Former President Barack Obama has warned that society faces a growing crisis as people lose trust in one another and struggle to agree on even the most basic facts.
Speaking at Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena, Obama discussed the challenges facing modern democracies during a A Conversation With tour. The event, hosted by writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch, explored everything from the influence of digital platforms to the responsibility of political leaders.
Throughout the evening, Obama offered pointed observations about the current political climate, including several subtle references to President Donald Trump.
According to Obama, the way people consume information online is contributing to a dangerous breakdown in shared understanding. He raised concerns about the way digital platforms are fragmenting the information people consume, calling it one of the “biggest dangers” facing society.
“It turns out that a lot of what keeps you hooked is anger, resentment, fear, along with lust and cat videos,” Obama said, according to VT. “It’s an interesting map of the human brain. So we all became trapped in our silos.”
The challenges of navigating today’s digital world
At the same time, Obama cautioned against giving governments too much control over online information.
“It’s a hard nut to crack because one solution is to control what is on the internet. Obviously China does that and now you have state control and that has its own dangers. So, the medicine may be worse than the disease.
“On the other hand, it is very hard to function in any kind of democracy if we don’t have an agreement on the basic baseline of facts. We can have 1,000, 20,000, 100,000 opinions about stuff, but if we can’t agree on basic facts like, you know, vaccines prevent diseases and have been really useful, or the planet is getting warmer…
“We can argue about how to respond [to these issues]. We can still have a lot of arguments, but we can’t have arguments about facts, about what happened, about what’s true and what’s false.
“What ends up happening is that we can’t debate each other if we are denying just basic things that are provable. What ends up happening is we think each other are all crazy, we lose social trust, we stop believing that the other person is operating in good faith. I think what we are going to have to do is find ways to rebuild social trust, validation, authority, belief in facts.”
Obama during A Conversation With tour
Obama also turned his attention to another challenge facing modern society: the difficulty of bringing people together despite their different backgrounds and experiences.
“I try to lift up stuff that tells a particular story that is close to me, that is a story that says we are wildly different and specific in our experiences and our traditions and our roots and our families and traumas, and we are deeply connected in so many ways,” he said, according to VT.
“Stories that tell us that. Stories that remind us of that, that we pass on to our children so they can walk through Manchester with all its diversity and feel like ‘you know what, I know that person and I understand them and I trust them and I’m not fearful because they are part of me in some way. I can relate.’”
While governments must be capable of delivering concrete results, he argued, their leaders also need to explain why those efforts matter and why people should care about one another.
“When I give advice now to younger politicians who are coming up and I tell them ‘if all you are doing is reciting facts and 10 point plans, you are missing the point’. We need governments that can execute policy and 10 point plans, but we also need political leaders who can tell a story about why we should want to work together and why we should care for each other.”
“It begins with the Declaration of Independence”
To close the evening, Obama pointed to historic movements, including the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement and the suffragette movement.
“We are reminding people of what’s possible, how change gets made. It begins with the Declaration of Independence, and the suffragette movement, the civil rights movement, the abolitionist movement and what it does is it reminds us that we are part of this ongoing story.
“That is where you get hope from, it’s just reminding ourselves that as frustrating as the moment feels now, we’ve been through worse. We’ve managed to get through it and not only get through it but make things better.
“I was reminded, being here in Manchester, of just this wonderful story of the cotton workers here in Manchester during the American Civil War. At a time when their livelihoods depended on cotton […] a bunch of British, working class workers who are hungry and not sure if they are going to be able to hold things together, they sit there and they collectively say ‘we are going to stand with those who are fighting for freedom, even though it is going to cost us.’
“I think if we can tell each other those stories and pass them to our children and our grandchildren, we’ll get through these times too.”