I mean you look back at American history and American culture, it's pretty striking. I mean this has been the safest country in the world forever, and the most frightened country in the world.

The very properties of the human mind that provide an enormous scope for human genius in some domains will serve as barriers to progress in other domains, just as the properties that enable each child to acquire a complex and highly articulated human language block the acquisition of other imaginable linguistic systems.

A woman was the property of her father or her husband and that remained true right into the twentieth century. It wasn't until 1975 that women had a guaranteed right to serve on federal juries.

The people we call the prophets I think are the earliest dissident intellectuals, and they're treated like most dissident intellectuals - very badly. They're imprisoned, driven into the desert. King Ahab, the epitome of evil in the Bible, condemned Elijah as a "hater of Israel." This is the first self-hating Jew, the origin of the term. It goes right up to the present. That's the history of intellectuals.

The general principle is that the victors don't look at themselves or concede anything. The defeated typically have to, except when it's beneficial to the powerful for them not to.

Take a look at the bombing of Serbia in 1999. The US was quite open about the reasons for the bombing. A main reason was to preserve stability and credibility. Serbia was interfering with stability, meaning that it was the one part of the Balkans that was not integrated into the Western-dominated (mostly US-dominated) system.

There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it's a period of close to global stagnation.