> QA: What, as an ordinary citizen now, frightens you most, would you wish, most could happen, to stop the panic at least. > YH: I think the worse thing is the

> QA: What, as an ordinary citizen now, frightens you most, would you wish, most could happen, to stop the panic at least. > YH: I think the worse thing is the disunity we see in the world, the lack of cooperation and coordination we see between different countries, and the lack of trust, both between countries, and also between the population and the government. ¶ This is basically the payday for what we've been seeing in the last few years, with the epidemic of fake news, and with the deterioration of international relations. ¶ If you compare this for example with the 2008 financial crisis — which is of course a crisis of a different kind, but there are similarities — in 2008 you had responsible adults in the world which took a leadership position, rallied the world behind them, and prevented the worst outcomes. But over the last four years basically we've seen a rapid deterioration of trust in the international system. The country which was the leader previously, both in the 2008 financial crisis and also in the last big epidemic, the Ebola epidemic in 2014 — and that country is the United States — now it is not taking any kind of leadership position. Actually since 2016, the current administration has made it very clear that the US has resigned its role as world leader, it made it very clear that the US has no longer any friends in the world, it has only interests. And even if now, the US — which is not doing so far — but even if it will try to assume a leadership position, nobody would follow a leader who's motto is “Me first.” ¶ So what really frightens me is the lack of leadership and cooperation, and what people should realize, is that the spread of the epidemic in any one country threatens the entire world because of the danger that if we don't contain this in time, the virus will evolve — that is maybe one of the worse problems with this kind of epidemic — is actually a rapid evolution of the virus. We saw it before with the 2014 Ebola epidemic. It actually started, the Ebola epidemic started, with one genetic mutation in one virus in one person in West Africa, which turned Ebola from a relatively rare disease into a raging epidemic, because this single mutation increased the contagiousness of the virus four times. ¶ Now this could be happening right now, somewhere in Iran, or in Italy, or in anywhere else, and wherever it happens, it endangers the entire world. ¶ Humanity needs to close ranks against the viruses. Yuval Harari then goes on to describe the second thing that scares him the most: The rise of authoritarianism through governments taking advantage of peoples’ fear about the virus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwusbaOFr2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwusbaOFr2Y