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How to make the world work | Simon Anholt | TEDxHamburg

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    (Applause)
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    Give me 30 seconds,
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    And I can give you a list of
    30 terrifying challenges
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    facing humanity and the planet
    at this point in history.
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    And we wouldn't sleep tonight.
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    There are so many of them,
    and they seem to be so frightening
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    It's not really surprising
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    that many of us are feeling
    a little bit disheartened,
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    and a little bit anxious at the moment.
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    But the way I see it -
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    There are really only two things
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    stopping the world working at the moment
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    The first one is the fact that
    the countries don't collaborate enough.
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    We know the solutions
    to most of those challenges.
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    But we don't implement them
    because we don't work together.
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    And the second thing
    that stopping the world working properly
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    is the fact that every single
    one of those challenges
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    has been caused by the behaviour
    of human beings.
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    And if we can change that
    we can change everything.
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    Now those sound like
    big tasks and they are.
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    But I'm optimistic.
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    For the last 10 years, I've been working
    on projects and plans and policies.
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    to try and attack those two barriers
    to making the world work better.
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    Some of them I tried to encourage
    countries to implement.
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    But the coolest ones, I keep
    and I try to do them myself.
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    So I'd like to tell you about two of those
    in the few minutes that I've got today.
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    The first one is more of an update.
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    It's a project called The Good Country Index,
    which I launched back in 2014.
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    I haven't spoken about it for a while,
    but it's been through 4 different editions.
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    And I thought it would be good
    to give an update.
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    So The Good Country Index is an attempt
    to measure what every country on earth
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    gives to the rest of the world
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    outside of its own borders,
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    a kind of balance sheet
    for the world if you like.
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    A lot of people, when I
    originally launched it said
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    not another country index, surely
    there are enough of those around already.
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    But the interesting thing is that
    almost all of the others look inwards.
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    They treat countries as if they were little islands
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    inhabiting their own private oceans.
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    But surely that doesn't really make sense.
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    Because everything everybody does
    has an impact on all of us, always.
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    If one country pollutes the air or water,
    that's our air and our water.
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    If they go to war,
    drags other countries in
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    and the refugees pour out.
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    There is really nothing
    you can do any more
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    that only impacts the domestic population.
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    So what The Good Country Index
    attempts to do
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    is to make a start towards
    helping people to understand
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    that this is an interconnected system,
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    by measuring what each country
    contributes to the rest of the world.
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    Now, it's not my opinion which countries
    rank higher and which ones rank lower.
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    It's formed from a set of 35
    large databases,
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    which mostly come from the UN system.
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    And what they do is they simply measure
    the positive and negative effects
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    that the countries have.
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    It's always been a tiny bit controversial.
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    But that's kind of good,
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    because it helps to start
    a new kind of argument.
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    In fact, it works really well.
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    Within hours of me releasing the first
    edition of The Good Country Index
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    I started receiving thousands of
    beautiful hate mails from trolls
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    all over the world, demanding to know
    why the country they hate ranks so high.
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    and the country they love ranks so low,
    and how I cooked up the entire thing
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    just to produce that specific result
    and annoy them personally.
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    And we have conversations about
    these things and we argue about it,
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    and at the end I'd always say
    the same thing, "Look, it's working."
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    I don't know if I am right.
    I don't know if you are right.
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    But in the end, we are
    discussing the right thing.
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    We are talking about
    not how well is your country,
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    but how much is your country doing.
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    And that's what it was supposed to achieve.
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    So by pushing the direction of
    the argument, the conversation,
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    towards a new way of looking at countries,
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    then I think that
    it's pushing the agenda forward
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    So, my colleague Robert Govers and I
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    just released the latest edition
    of The Good Country Index.
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    And I'll just give you a very quick glimpse
    of what's going on there.
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    Finland came first.
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    One of these days, somebody is going to
    invent a country ranking
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    that does not have
    a nordic country in the top ten.
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    (Laughter)
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    An index of modesty perhaps.
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    Anyway well done Finland, seriously!
    It's absolutely great.
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    And another rather interesting thing
    happened in this latest edition
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    of The Good Country Index,
    and that was
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    what you can see if you go to the
    slightly lower in the Index,
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    the USA has various reasons sunk
    quite a long way since the last edition,
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    and Russia for various reasons has risen.
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    And we now have this peculiar situation
    where the USA and Russia
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    relative to the size of their economies,
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    are neck and neck,
    quite a long way down the Index.
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    It's like two mean kids holding hands
    at the edge of the playground
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    and refusing to join the others.
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    (Laughter) (Cheering) (Applause)
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    But hey, it's an interesting result,
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    but in the end, I'm afraid to say that
    the world hasn't changed very much
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    since the first one came out in 2014.
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    It's still America first, Britain first,
    Russia first, Germany first.
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    And in a way I understand that.
    I don't have a problem with it.
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    I mean after all, if you are elected
    to run a country, it's pretty obvious
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    you put that country's interest first.
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    But what I find rather demoralising
    about those kinds of sentiments
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    is the implication that
    everybody else has to come last.
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    And this is what I dispute.
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    I think we can all come first.
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    And one of the nice things about
    the job I have been doing
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    for the last 20 years or so
    advising governments around the world
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    and trying out real policies
    in the real world,
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    is that it's perfectly
    possible to harmonise
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    your domestic and your
    international responsibilities.
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    You can do the right thing
    for your own people,
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    and you can do the right thing
    for humanity at the same time
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    without sacrificing yourself.
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    And the funny thing is,
    it makes better policies.
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    This is something that most
    governments have simply never tried.
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    So on to the second thing
    that's stopping the world working
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    the slightly more complicated issue
    of the behaviour of us humans.
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    Well, to get started on this.
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    I thought it would be interesting to try
    to find out how many people in the world
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    already agree with
    some of these basic principles,
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    the ones outlined behind
    The Good Country Index.
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    So Robert and I did some research
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    and we discovered that no less than
    10% of the world's population
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    appears to fully share
    the principles of The Good Country,
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    the idea that countries should collaborate
    and cooperate a great deal more,
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    and compete a tiny bit less.
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    This is great news. 10 percent,
    that's 760 million people.
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    If that were a nation, that would be
    the third largest nation on the planet
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    after China and India.
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    And I have to admit when
    those numbers came out,
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    I got very excited.
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    But then on mature reflection,
    I realised that actually
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    the counterpart of that is that
    90% of the people in the world
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    don't agree with that proposition.
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    And I think if one was going to
    take this challenge seriously,
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    one has to focus on the 90%.
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    It's not enough just to sell messages
    to the people who already agree with you,
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    and try to make them make tiny tweaks
    in their behaviour because
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    frankly, it's too late for that.
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    We are in too much of a hurry.
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    We need big change,
    we need it very soon.
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    In fact, we need it right now.
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    So how can we deeply educate
    the majority of the world's population
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    to behave in a way which is more
    friendly to the world that we live in
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    and more friendly to each other?
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    Because by the way, when I was speaking
    of trolls, of course it reminded me
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    of this strange idea that emerged recently
    and I don't know where it came from
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    that the people who
    care more about local things
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    and people like me who
    care more about global things
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    should be enemies.
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    Who thought of this idea?
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    I think this is the most dangerous idea
    in the world at the moment,
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    and I think we should all look out for it
    and challenge it whenever we hear it.
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    The people who care more
    about local things
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    and the people who care more
    about global things shouldn't be enemies.
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    They should be working together.
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    We should be glad that each other exists.
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    There isn't time for this kind of
    childish tribalism.
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    We need to get on and fix things.
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    While anyway as I was saying
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    the 90% need to be fundamentally
    educated in a different way.
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    And I started looking at some
    of the websites of the NGOs,
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    and the campaigning
    organisations and the charities,
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    and I began to notice there was
    a common theme emerging.
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    There was a sentence, which in
    one form or another
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    kept on cropping up.
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    And the sentence was something like this,
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    "And we should leave the world
    in a better state for our children."
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    And I've tried to read this sentence
    about 93 times in different places.
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    I began thinking to myself,
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    "you know that's pretty arrogant really."
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    The idea you can take something huge
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    like climate change, huge systemic problem
    or conflict or migration
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    that's taken billions of people
    centuries to perpetrate,
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    and you are gonna fix it
    before you check out?
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    (Laughter)
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    It's this kind of arrogance and impatience
    that causes more problems than it solves.
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    If we only have the nerve,
    if we only have the courage
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    to give it one generation,
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    we can fix everything and
    we can fix it for good.
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    Because every single day that passes
    humanity has an opportunity to start again.
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    Because every single day that passes
    new children are born,
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    and they can learn in new ways.
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    So there is a solution to every
    single challenge facing humanity.
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    It's called education.
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    But we need to do it in a new way
    and a different way
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    and a much more ambitious way
    than we've done it before.
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    Imagine if you wield a test tube rack
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    of the sort that you probably had
    when you studied science at school.
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    And in this test tube rack made of wood
    there are 7, 8, 10 I don't know
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    little glass test tubes, and each one
    contains a different coloured liquid.
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    And each one of those liquids
    is a vaccine, an educational vaccine
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    against the behaviours that cause
    climate change, conflicts,
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    human right abuses, terrorism, migration
    pandemic and all the rest of it.
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    And if we administer these educational
    vaccines to all of our children,
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    in the next generation, they will be
    incapable of continuing the behaviours
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    that we have indulged in for so long.
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    If we teach our children
    cultural anthropology at the age of 6,
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    it's a wonderful subject for 6 year olds.
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    They grow up taking a scientific pride
    in understanding cultural differences.
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    They are immunised
    against the kind of ignorance
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    that leads to prejudice and intolerance.
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    I know that one works, because
    I experimented on my own children
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    and it works a charm.
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    (Laughter)
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    If we want to lessen
    the speed of climate change,
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    we need to teach our children
    oceanography and meteorology,
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    and then maybe one day
    they will switch off the damn light
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    when they leave the bedroom.
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    (Laugher)
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    We need to teach our children hygiene
    so that there is less disease.
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    We need to teach them to meditate
    so there is less mental illness,
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    and they learn to have more empathy
    and more understanding and more kindness
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    towards everybody else.
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    There are so many subjects.
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    I can't decide which ones they should be.
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    What I think we need to do is
    we need to have a big global discussion
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    on the internet
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    where everybody puts in their own idea
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    about what should be
    the next set of values
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    that we are going to teach the next
    generation of children
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    so they can run towards
    the global challenges
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    instead of running away
    from them as we've done.
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    And we can do this.
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    Next year, it will be my aim, my ambition
    to have one hundred ministers of education
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    signing up to this new global compact
    of educational values.
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    UNESCO has already signed a letter saying
    that they would like to support this
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    if we can get it going.
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    And if you have any doubts
    about whether it's possible
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    for humanity to engage
    in such a big common project
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    despite all of that cultural differences,
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    we'll just have a think about
    the United National's charter
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    or the human rights documentation.
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    Have a read if you
    haven't read it for a while.
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    These are the most beautiful documents
    ever produced by humanity,
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    and they really give you faith,
    because they remind you as you read them
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    that we are capable of
    behaving like a single species
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    inhabiting a single planet.
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    We can do it if we really want to
    and if we do it at scale.
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    The good news is that
    it's more about joining up the dots
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    than starting from scratch.
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    Because there are of course hundreds
    and hundreds if not thousands of projects
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    around the world at the moment,
    finding and experimenting different ways
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    of educating children so they
    behave better in the future.
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    The trouble is they are mostly
    single topics and in single countries.
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    There's no time for doing it
    that slowly now.
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    We need to do it big,
    and we need to do it in one go.
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    Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old
    Swedish climate activist
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    is beginning to discover and beginning
    to show us how very difficult it is
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    to persuade grown-ups
    to change their behaviour.
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    But the simple fact to the matter is
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    that we can see that a lot of children
    have got the right attitude,
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    but they don't have the solutions.
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    Some adults have the solutions but they
    definitely don't have the right attitude.
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    And so guess what, it's another
    necessity for collaboration,
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    the children and the grown-ups
    working together.
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    We all have to think very hard now
    about being better human beings.
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    And that's about being better citizens,
    both locally and globally.
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    But it's also perhaps mainly
    about being better ancestors.
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    If we can do that,
    we can make the world work.
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    Thank you.
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    (Applause) (Cheering)
Title:
How to make the world work | Simon Anholt | TEDxHamburg
Description:

For more information on Simon Anholt, please visit our TEDxHamburg website www.tedxhamburg.de Simon Anholt has advised the presidents, prime ministers and governments of 55 countries during the last twenty years, helping them to engage more imaginatively and effectively with the international community, and to ‘make the world work better’.

He also publishes the Good Country Index, a survey that ranks countries on their contribution to humanity and the planet, and in 2016 launched the Global Vote, which enables anybody in the world to vote in the elections of other countries.

Simon’s TED talk launching the Good Country Indexhas received 5.6 million views, and his more recent one launching the Global Vote, over a million.

Professor Anholt is the author of five books about countries, cultures and globalisation. He is the founder and Editor Emeritus of a leading academic journal focused on public diplomacy and perceptions of places, and publishes a major global study measuring the international standing of fifty countries and fifty cities, the Anholt-IPSOS Nation Brands Index and City Brands Index.

Website: www.goodcountry.org This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
14:55

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