Thought Economics

Conversations with the Remarkable People Shaping Our Century (fully updated edition)

Vikas Shah

• Publisher: Michael O'Mara
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781789292459
• eBook ISBN: 9781789292671
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Toma de decisiones

'Stimulating, intelligent and enjoyable discussions of the most important issues of our day.' STEVEN PINKER 'From entrepreneurs to athletes, and world leaders to entertainers, this is a fascinating collection of interviews with some of the world's most influential individuals.' MARK CUBAN ' Thought Economics is a fine rebuke to the soundbite culture; these interviews are driven by real curiosity, and there is a wealth of wisdom here.' EDWARD STOURTON
________________________Since 2007, entrepreneur and philanthropist Vikas Shah has been on a mission to interview the people shaping our century. Including conversations with Nobel prizewinners, business leaders, politicians, artists and Olympians, he has been in the privileged position of questioning the minds that matter on the big issues that concern us all. We often talk of war and conflict, the economy, culture, technology and revolutions as if they are something other than us. But all these things are a product of us – of our ideas, our dreams and our fears. We live in fast-moving and extraordinary times, and the changes we're experiencing now, in these first decades of the twenty-first century, feel particularly poignant as decisions are made that will inform our existence for years to come. What started out as a personal interest in the mechanisms that inform our views of the world, and a passion for understanding, has grown into a phenomenal compilation of once-in-a-lifetime conversations. In this incredible collection, Shah shares some of his most emotive and insightful interviews to date.

Who are you? Well, physically, you’re mainly a bag of water. That sounds unremarkable enough, until you realize that the amount of water on our planet has remained reasonably constant since the earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Thus you, me and everyone around us are big bags of ancient water, which has cycled through oceans, rivers, forests and between each other. You could also be described as a bag of stuff, of matter, of atoms. Again, that sounds unremarkable enough until you realize that the stuff that forms us was made deep in the heart of stars, billions of years ago and, through processes that we still don’t fully understand, came to form you and me – strange super-monkeys that are intelligent enough to contemplate their origin and place in the universe.

Even the fundamental question of what we are when we refer to ‘I’ is fraught with doubt. Every day our body is changing and regenerating physically and developing mentally. It’s unlikely, for example, that you have many cells in your body now that were present at your birth, and the connections in your brain will be vastly different today than even a decade ago. When we refer to the self, we are really talking of the experiential continuity that has brought us to this present moment. You are in effect the result of your own idiosyncratic path through the gamut of reality, and the fact that those experiences are unique to you creates the self as an individual that exists as a phenomenon in time, irrespective and apart from any other individual. Understanding the self in this way is important. You are a unique and beautiful living experiment that is conscious enough to observe itself. The experiment of you is informed by a constant process of learning, given context by our education. To put it another way: we live, we learn. And that last point – learning – is critical. For most of history, deep thinking and self-discovery were tasks largely left to the intelligentsia and those who ruled their domain, whether it be religion, politics or nobility. The rest of us had to be passive and obedient enough to be useful, and relatively predictable.

As our species has progressed technologically, however, it has also become ever more protean. A citizen is no longer defined by ‘what’ they do, but rather exists as an individual who is able to learn, to question and to grow. Our new diffuse culture has also created the opportunity for humanity to innovate; we can explore who we are and what we are capable of in more dramatic ways than could ever be imagined. In the 1950s, for example, it would have been impossible to conceive the total sum of human knowledge being contained within a human-made computer network, or that we would have the technology to decode our very DNA, or that billions could be educated digitally in communities that still lack basic access to food and water. But less than half a century later, those things are taken for granted. The pace of change socially, culturally and technologically in our world is increasing rapidly, meaning that the shape of humanity even a decade from now will be significantly different to today, and invariably will require a different set of cognitive, emotional and spiritual apparatus to that which we currently wield.

Identity and who we are is so key to how we view everything else in our world that I wanted to start this book here. In this chapter are some of the conversations I had with artists, whose work naturally seeks to explain our place in the world. It also contains parts of some of the interviews I conducted with spiritual leaders for whom faith is a shared narrative of our experience of humanity, and with academics whose research and study are helping us to understand the beginnings of life itself. I have also included some of my interviews with leading physicists, who spoke to me about our place in the universe. Understanding identity, however, would feel incomplete without delving into the stories of our time, and so I’d also like to share conversations I had with some inspirational writers, who gave deeply beautiful accounts of who we are.

Why do identities matter?

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Identities essentially involve a few key elements. We have a label with ideas about how to apply it – to others, and by others. The label gives us a way to think, feel and do things and also consequences for identifying and thinking under that label. We also have the reality that in a society, the label affects how other people treat you and shapes how you treat and see them. For those of us who have an identity, it offers a conception of who we are, and helps us to think about how we ought to behave, who we belong with, with whom we should have solidarity, with whom we have conflict and who is on the inside and outside. Some of this, of course, can lead to negative outcomes, but there is a positive role of identity in shaping who we are. Modern life has allowed more identities, with more packages of expectations and behaviours for people who have those identities. In modern society, too, we can reject labels altogether and say, ‘I’m not a man! I’m a woman!’ or ‘I am a man, but being a man doesn’t have to be like that, it can be like this …’

How can we find our identity in this world?

Elif Shafak: I have always been very critical of identity politics. It saddens me to see how within my side of the political spectrum – the liberal left in general – many people, especially young people, want to defend identity politics as a progressive force. It is not. Identity politics can be a good starting point to raise awareness, but it cannot be our destination, it cannot be where we end up. The answer to a tribal instinct is not to retreat into another tribe. The way forward is to challenge the very mentality of tribalism. When I examine myself, I can see clearly that I do not have an identity. Instead I have multiple belongings. I am an Istanbulite, and I will carry Istanbul with me wherever I go. I am attached to the Aegean, the other side of the water, so Greek culture is also close to my heart. I am attached to Anatolia, with all its traditions and cultures: Armenian, Sephardic, Alevi, Kurdish, Turkish, Yazidi. I’ll embrace them all. I am attached to the Balkans – Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian, Slavic. I am attached to the Middle East: put me next to someone from Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Iraq – I have so much to share with them. At the same time, I am a European by birth, by choice, in the core values that I uphold. I am a Londoner, a British citizen and a citizen of the world, and a global soul. I am a mother, a writer, a storyteller, a woman, a nomad, a mystic, but also an agnostic, a bisexual, a feminist. Just like Walt Whitman said, ‘I contain multitudes.’ We all contain multitudes.

How have identities shaped society?

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Class has the virtue of being a kind of social identity that’s tied to something objectively real, that being your socioeconomic options. In some ways, our societies are becoming increasingly economically polarized and one of the challenges for those doing well out of the system (the club classes) is to distract people from the power of identity because if people organized around class identity, they would presumably be deposed since those at the bottom of the hierarchy are larger in number, and presumably they would wish to take action to reduce inequality. It’s a puzzle to me why class doesn’t play a bigger role in our politics. We use identities to make ourselves, to define ourselves with and against people – and we have to make a conscious effort to see this, else we will over-assign significance to identity, as we do in the world of gender. Women and men are far more similar than our gender ideologies suggest to us and we’ve been trying very hard for a couple of generations to push against the bad consequences of gender discrimination and patriarchy (the gender parallel to white supremacy). We’ve been trying to drive it out of our system, but people keep falling back into it. You cannot get rid of identities, but you can reform them.

Why do so many people build identity just on what they do?

Rose McGowan: I remember coming to a point where I realized that just because someone has a business card with their occupation on, it doesn’t define who they are or actually what they do. Why don’t those activities, which you don’t get paid for, which are your interests and passions, also qualify as being what you do; and why aren’t they, in some ways, more valuable? The two can certainly dovetail, but for most people these ‘other’ activities are dismissed as hobbies – or ‘useless talents’ – because they don’t make money. Those talents are actually there to help you to define yourself. I want to push society to grow, and four years ago when the #MeToo movement began, that was the idea: to see if we could push at the overall thought structure, and break those conversations that were happening over and over again. It was a bit like a cultural reset.

When people gather, I always think it’s interesting to hear the topics of conversation that ensue most often. If someone says, ‘So, tell me about yourself,’ the natural response is often to start with your occupation – ‘I run a business’, ‘I am a lawyer’, ‘I am a doctor’ and so on. When my first business collapsed following the dotcom bubble bursting, I came to realize very abruptly that defining your identity by what you do is dangerous and also limiting. We are capable of so much more than our jobs, and worth more, too. For as long as we’ve asked questions, religion and spirituality have been sources of answers, providing comfort and explanation for billions. I was born into quite a religious Hindu household, and saw this first-hand as my parents and extended family turned to religion to provide answers to the challenges of everyday life. As for me, my school, while grounded in faith, as many British schools are, had roots in science and in secular enquiry, and so my entire world view has been framed with this nuanced lens of deep respect for scientific and spiritual answers.

What does it mean to be alive?

Sadhguru: Not everybody is alive to the same extent. Life is available to us in many different dimensions, at different levels of sensitivity and perception, and unfortunately, not everyone is alive to the same extent; and that is why I’ve dedicated my work to get people to their fullest possible ‘aliveness’. The fundamental purpose of life is to know life in its full depth and dimension. If you want to know life, the only way is for you to live your own life at its peak. You are incapable of experiencing anything outside of you. What you think of as light and darkness are within you, that which is pleasure and pain happens within you, agony and ecstasy happen within you. Everything that you ever experience happens within you, and it’s your own aliveness that gives you access to the more profound dimensions of life to be experienced.

What does it mean to have a life well lived?

Jordan B. Peterson: A life well lived means that you spend a substantial amount of time addressing the troubles of the world – trouble with yourself, your family, your community. Everyone has a sense that things are less than they could be, and everyone is affected by the suffering they see around them. It seems to me that lays a moral burden on us that can’t be avoided, and that the only way to rectify this burden is to confront it and try to do something about it. People inevitably find that the worthwhile things they’ve done in their life – the things that give them strength and forbearance and a certain amount of self-respect – are acts of responsibility that they have been undertaking in the face of serious problems.

Making happiness the key pursuit in life is just hopeless. It’s just not a pursuit that’s going to fulfil itself. Life is already complex enough to make us anxious, painful, disappointed and hurt: that’s not a pessimistic viewpoint; it’s the truth. My experience has been that it takes very little time to talk to someone, so that if you really listen to them and get below the surface, you’ll find out how many truly difficult things they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis. You do see people in rare periods of life where they’re comparatively carefree, but that’s not common, as far as I’m concerned. The idea that impulsive gratification and ‘happiness’ are going to rectify life’s problems just strikes me as naïve beyond tenability, and so it’s no surprise that life is just a constant disappointment for people.

Anish Kapoor: Those moments of full involvement, when you lose yourself, those are the moments when you are most alive. There’s a moment when you look at good art when time changes. It’s as if time no longer exists, becomes longer, or is suspended. There’s a moment of reverie when you’re fully immersed in something apart from yourself. One experien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Thought Economics
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Lemn Sissay
• Introduction
• 1. On Identity: Who We Are
• 2. On Culture: The Context of Humanity
• 3. On Leadership: Bringing Humanity Together
• 4. On Entrepreneurship: The Creators and the Makers
• 5. On Discrimination and Injustice: Them and Us
• 6. On Conflict: War, Peace and Justice
• 7. On Democracy: A 2,500-year Experiment in Power
• Index