Brian Eno: Rethinking The Winners

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. You get unlimited articles and videos, hundreds of ad-free podcasts, and the BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7. From less than a dollar a week for your first year... Read, watch and listen to trusted, independent journalism and storytelling. It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com. Find out more at bbc.com slash unlimited.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, I'm Amol Rajan and welcome to the Rethink Podcast. The pandemic has forced change on all our lives. For some, temporarily. For others, things will never be the same again. But could it be a turning point, not just for individuals, but also for societies?

There are a lot of dichotomies knocking around to explain politics these days. Long gone is the boring old left versus right. Now we have open versus closed. Anywhere versus somewhere. Leave land versus Romania. I've even been known to mention fast versus slow in this context. For Brian Eno, there's a better one, and he might well be right. Life before and during this pandemic involves losers and winners. He asks us to rethink those.

In an unflinching assault on the cult of the strongman, those authoritarian leaders around the world who, though they've won elections, have little regard for most customs of democracy, Eno says there is a better kind of leadership available to us. And we don't have to look very far to find it. What do several of the countries that have most impressively tackled coronavirus have in common? Countries like Germany, Taiwan, New Zealand. Any idea? Yes, you guessed it.

but I'll let Eno explain. If we've learned one thing from the coronavirus experience, it's that a certain style of government and leadership, a style that's dominated the last few years,

isn't going to be of any use to us at all in the 21st century. The countries that have suffered worse from COVID all share a single governmental style. Macho, media-savvy authoritarian leaders whose primary talent is self-promotion, who lie freely when it suits them, who disregard scientific advice if it doesn't enhance their own claims.

These leaders gain power by manufacturing threats, Mexicans, immigrants, Muslims, Europeans, liberals, whatever you like, to create fake emergencies in which they can appear as saviors. But in the face of an actual threat, coronavirus, all that macho posturing proves to be worse than useless. What was needed was preparation, expertise, cooperation and good data. All complete mysteries to the macho mind.

contrast the performance of America, England and Brazil, currently 1, 2 and 3 in the mortality charts, with that of, say, Germany, New Zealand and Taiwan, who've had much better results. All those three countries have female leaders, as do many of the other nations with better than average outcomes from COVID. The nations that have done well spend more time listening to their scientists, apparently, than to their ideologues.

and don't consider evidence as a challenge to their manhood. It's to their examples that we must look for a future, because we're running out of futures.

By that I mean we're running out of choices about what kind of world we might inhabit. The urgency of climate change is propelling us towards two starkly contrasting visions. The first is the billionaire's utopia. where a few rich people secure themselves behind strong walls while the rest of us collapse in a fireball. The other vision is our only chance.

where we rethink our institutions and global arrangements so that in dealing with the upcoming disruptions of climate change and pandemics we build something new, something better than we have now. This sounds idealistic. But in fact, it's the only option. We have to make a society that works in the long term by valuing all its different intelligences, by engaging everybody rather than excluding most.

It's a future built on cooperation and inclusion, not division. We've seen the first green shoots of it in the better responses to COVID and in the proliferation of anti-discrimination activism. which could also be called pro-inclusion activism. If we want to live in a stable, creative society, we need to rethink things so that everybody in it feels welcomed and valued.

The more people have an investment in society, the more they'll want to nurture and improve it. This isn't about the winners being generous enough to share a bit of their spoils with the losers. It's about realising that a world with a few winners and a lot of losers isn't a tenable world.

Thanks very much indeed to Brian Eno for that essay, albeit his message was largely a pessimistic one. Sure, we face a choice, but recent evidence bodes ill. And in an age of winners and losers, both within societies and between them, Can it really be mere coincidence that so many of the democracies that have fared relatively well are led by women? And this despite the fact that the vast majority of national leaders in the world today, even among democracies, are men.

Brian Eno is right, of course, to say that the weaknesses in international alliances exposed by this virus do not convey the impression of a world well placed to reduce, let alone reverse, the frying of the earth. We hope you found this episode thought-provoking. There are many more episodes to choose from on BBC Sounds. If you don't know where to start, I'd recommend Jarvis Cocker, George Soros or Lady Hale. At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer.

Through frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens. from the BBC. Find out more at