London: Stephen Hawking, in an essay for The Guardian, outlined how the Brexit referendum was influenced by attitudes towards wealth and the way our society prioritises money and the accumulation of possessions.
“We need to understand why British people made the choice that they did. I believe that wealth, the way we understand it and the way we share it, played a crucial role in their decision,” he wrote.
Hawkings urged a divided Britain to accept its fate and move its focus to changing the general attitude towards money that helped foster such a division in the first place, warning the human race is in the midst of “perilous times”.
“Such pressing issues will require us to collaborate, all of us, with a shared vision and cooperative endeavour to ensure that humanity can survive. We will need to adapt, rethink, refocus and change some of our fundamental assumptions about what we mean by wealth.
“If we fail then the forces that contributed to Brexit, the envy and isolationism not just in the UK but around the world that spring from not sharing, of cultures driven by a narrow definition of wealth and a failure to divide it more fairly, both within nations and across national borders, will strengthen. If that were to happen, I would not be optimistic about the long-term outlook for our species.”
