Medium published my new article “Being Free and Interdependent”

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his time. Who puts the chains on us that deny us freedom? That is the question. Is it the environment or ourselves? Or is it just the nature of life? The answer depends on the depth of our contemplation.

From infancy, people are obliged to do all kinds of things. Babies are born, fed, and nurtured along certain paths as part of their development. Even if they do not want to receive medicine, for example, it is given to them. Then they are sent to kindergarten, to school. They have to get up early, get organized in a hurry, follow a rigid schedule all day, listen to things that do not necessarily interest them, and do homework. As we raise our children and prepare them for life, they have no freedom of choice.

Because a habit becomes second nature, we do not feel like we are handcuffed. We have become accustomed to the boundaries and conditions that have been set, and we feel free within those boundaries. We unconsciously just let life drive us: studies, career, family, status, successes.

There are those for whom the question of freedom and independence does arise. What am I actually living for? What is the essence and meaning of my life? Just buying a house, a car, going on vacation once in a while cannot be all there is to life. Even if there were to be a new discovery of how to prolong life in good health, would that give me a sense of freedom and make me happier? These are the ultimate big questions that each of us will eventually face.

Misery, at its core, stems from the realization that our life is limited and lacking, without a big and clear goal that we can achieve. Exactly this is the feeling of slavery, literally. If in the past people still managed to turn off the internal questioning by burying themselves in all kinds of mysticisms and religions, today this works less and less. It is no longer purposeful.

There are those who believe that being free means being independent and without any reliance on others. Is such a thing even possible? Because whether I am an employee or self-employed, an entrepreneur, a junior employee, or an executive, I am still dependent on many factors that limit me.

And if I could escape from all the limitations and dependencies on others to a desert island, sitting on a beach that belongs only to me, all alone, would I be defined as free? After all, at every moment new desires would arise in me forcing me to pursue and fulfill them at all costs.

So as we delve deeper into the question of freedom, we discover how vague the notion is. Life, however, has its own dynamic and we evolve from year to year. Sooner or later, even if all our material needs were already fulfilled and there was abundance of everything in the world, the question, “what are we living for?” would come to hound us.

Eventually, each one of us will discover that personal freedom can only be achieved by building a new kind of relationship between us: good, unlimited reciprocal relations. Evolution is moving us, the human race, forward toward such an integral connection, and within this connection that we will discover a completely new kind of life for ourselves.

Like children who run around the house in joyful abandon next to their mother who they know will take care of them and prepare everything that is good for them, a sense of freedom will grow within us as we develop love and closeness in the relationships between us. An assurance will grow that I will not have to defend myself against you and you against me; my heart will be open to you and yours to me.

The genuine human connection of mutual care and consideration will free us from worrying about ourselves and rid us of stress, problems, and struggles. The power of love and giving will fill all of creation, and this is the integral force that connects all parts of nature into a wonderful seamless fabric for an ultimately fulfilling existence.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Israel Is Only the Beginning”

A few days ago, Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, and the de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, held a confidential meeting in Egypt. The three met to discuss possible repercussions of the new nuclear pact with Iran. I think there is good reason for concern. While the Iranian people are not inherently hostile to Israel, the extremist regime of the Ayatollahs seeks world domination, and wiping Israel off the map is part of their plan to rule the world.

A nuclear agreement will not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. On the contrary, it will lift sanctions, release seized funds, and enable the fanatic regime to develop whatever it wants. This should be of great concern not only for Israel, but for every country in the world, and first and foremost for the countries in the region. This is why the leaders of countries that are threatened by the nuclear ambitions of Iran’s leadership met, and the unlikely alliance should send a warning signal for everyone.

The war in Ukraine and the looming nuclear pact signal to all of us that we must make a thorough revision of everything. We need to carefully examine what we want with ourselves, what we expect from life, from humanity, what future we are preparing for our children, if any, and what future we would like to build for them.

At the current levels of belligerence around the world, there is only one direction where the world can go: destruction. As Russia’s foreign minister has warned, if we end up in another world war, it will be a nuclear one. At the end of the war, we will still have to rethink everything, just as I am suggesting now, so why not do it while we are still here, instead of leaving it to the tormented few who will survive a global nuclear extinction?

I think we should all realize that from here on, things will only deteriorate until everything collapses. If we understand this, we will be able to agree to sit down and contemplate how we can prevent the impending catastrophe. We will succeed only if everyone agrees and cooperates. Since today, every country can set off a world war, all the countries must convene and jointly resolve to reform their connections.

There will be no affinity among the countries, no warmth or sympathy. However, it will buy us time to start building a new spirit.

Then, when we understand that no one succeeds unless we all succeed, we will be able to build a common world society where nations are not inherently hostile to each other, and even respect each other’s contribution to the world society. In such a state, we will be able to resolve differences without violence.
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Medium published my new article “Here Comes Another Wave”

While the media is busy covering the war in Ukraine, Covid has returned to haunt humanity. In China, more than fifty million people are on tight lockdown; in Hong Kong, the number of dead is rising; in Israel, the reproduction number (R) is climbing fast and is now well beyond the spreading mark of 1. If we thought Omicron was contagious, the new strain, BA.2, is 30 percent more so, and hybrid variants like the Deltacron are emerging, too. New strains and new waves will keep appearing until we learn all that we need to learn from the virus.

The virus is not here to teach us about itself; it is here to teach us about us. We think of these waves as waves of Covid-19, but they are not. The original strain is virtually gone; we are dealing with a different virus because we ourselves are different. This is why the vaccines that defeated the original strain are no longer effective.

As I said from the first appearance of the virus in early 2020, this virus, or its “relatives,” is here to stay. It needs to teach us how to live more peacefully and harmoniously with each other and with nature, and it will not leave until we learn.

We may not have noticed it, but the virus has already done a great deal of teaching. Our career aspirations have changed dramatically. Suddenly, everyone is talking about The Great Resignation and the fact that so many people now prefer to work from home.

Many people have also become content with less money in return for more peace of mind. The movement toward a four-day workweek is also gaining momentum around the world. Even in Asia, known for its workaholism, big corporations such as Panasonic and others have switched, or are in the process of switching to a four-day workweek.

Traditional education is also falling from grace. “Until 2019, the number of homeschooled students had been growing by between 2% to 8% each year. From 2019 to the fall of 2020, the percentage of homeschooled students changed from 3.4% to 9%.” According to the National Home Education Research Institute, “there were about 3.7 million homeschool students in 2020–2021 in grades K-12 in the United States (roughly 6% to 7% of school-age children).”

These are not minor changes. Fewer working people means more modest consumption, less congestion on the roads, especially if people are working from home, and more family time. Likewise, homeschooled children require a parent to stay home and tend to the education and occupation of the children. This, again, affects many other aspects of society.

This is why I think that Covid is not a punishment but a correction. The only reason that we feel this correction as painful is that we resent the change, so nature imposes it on us.

At our current level of narcissism, without restraint from the outside, we might destroy ourselves and the world with us. The war in Ukraine is only an example of what pride and power-hunger can inflict. Therefore, I think we should be grateful to Covid’s restraints. We are counting its victims, but we have no idea what catastrophes its appearance has prevented.

That said, I do not think we should continue to suffer its restraints. Since nature imposes corrections on us, and we have no choice but to obey, as is clearly the case, we can impose these corrections on ourselves instead of inviting nasty bugs to do it for us.

All we need to correct is our egoistic behavior. To do that, we need to be aware that in a world that has become totally interconnected, thinking that we can take all that we want regardless of others and enjoy other people’s pain is not only reckless, but destructive to everyone, including to ourselves.

We need to understand that if we want to subjugate other people, even in thought, much less in action, we are harming ourselves and our environment. No other being but humans have such evil, narcissistic thoughts. If we annihilate them from within us, we will put an end to war, hunger, exploitation, abuse, tyranny, and everything else that plagues our world. If we are reluctant to learn, the viruses will clear out these plagues from humanity.
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Medium published my new article “Man’s Insatiable Hunger for Power”

Since the dawn of time, man has craved power. Since the dawn of time, power struggles have disrupted people’s peaceful lives. Today, too, the hunger for power is wreaking havoc and destroying countless lives. Power turns people into bullies. We cannot kill it but we can use it positively. Unless we learn how to do it, it will destroy us all.

You could say that the hunger for power is man’s primary trait. We want to control everything around us. This is true not only of pitiless rulers, but of every human being.

Power-hunger exists within us from the moment we are born. Look at how babies grab everything their hand can grip. That, too, is a desire to control, to keep. It is the fundamental state of being of our desire: to want to own and control everything I see, to bring it under my governance, so that I am in control and everything else is subordinate to me.

In other words, the hunger for power begins from the most basic needs and increases to levels where people lose their ability to judge correctly because of their obsession with power. The initial desire is natural, but in humans, it evolves into a disastrous monster.

The problem is not that we want something, but that our desires grow beyond the level where we can balance them. Eventually, they become desires not only to get what we want, but mainly to prevent others from getting what they want, and to have them at my mercy.

There are two fundamental forces in existence: attraction and rejection. They manifest on every level, physical, biological, emotional, and moral. In all of nature, the opposites balance each other out. In humans, the pulling force grows from generation to generation, and keeps growing throughout our lives until it grows out of balance and out of control. In order to maintain the balance that the rest of nature maintains naturally, we must learn how to do it.

From early on in life, we must teach children about human nature, how we can keep it in check, what goals we should set for ourselves, and how to achieve them in constructive ways for ourselves and for society. We need to show children which social environments are good for them and which are not, and why, and show them the harm that reckless egoism can inflict.

Once people have acquired control over their ego, they can use it positively and constructively. If such people have a desire to rule, once they have learned how to rule their ego, they can become great rulers. They will be able to resist the intensification and inflation of the ego, and instead of saying l’état, c’est moi (the state is I), as did Louis XIV, they will feel humbled by the privilege that the public has bestowed upon them to lead it wisely.

Indeed, a leader must have an inherent feeling of unworthiness. Unless a leader feels that other people know better, are more capable, or have more experience and wisdom, nothing will stop him or her from becoming a tyrant. However, humility and a certain sense of inferiority curb the ego and allow the leader to remain attentive, appreciative, and, above all, caring.
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My new article on Linkedin “Can Happiness Be Measured?”

If a country makes the cut, it means that its inhabitants are among the happiest in the world, according to the UN World Happiness Report, a global survey from people in about 150 countries. The study recently revealed a very simple premise that is usually ignored: our levels of satisfaction are related to the levels of generosity and mutual aid which have risen over the past two years due to the pandemic. But does it mean people are happier because they are suddenly more altruistic? How can it be really measured?

Finland is the world’s happiest country, for the fifth consecutive year, according to this ranking which is based on the standard of living and mutual responsibility. Donating to charity, helping a stranger and volunteering have risen 25% globally in 2021 compared with pre-pandemic levels, the report says. That is probably the case but how a survey can penetrate people’s feelings and fulfillment is debatable and therefore, unreliable.

I think we have grown up a bit and are no longer so naive as to take polls seriously. Everyone understands that they are funded and involve political considerations. For instance, if we were to believe the surveys, we might be thrilled that Israel, the country where I live, has reached the respectable 9th place in the global happiness index despite the constant menace of security threats and high cost of living.

The relationship between us is more difficult day by day and the conflicts are exhausting so the conclusion would be that the seventieth place in the happiness index is more realistic for us. Thus, by placing Israel on top of the list, the United Nations are simply trying to conceal their ongoing biased treatment toward us.

If you put aside the glasses through which the UN survey shows us the “global happiness index” and look at the reality itself, you will see that Scandinavians, who take the first places of the list, are hardly a poster picture of joyful outburst.

There are general contrasting waves in reality of heat and cold, expansion and contraction, waves of stinginess and generosity, happiness and sadness. And now a warmer, open and friendly wave is sweeping through the world. It has been preceded by the Covid pandemic and global suffering. But it is only a passing wave and it will fade away.

The world will close itself, and people will once again become vindictive and selfish. This is because life events affect us and draw us outwardly to some degree of connection at one time and then to separation at another. But on the inside, we do not change.

We have remained this way for thousands of years, and continue to live with the same inner instinct that we were born with as human beings. It is the selfish instinct, the ego. That ego does not allow us to be truly happy. It causes us to run over others to achieve what we desire at their expense which in the end keeps us apart and suspicious and hostile about each other. No one can feel truly fulfilled in such conditions and environment.

We are part of the whole of humanity, and also part of the whole system of nature. Therefore, our happiness depends on and is connected to the happiness of everyone else. We cannot feel private happiness if we are not happy with all our surroundings. To be truly happy we must address the extent of the ego’s control over our lives.

When we change our perspective from egoistic to altruistic, we will climb the ladder of happiness without depending on surveys and empty pride. Everyone will feel the inner joy that exists in the harmonious relations between us, the real source of lasting fulfillment.

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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “The Israeli Education System Is Imploding”

Ayala Moshe, a student of mine, has been a school teacher in Israel for the past fifteen years. This year, she gave up. The audacity of students, the poor salaries, the disrespect and rudeness of parents, and the physical assaults have become too much. “I have been slapped, thrown down the stairs by students, and had to watch security camera footage showing me being thrown, when I had to defend myself in court for being a victim of an assault.”

Ayala is just one of thousands of teachers all over Israel who have had enough. According to a special report by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, thirteen percent of the teachers quit within their first year on the job. Within five years, a quarter of the teachers will be looking for a new occupation. Worse yet, the higher a teacher’s education, the more likely he or she is to leave in search of a more rewarding career. Clearly, the education system is imploding.

If I were asked what to recommend, I would advise them all to quit, every single teacher. This may be the only move that will make parents realize that education cannot be taken lightly. The education system should be the most important system in the country, and so should be the status of the teachers. We cannot throw the responsibility for the upbringing of our children on the laps of teachers who are not equipped or meant to handle it, who face mounting pressure from conflicting sources, receive an embarrassing salary, then face public scolding and derision left and right for their poor achievements. Parents must be held accountable for the behavior of their children, and they must take part in mending it.

If the system is already crumbling, it is time for parents and teachers to put their heads together, envision the kind of country and society they want to see, and design a plan to make it happen. A situation where neither parents nor teachers can bring up children to be human beings, where no one knows what values children absorb from dubious sources online and elsewhere, that situation is intolerable.

Currently, children go to school to be force-fed knowledge they neither care about nor need for life. They hate it, and therefore hate the people who feed it to them. Given the growing intolerance in society, it is no wonder that some of them turn violent.

Instead of memorizing material, they should first of all learn how to relate to one another. Afterwards, they need to learn how to learn, since they will be learning their entire lives, and finally, they need to learn how to cooperate in teams that learn together and achieve together.

In the real world, there are no individuals. Everything is achieved in teams and through cooperation with other teams. If people leave school without having learned to be good teammates, then they have been brought up to be misfits. In such a state, they will either adapt to a reality for which school did not prepare them, or they will not be able to make a proper living. Social skills are therefore vital for success in today’s world, and virtually no school teaches them.

Social skills are critical not only at work. They are the basis of every relationship—with the significant other, with the children, at work, and even with pets. If you let a person grow from infancy to adulthood without providing social skills, then you have crippled that person for life.

Now that the education system is collapsing, there is an opportunity to build it right, and our entire society will reap the benefits.
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Medium published my new article “The War That Awakened Europe from Its Slumber”

Despite the danger, the leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia boarded a train to Kiev to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. According to EU officials, this war has welded Western Europe together more than any other event since World War II. The continent will now arm itself against security threats.

In this war, Russia played the role of the unifying nation and brought European countries closer together. It gave them a good shake to make them feel that there are other important things beyond greed for oil and gas, such as security and preservation of nationalities. The Russians have done a wonderful job in that respect. Not by choice, probably unexpected, but that’s the way it turned out.

Europe has so far imagined that it can assert itself without investing in its existence and security. Each country has believed it can rest on its laurels forever without making any effort, contributing only a minimal share for security, nothing more. But that is not the way to ensure lasting security.

Due to the worsening situation, European countries are forced to examine the relevance of their NATO membership, which also requires NATO to prove that it really cares about everyone. To this day, when a country proposed to increase the defense budget, everyone blatantly replied that it was impossible.

Therefore, the blow in the form of war will make Europe realize that peace must be paid for. Hopefully this will happen and consequently the European psyche will change. They will unite for the sake of security.

There is no real unification right now between European NATO members, as true unity should be properly felt and a desire to unite should not be caused by compulsion i.e. the threat of war. Now it is happening only for lack of choice, but it is still a step forward to reveal the truth, which is to see how much there is a lack of union between the European countries and how weak and helpless they are.

So nature, the Upper Force, is working through Russia to awaken the lethargic Europe. It is the same force that created the world and drives humankind through all kind of predicaments and hardships to come closer and unite with each other.

Through the generations, the Upper Force has imbued humanity with pride, selfishness and other egoistic desires. The traits have caused all sorts of problems including separation and war. Since we all have the same selfish desires, we see the rest of the world as a tool to fulfill our whims. Thus, we exploit and take advantage of others for years, thinking that this is how life should be.

In our generation, these distinctions, which have lazily evolved through historical periods of slavery and coercion, plunder and cruelty, are gaining renewed importance. From now on, these insights will no longer develop gradually within us, but will fall upon our understanding like a slot machine from which a successful move drops an abundant stream of coins.

In the first phase, human society will realize that it cannot manage life without connection. We will see through plagues, conflicts and wars, and other unpleasant events, that without better human connection we have no future.

In the second phase, we will want to unite not only to survive and exist, but to live properly. We will also find out what counts as true life, how to overcome the egoistic instincts within us and resemble the force of nature, where everything is in balance. All that is required of us is the realization that the abusive and selfish relationship between us will ultimately lead to our destruction. From there, the path to the pursuit of unification is short.
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Medium published my new article “What People Are Searching for in Podcasts”

You would think that people would have less and less patience to listen to other people talk, but the opposite is true. In fact, the younger the listeners, the more likely they are to listen to online podcasts rather than to music. According to the music business blog Hypebot, the 2021 Spoken Word Audio Report from NPR and Edison Research has found that “Spoken Word’s share of audio listening has increased by 40% over the last seven years; 8% this year,” and “spoken word audio’s growth is driven by large increases in young and multicultural audiences,” while listening to music has fallen 10% over the same timeframe.

I have often said that today’s young people are not superficial or apathetic, as some people refer to them. On the contrary, they are very perceptive, direct, and know exactly what they need. When we do not give them what they need, they turn their backs to us and we interpret it as apathy. It is not; they simply cannot bother with words that do not satiate their thirst.

They need answers; they want precise information about the world they live in, and we are not providing it. We need to provide people, especially millennials and even younger, with understanding how to think and act in a globalized, interconnected and interdependent world.

They live it naturally; they have friends from around the world whom they have never met but only chat with over the internet. At the same time, the countries they live in may be hostile to each other or even at war with one another.

We, the older generation, still hold obsolete views of separation and borders, while they live in the virtual cloud, where there are no borders, and feel very comfortable there. Now they need information; they need to know how to conduct themselves in such a life because none of today’s educational systems provides them with any information about this.

The world is changing rapidly, and the pace is only growing faster. If we want a smooth transition, we must prepare for it. The paradigm of distinct entities that struggle with each other over dominance is obsolete in a world where every entity depends on all the other entities to meet its most basic needs.

Unless we transition quickly into a more cooperative way of thinking and functioning, reality will force us to do so the hard way — through wars, diseases, natural disasters, and countless other “lashes” that Mother Nature has up her sleeve to discipline her insubordinate children.

Not only the younger generation needs answers; we all do. The sooner we recognize that the world has changed, the sooner we will begin to study our world from this new, interdependent perspective, and we will be able to find the answers we need for ourselves and for our children.
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Medium published my new article “Do Scientists Determine the Results in Advance?”

A recently published essay has concluded something very interesting: The methodology that scientists use determines the outcome of the experiment. After examining more than 400 experiments on the connection between brain activity and consciousness, the researchers “found that supporting a specific theory can be predicted solely from methodological choices, irrespective of findings. Furthermore,” they conclude, “most studies interpret their findings post-hoc, rather than a-priori testing critical predictions of the theories.” This is yet another proof that as long as we are inherently partial, impartiality will not exist in science.

The experiment, jointly conducted by the Department of Neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University, and the Department of Psychology at Reed College, attempted to “present an unbiased, theory-neutral, quantitative and systematic review of empirical findings around leading theories of consciousness, providing a bird’s eye view of the field and looking for potential biases in interpreting empirical findings.”

Although clearly, neither the experiments nor their reviewers are impartial, the findings tell us that all of science is inherently partial, meaning driven by the ego. Because of it, we interpret all the natural laws that we discover through an egoistic lens, which paints everything we see as driven by the ego. This is why we cannot see that a non-egoistic force manipulates the connections between the egoistic particles that we perceive as independent.

We do see that humanity is becoming increasingly connected, but we interpret it as driven by egoistic interests, not realizing that even when we choose to separate, we cannot, since it contradicts the direction of the flow that is imposed on us. Hence, as hard as we may try, we will find ourselves increasingly entangled in a web of interdependence that connects us into one system.

Science makes life easy in more ways than we know. Without science, we would not even be reading these critical words about science. The problem with science begins where we cannot see clearly, yet still try to interpret.
This is where we get conflicting theories precisely because each theory reflects not the truth, but the subjective perception of its progenitor. In such a case, it stops being science, and we should not rely on it for anything in our lives.

If we want to find conclusive results that all the people will corroborate and that will benefit everyone, we must emerge from our self-centered perception. When it comes to fields of research where our perception is limited to our personal view, we must either accept the results as pertaining only to ourselves, or expand our perspective to include everyone else’s views, as well.

To achieve the latter, we must emerge from our inherently self-centered nature. This is the only way to reach a uniform result that will be valid in everyone’s eyes and that everyone will be able to use.

As said above, we currently perceive the world as governed by egoistic forces because we ourselves are selfish to the core. As a result, we cannot tell if anything is non-egoistic since we do not have that unselfish perception in our psyche. Yet, if we try to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and see things through their perspectives, we will find that all our separate views make up a complete picture that is none of the elements that make it up, but the network that holds them together.

Think of it as an organism. There are some ten trillion cells, which make up the seventy-eight main organs in the human body. Each cell and each organ works separately and performs fundamentally different functions. Yet, together, they allow the body to exist and maintain its vitality and health.

So it is with humanity. Each person has a specific function in the global human organism. If we could adapt the perspective of all of humanity rather than our individual perspective, we would be able to draw the right conclusions and make decisions that are valid and beneficial for all of us. This is where we need to go if we want to exist in a world where people are happy and safe a few years from today.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Tomorrow’s Leaders”

With so many crises to address, it seems like the thing we need the most today is competent leadership. The incumbent heads of state seem to be preoccupied primarily with their own legacy or their own survival rather than the survival, much less prosperity of their nations. Moreover, in a globalized world, leaders cannot mind only the benefit of their own country because every country is dependent on every other country. Although everyone knows and understands this, no one seems to act accordingly. It seems like we are in for a hard awakening.

As we evolve from year to year and from generation to generation, our expectations and aspirations change, as well. A leader must therefore be one whose eyes and mind are given equally to the present and to the future. Leaders must see where humanity is heading and prepare their people for that state. Otherwise, they are not leaders but followers.

The main problem with today’s leaders is that although the world has become completely interconnected and interdependent, they lead their countries as if all that matters is their country’s own well-being. They do not realize that policies that harm other countries, ultimately harm their own country.

Worse yet, even when they do realize it, they rarely act accordingly since the human ego has evolved to a level where it does not care about anything beyond immediate rewards. Therefore, a policy that inflicts future harm is no match for a policy that grants immediate, even if false, rewards.

Having said all that, I think it is a mistake to pin the blame on leaders. Leaders are a product of their nations. They cannot rise above the level of their nations since it is the nation that enthrones or dethrones them. Therefore, more than shape the spirit of the nation, they reflect it.

If we want leaders who understand the spirit of the time and can adjust their leadership to it, we must first teach ourselves, the people, about our particular time. Then, the leaders, who will grow from within the nations, will know what to do and will have the nation’s support for their moves.

It follows that leaders will not be able to take the global interconnectedness into consideration before it becomes the prevailing mindset in the public. Even if the majority of the public does not understand or think about it, there needs to be an understanding that thinking only about ourselves is counterproductive and does not serve our personal interests.

Once leaders begin to think of the world’s benefit rather than only their country’s—or as is the case today, their own benefit—it will be possible to build functional systems that are sustainable and benefit the entire human society. When people understand that we must also mind the benefit of humanity and the benefit of the planet, leaders will design sustainable policies and will stop pitting nation against nation recklessly and needlessly. World peace and sustainable living must rely on the understanding that we are all interdependent, that we will succeed together or fail together.
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