Yuval Noah Harari: evaluation

Transcript context

…The line between good and evil runs the heart of every man? Yes. I wouldn’t say that every person is capable of every type of evil, but we are all fallible. There is a large element. It partly depends on the efforts we make to develop our self-awareness during life, part of it depends on moral luck. If you are born as a Christian German in the 1910s or 1920s and you grow up in Nazi Germany, that’s bad moral luck. Your chances of committing terrible things, you have a very high chance of doing it, and you can with withstand it, but it will take tremendous effort. If you are born in Germany after the war, you are morally lucky that you will not be put to such a test. You will not need to exert these enormous efforts not to commit atrocities. This is just part of history. There is an element of luck, but again, part of it is also self-awareness. And you asked me earlier about the potential of power to corrupt, and I listened to the interview you just did with Prime Minister Netanyahu a couple of days ago. And one of the things that most struck me during the interview that you asked him, you asked him, “Are you afraid of this thing that power corrupts?” He didn’t think for a single second. He didn’t pause. He didn’t admit a tiny little level of a doubt or… “No, power doesn’t corrupt.” For me, it was a shocking and a revealing moment. And it kind of dovetails with how you began the interview, that I really liked your opening gambit. That kind of, no, really, you kind of told him, lots of people in the world are angry with you, some people hate you, they dislike you. What do you want to tell them, to say to them? And you gave him this kind of platform. And I was very, what will he say? And he just denied it. He basically denied it. He had to cut short the interview from three hours to one hour because you had hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets demonstrating against him. And he goes and saying, no, everybody likes me. What are you talking about? But on that topic, you’ve said recently that the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may go down in history as the man who destroys Israel. Can you explain what you mean by that?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.