 We have somebody who knows about religious authority and that kind of societies yes Yet you have made the choice for Tunisia to be a pluralistic society so that the religious authority steps Away to create a society which is quote-unquote more free If so, why why is it that you have made that choice and not the choice of Alexander to have a Authoritarian society. We are in Tunisia in transition, but we know where Yes, so we are going to to rebuild Real society based on freedom on democracy Reconciled between the concept of an individualism and the concept of society Community community how reconcile we because Islam respect both Individual and the collective the community so we are going to to Establish advanced society developed economy and reconcile between Through the concept of consensus between all fractions all ideologies all parties So far we succeed to provoke or to the Peaceful revolution and after that we preserve this flame of liberty of revolution preserve and transform it into Advice into institution Constitution based on the human rights on the quality between sex so and It's different from what happened in Egypt Where There is a coup d'etat a coup d'etat and we can Criticize brotherhood and I have done I can't decide them, but we cannot Pretend that we are Democrat and and Defend the coup d'etat happened So it's a it's scandal Scandal Western democracy is sort of scandal to Defend this coup d'etat the system of eradicate Totally the any voice of the of of liberty of democracy. So we hope that Western democracies Invest in democracy in Arab world not invest in dictatorship But but I must say I must say on more on moral grounds on moral grounds I prefer your Islamism to his Eurasianism. I just want to be clear and look we are experiencing in Liberal democracies a tremendous moment of challenge and for the reasons that Leon and others said earlier problems And we do have to get back to first principles But there are still certain first principles that really do matter and resonate One is that if you don't have a system in which the leaders are actually responsive and accountable to the people At some point you're headed for failure If you don't have a system in which the people and the mechanisms through which they're represented have the ability to tell the leader That he has no clothes At some point he or she is going to make a fatal mistake And so for example Hitler was a pretty terrible general, but his own generals couldn't tell him that and That led to something. You're familiar with Stalingrad If the emperor has no clothes, but no one can tell him the this is how this is how nations fail But there's something else at play here and I think again, I with great respect suggests that this collective Nationalist notion of strength and power is the wrong one If you if we were sitting around this table 50 years ago or 100 years ago when we were asking ourselves this question What constitutes the wealth of a nation? Probably we'd all offer different versions of the same answer. Well, it's the abundance of its natural resources It's the strength of its army. It's the size of its population It's the spans of its geography and those things still matter and as it happens Russia is still well endowed with them So is the United States But I think what we recognize more and more in the 21st century is that the true wealth of a nation is its human Resources and the ability of a country to allow them to reach their full potential And so the great question for all of us is what are the best means to do that? How do you achieve that? How do you allow the human resource to become educated? How do you allow it to be protected? How do you allow it to debate to argue to fight to create and for all of the deficiencies of liberal democracy? I still believe profoundly that no other system gives us the same opportunities to do that Yeah, but but then Cody the question is recently you will have all these things And yet Mr. Trump was elected How come? Why is it that those things you just mentioned in a very eloquent way are not in place right now in the United States of America? Well, first of all, they are in place but it's not functioning Well, in fact in many ways it still is functioning first of all We can never mind the fact that three million more people voted for his opponent doesn't work We have some structural problems in the in the system from its origins But beyond that no it is working and the fact of the matter is also this One of the things that that I find profoundly Hard to to rationalize I mean I of course I understand it but We're going through a huge crisis and fight over immigration in our country The idea that we would somehow profoundly object to the fact that the United States is the one country on earth that more people still want to come to To get educated to do business to visit that that's a problem not a great source of strength Is one of the great puzzles of this moment? But the fact is that's still true and the fact is if you go around the world as I had the opportunity to do as a Diplomat, many of our policies were often rightly Debated disagreed with but the one thing that remained across the board a very powerful pull of attraction for us was precisely our Education our science our technology our entrepreneurship our innovation that all functions education system In America in North America in the West is actually achieving what it should be I only say that because the education so much nowadays Especially with the advancement of technology has been equated with a degree and a diploma in order to get a job in order to Be part of a manufacturer system I usually use a term in Farsi in Persian We have a different word for people were in university and those were in high school for example the first one means is a student learning the second means a seeker of knowledge and I grew up in a world where the idea of going to university was always the the notion that you will go to get knowledge and you seek knowledge and my experience of Universities colleges around especially in the Western world despite all the wonderful freedom that exists is that there's as degree of Mediocracy there is a degree of Deming down and I go back to that the only thing I would agree with him on this is the question of what is threatening freedom as well Is the political correctness is the kind of a fear of not wanting to say so the void has been felt by the populace by those were Bluntly racist and fascist and yet they can get to say what they want to say But the rest of us because of our liberals and because of our politeness because of that notion of sort of We want to be civilized We are no longer able to the use of language for example in North America I am working on a documentary about media in the Middle East and the Western media And I can tell you that the use of language to avoid to tell the truth about the Middle East for example Is so creative that it could be passed as fiction And I think those are the roots of problem for me I would love to see liberalism and democracy flourish all over the world since I am one of the people who have directly benefited from it But at the same time I like to acknowledge that there are some fundamental problems And I think education is one of the first places where I would go to because I'm a big advocate or of education For all the people including in the Middle East and Afghanistan and in the West And the second thing for me, which again, I fought against communism I Flourished in a sort of a socialist system in Canada But I find more and more that there is a big problem with the market society I don't have a problem with market economy because there is a morality attached to it There are some values attached to it and it's about competition and about achieving the best But when a society has become a market society like as we're experiencing and I talk China is one of the greatest examples of it Then that kind of a mediocre educational system the political correctness and the market economy where everything is for sale Including love and friendship and everything else It's become devoid of the kind of moral values that we held so so there as freedom and that individual freedom that I respect And and I will die for that would be the only thing it's several issues at once And they serious issues one I mean the dumbing down of of education It's it's probably unavoidable because it has to do with it's becoming a mass phenomenon I mean in the old days. I mean there was a very narrow group of people who received college and the high Higher education. It's the same like with with music. I mean music used to be an elite phenomenon and There was some great music then, you know today. It's a phenomenon of mass culture and most of it is rubbish and and You know people from Prague think once upon a time only Mozart exists Quite but almost Leon but the second thing which is probably more serious and very troubling is what is being taught in in the Universities and in in the fast panel. I think it was better we who spoke about mentioned Michel Foucault and and for me, this is it's not the foocalls blame or anything, but this is where the process of post-modernism deconstruction of truce and its dissipation into what we call narratives I have a narrative you have a narrative my narrative is as good as your narrative and and that's that's that's all true people have different narratives, but the very concept of Truth has evaporated. There is no truth. I mean a friend of mine Peter Pomerance a Russian wrote quite wonderful book about Russia, which is where nothing is true and everything is possible and That is increasingly the the world We living in and we have to make an effort to pass away People who are still willing to to listen to us that the quest for truth may be very complex and sometimes unsuccessful and That also point faith painful because I think I think you're right. I would say together I would say two things about that the first is that the political crisis That we're facing in the United States is at bottom on if you pardon the expression an epistemological crisis In that we it's not that we disagree about policies We no longer agree on a description of reality and that is a very very profound Problem a very profound problem the second thing that's worth saying is when you talk about education and the media It's very important to remember that an open society Places an enormous intellectual Responsibility on ordinary people that is to say in an open society We govern ourselves by means of our opinions. We count them in elections. We discuss them It this means that the quality of our opinions will determine the quality of our politics And this means that what will really determine the quality of our politics is the quality of our opinion formation an Education and media in an open society are the those are the machineries of opinion Formation and one of the things you're seeing and certainly in the United States right now is a complete breakdown and degeneration of opinion formation and that is a problem that frankly it's not a political problem It's a cultural problem culture is much harder to deal with than politics for that reason It's going to take a while. This is not a question of an election cycle It's a much larger problem and frankly. I'm not sure what we're going to do about it But I think the crisis is that deep