During the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the third in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.
One of the fundamental ways in which personal stories can create impact is by shifting perceptions on an important topic. When we see an issue in a new light we’re able to think differently, and hopefully, act differently.
In his TED Talk, Leopoldo Lopez reminds us that freedom and democracy are threatened around the world. It was his talk at TEDNext that inspired me to dig deeper into the global state of democracy, which I explored in a previous post — The Story of a Flawed Democracy — so I decided to feature his talk in a separate post as a way to humanize the problem beyond the statistics.
Leopoldo opens with a story of his personal / political experiences, to establish a connection to the issues of democracy and freedom, then begins to explore this problem with a startling revelation:
Only 10 years ago, 42 percent of the world’s population was living under autocratic rule. That was 3.1 billion people. That’s around the same time I was sent to prison. Today, 72 percent of the global population is living under some sort of autocratic rule.
I’ve worked with a long list of people who currently live, or used to live, in one of those countries subject to autocratic rule. These are places where critical issues, such as poverty, healthcare, education, and nearly all aspects of equality suffer when compared to countries living under full democracy. As Leopoldo notes: “80 percent of the world’s poverty comes from autocratic countries.”
If you happen to be a human rights, political, or environmental activist, work in a government agency or NGO that’s subject to the inadequacies of autocratic rule, you probably have a story to share that can provide a personal perspective that others can relate to. As you view Leopoldo’s talk, and read the transcript below, think about how your personal story, combined with a description of the critical problem, and your proposed solution can shift perspectives on a global scale.
Transcript
So today I want to talk to you about something that has been at the core of my existence for the past years: freedom and democracy.
I was elected mayor of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, in the year 2000. I was reelected in the year 2004. And then in the year 2008, when I was running for higher office, I was banned to run for office. Because we were going to win. At that time, we started a movement, a nonviolent civil resistance grassroots movement that went all over Venezuela and worked with people all around the country to build a network that could face off the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro.
In the year 2013, Maduro was elected. He stole an election. And in January of 2014, we called for protest. Tens of thousands of people went to the streets. And that took me to prison. I spent the next seven years in imprisonment, four of them in solitary confinement in a military prison.
The history of my country, Venezuela, is one, like many other Latin American countries, African countries,
one of military rule, exile, imprisonment and politics. So I had read a lot about what it meant to be in prison. I read the usual suspects, I read about Mandela, I read about Gandhi, I read about my [role] model, Martin Luther King.
But I also read a lot about the experience of Venezuelans, including my great grandfather, who had been a political prisoner for years and died in exile. Everything that they had to say was relevant to their own condition, but they all spoke about the importance of having a routine. So I had my own routine since day one, February 18 of 2014.
My routine was simple. I would do three things every day. I would pray to take care of my soul. I would read, write, to do something with my mind. And I would do exercise. I did those three things with Spartan discipline every day. If I did them, I would feel that I was winning the day. But there was one thing that I would think about every single day: why I was in prison. And in fact, this is something that I’m sure happens to all prisoners, political prisoners or not. That’s what prison, in a way, is made for.
So every day I thought about what freedom and democracy meant. And it was there in a cell, two by two, in solitary confinement that I really got to understand what freedom was. And it became clear to me that freedom is not about one thing. In fact, freedom is about the possibility of doing many things. So the possibility to speak out, to express your mind. It’s the possibility to move around in your country. It’s the possibility to assemble with whomever you want to assemble, to pray to whomever you want to pray, to own property.
And all of those things were taken away from me and from millions of Venezuelans. And it also became very clear to me that freedom and democracy were two sides of a coin. Were interdependent. You cannot have freedom without democracy. You cannot have democracy if people are not free. So that took me to think about the state of democracy. In fact, next month, in November, we’re going to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 35 years.
Back then, I was in grad school. It was the ’90s. And I remember the excitement that was everywhere about spreading democracy, spreading freedom, human rights, all over the place. I remember my teachers going to different countries with students. But when we look back 35 years ago and we fast forward, things didn’t really come out the way it was expected.
Only 10 years ago, 42 percent of the world’s population was living under autocratic rule. That was 3.1 billion people. That’s around the same time I was sent to prison. Today, 72 percent of the global population is living under some sort of autocratic rule. So let’s think about this. This is 5.7 billion people in the world that don’t have the rights that most people in this room have. They can’t speak freely, they can’t move freely, they can’t pray freely, they can’t own property. 5.7 billion people in the world.
After seven years of imprisonment, I was able to escape prison and went into exile. Exile is another form of imprisonment. At the beginning, it was tough. But then I started to meet other people like myself, who had been leading protests in their countries, who had been political prisoners, who were in exile. And we were very different in any way we could think about: our skin color, our religion, our languages, the story of our families, the history of our countries.
We were very different. But when we spoke about what it meant to fight for freedom and to confront autocracies, I was with my buddies. It was the same people, the same movement. So we decided to create an alliance of democracy defenders and freedom fighters. So alongside with Garry Kasparov, from Russia, and an incredible woman from Iran, Masih Alinejad, we decided to create an alliance of freedom fighters and democracy defenders.
And that’s how we created the World Liberty Congress, which is an alliance of hundreds of leaders, many of them you have seen their work in Hong Kong, in Russia, in Belarus, in Uganda, in Zimbabwe, in Afghanistan, in Cambodia, Nicaragua, Cuba, in many countries. And we decided to work together, to come together with a single purpose: to stop autocracy and to bring democracy to our countries.
But it became very clear to us that we were not only facing our local autocrat, we were also facing a network of autocrats, an axis of autocrats. And this is something that might not be obvious to many people. But in fact, autocrats work together. They support each other. In many ways: diplomatically, financially, militarily, through their kleptocratic networks.
And this is not an ideological alliance. It has nothing to do with ideology. Right, left, conservative, liberals, nothing to do with that. It has to do with power, money and a common enemy: democracy. So that’s why you have the nationalists from Russia, the theocrats from Iran, the communists from China, working together under a similar alliance.
So if autocrats are working together and the world is coming to a point where 72 percent of the world’s population is under autocracy, it’s time to think about why should you care about this? Why should everybody, anybody care about this? Why should someone who’s living in the United States or in Europe or in a functioning democracy care about this?
Well, if you care about climate change, if you care about gender equality, if you care about women’s rights, if you care about human rights, if you care about corruption, if you care about migration, you need to be concerned about the rise of autocracy and the need for democracy.
30 percent of the CO2 emissions come from China and Russia alone. 80 percent of the world’s poverty comes from autocratic countries. 90 percent of the forced migration, and we from Venezuela can speak about this, has at its root cause autocracy. So we need to care about this.
And what can be done? What can be done about this? Well, I believe that we are now at a moment where we need to make a tipping point of the engagement of people around the world to create a movement towards freedom and democracy. Think about the climate change movement 20, 30, 40 years ago. It was not mainstream. It was there, but it was not mainstream.
But then what happened? Researchers, governments, policymakers, activists, artists, school teachers, students, children, everybody came together under the same cause. Because I remember during the 1980s, ’90s, you would look up to the sky and you would think that there was an ozone hole in the sky that was going to destroy. So the threat was very clear. People came together, policy came together, and now it’s mainstream. Things are being done. I believe we are at that point with respect to democracy and freedom. If that trend continues, today 72 percent, if that trend continues, maybe in the next 25 years, in 2050, the entire world would be autocratic. And that is less than a generation ago.
So we must take action. What can we do? Well, the first thing I believe is to assume that we need to take the offensive. Stop legitimizing autocrats. Autocrats today are comfortable. They do business with governments, with businesses. We need to think of smart sanctions, of ways to make them accountable for the violations of human rights. Second, there needs to be a support for pro-democracy and freedom movements.
In the United States, that is the most actively philanthropic society in the world, only two percent of philanthropy goes to democracy-related issues. Only two percent. And a fraction of a fraction of that two percent goes to promote democracy outside the US. It’s not a priority. So supporting pro-democracy movements, supporting the people that want to be free, should be a priority for all. And I mean, let me give you some examples.
Technology. Access to internet, to free and uncensored internet. Think of the potential transformational capacity to give people all over the world access to internet. Let me give you another example. Using new technologies like Bitcoin to promote and support the potential of these movements. We are doing this already. In the case of Venezuela, we supported more than 80,000 medical doctors and nurses using Stablecoins and Bitcoins because under autocracies you are under a financial apartheid.
Give opportunities for training. Give opportunities for these movements to be part of a global conversation. And finally, we need to build a global movement. There is not one person, one organization, one government, that can do this by themselves. Similar to climate change. We need to think of this challenge as a network. We need to create nodes of network, nodes of network that activate all over the place.
We need to activate anyone with the things that they can do. Musicians should think about singing for freedom. Artists, intellectuals, researchers, activists, governments. Everybody can create their own node with a similar goal, which is freedom and democracy. When I was in solitary confinement, I had a window, and I could see through the crack of that window that there was a tree, and in that tree there was a hawk. And I contemplated that animal for hours and hours and hours. I only think that you contemplate an animal that long if you’re in biology or you’re in prison.
And one day, a guard told me, because I was always telling the guards about the hawk, he said, “You know, the hawk is injured, went through barbed wire, and he’s injured.” And I said, “Bring it to me.” And to my surprise, they brought it to me. Maybe because they thought it was going to die. I fed that hawk. And that’s the hawk in my cell. That’s a drawing I made of the prison I was [in], of that tree and of the hawk.
And then one day, after a couple of months, they came to my cell, they threw a blanket on the hawk, they took it away. Of course it affected me. But less than a day after, that hawk was in the same tree. And it reassured me that it doesn’t matter how low you are, how low percentage possibilities you have to succeed, there is always possibility to do so.
So I came out and being in exile, I met a tattoo artist, that put me a tattoo of Venezuela on my leg, so I now have that eagle here, and I have it always with me. As a reminder, as a reminder that we can always rise up to all of the challenges. So I ask all of you to stand up, to speak out, to do something about our freedom. This is our time. Think of 25 years, and let’s give our children a free world with human rights, democracy and respect for all.
Thank you very much, thank you very much.
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Malcolm Gladwell: The tipping point I got wrong @ TEDNext 2024
/in Justice, Politics, Society, TED, TED Talk, Truth/by Mark LovettDuring the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the fourth in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.
TED Talks are one of the best know source of true personal stories. At least as true as a story can be when it’s told by a human with a faulty memory system, which includes all of us. The point being, we don’t intentionally include a false statement in such stories. But what about saying something we feel certain is true? We may do our research and verify the facts, but down the road it turns out that what we presented to the world as fact was actually false.
Malcolm Gladwell became a household name after his book, The Tipping Point, was published in 2000. In this talk, Malcolm refers to a particular point made in the book, one connected to the infamous Stop-and-Frisk policy that was used in New York City as a way to reduce crime. But it turned out, this policy didn’t have any effect on crime, none at all. And now, some 25 years later, Malcolm stepped onto the stage to admit that he got it wrong. While I applaud his making such an admission in public, there was something missing…
…there was a critical piece of the story he left out — the effects of stop-and-frisk on the victims of this illegal and immoral policing policy. Without mentioning any details of the program — how hundreds of thousands of innocent people were harassed and traumatized, their basic rights violated, how they became victims of racial profiling and suffered both verbal and physical abuse — Malcolm’s talk fell short regarding the impact it could have had.
If you’re wondering about what happened, The Center for Constitutional Rights published a report — Stop and Frisk: The Human Impact — on the practice, and the stories captured highlight the cost to innocent citizens of New York City. I’ve listened to some of the interviews and tried to put myself in their shoes.
Imagine walking down the street and being stopped by the police for no reason other than you’re a person of color. Then having those police officers accuse you of crimes you didn’t commit, sticking their hands in your pockets, and possibly arresting you without probable cause. I wish Malcolm had talked about this.
But Malcolm’s talk brought to light one of the most important aspects of telling personal stories — that everything we say that’s represented as truth is nothing more than what we believe to be true. And if you find out at a later date that you misspoke in some way, hopefully you’ll have a chance to correct your story, and say you’re sorry.
Watch Malcolm’s talk and read through the transcript. I’ve offered up my opinion — which you may or may not agree with — but what matters is what you think. Notice how he opens with a personal experience that sets the stage and lets you know his mindset at the start. The narrative shifts to explaining his research and how he formulated his theory. Ultimately, however, he comes to realize the fault in his logic and concludes with an apology. Overall, a brilliant talk.
Transcript
I want to tell you a story about when I moved to New York City in 1993. I was 30 years old, and I was moving to what was known as one of the most dangerous big cities in the United States. And every night, I would go out with my friends on a Friday or Saturday night, and at the end of every night we would have a little conference and we would pool all of our money, and we would figure out how everyone was going to get home, because you couldn’t go home on the subway by yourself and you couldn’t walk home, and if you were a woman, you definitely were not allowed to go home by yourself at one o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night. That’s what it meant to be in this very scary city called New York.
I used to live in the sixth floor of a walk-up in the West Village, and my bedroom faced the fire escape. And even in the summer, I had no air conditioning, I had to keep my window closed because I was scared that somebody would come down the fire escape into my apartment.
And then one day I woke up and I realized that I wasn’t scared anymore. And I kept the window open. And I realized that when I was going out with my friends, we weren’t having that conference at the end of the evening anymore. We were just going home. This city that I had thought, we all thought, was one of the scariest in the United States wasn’t scary anymore. And I remember at the time I was absolutely transfixed by this transformation. I couldn’t understand it. It was the same city full of the same weird, screwed up people, same buildings, same institutions. Only nobody was murdering each other anymore.
And I would call up criminologists and I would ask them, “What’s your explanation?” And no one could give me a good explanation. And I remember one day — I used to go to the NYU, New York University has a library called Bobst Library. I used to go to Bobst to look for ideas. And I remember one day I was on the sixth floor in the sociology section, HM-1A6, and I was reading back issues, yes, I was, back issues of the American Journal of Sociology, and I ran across an article from 1991 by a guy named Jonathan Crane called “The Epidemic Theory of Ghetto Life.”
And I’m going to read to you how it began. “The word epidemic is commonly used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos. The news is filled with feature stories on crack epidemics, epidemics of gang violence, and epidemics of teenage childbearing. The term is used loosely in popular parlance, but turns out to be remarkably apt.”
And what Crane was saying is that if you look at these kinds of social problems, they behave, they come and they go, they rise and they fall exactly like viruses do. He was saying that that term epidemic is not a metaphor. It’s a literal description. And I’ll never forget when I read that little paragraph and I was standing in this aisle in Bobst Library, and, you know, it’s a library. It’s got that hush and that musty smell of books. And I’m reading this crazy article from 1991, and I remember thinking to myself, oh my God, that’s what happened in New York.
We had an epidemic of crime. And what is the hallmark of an epidemic? It’s the tipping point. It’s the moment when the epidemic order goes up all at once or crashes all at once. And so I wrote an article for “The New Yorker” magazine called “The Tipping Point,” which was my attempt to use this theory to explain what happened in New York. And then I, because of that article, got a contract for a book called “The Tipping Point,” which did very well. And that book led to another book and another book and another book.
And I am standing here today because of that moment in the library 25 years ago. So “The Tipping Point,” my first book, was about all kinds of things. I talked about Hush Puppies and Paul Revere and teenage smoking. But at the heart of it was a chapter on why did crime decline in New York. And in that chapter I talked a lot about a theory called broken windows theory, which was a very famous idea that had been pioneered by two criminologists called George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in the 1980s, very influential article, in which they argued that very small things in the environment can be triggers for larger crimes.
That essentially small instances of disorder are tipping points for very serious things like murder or rape or any kind of violent crime. It was an epidemic theory of crime, and the New York City Police Department took that idea very seriously. And one of the things they began to do in the 1990s during this crime drop was to say what this argument means is that we can’t be passive anymore. We have to be proactive. We have to go out there and if someone is jaywalking or jumping a turnstile or doing graffiti or peeing on the sidewalk, we’ve got to stop them.
And if we see a young man walking down the street and he looks a little bit suspicious, we’ve got to stop him and frisk him for his weapons. That’s how the NYPD interpreted the broken windows theory in New York. And my chapter was how millions of people around the world came to understand the crime drop in New York, that it was all broken windows. And here’s the thing that I have come to understand about that explanation I gave of why crime fell in New York.
I was wrong.
I didn’t understand this until quite recently, when I went back and I decided on the 25th anniversary of my first book, “The Tipping Point,” that I would write a sequel. It’s called “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” and I went back and, for the first time in a quarter century, I reread my original book. I’m not someone who likes to revisit things, but I did it, and it was a uniquely complicated experience. It was like looking back at your high school yearbook. You know, when you see yourself and you have some combination of, “Wow, I look young,” and also, “Wow, I really wore that?” It was like that.
And what I realized is that in the intervening years since I wrote that explanation of why I think crime fell in New York, the theory of broken windows had been tested. There was a kind of classic natural experiment to see whether that theory worked. And the natural experiment was a court case, maybe one of the most famous court cases in New York history called Floyd v City of New York. It involved a young man named David Floyd, who had been stopped a number of occasions by the NYPD and was the face of a class action lawsuit that said the practice of stopping young men, largely young men of color, just because they look a little suspicious to police is not constitutional.
You can’t do that, right? And to everyone’s surprise, the Floyd lawsuit goes before a federal judge. And the federal judge rules in David Floyd’s favor. And overnight, the broken windows era in New York City policing ends. And the NYPD goes from — In 2011, they stopped and frisked 700,000 young men, right. And after the Floyd lawsuit was decided in 2013, that number drops to less than 50,000. So this is the perfect natural experiment. You have New York before Floyd and New York after Floyd.
Before Floyd, the principal tactic of the NYPD is stopping everyone they can. And after Floyd that goes away. They can’t do that anymore, right? This is the perfect test case for whether you think that’s why crime fell in New York. And if you believe in the power of broken windows policing, then your expectation has to be that after the Floyd case, when broken windows goes away, crime is going to go back up, right?
And I should tell you that in 2013, in the wake of the Floyd case, everybody thought crime was going to go back up. The NYPD thought that, the city government thought that, the pundits thought that, even the judge who wrote the opinion saying that stop and frisk was unconstitutional, said in her opinion that she strongly suspected that as a result of this opinion, crime would go back up. I thought crime was going to go back up, right?
All of us had internalized the logic of broken windows. We said, yes, we know this strategy poses an incredible burden on young men, but what choice do we have, right? You know, if the choice is being stopped repeatedly by police or being killed, maybe we’re better off with the former than the latter. This is the price we pay for a safe New York, right? So what happens after the Floyd case? Stop and frisk goes away and crime falls.
In fact, crime in New York City undergoes a second, even more miraculous decline, right? And what’s interesting about this is, you know, when the first crime declined in the 1990s, you see that decline almost everywhere in the United States, not quite as steep as New York, but crime goes down everywhere. And then in every other city in the United States, crime plateaus. But New York gets rid of broken windows, and crime starts to fall and fall and fall all over again.
To the point by 2019 that New York City is as safe as Paris, which is not a sentence I ever thought anyone would ever say in my lifetime. And what we realize in that second crime decline is that it wasn’t broken windows. It’s not indiscriminate policing that causes crime to fall. Rather, it is the intelligent and thoughtful and selective application of police authority that causes crime to fall.
Now, there’s a couple of really puzzling things here. One is that people don’t seem to have internalized the fact that New York underwent this second, even more dramatic crime fall. People still act like it’s the year 2000 when it comes to making sense of New York. You know, a whole bunch of very, very wealthy hedge fund guys have very loudly left New York for Miami in recent years. And they all say, when they’re packing up their offices in New York, “We can’t take the crime anymore.”
Well, violent crime in Miami is twice as high as New York City. If they were really concerned about violent crime, they would leave Coral Gables before they get murdered and move to the Bronx, where it is a whole lot safer.
The other even more important thing, though, is that people act like stop and frisk actually worked. No one seems to have internalized the lesson of the great Floyd case natural experiment. If you listen to people — I’m not going to name their names, but people going around the country now campaigning for higher office, they will say things like, “It’s time to bring back stop and frisk and broken windows policing. It worked so well in New York.”
They’re acting as if we didn’t have that great moment of understanding in 2013. And for that, for that misunderstanding, I think I bear some of the blame. I was the one who wrote this book saying this was the greatest tactic ever in stopping crime. Now, how do I make sense of my mistake? Well, I can give you all kinds of excuses. You know, I can say I’m not a fortune teller.
I didn’t know that David Floyd was going to come along 10 years after I wrote my book and give us this great test case in broken windows policing. You know, I could say that, you know, I was just writing what everybody believed back in the 1996 and 1997. But I don’t think those excuses hold any water whatsoever.
I think that journalists, writers need to be held to a higher standard, right? I wrote —
I told a story about how crime fell in New York, and I told the story like the story was over. And like I knew what the answer to this story was. And it wasn’t over and I didn’t know the answer, right? I wrote, “I know this is what happened,” and what I should have said is “This is what I believe happened now,” right? And those words “I believe happened now” have to be at the center of any understanding of how the world works.
We have to acknowledge that we are representing the position of this very moment, and that that position could change if the facts change, right? The great desire of any writer is to write a book for the ages, that will forever explain the way things are, but that’s not possible, and no one should ever try. That was my mistake. And I’m sorry.
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Crazy Bet by Nate DiMeo @ The Memory Palace
/in Democracy, Freedom, History, Podcast, Slavery, Warfare/by Mark LovettLong time readers of this blog already know that one of my favorite storytelling podcasts is The Memory Palace, hosted by Nate DiMeo. And the exciting news is that Nate’s new book was recently released. No surprise that the book’s title is: The Memory Palace – True Short Stories of the Past (Kindle, Hardcover). I know many of you are going digital these days, but the book cover is so beautiful I’m recommending people spend a few extra bucks for an edition they can hold.
While avid listeners won’t need an explanation, those of you who are unfamiliar with Nate’s podcast could use a primer as this is an unusual style of storytelling. Not only is the narrator (Nate) not part of the story, but each episode magically condenses what could be a rather long recitation (we’re talking hours here) of someone’s life story into a few brief minutes — a thread, if you will, that leads listeners on a journey of how the person at the center of the story came to be, and how they changed the course of history. While it differs from the type of personal storytelling I typically focus on, Nate’s ability to distill people, places, and events into a compact narrative is a valuable skill we can all utilize when crafting our own story. Pay special attention to the visual nature of his prose.
So many stories stood out for me — expect a few more posts down the road — so it was hard to pick one to feature, but as I have a thing for historical spycraft (you probably didn’t know that about me) I found one episode of great interest. Spies are characters in every war, but I had never hear of Elizabeth Van Lew, so was unaware of the role she played in aiding the Union during the Civil War.
This chapter in the book spans a bit over three pages, which doesn’t sound like much space for a story, but Nate paints a compelling picture of her personality and active contribution. Elizabeth, or Crazy Bet, as the title informs us, lived in Richmond, Virginia, which became the capital of the Confederacy in spring 1861. People often said she was an odd duck, which I took to be an apt description of her basic nature, but to some extent she would exaggerate her mannerisms in order to deflect suspicion from her real mission.
Soon after the start of the war she began visiting Union POWs at Libby Prison, bringing cakes and bread and meat wrapped in cloth, and books and Bibles. Toward the end of the war, when the capital was falling, Elizabeth raised an American flag atop her house. Angry residents attempted to burn her house down, but Crazy Bet didn’t back down and forced the crowd to retreat.
There’s so much more to her story, including the fact that after Richmond fell, General Ulysses S, Grant stopped by for tea and recognized the part she played in helping win the war. As is his style, Nate provides just enough detail, allowing us to visualize Elizabeth and her visits to prison. It’s the kind of storytelling that inspires us to ask, “What else did she do during the war, and during her life?”
That’s the ideal balance to aim for when creating personal stories. Enough detail to make your point, and at the same time, inspire a sense of curiosity, to provide an invitation for listeners / readers to explore the topic further.
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Rhaina Cohen: Why Friendship Can Be Just As Meaningful as Romantic Love @ TEDNext 2024
/in Emotions, Family, Friendship, Relationships/by Mark LovettDuring the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the fifth in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.
I’ve always thought of relationships as constituting the fabric of life, with those closest to us becoming metaphorical threads woven into our human tapestry. But are all threads treated as equals? In her TED Talk, Rhaina Cohen speaks to “…a culture that treats friendship as the sidekick to the real hero of romance.”
I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but that statement rings true for me. In my experience, if you’re not in a romantic relationship, the most prevalent question is, “Are you seeing anyone?” It seems that not having someone to share your life with means your life is somehow incomplete. Which is to say, the story of your life is missing a few chapters. But Rhaina has a different take — one in which friendships can be just as rewarding.
Rhaina uses a variety of story blocks, from her own experiences, to an American Supreme Court case, platonic co-parenting in Canada, statistics about marriage, a reflection on ancient Rome, and platonic life partners, to name a few. While a lot of TED Talks deal with learning something new, in this case I felt her talk was more about shifting perspectives, encouraging the audience to think beyond the status quo when it comes to the value of the friendships we build and maintain.
Transcript
There is a Supreme Court case that you could mistake for a sermon. It’s the case that recognized that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Here is a sense of what Justice Kennedy wrote: “Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there.”
He goes on to say that marriage offers care and companionship, and the decision argues that these are basic human needs that everyone should have access to, whether they’re straight or queer. Validating.
But what do these words say to you if you’re single? Anybody single here? I mean, there should be quite a few of you, because in the US, the percentage of American adults who have never been married is at a record high. Married people, you’re not off the hook. I’m going to get a little morbid for a moment and have you contemplate what happens if your marriage doesn’t last until the end of your life, whether because of divorce or outliving your spouse? In the US, about 30 percent of women over 65 are widows.
The reality is, any one of us is unlikely to have a spouse by our side until our last dying breath. Regardless of whether we are partnered now, we need to rely on more than one relationship to sustain us throughout our full, unpredictable lives. We need other significant others. And there’s an overlooked kind of relationship that we can turn to. Friendship.
I got the sense that friendship could be this stronger force in our lives because of a friendship that I stumbled into. We would see each other most days of the week, be each other’s plus-ones to parties. My friend has this habit of grabbing my hand to hold, including when I brought her to my office, and then I’d have to be like, no, not in the office.
(Laughter)
But I mean, I wouldn’t let my husband do that in the office either. It’s just, you know, setting matters. But it was only an issue because for us, affection is a reflex. And I knew it couldn’t be just us. I went out and interviewed dozens of people who had a friendship like ours, and I wrote a book about them. And the kinds of friends that I spoke to, they don’t just have a weekly phone call. They’re friends like these.
Natasha and Linda are the first legally recognized platonic co-parents in Canada. And this is them with their teenage son on vacation. Joe and John have been best friends for many decades. When Joe was struggling with alcohol and drug use, John got him into recovery. And then John decided that to support his friend, he would also become sober. Joy took care of her friend Hannah during Hannah’s six-year battle with ovarian cancer. And that included flying out to New York, where Hannah got specialized treatment. Joy had trouble actually sleeping overnight in the hospital, because she was too busy watching to make sure her friend’s chest was still rising and falling.
Some of the friends that I spoke to had this friendship occupy the space that’s conventionally given to a romantic partner. Some had this kind of friendship and a romantic partner. It’s not either/or. As I spoke to these people, I realized that they were at the frontier of friendship, helping us imagine how much more we could ask of our platonic relationships. Which is true, but another way of looking at it is they’re doing something retro, even ancient.
In ancient Rome, friends would talk about each other as “half of my soul,” or “the greater part of my soul.” The kind of language we now use in romantic relationships. From China to Jordan to England, there was a practice called “sworn brotherhood, where male friends would go through a ritual that would turn them into brothers.
About a century ago, friends would sit for portraits like these, with their arms wrapped around each other, their bodies up close. What I took from this history is that if we don’t limit friendship, it can be central to our lives.
But today, not everybody recognizes that. I spoke to a mother who really tried to get her son to make dating a priority because she wanted him to find emotional wholeness. And her son told her, “I found it in my platonic life partner.” His best friend, who he had known since high school, who had moved across the country to be near him, to live with him, in fact.
The mother said, “I don’t understand how you can be partners with someone you’re not romantic with.” Understandable as a reaction in a culture that treats friendship as the sidekick to the real hero of romance. We get that message from rom-coms, from Supreme Court justices, also from policy.
So Joy, during the six years she took care of her friend, she was not entitled to family medical leave. When Hannah died, Joy was not entitled to bereavement leave, because the two of them were considered unrelated. In our government and workplace policies, friendship is invisible.
Sometimes this diminishment of friendship comes from the outside, and sometimes it comes from the inside. A woman wrote to me about her friend who she considers her person. She spent so much time with her friend’s kids that she was given car seats for them. She’s also divorced and tried to find a new spouse because there was a hole she wanted to fill in her life. Then she read stories of people like Joe and John in an article I’d written. And she realized there was no hole. She had been happy all along, but she hadn’t known, been made to believe that it was possible to have a friend be enough.
If we can recognize what friendship has the potential to be, and if we can recognize that there is more than one kind of significant other then we can imagine more ways for us to find love and care and companionship. And we can support people who have these kinds of friendships. So the mother I mentioned, she’s completely changed her tune. She now admires the commitment between her son and her son’s friend.
I feel like I get to live in a future world where you can just build a life with your friends. I live not only with my husband but also two of my closest friends. One of them we kind of like had a courtship process to recruit him to come to our city and live with us. The other had a job in our city, and we invited her to stay.
It didn’t take long for us to start scheming with about a half dozen other friends, about trying to buy property together. The kind of place where we could raise kids alongside one another, our working title for the place is “The Village.” I don’t know if this will work out. I can keep you posted about it, but if it does, I feel really confident about one thing. That if one of us has a migraine at 6am and there’s a toddler bouncing around, or we get a terrifying diagnosis, we will not be a lonely person calling out only for no one to answer.
And this is what I hope for all of us. That we feel like we have permission to share our lives with whoever we are lucky enough to find, whether that’s a spouse, a sibling or a house full of friends.
Thank you.
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Leopoldo Lopez: How to defend democracy and fight autocracy @ TEDNext 2024
/in Democracy, Freedom, Government, Humanity, Politics, TED Talk/by Mark LovettDuring the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the third in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.
One of the fundamental ways in which personal stories can create impact is by shifting perceptions on an important topic. When we see an issue in a new light we’re able to think differently, and hopefully, act differently.
In his TED Talk, Leopoldo Lopez reminds us that freedom and democracy are threatened around the world. It was his talk at TEDNext that inspired me to dig deeper into the global state of democracy, which I explored in a previous post — The Story of a Flawed Democracy — so I decided to feature his talk in a separate post as a way to humanize the problem beyond the statistics.
Leopoldo opens with a story of his personal / political experiences, to establish a connection to the issues of democracy and freedom, then begins to explore this problem with a startling revelation:
I’ve worked with a long list of people who currently live, or used to live, in one of those countries subject to autocratic rule. These are places where critical issues, such as poverty, healthcare, education, and nearly all aspects of equality suffer when compared to countries living under full democracy. As Leopoldo notes: “80 percent of the world’s poverty comes from autocratic countries.”
If you happen to be a human rights, political, or environmental activist, work in a government agency or NGO that’s subject to the inadequacies of autocratic rule, you probably have a story to share that can provide a personal perspective that others can relate to. As you view Leopoldo’s talk, and read the transcript below, think about how your personal story, combined with a description of the critical problem, and your proposed solution can shift perspectives on a global scale.
Transcript
So today I want to talk to you about something that has been at the core of my existence for the past years: freedom and democracy.
I was elected mayor of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, in the year 2000. I was reelected in the year 2004. And then in the year 2008, when I was running for higher office, I was banned to run for office. Because we were going to win. At that time, we started a movement, a nonviolent civil resistance grassroots movement that went all over Venezuela and worked with people all around the country to build a network that could face off the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro.
In the year 2013, Maduro was elected. He stole an election. And in January of 2014, we called for protest. Tens of thousands of people went to the streets. And that took me to prison. I spent the next seven years in imprisonment, four of them in solitary confinement in a military prison.
The history of my country, Venezuela, is one, like many other Latin American countries, African countries,
one of military rule, exile, imprisonment and politics. So I had read a lot about what it meant to be in prison. I read the usual suspects, I read about Mandela, I read about Gandhi, I read about my [role] model, Martin Luther King.
But I also read a lot about the experience of Venezuelans, including my great grandfather, who had been a political prisoner for years and died in exile. Everything that they had to say was relevant to their own condition, but they all spoke about the importance of having a routine. So I had my own routine since day one, February 18 of 2014.
My routine was simple. I would do three things every day. I would pray to take care of my soul. I would read, write, to do something with my mind. And I would do exercise. I did those three things with Spartan discipline every day. If I did them, I would feel that I was winning the day. But there was one thing that I would think about every single day: why I was in prison. And in fact, this is something that I’m sure happens to all prisoners, political prisoners or not. That’s what prison, in a way, is made for.
So every day I thought about what freedom and democracy meant. And it was there in a cell, two by two, in solitary confinement that I really got to understand what freedom was. And it became clear to me that freedom is not about one thing. In fact, freedom is about the possibility of doing many things. So the possibility to speak out, to express your mind. It’s the possibility to move around in your country. It’s the possibility to assemble with whomever you want to assemble, to pray to whomever you want to pray, to own property.
And all of those things were taken away from me and from millions of Venezuelans. And it also became very clear to me that freedom and democracy were two sides of a coin. Were interdependent. You cannot have freedom without democracy. You cannot have democracy if people are not free. So that took me to think about the state of democracy. In fact, next month, in November, we’re going to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 35 years.
Back then, I was in grad school. It was the ’90s. And I remember the excitement that was everywhere about spreading democracy, spreading freedom, human rights, all over the place. I remember my teachers going to different countries with students. But when we look back 35 years ago and we fast forward, things didn’t really come out the way it was expected.
Only 10 years ago, 42 percent of the world’s population was living under autocratic rule. That was 3.1 billion people. That’s around the same time I was sent to prison. Today, 72 percent of the global population is living under some sort of autocratic rule. So let’s think about this. This is 5.7 billion people in the world that don’t have the rights that most people in this room have. They can’t speak freely, they can’t move freely, they can’t pray freely, they can’t own property. 5.7 billion people in the world.
After seven years of imprisonment, I was able to escape prison and went into exile. Exile is another form of imprisonment. At the beginning, it was tough. But then I started to meet other people like myself, who had been leading protests in their countries, who had been political prisoners, who were in exile. And we were very different in any way we could think about: our skin color, our religion, our languages, the story of our families, the history of our countries.
We were very different. But when we spoke about what it meant to fight for freedom and to confront autocracies, I was with my buddies. It was the same people, the same movement. So we decided to create an alliance of democracy defenders and freedom fighters. So alongside with Garry Kasparov, from Russia, and an incredible woman from Iran, Masih Alinejad, we decided to create an alliance of freedom fighters and democracy defenders.
And that’s how we created the World Liberty Congress, which is an alliance of hundreds of leaders, many of them you have seen their work in Hong Kong, in Russia, in Belarus, in Uganda, in Zimbabwe, in Afghanistan, in Cambodia, Nicaragua, Cuba, in many countries. And we decided to work together, to come together with a single purpose: to stop autocracy and to bring democracy to our countries.
But it became very clear to us that we were not only facing our local autocrat, we were also facing a network of autocrats, an axis of autocrats. And this is something that might not be obvious to many people. But in fact, autocrats work together. They support each other. In many ways: diplomatically, financially, militarily, through their kleptocratic networks.
And this is not an ideological alliance. It has nothing to do with ideology. Right, left, conservative, liberals, nothing to do with that. It has to do with power, money and a common enemy: democracy. So that’s why you have the nationalists from Russia, the theocrats from Iran, the communists from China, working together under a similar alliance.
So if autocrats are working together and the world is coming to a point where 72 percent of the world’s population is under autocracy, it’s time to think about why should you care about this? Why should everybody, anybody care about this? Why should someone who’s living in the United States or in Europe or in a functioning democracy care about this?
Well, if you care about climate change, if you care about gender equality, if you care about women’s rights, if you care about human rights, if you care about corruption, if you care about migration, you need to be concerned about the rise of autocracy and the need for democracy.
30 percent of the CO2 emissions come from China and Russia alone. 80 percent of the world’s poverty comes from autocratic countries. 90 percent of the forced migration, and we from Venezuela can speak about this, has at its root cause autocracy. So we need to care about this.
And what can be done? What can be done about this? Well, I believe that we are now at a moment where we need to make a tipping point of the engagement of people around the world to create a movement towards freedom and democracy. Think about the climate change movement 20, 30, 40 years ago. It was not mainstream. It was there, but it was not mainstream.
But then what happened? Researchers, governments, policymakers, activists, artists, school teachers, students, children, everybody came together under the same cause. Because I remember during the 1980s, ’90s, you would look up to the sky and you would think that there was an ozone hole in the sky that was going to destroy. So the threat was very clear. People came together, policy came together, and now it’s mainstream. Things are being done. I believe we are at that point with respect to democracy and freedom. If that trend continues, today 72 percent, if that trend continues, maybe in the next 25 years, in 2050, the entire world would be autocratic. And that is less than a generation ago.
So we must take action. What can we do? Well, the first thing I believe is to assume that we need to take the offensive. Stop legitimizing autocrats. Autocrats today are comfortable. They do business with governments, with businesses. We need to think of smart sanctions, of ways to make them accountable for the violations of human rights. Second, there needs to be a support for pro-democracy and freedom movements.
In the United States, that is the most actively philanthropic society in the world, only two percent of philanthropy goes to democracy-related issues. Only two percent. And a fraction of a fraction of that two percent goes to promote democracy outside the US. It’s not a priority. So supporting pro-democracy movements, supporting the people that want to be free, should be a priority for all. And I mean, let me give you some examples.
Technology. Access to internet, to free and uncensored internet. Think of the potential transformational capacity to give people all over the world access to internet. Let me give you another example. Using new technologies like Bitcoin to promote and support the potential of these movements. We are doing this already. In the case of Venezuela, we supported more than 80,000 medical doctors and nurses using Stablecoins and Bitcoins because under autocracies you are under a financial apartheid.
Give opportunities for training. Give opportunities for these movements to be part of a global conversation. And finally, we need to build a global movement. There is not one person, one organization, one government, that can do this by themselves. Similar to climate change. We need to think of this challenge as a network. We need to create nodes of network, nodes of network that activate all over the place.
We need to activate anyone with the things that they can do. Musicians should think about singing for freedom. Artists, intellectuals, researchers, activists, governments. Everybody can create their own node with a similar goal, which is freedom and democracy. When I was in solitary confinement, I had a window, and I could see through the crack of that window that there was a tree, and in that tree there was a hawk. And I contemplated that animal for hours and hours and hours. I only think that you contemplate an animal that long if you’re in biology or you’re in prison.
And one day, a guard told me, because I was always telling the guards about the hawk, he said, “You know, the hawk is injured, went through barbed wire, and he’s injured.” And I said, “Bring it to me.” And to my surprise, they brought it to me. Maybe because they thought it was going to die. I fed that hawk. And that’s the hawk in my cell. That’s a drawing I made of the prison I was [in], of that tree and of the hawk.
And then one day, after a couple of months, they came to my cell, they threw a blanket on the hawk, they took it away. Of course it affected me. But less than a day after, that hawk was in the same tree. And it reassured me that it doesn’t matter how low you are, how low percentage possibilities you have to succeed, there is always possibility to do so.
So I came out and being in exile, I met a tattoo artist, that put me a tattoo of Venezuela on my leg, so I now have that eagle here, and I have it always with me. As a reminder, as a reminder that we can always rise up to all of the challenges. So I ask all of you to stand up, to speak out, to do something about our freedom. This is our time. Think of 25 years, and let’s give our children a free world with human rights, democracy and respect for all.
Thank you very much, thank you very much.
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Shu Takada: Yo! Have you ever seen a yo-yo dance like this? @ TEDNext 2024
/in Passion, Performance, TED, TED Talk/by Mark LovettDuring the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the second in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks from the stage.
While most of the folks who step on stage at a TED event are there to deliver a talk, but there are exceptions, most notably for a musical performances. But on occasion, the audience is treated to a different type of performance — one that highlights an amazing talent. To be honest, the last thing I expected to see on a stage at TEDNext was someone playing with a yo-yo.
While watching Shu Takada’s incredible yo-yo performance I was wondering how many thousands of hours it took to reach this level of proficiency. And to realize that he can demonstrate his talent anywhere in the world, and please people no matter their language or culture. By the time he finished I was thinking how cool it would be to hear some of those stories. I’m sure he has a long list of beautiful stories that he could share about the people he has met. Enjoy!
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