, but this is related to the concept of a paradigm. And in science, you know, the paradigm is a big theory to explains everything and what scientists do is theyre looking for ways to fill in the gaps and you know, complete the paradigm. Theres always a few things that dont fit and you know, you set them aside and dont think about them. If the things that dont fit keep increasing, and the connections between the things that youre saying are part of the same, get more and more ten use. Eventually the paradigm is in trouble and then it can be, that one idea or, you know, one sort of crucial idea can pull together a whole bunch of these things at which points some of the dots that were significant before with are not and theyre irrelevant. And some that were anomalies now become a part of the picture. Its a question that a paradigm doesnt change gradually, it changes suddenly and until that moment when it changes, when that last little bit comes in, theres nobody sees it, its not there until its suddenly there. So huge numbers of people well, huge numbers of people have some basis in the anxiety of their lives, you know . Follow some horrible leader is not as amazing as you might think it to be when you think about the fact that huge numbers of people for some reason or another find out they go in the army in march off and most get killed. And usually most people usually most people dont think its possible to explain that. It happens all the time. This may be a ridiculous question, but would you say that you might be implying that in order for us to have a Better Future and not extinguishing ourselves, that we might be moving towards a more harmonious shared narrative, global narrative . Or a collection of more harmonious narratives. And if so, do you have any suggestions about how to facilitate that . [laughing] yes to the first part and no to the second part. [laughing] and really i think no person could make the change happen. Its a process thats going on and i think partly we have to be patient with the fact that new narratives, i dont come into existence by agency or in sideways. Lots of little ideas have to flow together. I will only say this, however, that when one looks out at the experience, political experience of the society at any current time, that the thing that can is onlynd thered another narrative. So it was important to be responding to the things that are supporting emotionally a narrative you dont like, and drawing on the common experiences and crafting a new narrative that explains it all but goes in a different direction. I think what we will do, you know, is probably people have little questions they want ask when they comeeo to get the boos side. This always happens here. Were going to do is, thats okay, were going to stop the q a on the big public scene here and thank you very much for coming. [applause] coming up on cspan2 creator of the comic strip Dilbert Scott adams offers his thoughts on how to avoid what he calls loserthink. Former Harvard Law School dean is interviewed by former federal prosecutor about cases in which the law is forgiving. Thats followed by debate of whether americas founders were influenced either religious beliefs. Mark david hall author of did america have christian founding. Youre watching a a special edition of booktv not airing during the week while members of congress are in the district due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight, america at war. Enjoy booktv now and over the weekend on cspan2. And now pleased to welcome scott adams and melissa king. [applause] do you have a gavel . Is there a gavel . I just dont think its official. Its not official. Unless we have the gavel. I dont feel right. The way its going to work with going to dive right in with questions. Ill read a littlen intro, and then will start the thing
vimarsana.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.