21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?

Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’. If a government is corrupt and fails to

But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption.

Panic is a form of hubris.

‘free will’ will likely be exposed as a myth, and liberalism might lose its practical advantages.

chaos. In particular, democracy cannot really function without nationalism.

if you are elected, what actions will you take to lessen the risks of nuclear war? What actions will you take to lessen the risks of climate change? What actions will you take to regulate disruptive technologies such as AI and bioengineering? And finally, how do you see the world of 2040? What is your worst-case scenario, and what is your vision for the best-case scenario?

Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the centre, because the centre is built on existing knowledge.