Former US president Barack Obama spoke to a packed auditorium at the Hydro in Glasgow
Barack Obama has warned that democracies risk repeating the mistakes of the past as political leaders exploit division.
Speaking at an event in Glasgow, the former US president said that trust between politicians and voters can be restored.
Mr Obama told an audience at The Hydro to have hope that things will turn out well if people work together.
Asked whether he still believed in Martin Luther King Jr’s famous quote, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”, Mr Obama replied: “I choose to believe in that.”
Mr Obama said it was healthier to believe that violence, hatred, poverty and loneliness could be reduced, even when individual efforts failed to achieve their objectives.
He acknowledged the extraordinary sacrifices made by figures such as Nelson Mandela but urged ordinary citizens to contribute through community activism.
In a wide-ranging interview, Mr Obama also warned the world is in danger of forgetting the lessons of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
He warned against hostility towards groups including immigrants, Jews and gay people, and the belief that authoritarian leaders could be justified if they appeared capable of delivering results.
Mr Obama, who served in the White House from 2009 to 2017, said during his lifetime, the world had become wealthier and more tolerant.
Such improvements were easily obscured by the conflicts and crises dominating contemporary politics, he added.
Mr Obama referenced a conversation with his daughter Malia, 27, about climate change several years ago when she said her friends felt fighting against climate change had become “hopeless”.
He told the Glasgow audience that his advice to Malia was that yes, targets will be missed, but “that difference of half a degree Celsius might make the difference with a billion people not going through massive droughts or flooding, and that's a pretty good thing to fight for”.
He added humanity is “lost and confused” and are “chimps”.
“Sometimes we behave worse than chimps,” he said, “Because we can rationalise what we do to spin these wild tales to justify just wanting more bananas.
“But but we can be better, and when we make that decision, the world gets incrementally better, and that is that's a worthy goal, a goal worth fighting for.”
Mr Obama also told the audience he felt like an outsider and found it difficult, since leaving the White House to form connections with new people.
The former president said he feels the loss of being able to just go to the shops.
“I sometimes people ask me what was the hardest thing about the presidency?” he said.
“It was that isolation, and to some degree, I still live in it.
“And when you've lost that ability to just connect with strangers in your daily life, when you're no longer going to the market because you're ordering everything online, those small interactions make a difference in building up habits of trust that are part of democracy.”
He avoided any mention of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.
However, he did reflect on divisions caused by the rise in social media, saying the internet had changed vastly even in the time he was in office.
He also spoke of his first meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, he founder of Meta, which runs Instagram and Facebook, saying he thought the now-billionaire was “someone’s kid on meeting him”.