Is this the time of monsters — or miracles? | Angus Hervey

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Solutions journalist Angus Harvey has been reporting on stories of progress for years. In his talk, he wonders if he's been wrong for reporting only on the good things, but not in the way you might think. He puts a spotlight on overlooked breakthroughs in a world teetering between collapse and progress, all while asking us, what is the narrative we should be telling about our times? Coming up.

0:47I'm a solutions journalist. For over a decade, I've been reporting on stories of progress. But in the last few months, I've started to think that maybe I was wrong. Almost a century ago, the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, thrown into prison by Mussolini, wrote, The old world is dying. New world struggles to be born. Now is a time of monsters. Those words are haunting. It feels like it could be speaking to us today. A great unraveling is underway. And you know this story because it is everywhere. The end of the international rules-based order, power over principle, aid budgets, obliterated, science under attack, Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Gaza, hospitals, hostages, Sudan, famine, DRC, rebels, Yemen, Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary, Taiwan, the United States of America, the economic vandalism, the contempt for the rule of law, the casual cruelty, the measles.

2:08All of the values that we assumed were universal, truth, decency, common sense, faced not just reversal, but violent backlash. Beneath the surface, deeper, more menacing undercurrents, the digital platforms that were supposed to connect us now do the opposite. Algorithms breed paranoia, manufacturing division, drowning truth in deliberate falsehoods. Carl Sagan warned us about this, an era where people, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what is true, slide almost unnoticed back into superstition and darkness. And as we argue online, planetary crisis, firestorms in our cities, plastic in our blood, the pollinators, the permafrost, the coral reefs, an ice-free Arctic within our lifetimes.

3:03The tipping points loom, and Gramsci's monsters are at the gates, precisely at the moment that we seem least equipped to deal with them. This is the story of Collapse. It is on the front page of all the news sites, it is at the top of all our newsfeeds. We are intimately familiar with its graphic details. You can tune it out, you can turn it off, but you cannot ignore it.

3:37There is something missing, though, from this story. There's no room in it for the words of people like Helen Awiro, a nurse from Kenya.

3:52What I can say is that the deaths that we used to see from the severe forms of malaria in children under five have greatly gone down. and I think this is being attributed to the presence of this vaccine. The mere fact that we can now reduce these deaths, it's really great for our community because no one should lose a child. Just over 12 months ago, humanity began the rollout of the first ever vaccine for malaria. And as you can hear, it's working. The kids aren't dying anymore. Already, over 5 million children in 17 countries have been vaccinated. By the end of this decade, the plan is to reach 50 million.

4:3650 million children finally protected against a disease that has been killing children since before we invented writing. And that is not the only story that's missing. Since you were last all in this room, 11 countries have eliminated a disease, including Jordan, the first ever country to eliminate leprosy. Eight countries, home to over 100 million children, have either banned or committed to banning corporal punishment in all settings. Zambia, Sierra Leone and Colombia all banned child marriage. Syria rid itself of a 50-year-old autocratic regime. Bangladesh's students sparked democratic change through massive protests.

5:17Voters in India, the world's largest democracy, firmly rejected authoritarianism. England, Ireland and Canada extended free contraception to more women. Indonesia launched a program to feed all 70 million of its school students. And did you know that Cambodia, once the world's most mined country, is on its track to be landmine free within the next few years? In 2024, fewer people died from natural disasters than almost any year in history. The murder rate in the United States saw its biggest ever 12-month decline, beating the previous record, which was set in 2023, and deforestation in the Amazon declined to its fourth lowest level on record, an achievement that gives me more hope for life on Earth than all the rockets that we send to Mars.

6:04Last year, we installed enough solar panels and wind turbines to replace 6 % of the world's fossil fuel electricity. This year, we will install even more. We are bending the curve. Emissions are declining in Europe and America and have finally leveled off in China. Electric vehicles are biting into oil demand now. Wind, water and sunshine will overtake coal this year as the world's leading power source, regardless of what anyone says in the White House. And thanks to artificial intelligence, we are now starting to see breakthroughs we once thought impossible, the biggest boost to human knowledge since the scientific revolution.

6:40We are determining the structure and interaction of every single one of life's molecules, inventing extraordinary new enzymes, new drugs, new materials, controlling plasma and nuclear fusion experiments. Last year, we got a new miracle drug for HIV prevention, mRNA vaccines for cancer. We found the building blocks for life in an asteroid, decoded whale speech and discovered fractals in the quantum realm. Did you know that sea turtle populations are increasing around the world? Or that overfishing is declining in the Mediterranean? Or that last year, China finished encircling its largest desert with a giant belt of trees, its very own Great Green Wall.

7:23And this year, the United States created its largest conservation corridor, stretching from Utah down to California. These are all victories from the last 12 months, but they happen because people, often small groups of people, fought for years and sometimes decades. And if we extend our timeframe out, even better news. Over 4 million square kilometers of the world's oceans have been protected in the last four years. Air pollution has started to decline. In the last decade, over 250 million children have gained access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene at school. And in this century, this insane rollercoaster of a century, over a billion people have been lifted from extreme poverty.

8:09Deaths from the world's deadliest infectious diseases have halved. And for the first time in history, over 50 percent of students receive a high school education. We have no precedent for that. A world where a majority of people can read, write and calculate, where most humans possess the tools to question authority and determine their own destinies.

8:34So.

8:39Which one of these stories is true? Is this the long-awaited fall from grace? Or are we on a journey to the promised land? Collapse or renewal? The answer, of course, is that it's both. And the truth is that it has always been this way. Even as we rebuilt from the ashes of the Second World War, the shadow of nuclear annihilation loomed. The pandemic devastated our communities, yet our scientific response was revolutionary. Climate change threatens our future, yet its solution, clean energy, offers us a fairer, better world. This is not an easy paradox to hold in your head or in your heart. The understanding that in the same moment, innocent people are being snatched off the streets and children are dying in airstrikes, the malaria wards are emptying across an entire continent and in a faraway village under a thousand stars, a young girl who had once been forced into marriage is studying equations under an electric light that wasn't there a year ago.

9:50Real life isn't a story. History doesn't have a moral arc. Progress isn't a rule. It is contested terrain, fought for daily by millions of people who refuse to give in to despair. ultimately none of us know whether we're living in the downswing or the upswing of history but i do know that we all get a choice we all of us get to decide which one of these stories we are a part of we add to their grand weave in the work that we do in the daily decisions we make about where to put our money where to put our energy and our time in the stories we tell each other and in the words that come out of our mouths.

10:38It is not enough to believe in something anymore. It is time to do something. Ask yourself, if our worst fears come to pass and the monsters breach the walls, who do you want to be standing next to? The prophets of doom and the cynics who said we told you so? Or the people who, with their eyes wide open, dug the trenches and fetched water? Both of these stories are true.

11:08The only question that matters now is which one do you belong to?

11:23That was Angus Harvey speaking at TED 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curationguidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

12:06you