Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with dan
carlin
host of hardcore history and common
sense
podcasts to me hardcore history
is one of if not the greatest podcast
ever made dan and joe rogan are probably
the two main people who got me
to fall in love with the medium of
podcasting as a fan
and eventually as a podcaster myself
meeting dan was surreal to me
he was not just a mere human like the
rest of us since his voice
has been a guide through some of the
darkest moments of human history for me
meeting him was like meeting genghis
khan stalin
hitler alexander the great and all of
the most powerful leaders in history all
at once
in a crappy hotel room in the middle of
oregon
it turns out that he is in fact just the
human
and truly one of the good ones this was
a pleasure
and an honor for me quick mention of
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this podcast as a side note let me say
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we're living through one of the most
challenging moments in american history
to me the way out is through reason and
love
both require a deep understanding of
human nature and of human history
this conversation is about both i am
perhaps hopelessly optimistic about our
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of the great filter
watching our world consumed by fire
think of this little podcast
conversation
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at lex friedman and now finally
here's my conversation with the great
dan
carlin let's start with the highest
philosophical question
do you think human beings are
fundamentally good or
are all of us capable of both good and
evil
and it's the environment that molds how
we
uh the trajectory that we take through
life how do we define
evil evil seems to be a situational eye
of the beholder kind of question
so if we define evil maybe i can get a
better idea of
and and that could be a whole show
couldn't defining evil
but when we say evil what do we mean
that's a slippery one but i think
there's some way in which your existence
your presence in the world leads to
pain and suffering and destruction for
many others
in the rest of the world so you you
steal the resources
and you use them to create more
suffering than there was before
in the world so i suppose it's somehow
deeply connected to this
other slippery word which is suffering
as you
create suffering in the world you bring
suffering to the world
but here's the problem i think with it
because i i fully see where you're going
with that
and i understand it the problem is is
the question of
the reason for inflicting suffering so
sometimes
one might inflict suffering upon one
group of individuals
in order to maximize a lack of suffering
with another group of individuals or one
who might not be considered evil at all
might make the rational
seemingly rational choice of inflicting
pain and suffering on a smaller
group of people in order to maximize the
opposite of that for a larger group of
people
yeah that's one of the dark things about
i've spoken and read the work of stephen
codkin i'm not sure if you're familiar
with the historian
and he's basically a stalin a joseph
stalin scholar
and one of the things i realized i'm not
sure where to put hitler
but with stalin it really seems that
he was sane and he thought he was doing
good for the world
he i i really believe from everything
i've read about stalin
that he believed that communism
is good for the world and if you have to
kill a few people along the way if it's
like you said the small groups if you
have to
sort of remove the people that stand in
the way of this utopian system
of communism then that's actually good
for the world and it didn't seem
to me that he could even consider the
possibility that he was evil
he really thought he was doing good for
the world and that stuck with me because
he's one of the most
is to our definition of evil he seems to
have brought more evil onto this world
than almost any human in history
and i don't know what to do with that
well
i'm fascinated with the concept so
fascinated by it that the very first
hardcore history show we ever did which
was a full
15 or 16 minutes um was called alexander
versus hitler
and the entire question about it was
the motivations right so if you go to a
court of law because you killed somebody
one of the things they're going to
consider is why did you kill them
right and if you killed somebody for
example in self-defense
you're going to be treated differently
than if you malicious kill kill somebody
maliciously to take their wallet
right and in the show we we wondered
because you know i don't really make uh
pronouncements but we wondered about
uh if you believe hitler's writings for
example mein kampf
uh which you know is written by a guy
who's a political figure who wants to
get
so i mean it's about as as believable as
any other political tract would be
but in his mind the things that he said
that he had to do
were designed to for the betterment of
the german people right
whereas alexander the great once again
this is somebody from more than 2000
years ago so
with lots of propaganda in the
intervening years right but one of the
the views of alexander the great is that
the reason he did what he did was
to for lack of a better word write his
name in a more permanent graffiti on the
pages of history right in other words to
glorify himself
and if that's the case does that make
alexander a worse person than hitler
because
hitler thought he was doing good whereas
alexander if you believe the
interpretation was simply trying to
exalt alexander
so the the motivations of the people
doing these things it seems to me
matter i don't think you can just sit
there and go the only thing that matters
is the end result because that might
have been an unintentional byproduct
uh in which case that person had you
been able to show them
the future might have changed what they
were doing so were they evil or
misguided or wrong or made the wrong you
know
so and i hate to do that because there's
certain people like hitler that i don't
feel deserve the benefit of the doubt
uh at the same time if you're fascinated
by the concept of evil
and you delve into it deeply enough
you're going to want to understand
why these evil people did what they did
and sometimes
it can confuse the hell out of you you
know who wants to sit there and try to
see things from hitler's point of view
to get a better understanding and sort
of commiserate with
so um but in fact obviously first
history show i'm fascinated with the
concept
so do you think it's possible if we put
ourselves in the mindset of some of the
people that have
led created so much suffering in the
world
that all of them had their motivations
were
had good intentions underlying them no
i don't i mean simply because there's so
many i mean the law of averages would
would suggest that that's not true i
guess it is pure evil
possible meaning you uh again it's
slippery but
you the suffering is the goal
suffering intentional suffering yeah yes
i think that
and i think that there's historical
figures that that that one could point
and but that gets to the deeper question
of are these people saying
uh do they have something wrong with
them are they twisted from something in
their youth
um you know i mean
these are the kinds of things where you
start to delve into the psychological
makeup of these people
in other words is anybody born evil and
i actually believe that some people are
i think the dna can get scrambled up in
ways i think the question of evil is
important too because i think it's an
eye of the beholder thing i mean if
hitler for example
had been successful and we were today
on the sixth or seventh leader of the
third reich since
i think his entire history would be
viewed through a different lens because
that's the way we do things
right genghis khan looks different to
the mongolians than he does to the
residents of baghdad right
um and i think so so an eye of the
beholder question i think comes into all
these sorts of things as you said it's a
very slippery question
where do you put as somebody who's
fascinated by military history
where do you put violence as uh
as in terms of the human condition is it
core to being human or is it just
a little uh tool that we use every once
in a while
so i'm going to respond to your question
with a question what do you
see the difference being between
violence and force
let me go farther i'm not sure that
violence is something that we have to
put up with as human beings forever that
we must resign ourselves to violence
forever but i have a much harder time
seeing us able to abolish force
and i there's going to be some ground
where if those two things are not the
same and i don't know that maybe they
are
where there's certainly some crossover
and the re i think
force you know you're an engineer you'll
understand this better than i but think
about it as a physical law
if you can't stop something from moving
in a certain direction without pushing
back
in that same direction i'm not i'm not
sure
that you can have a society or a
civilization
without the ability to use a counter
force
when things are going wrong whether it's
on an individual level right
a person attacks another person so you
step in to save that person
um or on uh you know even at the highest
levels of politics or anything else a
counter force to stop the
uh inertia or the impetus of of of
another movement so i think
that force is is a simple almost law of
physics
in human interaction especially at the
civilizational level i think
civilization requires a certain amount
of if not violence than force
so um and again they've talked i mean it
goes back into
saint augustine all kinds of christian
beliefs about the the proper use
of force and people have have
philosophically tried to decide between
can you have a sort of an ahinsa uh
buddhist sort of we you know
we would be non-violent toward
everything and exert no force or
or there's a reason to have force in
order to create the space for good
uh i think force is inevitable now
we can talk and and i've not come up to
the conclusion myself uh if there is a
distinction to be made between force and
violence i mean is
is um is a non-violent force enough or
is
violence when done for the cause of good
a different thing than violence done
either for the cause of evil as you
would say or
simply for random reasons i mean we
humans lack control sometimes we can be
violent
for no apparent reason or goal um and
that's i mean
you look at the criminal justice system
alone and the way we
we interact with people who are acting
out in ways that we as a society have
decided
is intolerable can you deal with that
without force and at some level violence
i don't know can you maintain
peacefulness without force i don't know
just to uh be a little bit more specific
about the idea of force
do you put force as general enough
to include force in the space of ideas
so you mentioned buddhism or
religion or just twitter
i can think of no things farther apart
than that okay
is uh the battles we do in the space of
ideas
of um you know the great debates
throughout history
do you put force into that or do you
in this conversation are we trying to
right now keep it to just physical force
in saying that you you have an intuition
that force might be with us
much longer than violence i think
the two bleed together so um
take because it's it's always it's
always my go-to example i'm afraid and
i'm sure that the listeners all hate it
but take
take germany during uh the 1920s early
1930s before the nazis came to power
and they were always involved in some
level of force you know beating up in
the streets or whatever it might be but
think about it more like
an intellectual discussion until a
certain point
um is that it would be difficult i
imagine to keep
the intellectual counterforce of ideas
from at some point degenerating into
something that's more
um coercion um counterforce if we want
to use the phrases we were just talking
about
so i think the two are are intimately
connected i mean
actions follow thought right and at a
certain point
i think especially when when one is not
achieving
the goals that they want to achieve
through uh peaceful
discussion or argumentation or um trying
to convince the other side
that sometimes the next level of
operations is something a little bit
more physically
uh imposing if that makes sense we go
from the intellectual to the physical
yeah so it too easily spills over into
violence
yes and one leads to the other often so
you kind of implied uh
perhaps a hopeful message but let me ask
in the form of a question
do you think we'll always have war
i think it goes to the force question
too so for example
um what do you do i mean we're
let's let's play with nation states now
although i don't know that nation states
uh
are something we should think of as a
permanent constitution forever
um but how is one nation state supposed
to prevent another nation state
from acting in ways that it would see as
either detrimental to the global
community or detrimental to the interest
of their own nation-state um you know
and i i think
i think we've had this question of
going back to ancient times but
certainly in the 20th century this has
come up quite a bit i mean
the whole second world war argument
sometimes revolves around the idea of
what the proper counterforce should be
uh can you create an entity a league of
nations a united nations
uh a one world entity maybe even that
that
alleviates the need for counterforce
involving mass violence and armies and
navies and those things
uh i think that's an open discussion
we're still having
it's good to think through that because
um
having us like a united nations there's
usually a centralized control so there's
humans at the top
there's committees and uh usually like
leaders emerge a singular figures that
then can become corrupted by power and
it's just a really important
it feels like a really important thought
experiment and something to
really rigorously think through how can
you construct
systems of government that
are stable enough to push us towards
less and less war
and less and less unstable
and another tough war which is unfair
of application of force you know it's
that's really at the core of the
question that we're trying to figure out
as humans
as our weapons get better and better and
better destroying ourselves
it feels like it's important to think
about how we minimize
the over application or unfair
application of force
there's other elements that come into
play too you and i are discussing this
at the very high intellectual level of
things but there is also a tail wagging
the dog element to this so think of a
society of
warriors a tribal society from a long
time ago
how much do the fact that you have
warriors in your society
and that their reason for existing what
they take pride in what they train for
um what their status in their own
civilization how much does that itself
drive the responses of that society
right um
how much do you need war to legitimize
warriors
um you know that's the old argument that
you get to and we've had this in the
20th century too that
that the creation of arms and armies
creates
a an incentive to use them right and and
that they themselves can drive that
incentive as as a justification for
their reasons for existence you know
um that's where we start to talk about
the interactivity of all these different
elements of society upon one another
so when we talk about you know
governments and war we need to take into
account
the various things those governments
have put into place in terms of systems
and armies and things like that
to to protect themselves right for
reasons we can all understand
but they exert a force on your your
range of choices
don't they it's true you're making me
realize that
uh in my upbringing and i think i'm
bringing of many
warriors are heroes you know to me
i don't know where that feeling comes
from but to sort of
uh die fighting
is uh it's an honorable way to die
it feels like that i've always had a
problem with this because as a person
interested in military history
the distinction is important um and i
try to make it at different levels
so at base level the the people who are
out there
on the front lines doing the fighting uh
to me
those people can be compared with police
officers and firemen and people the
fire persons um but but i mean
people that are are um involved in
an ethical uh attempt to perform a task
which ultimately uh one can see in many
situations as being
a savings sort of task right or or if
nothing else a self-sacrifice for what
they see is the greater good now
i draw a distinction between the
individuals and the entity that they're
a part of a military
and i certainly draw a distinction
between the military and then the entire
for lack of a better word
military-industrial complex that that
service is a part of i feel a lot less
moral attachment to uh to those upper
echelons than i do the people on the
ground the people on the ground could be
any of us and have been in a lot of
you know we have a very professional uh
sort of military now where it's a very
uh a subset of the population but in
other periods of time
we've had conscription and drafts and
and it hasn't been a subset of the
population it's been the population
right
and so it is the society oftentimes
going to war and i make a distinction
between
those warriors and the entities either
in the system that they're part of the
military or the people
that control the military at the highest
political levels i feel um
a lot less moral attachment to them and
i have
i'm much harsher about how i feel about
them i do not
consider the military itself to be
heroic and i do not consider the
military-industrial complex to be heroic
i do think that is a tail wagging the
dog situation
i do think that draws us into looking at
um
military endeavors as a solution to the
problem
much more quickly than we otherwise
might and to be honest to tie it all
together i actually look at
the victims of this as the soldiers we
were talking about i mean if you
if you set a fire to send firemen
into to fight um then i feel bad for the
firemen i feel like you've abused the
trust that you give those people right
so when
when people talk about war i always
think that the people that we have to
make sure that a war is really necessary
uh in order to protect are the people
that you're going to send over there to
fight that
the greatest victims in our society of
war are often the warriors
so i in my mind um you know when we see
these people coming home from places
like iraq a place where
i would have made the argument and did
at the time that we didn't belong
to me those people are victims and i
know they don't like to think about
themselves that way because it runs
totally counter to the
to the ethos but if you're sending
people to protect this country's shores
those are heroes if you're sending
people to go
do something that they otherwise
probably don't need to do but they're
there for political reasons or anything
else you want to put in that's not
defense related well then you've made
victims of our heroes and so i
i feel like we do a lot of talk
about our troops and our soldiers and
stuff but we don't treat them
as valuable as we as as the rhetoric
makes them sound otherwise we would be
more um we would be much more careful
about where we put them
if you're going to send my son and i
don't have a son i have daughters but if
you're going to send my son
into harm's way i'm going to demand
that you really need to be sending him
into harm's way and i'm going to be
angry at you
if you put him into harm's way if he
doesn't if it doesn't warrant it
and so i have much more suspicion about
the system that sends these people into
these situations where they're required
to be heroic than i do the people on the
ground that i look at as
um either uh the people that are
defending us
you know in situations like this you
know the second world war for example or
or the people that um
turn out to be the individual victims of
a system
where they're just a cog and a machine
and the machine doesn't really care
as much about them as as the rhetoric
and the propaganda
would insinuate yeah and uh as my own
family history
it would be nice if we could talk about
there's a gray area
in in the places that you're talking
about there's a gray area in everything
and everything
but when that gray area is part of your
own blood
as it is for me it's
it's worth shining a light on somehow
sure give me example what you mean so
you did a program of four episodes of
ghosts of the us front yeah so i was
born
in the soviet union i was raised in
moscow my dad was born and raised in
kiev
my grandmother who just recently passed
away was um
uh raised in ukraine
she it's a small city
on the border between russia and ukraine
i have a grandfather born in kiev
in kiev the interesting thing about the
timing of everything
as you might be able to connect as she
survived
she's the most badass woman of uh i've
ever encountered my life and
most of the warrior spirit i carry is
probably from her
she survived polymor the ukrainian
starvation of the 30s
she was a beautiful teenage girl during
the nazi occupation
of so she survived all of that
and of course family that that everybody
you know
and so many people died the whole
process so
and one of the things you talk about in
your program is that the gray area is
even with the warriors
it happened to them just like as you're
saying now it uh
they didn't have a choice so my my
grandfather on the on the other side
he was uh a machine gunner
uh that was in ukraine that that
in the red army in the red army yeah and
they
through uh like the
the statement was that there's i don't
know if it's obvious or not but the rule
was there's no surrender
so you you better die so you i mean
you're basically the goal was when he
was fighting
and he was lucky enough one of the only
to survive
by being wounded early on is there was a
march
of uh nazis towards i guess moscow
and the whole goal in ukraine was to
slow
everyth to slow them into the into the
winter
i mean i view him as such a hero and
he believed that he's indestructible
which is survivor bias and
that you know bullets can't hurt him and
that's what everybody believed
and of course basically everyone that
uh he quickly rose to the ranks let's
just put it this way
because everybody died it's it's it's
it was just bodies dragging these heavy
machine guns
like always you know i was slowly
retreating
shooting and retreating shooting and
retreating and
i don't know he was a hero to me
like i always i grew up thinking that he
was the one that sort of defeated the
nazis right
and but the reality that there could be
another perspective which is all of this
happened to him
uh by the incompetence of stalin the
incompetent
incompetence and uh
men of uh the soviet union being used
like pawns
in a in a shittily played game of chess
right so like the one
narrative is of him as a victim as as
you're kind of describing
and it then somehow that's more
paralyzing
and that's more i don't know
it feels better to think of him as
a hero and as russia soviet union
saving the world i mean that narrative
also is in the united states that
that uh the united states was key in
saving the world from the nazis
it feels like that narrative is powerful
for people
i'm not sure and i carry it still with
me
but when i think about the right way to
think about that war
i'm not sure if that's the correct
narrative
let me suggest something there's a line
that uh
that a marine named eugene sledge uh
had said once and i i keep it on my
phone because it's it's
it makes a real distinction and he said
the front line is really where the war
is and anybody
even a hundred yards behind the front
line doesn't know what it's really like
now the difference is is there are lots
of people miles
behind the front line that are in danger
right you can be in a medical unit in
the rear
and artillery could strike you planes
could start i mean you could be in
danger
but at the front line there are two
different things one is
um that that and at least and i'm doing
a lot of reading on this right now and
reading a lot of veterans accounts
james jones who wrote uh uh books like
from here to eternity fictional accounts
of the second world war but he based
them on his own
service he was at uh guadalcanal for
example in 1942.
and jones had said that the evolution of
a soldier
in front line action requires an
almost surrendering to the idea that
you're going to live that you
you you become accustomed to the idea
that you're going to die
and he said you're a different person
simply for considering
that thought seriously because most of
us don't but what that allows you to do
is to do that job at the front line
right
if you're too concerned about your own
life
um you become less of a good guy at your
job
right the other thing that the people in
the one in the 100 yards of the front
line do that the people
in the rear medical unit really don't is
you kill
and you kill a lot right you don't just
oh there's a sniper back here so i shot
him
it's we go from one position to another
and we kill lots of people
those things will change you and what
that tends to do
not universally because i've read
accounts from uh red army soldiers and
they're very
patriotic right but a lot of that
patriotism
comes through years later as part of the
nostalgia and the remembering
when you're down at that front 100 yards
it is
often boiled down to a very small world
so your grandfather
was it your grandfather grandfather at
the machine gun
he's concerned about his position and
his comrades and the people who he owes
a responsibility to
and those it's a very small world at
that point and to me that's where the
heroism is right
he's not fighting for some giant world
civilizational thing
he's fighting to save the people next to
him and his own life at the same time
because they're saving him too
and and that there is a huge amount of
heroism to that and that gets to our
question about force earlier
why would you use force well how about
to protect these people on either side
of me right their lives
um now is there hatred
yeah i hated the germans for what they
were doing as a matter of fact i uh
i got a note from a poll not that long
ago
and i have this tendency to refer to the
nazis right the regime that was
and he said why do you keep calling them
nazis he says say say what they were
they were germans
and this guy wanted me to not absolve
germany by saying oh it was this awful
group of people that took over your
country he said the germans did this
and there's that bitterness where he
says let's not forget you know what they
did to us and why
and what we had to do back right um so
for me
when we talk about these combat
situations the reason i call these
people heroic is because of
they're fighting to defend things we
could all understand i mean if you come
after my brother
and i take a machine gun and shoot you
and you're going to overrun me i mean
you're gonna though that becomes a
situation where we talked about counter
force earlier
um much easier to call yourself a hero
when you're saving people
or you're saving this town right behind
you and you know if they get through
your machine gun
they're gonna burn these villages
they're going to throw these people out
in the middle of winter these families
that to me is a very different sort of
heroism than this amorphous idea
of patriotism you know patriotism is a
thing that we often get um
used with right people people manipulate
us
through love of country and all this
because they understand that this is
something we feel very strongly but they
use it against us sometimes
in order to whip up a war fever or to
get people i mean
there's a great line and i wish i could
remember it in its entirety that herman
goering
had said about how easy it was to get
the people into a war
he says you know you just appeal to
their patriotism i mean there's buttons
that you can push and they take
advantage of things like love of country
and the way we um the way we have a
loyalty and admiration to the warriors
who put their lives on the line
these are manipulatable things in the
human species
that reliably can be counted on to
move us in directions that in a more um
sober reflective state of mind we would
consider differently it gets the i mean
you get this war fever up and people
people wave flags and they start
denouncing the enemy and they start
signing
you know we've seen it over and over and
over again in ancient times this
happened
but the love of country is also
beautiful so
i haven't seen it in america as much so
people in america love
their country like this patriotism is
strong in america
but it's not as strong as i remember
even with my
sort of being younger the love of the
soviet union
now was it the soviet union this
requires a distinction or was it
mother russia what it really was was the
communist party
okay so it was this it was the system in
place okay the system in place like
loving i haven't quite deeply
psychologized exactly what you love
i think you love the that like populist
message of the worker
of the common man that's common so let
me let me draw
the comparison then um and i often say
this that that
the united states like the soviet union
is an ideological based society right so
you take a country like france
it doesn't matter which french
government you're in now the french have
been the french for a long time
right uh it's it's not based on an
ideology
right whereas what unites the united
states is an ideology
freedom liberty the constitution this is
what draws you know it's the e pluribus
unum kind of
the idea right this that out of many one
well what what
binds all these unique different people
these shared beliefs
this ideology the soviet union was the
same way because as you know the soviet
union russia was merely one part of the
soviet union
and if you believe the rhetoric until
stalin's time
everybody was going to be united under
this ideological banner someday right it
was a global revolution
um so ideological societies are
different and to be
a fan of the ideological framework and
goal i mean
i'm a liberty person right i would like
to see everybody in the world
have my system of government which is
part of a of a bias
right because they might not want that
but i think it's better for everyone
because i think it's better for me
at the same time when the ideology if
you consider
and you know this stems from ideas of
the enlightenment
and there's a bias there so my bias are
toward the but you feel and this is why
you say we're going to bring freedom to
iraq we're going to bring freedom to
here we're going to bring freedom
because we think we're spreading to you
something that is just
undeniably positive we're going to free
you
and give you this um
it's hard for me to to wipe my own bias
away from there right because if i were
in iraq for example i would want freedom
right
but if you then leave and let the iraqis
vote for whomever they want
are they going to vote for somebody that
will i mean you know
you look at russia now and i hear from
russians quite a bit because so much of
my um
my views on russia and the soviet union
were formed in my formative years
and and you know we were not hearing
from many people in the soviet union
back then but now you do you hear from
russians today who will say
your views on stalin are archaic and
cold you know so
so you try to reorient your beliefs a
little bit but it goes to this idea of
if you gave the people in russia a
free and fair vote will they vote for
somebody who promises them a free and
open
society based on enlightenment
democratic principles or will they vote
for somebody we in the u.s would go
what are they doing they're voting for
some strong man who's just good you know
so
um i think it's very hard to throw away
our own
uh biases and and preconceptions and and
you know it's an all
eye of the beholder kind of thing but
when you're talking about ideological
societies
it is very diff difficult to throw off
all the years of indoctrination into the
superiority of your system
i mean listen in the soviet union
marxism one way or another was part of
every classroom's you know you could be
studying geometry and they'll throw
marxism in there somehow
because that's what united the society
and that's what gave it a higher purpose
and that's what made it in the minds of
the people who were its defenders
a superior morally superior system and
we do the same thing here in fact
most people do but see you're still
french no matter what
what the ideology or the government
might be so so in that sense
it's funny that there would be a cold
war with these two systems because
they're both ideologically based systems
involving peoples of many different
backgrounds
who are united under the umbrella of the
ideology
first of all that's brilliantly put
i'm in a funny position that um in my
formative years i came here when i was
is when i you know teenage is your first
love or whatever
as i fall in love i fell in love with
the american set of ideas
of freedom and individuals
but i also remember it's like you
remember like maybe an ex-girlfriend or
something like that
i also remember loving
as a very different human the
the soviet idea like we had the national
anthem
which is still the i think the most
badass national anthem which is the
soviet union
like saying we're the indestructible
nation i mean just the words are so
like americans words are like oh we're
nice like we're freedom
but like a russian soviet union national
anthem was like we're bad motherfuckers
nobody will destroy us
uh i just remember feeling pride in a
nation as a kid like dumb not knowing
anything because
we all had to recite the stuff it was um
there's a uniformity to everything
there's pride underlying everything
i didn't think about all the destructive
nature of
the bureaucracy the incompetence the of
you know all the things that come with
the implementation
of communism especially around the 80s
and 90s but i i remember what it's like
to love
that set of ideas so i'm in a funny
place of like
remember like switching the love because
i'm you know i kind of joke around about
being russian but you know my my
long-term monogamous relationship is not
with the idea
the american ideal like i'm stuck with
it in my mind
but i remember what it was like to love
it and i
and i i think about that too when people
criticize china or they criticize
the current state of affairs with how
stalin is remembered
and how putin is
to know that the you can't always wear
the american ideal of individualism
radical individualism and freedom in
analyzing
the ways of the world elsewhere like in
china
in russia that it does
if you don't take yourself too seriously
as americans all do as i do
it's it's kind of a beautiful love to
have for your government
to believe in the nation to let go
of yourself and your rights and your
freedoms
to believe in something bigger than
yourself that's
actually uh that's a kind of freedom
that's you're actually liberating
yourself if you think like life is
suffering
you're you're giving into the flow of
the water the flow the way of the world
by giving away more power from yourself
and giving it to what you would conceive
as
as the power of the people together
together we'll do great things and
really believing
in the ideals of um what
in that in this case i don't even know
what you would call russia but whatever
the heck that is
authoritarian powerful state
powerful leader believing that can be uh
as beautiful as believing the american
ideal not just that
let me add to what you're saying i'm
very
i spend a lot of time trying to get out
of my own
biases uh it is it is a fruitless
endeavor
long term but you try to be better than
you normally are one of the critiques
that china and i always you know as an
american i tend to think about this as
their government right this is a
rationale that their government puts
forward but what you just said
you know is actually if you can make
that viewpoint beautiful is kind of a
beautiful way of approaching it the
chinese would say
that what we call human rights in the
united states and what we consider to be
everybody's birthright around the world
is instead
western rights that's the words they use
western rights
it's a it's a fundamentally western
oriented
and i'll go back to the enlightenment
enlightenment based ideas
um on what constitutes the rights of man
and they would suggest that that's not
internationally and always applicable
right that you can make a case and again
i don't believe this
this runs against my own personal views
but that you could make a case
that the collective well-being of a very
large group of people
outweighs the individual needs of any
single person especially if
those things are in conflict with each
other right if you cannot provide
for the greater good because everyone's
so individualistic
well then really what is the better
thing to do right to suppress
individualism so everybody's better off
um i think trying to recognize how
someone else might
see that is important if we want to you
know you had talked about eliminating
war we talk about eliminating conflict
uh the first need to do that is to try
to understand
how someone else might view something
differently than yourself
um i'm famously one of those people who
buys in
to the ideas of of traditional
americanism right
and look what a lot of people who who
live today i mean they would seem to
think that things like
um patriotism requires a
belief in the strong military and all
these things we have today but that is a
corruption of traditional americanism
which viewed all those things
with suspicion in the first hundred
years of the republic because they saw
it
as an enemy to the very things that
americans celebrated
right how could you have freedom and
liberty
and individualistic um expression if you
had an overriding military that was
always fighting wars and
and the founders of this country looked
to other examples like europe for
example
and saw that standing militaries for
example standing armies
were the enemy of liberty well we have a
standing army now
um and and one that is totally
interwoven in our entire society if you
could
if you could go back in time and talk to
john quincy adams right early president
of the united states and show him what
we have now
he would think it was awful and horrible
and
somewhere along the line the americans
had lost their way and forgotten what
they were all about
but we have so successfully interwoven
this modern uh military industrial
complex with the the traditional
uh benefits of the american system and
ideology
so that they've become intertwined in
our thinking whereas 150 years ago
they were actually considered to be at
opposite polarities and a threat to one
another
um so when you talk about the love of
the nation
i tend to be suspicious of those things
i tend to be suspicious of government i
tend to tend to
try very hard to not be manipulated and
i feel like
a large part of what they do is
manipulation and propaganda
and so um i think a healthy skepticism
of the nation state is actually 100
americanism in the traditional sense of
the word but i also have to recognize as
you so eloquently stated
americanism is not necessarily universal
at all
and so i think we have to try to be more
understanding
see our the the traditional american
viewpoint
is that if a place like china does not
allow their people individual human
rights
then they're being denied something
they're being denied
and 100 years ago they would have said
they're god given rights
man is born free and if he's not free
it's because of something done to him
right the government has taken away his
god-given rights
i'm getting excited just listening to
that well but i mean but i mean i think
i think the idea that this is universal
is in and of itself a bias now do i want
freedom for everybody else
i sure do but the people in the soviet
union who really bought into that
wanted the workers of the world to unite
and not be exploited by
you know the the greedy blood-sucking
people who worked them to death and
pocketed all of the fruits of their
labor if you frame it that way that
sounds like justice as well
you know so it is an eye of the beholder
sort of thing
i'd love to talk to you about
vladimir putin sort of
while we're on this feeling and wave of
empathy
and trying to understand others that are
not like us
one of the reasons i started this
podcast
is because i believe that there's a few
people i could talk to
some of it is ego some of it
stupidity is there some people i could
talk to
that not many others can talk to
the one person i was always thinking
about was vladimir putin
do you still speak the language i speak
the language very well that makes it
even easier i mean you might be you
might be appointed for that job
that's the context in which i'm asking
you this question what
are your thoughts about vladimir putin
from historical context have you
studied him have you thought about him
yes uh
studied as a is a loaded word um
here's here's and again i i find it hard
sometimes to not
filter things through an american lens
so as an american
i would say that the russians should be
allowed to have any leader that they
want to have
but what an american would say is but
there should be elections
right so if the russians choose vladimir
putin
and they keep choosing him that's their
business
where where as an american i would have
a problem is when that leader
stops letting the russians make that
decision and we would say well
now you're no longer ruling by the
consent of the governed
you've become the equivalent of a person
who may be oppressing your people you
might as well be a dictator
right now there's a difference between a
freely elected and re-elected and
re-elected and re-elected dictator
right if that's what they want and and
look i i it would be silly to broad
brush the russians like it would be
silly to broad-brush
anyone right millions and millions of
people with different opinions amongst
them all
but they seem to like a strong person at
the helm and listen there's a giant
chunk of americans who do too
um in their own country but an american
would say
as long as the freedom of choice is is
given to the russians to decide this
and not taken away from them right it's
one thing to say he was freely elected
but a long time ago and we've done away
with elections since then
is is a different story too so my
attitude on on vladimir putin is if
that's who the russian people want
and you give them the choice right if
he's only there because they keep
electing him
that's a very different story when he
stops
offering them the option of choosing him
or not choosing him
that's when it begins to look nefarious
to someone born and raised
with the mindset and the ideology that
is an integral part of
of yours truly and that i can't you know
you can see gray areas and nuance all
you like but it's hard to escape as you
wish and you you alluded to this too
it's hard to escape what was
indoctrinated into your bones in your
formative years
uh it's like exit you know your bones
are growing right
and you can't go back so to me this is
so much a part of who i am
that i have a hard time jettisoning that
and saying oh no vladimir putin not
being elected anymore it's just fine
i'm too much of a product of my
upbringing to go there does that make
sense yeah
absolutely but of course there's like
what we're saying there's gray areas
which is
i believe i have to think through this
but i
think there is a point at which adolf
hitler became
the popular choice in nazi germany in
the 30s
there's a in in the same way
from an american perspective you can
start to criticize
some in a shallow way some in a deep way
the way that putin has maintained power
is by controlling the press so limiting
one other freedom that we americans
value which is
the the freedom of the press or freedom
of speech that
he it is very possible now things are
changing now but for most of his
presidency
he was the popular choice and sometimes
by far
and you know i have i actually don't
have real family in russia who don't
love putin
i the only people who write to me about
putin
and not liking him are like sort of
activists who are young right
but like to me they're strangers i don't
know anything about them
the people i do know have a big family
in russia
they love putin they
do they miss elections
would they want the choice to prove it
at the ballot box
and and or or are they so in love with
him
that they're they wouldn't want to take
a chance that someone might vote him out
no they don't think of it this way and
they are aware
of the incredible bureaucracy and
corruption
that is lurking in the shadows which is
true in russia
right everywhere everywhere but like
there's something about the russian
it's a remnants it's corruption is so
deeply part of the russians so the
soviet system
that even the overthrow of the soviet
the the
the breaking apart of the soviet union
and
uh putin coming and reforming a lot of
the system
it's still deeply in there and and
they're aware of that
that's part of the like the love for
putin is partially grounded
in the fear of what happens
when the corrupt take over the greedy
take over
and they they see putin as the
stabilizer as like
a hard like force that says
counterforce counterforce like get your
shit together
like basically from the western
perspective putin is
is terrible but from
from the russian perspective putin is is
the only thing holding this thing
together before it goes
if it collapses now the from the like
gary kasparov has been loud on this
you know a lot of people from the
western perspective say
well if it has to collapse let it
collapse you know
that's easier said than done when you
don't have to live through that exactly
and so anyone worrying about their
family about and they also
remember the
the inflation and the economic
instability and the suffering and the
starvation that happened in the 90s with
the collapse of the soviet union
and they saw the kind of reform and the
economic vibrancy that happened when
putin took power
that they think like this guy's holding
it together
and they see elections
as potentially being
mechanisms by which the corrupt people
can manipulate the system
unfairly as opposed to letting the
people speak with their voice
they somehow figure out a way to uh
manipulate the elections to elect
somebody uh
like one of them western revolutionaries
and so i think one of the beliefs
that's important to the american system
is the belief
in the electoral system that
the voice of the people can be heard in
the various systems of
government whether it's judicial whether
it's uh
uh i mean basically the assumption is
that the system works well enough for
you to
be able to uh elect the popular choice
okay so there's a couple of things that
come to mind on that
the first one has to do with the idea of
oligarchs
um there's a belief in political science
uh
you know it's not the overall belief but
but that every society is sort of an
oligarchy really if you break it down
right so what you're talking about are
some of the people who would form
an oligarchic class in in in russia
and that putin is the guy who can
harness
uh the power of the state to keep those
people in check
the problem of course in a system like
that a strong man system
right where you have somebody who can
who can hold the reins and steer the
ship when the ship is
violently in a storm is the succession
so if you're not creating a system
that can operate without you then that
terrible instability and that terrible
future that you
that you justified the strong man for is
just awaiting
your future right i mean unless unless
he's actively building
the system that will outlive him and
allow successors
to do what he's doing then then what
you've done here is create a temporary i
would think a temporary stability here
because
it's the same problem you have in a
monarchy right um where
where you have this one king and he's
particularly good or you think he's
particularly good
but he's going to turn that job over to
somebody else down the road
and the system doesn't guarantee because
no one's really worked on and again you
would tell me if if putin is putting
into place
i know he's talked about it over the
years putting into place a system that
can outlive him
and that will create the stability that
the people in russia
like him for when he's gone because if
the oligarchs just take over
afterwards then one might argue well we
had 20 good years you know of stability
but i mean i would say that if we're
talking about a ship of state here
the guy steering the ship maybe if you
want to look at it from the russian
point of view has done a great job maybe
just saying but the rocks are still out
there and he's not going to be at
the helm forever so one would think that
his job is to make sure that
there's going to be someone who can
continue to steer the ship for the
people of russia after he's gone
now let me ask because i'm curious
and and ignorant so uh is he doing that
do you think
is he setting it up so that when there
is no