Yuval Noah Harari

Now we are living at the moment in a moment of crisis of liberalism.

One of the reasons is that over the last few decades, liberalism has kind of lost touch with something that was a close ally of it for many generations, which is nationalism.

You know, in the 19th century, liberalism and nationalism go hand in hand.

And if you look at at least some places in the world today, like Ukraine, they still go hand in hand.

The Ukrainians are fighting at one at the same time for their national survival and independence and for liberal democracy.

There is no contradiction between the two.

You know, I would say that since 1789, nobody managed to think about anything new in the political realm.

The French Revolution came up with this kind of ideological package, which was complex.

Liberty, equality, fraternity.

And people tend to forget the third one, fraternity.

Fraternity is the national community.

And you can say that the whole of political history since 1789 is experimenting with different combinations of this trio.

And every movement that tried to completely abandon one of these three failed.

Fascism was all about fraternity, no equality, no liberty.

Communism emphasized one, equality, at the expense of liberty, and to some extent fraternity.

One of the explanations of what is happening to liberalism in recent decades, liberalism focused on equality and liberty, but tended to forget fraternity.

And this proved to be untenable.

Yeah, and I think the important thing to emphasize here, I mean, the reason that liberalism kind of lost touch with fraternity is that some people told a very negative story about fraternity, seeing it primarily in terms of conflict with other communities.

That fraternity is about hating and fighting with other nations.

And if we remember that, no, as we said in the beginning, the essence of fraternity is caring and loving a certain group of people.