ROW Episode 31

In this episode I aim to raise awareness about ways in which a nation can avoid slipping into civil war by highlighting some important insights gleaned from the book “How Civil Wars Start” by Barbara Walter and offering reflections on them.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, I aim to raise awareness about ways in which a nation can avoid slipping into civil war by highlighting some important insights gleaned from the book,"How Civil Wars Start," by Barbara Walter, and offering my reflections on them. Some of you have been asking in the chats on YouTube who I am. I am the founding director of the Center for Peace and Global Governance. You can find out more about us at cpgg. org. And suffice it to say that it is an entirely and strictly non partisan center, and it is completely non affiliated with any institution, organization, or ideology. Okay, let's dive into today's topic. A lot is being said about the rise of autocracies and how do autocrats come into power, and a lot is being written about this, and a lot is being discussed about the subject on the various television panels and so on in the media. But despite that, I feel like we're missing an even more important question, and that is the question of how we can avoid sleepwalking our way into a civil war, even if our country is not an autocracy. And this is a really important and interesting topic. The reason I've chosen to cover it today is because I think as part of this program, it's important to continue raising our collective awareness and consciousness. If we want to reimagine a better future for ourselves, we have to be fully aware of the choices we've made in our past so that we don't repeat the past. We also have to imagine where we're going to end up if we continue on the trajectory that we're on. In other words, will we end up in a civil war unwittingly, not because we want to go there, but because that's where our current behaviors will take us. And then we need to imagine where else we might rather be, and what steps we need to take to get there. So the book that opened my eyes to this whole topic was a recently published book entitled,"How Civil Wars Start," by Barbara Walter. I actually commend it to you. I don't know Barbara Walter. I've never met her. I don't get any a cut of any royalties. I just happen to think it's an easy to read book that conveys a lot of very useful information. What I'm going to try and do today is to share with you some highlights, obviously going through my filters, and add some reflections on some of these highlights. Suffice it to say again that this book has opened my eyes to the grave dangers that we face regardless of country we live in, even if we live in a western democracy that we believe is strong. The good news is that robust studies have been done showing that there are certain common factors, apparently, that spark all civil wars everywhere, regardless of geography, regardless of time. And therefore, we can predict where a civil war is likely to happen, and most importantly, we can then take steps to avoid unwittingly slipping into it, or as I have put it, sleepwalking our way into it. Now, I want to begin by sharing with you an analogy that is the conceptual framework for the way I see what this book,"How Civil War Starts," proposes and what it teaches us. Imagine that you have a forest that has been subjected to a long period of dryness, lack of rain. The conditions become ripe for that forest to catch fire because of the tinder like quality of the wood and the dryness of it. Then what you need is a spark, something that sets this tinder on fire. And the third thing that aggravates a wildfire that starts is an accelerant like gusts of wind. And we've seen this recently in the United States and in many parts of the world. We've been seeing this in New Mexico with the fires that have been raging there. So in this analogy, the civil war is the conflagration, the fire that we're trying to avoid. We want to understand what are the conditions that lead to the dryness, that makes us susceptible as any country or nation to have a civil war? And then what are the traditional sparks that we know from these studies are likely to ignite this civil war? And then what are the accelerants, as Barbara Walter refers to them or one particular one that we'll come to that exacerbates the Civil War and keeps it going? Okay, let's dive in. The first factor that is an excellent predictor of civil war, so this is what conduces to the dryness, is something called an anocracy. Now, I had not heard of an anocracy before I read this book, so I thought you might be interested in learning about it just as I did. Apparently we think of countries as either democracies or autocracies. But as countries move, start to move, either from being democracies sliding down towards autocracy or are autocracies and start implementing reforms that take them towards democracy. This transitional period can be a very dangerous period. Experts have created what they call a polity index score that shows for any given country in any given year where a country is and its slide between democracy and autocracy. The scale goes from minus 10 to plus 10. If a country is between 6 and 10 on the scale, then it's basically a good solid democracy, with 10 being like the highest. If it's between minus 10 and minus 6, then it's basically in the domain of being an autocracy. Now, as countries slide further down the scale, they get into what Barbara Walter describes as a danger zone, which is what is called an anocracy, which is somewhere between a democracy and autocracy, kind of right in between. And the range is minus five to plus five, with the biggest danger being in the minus one to plus one range. One of the things that is really interesting is that countries that start off as democracies and start to erode various indicia of democracy. Like if they start to silence dissent, or if they start to try and control the media, or they manipulate elections, or they start appealing to populism, or they declare states of emergency There are a whole bunch of indicia that show whether a country's sliding from democracy to autocracy. Once they start sliding from a democracy, they become particularly prone to civil wars. Interestingly, a country that is a partial democracy is twice as likely than an autocracy to experience a civil war, and three times more likely than a democracy. So why are anocracies so dangerous? Again, a couple of interesting points that we learn. A government that is democratizing, so moving from an autocracy now to a democracy, is weak compared to the government that came before it. It becomes weaker politically, institutionally, and militarily. And so the risk goes up. And the reason this happens is during periods of transitions, the winners and losers in a system change. And one of the fascinating things that I learned from reading this book is that the faster a country tries to implement reforms, so moving from an autocracy to a democracy, the more likely the chance that a civil war will break out, especially in the two years after reforms are implemented. So the lesson actually is democratize more slowly. Take your time and evolve the political system gradually. Why is that? Because slow reforms allow a country's citizens, especially those who are the elites who have hitherto held power, it allows them time to accustom themselves to the new situation, and it sets a more conciliatory tone and provides them with an opportunity to gracefully let go of the power they've held. And consequently, there's less likelihood that they'll be violent. Another reason is that elected leaders, now starting with a democracy, if you get leaders in power within a democracy who start ignoring the democratic underpinnings of a society, including the guardrails the powers of the executive and the checks and balances of government and a free press, then again you will start to see civil war arising, because this tends to happen quickly, and when that change happens quickly, then we have a greater chance of civil war. Now, as they did their studies, these folks happened upon a really interesting fact. Many of us think that countries that are more ethnically diverse are more susceptible to civil wars. But it turns out that's not true. It is not ethnic diversity that makes a country susceptible to civil war, so to creating that tinder that can be set on fire, but it is something called factionalism. And factionalism is basically defined in this book as an acute form of political polarization, where you get political parties that are based on ethnic identity, or racial identity, or religious identity, rather than ideology. Because what happens is that these parties try to rule at the expense of other people. So countries that are considered factionalized have identity based political parties. And what happens is that these parties become very rigid, and it therefore leads to intense competition and a winner take all attitude. Another feature of factionalization is that very often you will get a dominant charismatic figure arising, who appeals to either ethnic or religious or racial nationalism, and they then fight to maintain power. Now, the question is, why does factionalism make it so much more likely that a country will slip into civil war? A couple of interesting observations from the studies. When you have identity based parties based on religion or ethnicity or race, it makes it impossible for voters to switch sides because there's nowhere for them to go. If you don't fit into this particular identity, then you can't switch to the other party because it's not based on ideology and ideas, it's based on identity. And the second thing, and this is really fascinating, is that politics, the whole way of organizing a society moves from being about doing what's best for all the citizens in a country, taking care of the good of the collective whole, to taking care of the good of the members of the identity group, of that political group that is identity based. Interestingly the factors that have led to civil wars, the factional factors, have changed from the beginning of the 20th century, where they were mostly provoked by class and ideology, but starting in the mid 20th century, apparently, wars were fought more based on ethnicity and identification with a particular religion as opposed to a political group. So, so far we've considered two big factors that make it more likely that you create the environment where a civil war can arise. Let's stay with factionalism for a second. There is an aspect of factionalism that exacerbates the chances of a civil war rising. And that's when something called super factions arise in a country. Experts have found that a country is more likely to slide into civil war when one becomes a superfaction. What does that mean? When the members start to share not only a single ethnic or racial identity, but also in addition they share the same religion or the same class and or a geographic location where they live. An example of this is Sri Lanka. What happened in Sri Lanka was that the Tamils and Sinhalese first were divided and divided themselves along ethnic lines. And then they found that they had insurmountable differences, or so they told themselves, along religious lines with the Tamils being Hindu and the Sinhalese being Buddhist. In addition to that, they also split along geographic lines with the minority Tamils being concentrated largely in the north and east of Sri Lanka. In this manner, these two super factions formed where they had a complex of identities within each faction. Another example is India, where for more than five decades India with all its amazing ethnic diversity, struggling economy, and poverty had managed to stay very unified, even though 80 percent of the population was Hindu, with Muslims being about 14%, and other religious groups constituting 6%, but it was a strictly secular state. And then what happened was that in the second part of the second decade of the 21st century, we started to see the rise of Hindu nationalist groups who really were pushing for India for the Hindus, basically. They started to take certain steps in that direction, like rescinding the special status of the only Muslim majority region in India, Jammu and Kashmir, and also changing the laws on citizenship to exclude Muslims, and so on. And so we're now seeing this drive towards factionalism and superfactionalism based both on ethnicity and religion. Now, superfactions can be exacerbated in a number of ways. You can have the urban rural divide that we see, including in the United States. You see this very clearly. Another thing that exacerbates superfactions is the role of what political scientists call ethnic entrepreneurs who stoke ethnic nationalism. Essentially, you have somebody who's willing to be the bullhorn or the mouthpiece to appeal to people to act on the basis of discrimination against another group. And what ethnic entrepreneurs do is they basically expressly fight to preserve their own groups, position, and status in society. And by the way, politicians are not the only ones, as Barbara Walter points out, who basically stoke and take advantage of the division over identity. There are what she calls lesser ethnic entrepreneurs, including business elites, who maybe are trying to shore up their brand loyalty, or religious leaders who are trying to expand their following, or media figures who are trying to grow their audience. And we see this, again, in the United States, and we've seen interesting articles over the last few days about a particular television personality whose method seems to be creating an us versus them narrative, that they are out to get us. The particular group that he's referring to are particularly, white males. It's fascinating to see how this conversation goes. Feminism is bad, because we get emasculated as males, and feminism also undermines traditional family values, and immigration is bad because it dilutes our power and economic power and opportunities in society, and this whole idea of people are trying to replace us. Replacement theory becomes a dominant theory in many countries that are sliding towards civil war. The third factor that contributes to creating the environment where civil war is likely to break out, this conflagration is likely to break out, is something that is called downgrading. What this means is when members of a particular group that has been in power start to feel like they're losing power. It is based on the idea of entitlement and expectation, like we are entitled to have the status, whether it's economic power or political power or cultural power, it can be all kinds of different power, and oh boy, we're losing it. Now, it's very understandable because human beings don't like to lose anything they already have. So in some sense, you can understand why it happens. It becomes very interesting later when we talk about solutions, how do we overcome this natural human tendency? And it happens all over the world. An example is what happened in Abkhazia, which is the breakaway province in Georgia, next to Russia. The Abkhazians were an indigenous group of people who were referred to as the sons of the soil. They were the original natives of this part of the world and that's how they view themselves, and they have no other homeland outside of the country of Georgia. They had been subjected by many different peoples and empires, and Stalin tried to wipe them out, but they survived and under his reign, they actually secured a status of being a protected minority. Then when the country of Georgia came into being, the Georgians also tried to dilute them and the Georgians became the majority. The Abkhazians were really worried about losing their hitherto status under Stalin, and so they fought back against it. In fact, in 1992, they engaged in acts of ethnic cleansing, trying to get rid of the Georgians so that the number of Abkhazians again would go up, so they wouldn't be diluted as much, and so they could regain the power that they felt had unjustly been taken away from them. That's a really interesting example that one finds in the book, and it's a story that plays itself out all over the world, in the Philippines, in the former Yugoslavia, in Myanmar, in Northern Ireland. Pick a part of the world and you will see that at some point the story has played out in the same fashion. Now, people can feel downgraded in many different ways. They can feel like their language and culture is being taken over. They're not allowed to use their language and culture. It's no longer the dominant language and culture, and so they're being forgotten and left behind. An interesting example of that is the section of India called Assam. It's in the northeast of India. The Assamese people, when they were colonized by the British, had their own regional government, but then the British started to bring in workers from Bangladesh and, over time, the number of Bengalis started to exceed the number of native Assamese. We have the story repeated. The Assamese feared the loss of power, cultural power, political power, and economic power, because they were left with low skilled jobs while the Bengalis were in administration and had the well paying jobs and got to make decisions, and the language changed, the official language and culture, and so it led to a resistance movement on the part of the Assamese. And they also, the Assamese, who were then the minority, tried to engage in ethnic cleansing of the Bengalis in order to restore the balance so they could get back into power. So you see how this works, very often ethnic cleansing is there because people feel,"Well, we're getting diluted. We need to restore ourselves in terms of number and become the majority again and regain all kinds of power." People can feel downgraded because of loss of economic opportunities, and because of economic inequities. A very interesting point that is made in the book that I feel is worth highlighting is that economic discrimination doesn't need to be deliberate. It can happen just as a result of modernization. So we can, if we're not aware, if we don't have leaders who are conscious and farsighted and aware of historical realities, they don't take the steps to ensure that, as modernization happens and has its upsides, that they make sure that they bring along the people who are otherwise likely to get left behind. Ms. Walter points out in her book that sons of the soil, the natives of any land, tend to generally be disproportionately affected by these huge shifts. They feel like they were the first on the land and now it's become a handicap because they're more vulnerable to competition and they're being forgotten and ignored. So again, one can understand the emotions, the thinking and emotions that prompt people to get angry and resentful, and then act in violent ways eventually, if their needs are not met and their voices are not heard. Okay. We've talked about the three main factors now whether a state is an anocracy, sliding in the danger zone of an anocracy; whether there's factionalization, and even more importantly, superfactions; and thirdly, whether a particular group, particularly the original natives, feel like they're being downgraded. Those factors create the conditions for this conflagration to happen, but then you need a spark. And the question is, what are the sparks? Let's identify them so we can be aware of them. Now the first spark, really interesting according to this study, is loss of hope. It turns out that human beings are fundamentally really hopeful, and we always want to believe that our life is actually going to get better no matter how bleak, and we're willing to actually go through decades of hardship and suffering, injustice and iniquity, if we somehow believe that over time, our lot will improve. That's really interesting. But hope can be lost, and it can be lost in a number of ways. There are two ways, typically where people get to the point where they realize,"You know what? Nothing's ever going to change, and we lose hope." The first is failed protests. When people are initially unhappy, one of the natural things they do is they go out into the street and they protest. They say,"Hey! Listen to us. We've got these grievances." Protests are really a warning sign to a society and government that, that citizens believe that,"Hey! We're not doing so well and our system needs reform." But it's the failure of protests that eliminates hope and that takes us then into the danger zone, because, if the factors exist that we've talked about, that spark of the loss of hope can then ignite a civil war. Now, a couple of observations that I found interesting. Both democracies and autocracies can handle protest really well, but once you're in that middle state of an anocracy, protests can become really dicey and can lead to violence. The same is true of factionalization. If you've got factions and particularly super factions in a society, if one of those super factions or factions starts protesting, it's less likely that the government will listen to them. A government is more likely to listen to protests if they represent many elements in society as opposed to a single element that they view as a group. Very interesting. So if one wants to bring about change through peaceful protests, it's best to get together an array of people. And honestly, when I think back to what happened during the pandemic in the United States, one of the things that was heartwarming and fascinating was that for the first time protests had people from all racial backgrounds and all ages participating. It wasn't just the Blacks out there saying,"Hey! We're an aggrieved group. Don't be unjust.", but it was all of society turning out and saying,"Hey, listen! We need to do something here, because this is just not just." I thought that was an interesting connect. Another way in which hope can be lost is through elections that are lost. Again, if you already have an anocracy or a super factionalized society, loss of elections can be interpreted as meaning several things to people. That the ruling party is not willing to play fair, and it's not really committed to democracy, or tells people that,"Oh. One side can manipulate an election." So people feel that an election is fraudulent, whether it's true or not, just that very feeling is dangerous, because then they think conventional means can't be used to regain our status, especially if they are the downgraded group or feel like they are losing something. And so they resort to violence in order to regain access to authority. And again, the U. S. is a good example of that. Another example is Ukraine, where civil war began in 2014 after Mr. Poroshenko won a special election that was designed to replace the incumbent, President Yanukovych, because there were mass protests. And so the Russian speaking people in eastern Ukraine who had been represented by Mr. Yanukovych thought,"Wait a minute! The system is stacked against us." So they started to fight for independence and they took up arms. And another really interesting point that's made in this book is that in the United States, it was the election of President Lincoln. He was the first president who was able to win power without the support of Southern Democrats. That's what convinced the Southerners that they needed to break away and secede from the rest of the nation. These are all really interesting Now, a prime example that demonstrates loss of hope is the story of Northern Ireland, where the Irish Catholics had lived in the north until way back a few centuries ago the Brits came and took over, and they encouraged Protestants to come across the channel from Scotland and take up residence in the north of Ireland. Once the Republic of Ireland was created in the south, the Irish Catholics in the north remained as part of this separate place called Northern Ireland, in which their numbers had become diluted by all these Protestants coming in who were Scotsman and British. And it ended up that the Protestants were two thirds of the population and the Irish Catholics became one third of the population. The government was semi autonomous. So the Protestants ended up controlling education, law, social services, industry, agriculture, and everything. Now, the Irish Catholics, although they suffered for many years. They lived geographically in different places. They had a different religion. They basically had more of the menial tasks: they were construction workers and laborers, whereas the Protestants were the administrators and so on. Despite all of this, what was fascinating is that they didn't revolt. They only revolted when they realized that their voices were not going to be heard and that the British, they had always thought that the British would have their backs in the end, when push came to shove. It wasn't until there was a march next to Bogside, which was a place where the Irish Catholics lived, that sparked riots, and the British for the first time sent troops in. Irish Catholics initially welcomed the troops because they thought,"The Brits will have our backs and they will separate us from the Protestants and they will maintain peace." But no, what they saw instead was that the British troops opened fire on them, started searching their homes and singled them out and targeted them. That's when they lost hope. And it was then that they started to take the next step of creating militias, and the provisional IRA was established in order to protect the interests of the Irish Catholic minority, even though they had been the natives, the sons of the soil. Very interesting example. All right, the second spark when you have these conditions is that extremists step in when they realize that the terrain is already dry and a spark will do the trick. They manipulate the opportunities and they step in and they say,"Hey, listen! Yeah, we know you're unhappy. We have an amazing alternative to offer you." And what actually ends up happening interestingly is that it starts with a very small group of extremists. Sometimes it's exiled students. Sometimes it's dissidents. Sometimes it's former members of the military. And these folks, unfortunately, tend to think more about their own power than the good of their average citizens. They're basically taking advantage of a situation where people are unhappy and discontented with their lot. By the time average citizens become aware that a militant group has formed, they're usually more entrenched than anybody has realized. And that's when you get these conflagrations. The spark is lit that leads to war and conflagration. If you want examples, again, feel free to read the book, there are wonderful examples there. Okay, we've talked about the two sparks, now there's a third thing that when added to the two sparks acts as an accelerant, and that is social media. Social media acts both as a spark and an accelerant in triggering civil war. Extremists are very good, generally, at using social media in order to get out their divisive messages. They've found this amazing, powerful new weapon. It's cheap, it's fast, and it does a really good job of triggering anger and resentment in people. A nice example of this is Myanmar. So again, going back in historical times, the British occupied what was known as the country of Burma. They occupied it between 1826 and 1948, and they used to bring in Muslim and Indian skilled workers to run the British industries there. The Burmese were Buddhist, and these folks coming in were Muslim, and so resentment again started to build up as the natives, the Buddhists, realized,"Oh gosh. We're being left behind economically." And there's discrimination; they were demoted from citizenship. And it was very difficult. Before 2012 in what became Myanmar and is today's Myanmar, former Burma, only 1 percent of the people had access to social media, Facebook. By 2012, Facebook entered and by the time Aung San Suu Kyi came into power, 20 percent of the people of the country had access to Facebook. That was when the Buddhist ultranationalists started taking to Facebook to target the Muslims. In short order, a few months after that, you started to see violence breaking out in the Rakhine State, where the Rohingya live. And we now have been hearing a lot about the Rohingya, who have been mistreated, where egregious human rights abuses have taken place, where they've been displaced and forced from their land. Many of them have ended up in Bangladesh and other countries, but most of them in Bangladesh. So social media is an accelerant. It's the gusting winds when you have a wildfire that just spreads the wildfire further and makes it very difficult to control. Now, we've now examined, the three main factors, the two big sparks, and we know what the accelerant is that is likely to start and then spread a civil war. What we need to be very careful of, especially those of us who live in Western democracies, is that we are susceptible to civil wars. We start analyzing how each of our countries is doing. Are the factors there? Is the ground getting ready? Has there been a drought that is drying the the societal terrain? And are there sparks in the air? And, are there winds blowing? And therefore if a fire starts, will we be able to control it? What is interesting is that the decline towards civil war with all these factors and sparks tends to be very incremental, happens very slowly, and therefore we tend to miss it because it's imperceptible. Again, the author of this book does a wonderful job at taking the United States--I guess she's American and wrote this book for everybody, but also to alert, to raise consciousness in this country, to say,"Hey guys! Let's wake up and look and see that these factors are present, that we are susceptible as a nation, and if we see that this train is hurtling off the cliff, we need to ask ourselves, do we want to hurtle off the cliff into civil war, or do we want to change the trajectory of where our society is going?" The United States, in short, in 2021, officially became an anocracy. It got to plus five on the polity index scale, so that's factor number one present. It is highly factionalized, and in fact we now have super factions. It started in the 1960s with race becoming one of the factors of factionalization, followed quickly by religion. We've got the urban rural divide. We've got people feeling downgraded, people who had power before now feeling that they are being left out being left out of the equation, that they don't have the same economic and job opportunities, that their culture and values are being overtaken, their homeownership. They're having a hard time earning enough to have homes. Their life expectancy is dropping. All of these factors are there. The loss of hope is there. They feel rightly or wrongly, there's been a lot of disinformation--, but they feel like maybe an election has been stolen from them. And we know that loss of hope is a spark that can trigger civil war, so we have to be really careful. There's more analysis that I'm not going to go into. This is where the United States is today, in a place where we need to really sit up and listen. We simply can't afford to be complacent and to sleepwalk our way into a civil war. There's no need for that to happen. We've done the assessment. The question then is, how can we avoid civil war? There are many things that can be done. The most important thing seems to be the role that leaders play. The book makes a really interesting observation that South Africa was closer 1989 than we are here in the U.S. today, and yet they avoided it because political leaders, opposition leaders, business leaders came together and were willing to compromise to face down the danger and not to sink into civil war. If they can do it, we can do it. There's several things that leaders can and should do. The first is to deal with all areas in which people feel that they're unjustly treated. We need to examine carefully the areas of society where reforms are necessary in order to make people feel like they are not forgotten, not left behind, that their voices are heard, and that they are participating in decisions. The second thing is then undertaking reforms, whether that means reforming voter registration, stopping gerrymandering, doing all kinds of reforms that are necessary for everyone. The third is civic education, making sure that we all understand how our system of government actually works: where it's weak; where it's strong; where it can be easily manipulated; why we have the safeguards we have; why it's important to maintain them. The fourth is actually changing the conditions that extremists tend to exploit. So when they see weaknesses, they go in and they use those as wedge issues to divide the country further. By actually resolving those issues, we take away the possibilities, the weaknesses. Another is to take away the social media bullhorn, as Barbara Walter describes it. There are many ways in which we can do that. Again, we need to come together and decide on what reforms and legislation is necessary to do that. So these are all things that can be done. But I want to end with what I believe the place we should start. If we are to avoid the conditions and the sparks that trigger civil war, we need to begin by radically reconceptualizing and restructuring our society because Humanity has grown. We've come a long way, but we haven't revised and revisited our identity, who we believe we are. We're still playing out old narratives and stories of who we were 200 years ago or 100 years ago or, 50 years ago. We need to update our identity. Because human beings tend to always gravitate towards the self identity, the conception of self identity that we have in our minds, both as individuals and society. How do we do that? Step one, raise awareness amongst ourselves at the grassroots. How do we do it? Using the principle of consultation. We've had a whole episode on this, so feel free to go back and take a look. Making sure that diverse voices, that all voices are heard, that we're actually listening to each other, that we're actually valuing diversity because our collective understanding is enhanced as we listen to each other and see things the gemstone of truth from different angles. We raise awareness that way. The second thing we do at the grassroots is to identify certain key principles. that we want our society to be built on. I submit that the most important principles are those of justice or fairness, if you like, and truth. Truth is something that has definitely suffered a lot of damage especially with the media and social media. I was stunned to hear one of the talk show hosts, when asked about a particular subject that he had commented on: Didn't you tell the truth? And he says,"Hey, look! I can't go and on my show and tell the truth. That's not what people are watching me for. I'm here to entertain." So this whole idea of news as entertainment is something that we really need to think about. If the fundamental foundation upon which we want to build all our institutions and processes and policies is truth, then we need to reconceptualize also the role of the media and how the media should operate. Once we've identified these principles, we then need to make sure they get woven into all of our reformed institutions and processes. The second thing we need to do is learn to elect fit leaders who are capable of doing a bunch of things. First of all, that they have qualities like the courage to do the right thing, even if it's not popular. Again, we've had a whole episode on this. The courage to also make changes when it's time to make change, like in the face of climate change and global warming, we have to change our behaviors. We need leaders who are strong enough to do that. We need leaders who are free of prejudice and do not stoke prejudices that members of society have. In fact, we need leaders who are unifiers, who are able to harmonize people and bring them together and give them a loftier view of their own reality and their future. We need truth tellers. No matter how difficult and painful the truth is, we need leaders who can speak those truths. We need them to be farsighted and not wait for emergencies to happen, but to think about what to do in the face, for instance, of a looming pandemic, global war, nuclear war, a conflict like Ukraine. We need leaders who can say we need a system of collective security, which was the topic of last month's episode. And we need leaders who can bring us all along and harmonize our perspectives and help us transcend our differences. So this is what I believe is necessary over and above the suggestions that are made in this book. And in fact, I believe that this is where we need to start. So the very first thing we do is start having conversations with each other at the grassroots, bridging the artificial divides between us, taking the labels off each other so we don't view each other as labels, Democrat, Republican, White, black, woman, man, whatever gender. That's not what defines us as human beings. We need to really listen to each other and to listen to each other's concerns and fears and then have a consultation on how we can address these. If we can go to the moon and we can go to planets, we can, I am confident, come up with ways to speak to everybody's fears and resolve them and create a system of governance that works for all. The good news is that these conversations are happening at the grassroots all around the world, even as we speak there. And that's very exciting. You should go and find out where these conversations are taking place in your own backyard. If you want to get in touch with me, I can probably tell you more about some of these conversations. But I look forward to hearing your comments. And if not today, then please go on YouTube or Facebook and comment and start a conversation with each other. All right. Thank you all. It was a pleasure to be here and I look forward to seeing you again. Bye bye. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.