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For years I have repeated, in all my lectures and in all my writings, a kind of mantra: the most valuable asset a person, a company, a marriage, or a country can possess does not appear on any balance sheet. It is culture, and by culture, I mean a culture of Mutual Trust and Respect.

Mutual Trust means that we believe we share a common goal, even as we remain aware that each of us has different interests and pursues different ends. When we trust, we have faith that, above it all, there is a common goal we must achieve together, and on the strength of that faith we are willing to cooperate and to carry out a decision even when it does not perfectly match our own interests.

Mutual Respect means that we recognize the right of the other person to think differently. We stay open to the chance to learn from that difference. As Zen Buddhism observes, "If two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary." We learn from our differences. We grasp the essence of literature more deeply through comparative literature; we understand a political system more clearly by comparing it with others.

In modern life, Mutual Trust and Respect are in rapid decline, and the more developed the country, the worse the phenomenon.

Artificial intelligence is destroying trust at an astonishing speed. I lost more than a thousand dollars on supplements promoted by well-known physicians and endorsed by celebrities. It was utterly convincing. Only later did I discover that it was a scam. The doctors and the celebrities alike were personalities fabricated by artificial intelligence. Moreover, medical doctors promote some supplements they developed and claim that the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt. It does not allow healthy supplements if they endanger the market for their drugs. With such criticism trust is destroyed in the pharmaceutical industry and their drugs.

As AI advances, we lose more and more trust, because we can no longer tell whether what we see, read, or even hear is real or fabricated. The counterfeit has become so good that it is nearly impossible to distinguish from reality.

Mutual Respect is under threat for a different reason. We live inside a hurricane of information that overwhelms us, with endless back-to-back problems to solve and people's expectations to meet. As time grows scarce and we must decide and act, we begin to speak faster. Listen to the news. Watch a modern film. Everyone is talking very fast. Under the pressure of too much to do and too many problems to solve, we grow intolerant and impatient, unwilling to hear what others have to say. We want the solution quickly, and we would prefer it be our own. Tolerance falls, and with it the patience to listen to those who think differently.

It is painful to bear with, and be patient toward, people who think differently from us. (In Hebrew, the words for patience, tolerance, and pain share the same root, the same consonants. Only the vowels differ.)

As Mutual Trust and Respect decline, disintegration grows to the detriment of our well-being.