2024
The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Brains, Minds and Narratives, and How We Change Them to Change the World
Villa Monastero, Varenna, Italy, 17 – 19 May 2024
Human beings are hard-wired, individually and collectively, to make and transmit stories and to shape our reality in the image of the stories we tell. The stories we tell about the future – Will it be dystopian? More or less equal? A zero-sum conflict against outsiders? Can it only be changed by lone superheroes in a winner-takes-all world? – profoundly shape the possibilities we can imagine and build.
At present, the loudest stories are the conflict- and outrage-driven narratives of mass and social media, actively generating anxieties and damaging democracy through populism and polarisation. As we collectively face climate chaos, the potential for climate- and inequality-induced mass migration, resource shortages, and growing global conflict, the stories we tell about our present and future must change. We need new stories to imagine and support the systemic changes we will need to survive and flourish as a species, prosocial stories, modelling sustainable lives well lived now and for future generations – what we in shorthand refer to as Good stories with a capital G.
At Villa Monastero, we brought together leading storytellers, communicators, artists, producers, neuroscientists, psychologists, emotion researchers, systems design thinkers, policymakers, philosophers, and others to discuss how telling better stories can help us to better navigate the challenges currently facing the planet. The agenda was co-created with those taking part in the meeting.
The Future of Global Governance and International Cooperation in an Increasingly Fractured World
29 January 2024
The system of global governance from 1945 onwards, always subject to challenge, has become increasingly fragile, perhaps heading to disintegration, given the shifts in global power balances over recent decades, now brought into stark relief by the invasion of Ukraine and the Israel/Palestine crisis. But the need for global governance and collaboration has been intensifying as the planet also becomes increasingly fragile, as have the foundations of human health and sustainable, open economies.
Common interests demand global collaboration, but they are in tension not only with particular national interests but also clashing value systems - along a spectrum from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, with a further dimension of populism undermining liberal democratic norms in the West – along with the rivalries, shifting in line with whatever is in contention, between status quo and revisionist powers.
Given these complexities, what will global governance look like in the future? Who will make and enforce the rules? There is likely to be a variable geometry, given great power alliances and competition, with variations along ideological and geographic axes. How can global governance adapt to this geometry and remain effective amidst the shifting distribution of power? Would a more regionalized approach strengthen or weaken the pursuit of global goals? The system is likely to be messy and develop in unanticipated directions, but what principles might help to reshape a system resilient to present and future stresses?
The eighth Palliser Lecture was delivered by Pascal Lamy, coordinator of the Jacques Delors Institutes and vice-chairman of the Paris Peace Forum. On January 29, 2024, guests convened at Aga Khan Centre, London, UK, to hear the former director-general of the World Trade Organization speak.
Read a summary of Pascal's lecture, watch a recording, or view photos on Facebook and Flickr of the reception, lecture, and Q&A.