Yuval Noah Harari: Few People Are Willing To Kill Or Be Killed For Nationalism"Nationalism today

Yuval Noah Harari: Few People Are Willing To Kill Or Be Killed For Nationalism

"Nationalism today is far weaker than a century or two ago. We just forgot how strong it was. Go back 100 years to 1918, Europeans were killing each other by the million over questions of nationality … A good way to assess the power of an idea is to do a body count."

"A century or two ago, to decide a question like whether Britain should be part of the EU... you would need a big war with millions of people being killed and injured and so forth... In Brexit, only one person lost her life, a British MP who was murdered by some fanatic, and the rest of the people just followed whatever the referendum said."

"The same with the Scottish referendum. In past century, if Scotland wanted to be independent of London... they needed to raise an army and to confront the armies that London would send from the south to burn Edinburgh down. Now they just go to a referendum and almost everybody just accepts the results."

"All the major problems of the world today are global problems. The three biggest problems we face are nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption. And none of these problems can be solved on the level of a single nation. You just can't solve climate change or regulate AI on the level of a single nation. So the only solution to these global problems is greater global cooperation."