We’re All Connected: Why Bigotry and Racism Are Not Just Harmful, But Illogical

A note to young leaders.

Bigotry and racism are not only toxic to your happiness and wellbeing, they are just plain dumb.

When I was in my mid-twenties, the late John Caldon – former Deputy MD of Macquarie Group – once posed this question to me:

“We all have two parents and four grandparents, Adam. How many great, great, great etc parents would you and I each have in 30 generations? Have a guess.”

Having a calculator handy, and not wanting to guess wrong and look stupid, I quickly punched in 2^30: the answer is close to 1.1 billion.

That’s the number of direct ancestors we each have in the year 1200 (not counting cumulatively and not counting great uncles and aunties)!

“But there weren’t that many people on the planet at the time. The world population in 1200, Adam, was only about 450 million. How is that possible?”

The answer is we all have quite a few common ancestors. As for example, when first or second cousins marry each other.

Chances are high that the vast majority of us are related in some way if we were to trace our family tree just seven generations back.

What’s true of the internet, is true of us as a species. We are all threads in a world-wide web. What we do to the web, we do to ourselves.