Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 So we are, uh, at seven o'clock we'll just go ahead and get started today and I'm sure people will come in. I'm gonna keep sharing as well. Uh, thank you for joining us. I'm Scott Schiff for the Atlas society with TAs fellow senior fellow Rob truss, discussing the lessons of Sri Lanka. Uh, I'd ask everyone to share the room and to please raise your hand if you wanna join the conversation. Uh, Rob, thanks for doing this topic. What happened in Sri Lanka?
Speaker 1 00:00:32 All right. So this is something that, that happened, uh, in the last few weeks and it sort of drifted into American news and out of it pretty quickly. And I think people didn't absorb everything there was to, to learn and to appreciate from it because it has a lot of lessons that actually quite relevant to what to what's going on our own in our own politics. Right? So this is, this happened, uh, I think early July that, uh, there was a, it came so Americans don't like to pay attention to the news from overseas. We basically, you know, the, the, at the ocean's edge, all, all events stop. And we, we, you know, it takes us something very big to sort of penetrate, uh, our news. So what happened that most of you probably saw something about was that there was a popular uprising against their mass street demonstrations against the government in Sri Lanka, the president to Sri Lanka, uh, fled, uh, the pres you know, resigned, fled the presidential palace, fled the country, uh, and, uh, they have a new government that's now cobbling together that that is taking over.
Speaker 1 00:01:35 And what you might have heard from that is, is one of the reasons from it, for that, for this uprising, for this popular unrest, one of the reasons was that they had adopted this scheme of organic farming. So the idea is they had actually stopped. They banned the importation of fertilizers and pesticides and had said, we're gonna do all, you know, is gonna be environmentally, correct environmentally, extremely progressive environmentally. We're gonna have total organic farming for the whole country. And of course, what predictably happened is that yields on all the top crops for in Sri Lanka crashed, uh, going down 30 or 50%, you know, far, fewer, far, fewer, uh, far smaller crops, far fewer products. And, and this is hugely important for Sri Lanka because they have, you know, the, uh, certain agricultural imports that are very important to them above everything else. They have tea, you know, it's one of the places where tea leaves come from, and it's a huge, uh, source of cash and a huge source of foreign capital, uh, or foreign currency.
Speaker 1 00:02:47 Excuse me. So, you know, one of the things that, one of the things you have to deal with when you're trading is you have to have, you know, if you go out and try to import goods from outside, you have to be able to pay for those goods in a currency that, that, um, is readily accepted by the people from whom you're buying it. You have to be able to pay for it in American dollars, uh, or some equivalent dollars euros. What have you. And so it's important that you have people then coming in and buying your own exports so that you can then, uh, and, and paying you in dollars for those exports. So you that have those dollars, you can use to buy, uh, to buy goods that you're going to import. And T has been a major source of that, a major source of that for Sri Lanka.
Speaker 1 00:03:32 So it, it just created an even bigger crisis that they couldn't export tea and, uh, all these and, and, you know, it's tea, it was rice, it was vegetables. There are major growers and vegetables that's important to the local diet. So they had this crash in production because they did this vast national experiment in organic farming. So you may have heard that. And I say, you may have heard that because there were a number of, uh, articles, you know, it's the New York times that a couple other places, there were a number of articles that said, well, it was a currency crisis and it was this. It was that. And they, you know, basically they did not want to mention the fundamental underlying cause of the crisis, which is, or, or the, the most immediate and largest cause of the crisis, which was this collapse in agricultural yield because of this, uh, sort of environmental utopianism that they had pursued.
Speaker 1 00:04:22 So you might have heard if you, cause if you consume some right-leaning media, you would definitely have heard about this national experiment or organic farming, and that would be blamed as the cause of it. But I found there's another cause behind that, that is also important for our, uh, domestic politics on domestic ideology. Now the environmental part is important for our domestic politics and for the ideological battles we have here, because there is a, you know, there's a push right now for the idea, we need a green new deal. And the green new deal generally consists of let's ban all of our existing sources of power and put a massive effort to build up unproven and probably impractical sources of power to replace it. Right. So we're gonna have solar farms or, um, uh, uh, well, solar is the main one that they want to use, uh, as a, as a renewable source without thinking about, well, what will actually require to build enough, oh, solar and wind is I gonna say, so what'll actually required to build enough solar and wind power.
Speaker 1 00:05:25 And is it actually reliable? You know, the problem with solar and wind is that it's, uh, you know, it, it works while the sun shining and while the wind is blowing, but, you know, while back Germany had a problem where they had cloudy, they had days that were cloudy, but also windless. And they had a major crisis in Germany. They had, you know, brownouts happening and, and shortages of electricity because suddenly, you know, the, these renewable sources weren't producing reliable energy. All right. So, so one of the lessons here about the, so the lesson for sort of, for the lesson for the left is this idea of having this crash course of radically changing how your entire economy works overnight and as an emergency thing and doing it in a totally speculative way without demonstrating, you could actually make this work. And that's what they did in Sri Lanka.
Speaker 1 00:06:23 They said, we're gonna go all through organic farming immediately right away the entire economy without having actually demonstrated well, can you actually run this agricultural economy? That's so important to, to, to, uh, ster cuz economy can't, you actually run it purely on organic farming. And of course, you know, a lot of us sort of predicted, no, you can't. And of course they couldn't now, by the way, ster Lanka was a huge, um, uh, beneficiary in the 20th century, huge beneficiary of what they called the green revolution, which was when you brought in artificial fertilizers and, um, uh, you know, not just compost, you know, and, and manure from the animals, but, you know, higher, great, higher potency, artificial fertilizers, and pesticides and things like that. And when you brought all that in and you increased agricultural yields by huge amounts, and it took these countries that had previously been, you know, constantly under the Bri conservation and made them net exporters of food.
Speaker 1 00:07:18 And so it was predictable that if you just totally reverse the green revolution, if you go the exact opposite direction, you're gonna be going back to the point at which you can't grow enough food and everybody's serving all right. So the lesson for us is for something like the green new deal, the idea that you're going to get rid of all of our existing sources of power, and then go to these speculative and unreliable alternatives, it it's predictable that you're going to be basically crashing the economy and creating, uh, a constant shortage of, of, of, of, of energy of power. Uh, and so it's, so it's partly a lesson for our politics of the foolishness of this kind of approaches environmental utopianism, but here's the other aspect of it, which is when I looked into this, I found that the unrest in Sri Lanka, wasn't just about the, uh, agricultural collapse and this, this green, uh, uh, organic farming, uh, experiment.
Speaker 1 00:08:15 That was part of a, that it was because of that. That was the main immediate cause. But the larger cause was that this was imposed by pretty much essentially by executive order, by some equivalent of executive order, by the S Lanka government, as part of the control of S Lanka politics for a long time, by a single powerful family that is becoming, has been imposing increasingly authoritarian rule. So part of the lesson here is about this type of government that they have, and the idea that they have been giving more and more power to sort of a populist strong man. Now, by the way, this is, you know, know totally relevant to the politics of global warming and, and of the power regulations, because you have a bunch of people on the left who have been saying, oh, oh, Joe Biden, uh, president Biden should declare a climate emergency and, and do all sorts of things to emergency executive powers.
Speaker 1 00:09:10 You know, they, they hate, they hate it over reaching executive when it's the other guy, but they love it O reaching executive, when is their guy. But the wider lesson here is about this idea of the danger of an overreaching executive of a, an executive that's too power, too powerful. And has this sort of authoritarian control now in Sri Lanka. It's interesting too, because it is not essentially, it is not fun to say the left wing government that they've had, it would be in American terms considered probably more of a right-wing government. It was nationalist and it was religious nationalist. So the, uh, and it was this very diagnostic sort of approach. So the family that was control of Sri Lankan politics is the Raja parka family. And the president who left was go to Paul RAA, but his brother was the previous president was one of the previous presidents and his cabinet featured not only his ex-president brother, but two other brothers from the RAA family who were key roles, including a guy named basil Roda.
Speaker 1 00:10:10 Who's considered to be the, the, the genius, the brain behind all these, uh, all the, uh, disastrous decisions, uh, made in, in that led to this crisis. So what you have is a lesson about how now, by the way, I talked about the meaning nationalist and, uh, religious, because one of the main things that, that the, uh, the Roger Oxis did to appeal to the voters in Sri Lanka, and to get into power was they represented to the, the largest, uh, ethnic and religious majority in, in, uh, the, the ethnic religious majority in Sri Lanka is Sinhala Buddhist. And so they basically have this, you know, appeal to Sinhala, Buddhist, nationalism, this sort of merging of that ethnic or religious identity with gov with the government. And that's what they appealed to. So for example, good to BA Roger POA. Who's the guy who just left was, you know, part of his claim to, to, to why he should be elected president is he was under his brother.
Speaker 1 00:11:15 He was the minister of defense when the, uh, Sri Lankan army defeated, uh, a, an insurgency long running insurgency by the TA separatist in the north of Sri Lanka. So it was ethnic, uh, minority, and they also, of course, um, appealed a lot to, there have been some terrorist attacks and they appealed a lot to anti-Muslim sentiment. So, you know, it's the Buddhist versus the Muslims. It's every, you know, it's always every religion versus every other religion, uh, wherever you go on the earth, it's just a matter of which ones it is. So, and then in, after defeating the Samuel separatist, the big thing that the Raja family did to gain, um, uh, uh, sort of appeal among the public is they went to this giant building program of they were gonna have super growth. We're gonna have extremely high economic growth. We're gonna do that by having the government go as afford a bunch of building projects, which just also happened to sort of be lining the pockets of the Roger parka family.
Speaker 1 00:12:13 And, uh, uh, oftentimes were done in partnership with the Chinese government, as the Chinese governments was spreading a lot of money around in these areas, trying to, uh, make more economic connections and have more countries be dependent on China as part of their foreign policy. And so they ended up in massive debt to China for these projects. And it turned out to be sort of a Potemkin village kind of thing, where they did all these big splashy building projects, but it didn't actually produce the economic growth that they pro that was promised. Now, they were also hit by the loss of a lot of tourism dollars when you had the, uh, the cuz the pandemic that's one of the causes, but it really came down to the fact that they had been spending way too much for too long on these Potemkin village, uh, building projects to make the ruling family look good.
Speaker 1 00:13:04 And then at the same time to cement their role, this ruling family had, uh, pushed forward. Their, their party had pushed for some amendments to the constitution that allowed them to basically, uh, not have to, uh, not have as much oversight from the parliament. And one of the things of course, was that they, they basically got rid of the, they had something similar to advice and consent like we have in the us where if the, if the chief of executive, the president wants to import, uh, once who wants to appoint someone to an important position in the cabinet, he has to go to the legislature and say, okay, well, do you approve this or not? Well, they got, they had something similar to so Lanka and they got rid of that. And the obvious reason is they got rid of it so they could put more oxes in, in, in top positions and positions of authority.
Speaker 1 00:13:51 It very much became one family. One dynasty sort of kind tries to control the government, engaging in these Potemkin village projects to try to make themselves look good, but underlying that was this tremendous weakness to the economy. And then when the, when the, when the pandemic hit, it, it, it, it, uh, caused an economic downturn. And when that downturn came, they said, well, we don't have enough foreign currency reserves anymore. Cuz the tourists aren't coming, we don't have foreign currency reserves to pay for all of the fertilizers and all of the pesticides that we need to keep the agricultural economy running. And so by executive decree, because, you know, it's, it's, it's becoming a increasingly a government run by the executive by an uncontrolled strong man. And so by executives tree, they said, therefore, BEC you know, because, because we're, they didn't say because we're because we can't afford it.
Speaker 1 00:14:44 Cause we don't have the money. They said because we have all these environmental ideals and it's healthier to have organic farming. Therefore we're gonna mandate no, no abandon pesticides, abandon fertilizers. And we're gonna go all through organic farming. So you see how this is actually this perfect storm of sort of, uh, uh, environmental utopianism meant to appeal to the Western do-gooder types and religious nationalists, strong man government. That's sort of more of a right wing kind of authoritarianism. And you're combining those things two together and, and those two things together and you're basically getting the worst of both worlds and the results is a massive economic crisis. Uh, which fortunately, I guess, fortunately, we'll see how, how, what they do after this, but at least they have the ability now that, you know, they've had this popular unrest and the president has resigned and fled.
Speaker 1 00:15:34 They have the ability to choose somebody else to not vote for anybody named Dr. Xa for a long time and to maybe go back and, and reverse some of these policies and rebuild, but they are not gonna be done paying the, the consequences for this in Sri Lanka for a long time. So anyway, I think you can see how there's a lot of lessons in here, both for the left and for the right in America. And, uh, and I think especially for this, you know, something that swings to be popular in the, both the left and the right and the center is this idea that, well, we have too much gridlock. We need to, you know, haves of breaking through and getting more things done and often playing around with the idea of wanting a stronger executive that can act more vigorously and more quickly to deal with our various problems.
Speaker 1 00:16:19 And this is a great example of how, you know, a strong executive that can act vigorously is an unchecked executive that can also make terrible mistakes. So there's an old quote, usually attributed to Thomas Jefferson that, uh, and it's somewhat dubious whether he said it, but I, I, I, I cut people with slack because it's totally the sort of thing Jefferson would've said. So, um, and this quote is that a government big enough to give you everything you want is, is strong enough to take everything you have. And my corollary to that is, uh, a government, uh, strong enough to do all the good things you hope for is also strong enough to do all the horrible things that you fear. So that's the reason why we do not want a more active and vigorous and empowered executive. Um, uh, we don't want to break through the gridlock. We should want, uh, the president to be hemmed in, on all sides by Congress, in the courts, uh, and, and, and vice versa. So, uh, those, I think the lessons that are, are for both sides to take from the debacle in Sri Lanka, and by the way, I covered all of this in an article published, uh, a week or so ago, um, at discourse magazines. So check out discourse magazines called the real lessons of Sri Lanka. And I go through some of the details. I've got some good links to more information.
Speaker 0 00:17:36 Great. Uh, wanna encourage everyone to share the room or raise your hand if you want to get involved. I have a bunch of questions myself. Um, you know, you talk about the perfect storm, um, but in some ways it's the perfect storm of the authoritarian going along with the progressive globalists. That seems to be the bad combination. And just historically thinking about how, you know, world war II in Europe really started with, uh, Stalin and Hitler carving up Poland together.
Speaker 1 00:18:07 <laugh> well, I think that's one of the lessons though, is how those people are never historically it's. So, so one of the things is that when you get the sort of authoritarian types on the right, and I know we can, we can debate double Trump separately, uh, or, or later on in this discussion. But when you get some, the authoritarian types on the right, they tend to sell themselves and, you know, the Nazis, the, the Hitler sold themselves the same way too. He said, you need us to be the strong men to rule and, and take half, take power to keep the left out of power. You know, the Hitler's whole pitch was you don't want the communist to take over cuz you know, the communist were there. They're very strong in, in Germany, they marching in the streets and rioting. And what have you is you don't want the communist to take over.
Speaker 1 00:18:51 So you need us. And a bunch of people bought that. And one of the lessons from all of this is that the distance between authoritarians and the right and authoritarians of the left is actually never that far in practice. Uh, and never that far in theory too, because you know, one of the things, if you look for who are the sort of ideological defenders, the big ideological defenders of right wing authoritarianism right now, you'd have to go for guys like so Amari and the Patrick dine and these nationalist conservatives while. So Amari just went out and started a magazine with a Marist <laugh> in which one of his, uh, campaigns is, oh, well we need to, we need to go basically move to the left on economics. We need to have, uh, the, the free market economy isn't working for families. So we need to have more government regulation and more big government.
Speaker 1 00:19:40 So, you know, the authoritarianism left and the right go hand in hand. And that, so one of my things I wanna say is that when you're on the right, you're saying, yes, we need a strong ruler. Who's gonna fight off the left. One thing you discover is first of all, what he actually gets into power. He may be, he may adopt some of the policies of the left, or he may adopt something just as disastrous based on his own whims or his own, what whoever's whispering in his ear. But also that you also might not get your strong amount into power. But in the meantime, you might knock down a lot of the limits on executive power and then you'll get an Elizabeth Warren in power. Or actually one of the examples I used to use is, um, uh, Kamala Harris. Who's currently the vice president and who is one ver one relatively frail heartbeat away from the presidency.
Speaker 1 00:20:30 Uh, she used to talk lovingly about all the things she wanted to impose by executive order and by executive action if Congress wouldn't act. So, you know, the minute you start embracing the idea of, oh, we need a strong man, who's gonna have lots of power. And to fight off the left, you may just simply be creating the precedents and the conditions that will allow a leftist, strong man, a leftist, uh, uh, someone on the left to come in and abuse their power and oppose something like the green new deal or, you know, national, organic farming.
Speaker 0 00:21:01 I, uh, I, I wanna get to others here. Um, you know, I just think that along those lines, there's something to be said for, you know, populism, it, it's not ideological. It can be left or right. I mean, is, is it some ways a, a natural reaction to a perceived corrupt establishment, just being dismissive of what people are concerned about?
Speaker 1 00:21:26 Yes. Uh, yeah, by populism, but say the problem with populism is it talks about being in favor of the people, but the actual, so when, when, when, uh, political sci, it's fascinating a little subject that when political scientists go to take apart, well, what do we mean when we say populism, what is populism? What is the essential design defining characteristics? Now the populism doesn't just mean anything that's popular, right? Anything that the people like populism specifically has a signature in, in, in, uh, in, in, from a perspective of political science and the signature of populism is the idea of the real people, right? So the populists come in and they say, we are, we speak for the people against the elites, but inevitably they don't speak for all of the people they speak for some politically engaged faction. Usually it's something like 30% of the PO of the country.
Speaker 1 00:22:19 You know, if you were to talk about, you know, the, the, uh, if you were to talk about the, you know, Bernie Sanders as a populist, or at least believes themselves, that sees themselves as a populist, how much of the public population does he speak for maybe 10%, uh, uh, or, you know, Donald Trump is considered a populist leader, but has never broken 50% in any election. And if you took, you know, if you break it down to the people who will, you know, difference people who will hold their noses of vote and the people who really embrace the whole agenda, it's, it's under 40%, right? So invariably people who say I'm for the people against the elites are actually for a subsection, a faction of the people. And so the way populists usually square this, you can see this in the rhetoric is they talk about, well, I'm for the real people.
Speaker 1 00:23:06 I'm for real Americans, real Americans want this, and they don't want that. And real Americans always means basically people in my faction, the people who agree with me and everybody else is considered by therefore not a real American. And maybe they're, you know, if they're, it's the globalists, see, it's not, they're not real Americans, they're globalists. So you see they're really practically foreigners and they're being influenced by these foreigners. Or if you see the way that, um, one of the great examples of this is the way that, um, uh, uh, the way, the way that, um, in, in Hungary, the way that Victor Orban does this in Hungary is, you know, it plasters the name of George Soros everywhere. Cause the idea is, oh, well this isn't real Hungarian ideas. These are things being imposed on us by this billionaire George Soros is trying to manipulate everything, right? So that's how he sort of creates that bogeyman. So they create this idea that there's, there's, there's these elite, this small number of elites trying to impose this on us. And then there's real America. And real America always just means my own minority faction. So that's the problem, the sort of contradiction of populism, is it claims to speak on behalf of the people, but then engages in this mental gymnastics to basically say no, I'm really talking on behalf of my faction.
Speaker 0 00:24:23 Yeah. I, I think that happens. Uh, well, uh, let's go to Lawrence. Thanks for your patience.
Speaker 2 00:24:31 Hi Rob. Uh, so I think I asked you a similar question to this a few weeks ago, but sort of seeing the situation in Sri Lanka, pretty different in terms of the governmental structure that influenced these events, but how do you relate, how do you relate these things to kind of the things that we're trying to see more in the west in regards to what happened to the Netherlands and how Ireland government is getting on board with these regulations to reducing farms and, uh, stuff like that. Mm-hmm
Speaker 1 00:25:01 <affirmative> no, I think so. Like I said, part of this is about authoritarianism. Although also when it comes to, uh, Europe, the European context in particular, they don't have necessarily populous authoritarianism, but they often have a highly centralized regulatory state that is very unresponsive to the people. This is, this is the, uh, the, uh, the elites, the corrupt elites that, uh, Scott was talking about. They're not necessarily corrupt, but they're often, you know, very technocratic they're very much in their own cultural bubble. And you know, that they basically have whatever the popular ideas are among that class, that sort of regular, that sort of administrative class. Uh, and so they're able to impose things in a very centralized way without having to fear a backlash from the voters.
Speaker 1 00:25:52 But I said the, like I said, the other part of the lesson though, is that part about the lesson of environmentalism, one of the great things, uh, and, and, and, you know, the danger of this utopian environmentalist stuff, a great observation that was made a couple years back. I think it was in response. This is some of these pop culture things there response to one of the, the Marvel superhero movies, I guess, in the latest incarnation of these things. Thanos who's one of the big, bad villains in the Marvel comic books is motivated by environmentalist concerns. I guess he's concerned about over back in my day, Thanos was a like, uh, Thanos wanted to kill most of the population of the galaxy because he was in love with death. He like had this love affair with the personification of death. It was very weird. Don't ask me to elaborate on like
Speaker 0 00:26:36 The Taliban
Speaker 1 00:26:38 <laugh>. I mean, just specifically, he was in love with a woman who was the personification of death, and he was trying to approve his love to her by killing everybody when their modern version, they didn't go that direction. Apparently he was he's wants to kill half the population of the galaxy because he concerned about overpopulation. And in response to that sunny bunch, uh, who's a movie reviewer. I think he writes for the bull work these days. Um, he wrote something about how environmentalists make the best super villains. I thought it was a brilliant, a brilliant identification. You can see a number of different examples of this throughout the films. You know, that everybody embraces environmentalism and you can't criticize environmentalism, but somehow it seeps through people's consciousness that they keep making super to keep making environmentalist super villains. Cuz it's the perfect ingredient for a super villain because a it's somebody who is be precisely because environmentalism is so widely accepted precisely cuz it has this aura a virtue to it that somebody can convince themselves.
Speaker 1 00:27:40 No, no, no. I'm really the good guy. And in wiping out half the population of the galaxy killing billions upon billions of people, I'm actually doing something good. So it's, it's a great way. If you wanna build a fictional villain, somebody who's absolutely convinced that he's the good guy and he's doing the right thing while he's doing something horrible, then environmental's a great motive, right? It's, it's a great way for the bad guy to convince himself that the atrocities of these committing are actually heroic. But then the other thing about it is that environmentalism by its very nature is something that wants to take stuff away from us. It wants to make our lives worse. That is it's basic. You know, if you look at every aspect of environmentalism, it says you're gonna get by with less power. You're gonna get by with uh, less food.
Speaker 1 00:28:25 You're not gonna be able to eat. You're not gonna be able to eat meat. You're gonna have to eat bugs. You know, it's all there. There's they keep inventing. Also you have to use you can't, you have to, uh, use only a couple squares of toilet paper when you go to the bathroom. I mean, everything they have, that's a real thing by the way, every a real demand. So everything that we have in life that we enjoy, they want to take it away from us and make our SI make our lives worse. They wanna make us poorer and hungrier and sadder. And so that's another reason why environmentalists make great super villains because again, they're convincing themselves they're virtuous, but they really are trying to make you well, they're trying to make everybody's life worse. Um, and I think that's the big lesson that you have to learn about this and it's gonna happen again and again, as they keep pushing for these things, uh, these, these various agricultural controls and uh, you know, like I said, farmers, farmers are always on the edge, uh, economically and you know, one, one heavy rain, uh, strong winds, uh, too much sun, too little sun, whatever you're, you're always on the, on the brink of, of uh, of a bad crop and a bad year and going under.
Speaker 1 00:29:32 So they're always like, they're the canaries in the coal mine here. They're the coal mine, another thing that's going out of existence. Uh, but they are the, they're the ones who feel the effects of these things. First
Speaker 0 00:29:44 Women and minorities hardest hit
Speaker 1 00:29:47 <laugh>. Oh no, it's always the farmer hardest hit
Speaker 0 00:29:49 <laugh>
Speaker 1 00:29:51 You can take that to the bank.
Speaker 0 00:29:52 That's right. Patrick, thank you for joining us in, in your patience.
Speaker 3 00:29:57 Hey, no problem, Rob. Um, I've been in touch actually with avocado across the past seven months because we're doing a video project with them. Uh, and so I, I kind of had two questions. They're both sort of unrelated. Uh, so avocado the, as I understand it, like Sri Lanka went through this in the late seventies and a very similar situation where there is this attitude that they need to be self-sufficient. And that basically this idea that they import goods and engage in, you know, kind of free market activity is, is in some ways like a detriment. And that partially that attitude is kind of what, uh, is used. And there's like almost like a cultural sensibility about it. Um, I, I wanted to see if you, you know, kind of saw that same parallel here, or if you feel that's, uh, you know, off base because we are basing our video on the idea that they're repeating a loop.
Speaker 3 00:31:03 Um, the second is on this question of populism. Uh, I mean, so to me, I look at populism as kind of neutral. Um, and I tend to do, I suppose, tend to see it as having like an identity, but if populism is like sort of a negative thing, uh, it almost, it sounds like you're suggesting that there is no French identity or American identity. Like, I don't mean to say someone who got here yesterday is not American if they're an American citizen. Right. But it seems to me that someone whose family has been farming in Virginia for 300 years is in many ways more American, you know, but, uh, because they participate in the customs habits, traditions and the things that one would describe if we were alien scientists looking at, you know, people as well, this is what these people do. This is their Aristotelian habits that make up their character mm-hmm <affirmative> and there is a shared cultural identity there. So when a populist is calling upon that, um, is, is that, do, do you find that to be illegitimate?
Speaker 1 00:32:23 Okay. So you got two questions that are gonna take them in turn. Uh, so about repeating the mistakes. Yes. There is an old anti-trade viewpoint that I think is deeply embedded. And especially, I, I don't know the exact specifics, but I, I would suspect it says is probably connected to India because, you know, Sri Lanka is so close to India. Uh, again, its independence around the same time. And the, uh, one of, you know, Gandhi was notorious for this, of having this, you know, having absorbed this economic viewpoint in which trade is exploitation, right? And so the ideal thing is that, you know, your country should be totally self-sufficient manufacture all its own stuff, not be dependent on foreign trade in any way. Uh, and, uh, this of course is, you know, economically it's, it is disastrous, you know, it's, uh, was called autarchy it's the term for it.
Speaker 1 00:33:16 The most AAR system in the world is North Korea. Right? So, uh, <laugh> gives you an idea of how successful the whole thing is because trade is good. You know, you can take something that's way more valuable to other people like, you know, the tea that you can grow in Sri Lanka that doesn't grow in America and you can sell it to people who wanna drink tea, uh, or I should probably should have said, uh, in, in, in great Britain, you can't grow tea. The climb is totally wrong, but the British love their tea. They have to have tea all the time. So you can take this thing that's that, that you have, that's very valuable to somebody else who trade it to them. And then you take something that somebody else has that's of great value to you, like fertilizers or pesticides, and you can import it.
Speaker 1 00:33:57 And so, you know, everybody wins from trade. The whole, the idea of comparative advantage, everybody wins from trade and countries have be, you know, we we've sort of demonstrated over the last 60 years, especially in Southeast Asia that, you know, more trade makes everybody richer faster. Right? So let's, but that is deeply embedded, you know, even before environmentalism became the, the cause dojo that was deeply embedded in the sort of the psyche, uh, economically, because there was a whole anti-trade school of thought that came with sort of big government leftist economics, uh, and was deeply, you know, spread deep and wide in the early 20th century. And, you know, guys like, uh, Gandhi and guys like Naru in India absorbed that deeply. And it, it became, and I think throughout the 20th century, as it was it tied into these sort of independence movements and the, uh, anti-colonial movements, you know, the idea that, well, we were a part of the British and we were exploited by the British.
Speaker 1 00:34:56 So therefore once we gain our independence from the British empire, we should be totally unconnected from them by including not dependent on them for trade or investment or those things, then we should, you know, put up the economic walls and it became part of these sort of independence movements to say, no, no, we should be totally self-sufficient. And of course, you know, it, it, it turned out to be a disaster and it's being, it was mostly reversed by the end of the 20th century. And when it was reversed, a lot of these countries became much wealthier, much faster, but like I said, it's hard to kill bad ideas, but now to get you your second thing about populism, because I think it's a fascinating topic about populism. Yes. I think there is such a thing as a national identity in the sense of certain ideas and attitudes and traits, and that can also include, you know, language and, um, cuisine and things like that.
Speaker 1 00:35:53 Now, one of the interesting things though, about the couple of interesting things about that is one is in a European context. And that's not a great article about this recently, recently in the context of Russia and Ukraine, cuz the person talked about the importance of national poets. So the national poet of Russia is Pushkin and the national poet of Ukraine is a guy who name I can't remember. Cause I, you know, it's hard to remember the names of poets and another language because you can't, you, it's hard to UN it's hard to appreciate poetry written in a language you don't know, but there's another guy whose name is not the tip of my tongue, who was the great national poet of Ukraine and helped to forge the Ukrainian language, you know, think of Shakespeare Chenko chef Chenko. Yes. Thank you. Um, so think of the, the equivalent of these guys in, in English would be Shakespeare, right?
Speaker 1 00:36:45 Shakespeare helped create and define modern English because everybody read his plays. Everybody read his sonnets. He had, you know, everybody used the language the way he, everybody in their education grew up trained learning to use the language the way he used it. And of course he's also tremendously inventive in his use of language and created so many phrases and figures of speech that, that are everywhere today. Uh, so you know, he, you have a national poet who sort of forges a national language and a national identity and, and helps create a unified national identity. But somebody was pointing out that how recent this is, uh, and how artificial it is in some ways that, you know, if you go back 300 years in some places, 400 years, 600 years, what you'd find is there was no one French national identity or even of one French language, there were a whole bunch of different dialects.
Speaker 1 00:37:40 And the nation itself was actually formed often very deliberately. You know, public education was embraced in some of these countries as a nationalizing influence the idea that everybody will learn the national poet and everybody will learn, you know, the, the, the, the national language, the way it's meant to be spoken. You know, that in, in France, they have the academy Franz that, you know, tries to ban importation of English words like low weekend. Um, they try to, you know, keep the language pure. And it's this part of this idea of this national identity that's sort of artificially created and perpetuated and opposed to some cases by people who wanted there to be a national, you know, wanted to, by these nationalist movements that happened, you know, up through the, up through the 19th and into the early 20th century. So to some extent, yes, there is a national identity.
Speaker 1 00:38:30 Sometimes that national identity is kind of artificially created and sometimes created with a lot of victims in the sense of local cultures and local dialects that were crushed or suppressed. Um, I was just a couple months, about a month and a half ago, I was in Barcelona. So, you know, in Catalonia, people are very, <laugh>, uh, very attuned to the idea of how a national identity is created by trying to suppress the, the local identity of sub region. But in America, there's something that you add on top of that, the French have this partly, but especially in America and the English have this as well, but especially in America, which is the national identity is not defined as much by things like language or cuisine. I mean, what's, what's American national cuisine. I think we have some good food, but you know, there, there's not like one American national cuisine people say, you know, should we go for Italian or, uh, or, or Thai food tonight?
Speaker 1 00:39:26 Right. We, we, we, our national cuisine is to borrow stuff from everybody else's national cuisine. Um, there is a, you know, the English is clearly the dominant language in America, but primarily our national identity is about ideas. It's about certain political ideas as sort of a national political creed and also certain attitudes towards life that, that, uh, come that sort of underlie that political creed. And so, you know, I think the person who really identified what's the American identity is Alexis to Oakville, right? In, in democracy in America. He talked about not just about the American political system, but about American attitudes and American ideas and how, how Americans approach, how they think about things. And, uh, basically it was a Lockian enlightenment influence, uh, you know, pro reason pro individualist, um, uh, and, and pro commerce. You know, the idea that he said was what, uh, what seems like, uh, greed and AEST to the European seems like praise worthy industry to the American.
Speaker 1 00:40:30 So we didn't look down on business and making a living and, and getting wealthy as suspicious. So this, all these aspects of our national character that were formed by certain basic ideas. So what that means of course, is that anyone who comes here can become American by, um, uh, by adopting and, and, uh, uh, adapting and, and assimilating with those basic ideas and attitudes. And it becomes noticeable. I saw a great article a while back about, um, uh, Asian Americans talking about how, you know, can you tell the difference between an Asian American and an Asian? So these are people, you know, going back to, uh, the countries that their, their, their, uh, grandparents or whatever came from going back to Taiwan, or going back to Hong Kong, or going back somewhere else and saying, people can tell I'm an Asian American, even though there's no physical difference in my appearance from them, right.
Speaker 1 00:41:25 They can tell, by the way, I walk, by the way I stand, by the way I talk by, uh, the, by the attitude that comes through, people can tell just by looking at you that you're an Asian American. So that's what I mean by that thing, that there are certain basic attitudes that you can absorb now, by the way, I'm, I'm gonna take and one last. So that's why I say that the national identity is not something that should be seen as so much a tradition that only certain people are capable of having it is a wide, wide creed that many people can adopt. Um, and by the way, I take particular exception to your people who live for 300 years in Virginia. I moved to Virginia about 25 years ago, 24 years ago. And I hu I like to think that I can be accepted as a real Virginian. I I've, I learned, I got far enough as so far as to learn how to, how to say y'all in, in casual conversation and not have anybody raise their eyebrows. So I'd like to think that I can become a real Virginian without having to have family. That's been here for 300 years, because by the way, I know people <laugh>, uh, have neighbors and people like that whose family has been here for as long as anybody can remember. And, uh, I'd like to think that they don't have monopoly on being a Virginia
Speaker 0 00:42:38 <laugh>. Um, one thing that brought up, uh, to me, I'm just thinking of the example of Egypt and CC, where you've got like a real politics situation where the strong man brought, brought stability versus this nationalistic group.
Speaker 1 00:42:57 Well, actually CC is a nationalist, um, but not
Speaker 0 00:43:01 Muslim
Speaker 1 00:43:02 Cancer. Yeah. Well, but they're not a nationalist group. They're religious fanatics. And that, yeah, they, they brought chaos because they're religious fanatics, although that's a form of populism itself. I mean, you know, populist, that's why I say populism is always, is a weird thing because everybody claims to be populist on behalf of their view of what their, because, you know, you say talking about national identities, often people have very Contently have different ideas of what the national identity is or different shades of the same national identity, right. So is slavery as a peculiar institution. Is that, uh, something that is, uh, perfectly American and should be accepted? Or is it anti-American, is it against the basic creed of the, uh, uh, in the declaration of independence that all men are created equal? Well, we had such a great division over that, um, uh, 150 years ago that we all went to war over it.
Speaker 1 00:43:57 Uh, so there's always something like that that divides you of like, well, what is our national identity? So in Egypt, what you have is you have one group that sort of Naar rights groups, you know, Naar was the, uh, the, the sort of the strong man dictator, the nationalist strong men dictator of, uh, of Egypt know, you know, in, in the mid middle of the 20th century and CC the general HUD go is in the new strong man in charge of, of Egypt is basically the descendant through various, through several other people. These, the descendant, you know, there was, there was Nasser, then there was, uh, um, was it, uh, Sadat? And then there was, uh, Mubarak I'm trying, right. Sadat Mubarak. And then now there's CC. So, you know, through that chain of, of succession, he is the successor, the new nationalist strong man.
Speaker 1 00:44:50 And he has to say to that, well, no secular nationalism and Arab nationalism and a more secular system, that's our national identity for Egypt. And the Muslim brothers said, no, our national identity is that we're Muslims, we're it, it's our for religious belief. And we should have a more religious government. So again, you have this idea of two competing. Populisms, you know, one, uh, uh, sort of the, the national, the Muslim brotherhood appealed more to the rural people, the people out on the farms who still have the unsophisticated version of the old faith, the old Muslim faith, whereas, uh, CC and the, the other national, uh, were more appealing to the urban middle class. And they were the ones who won out. Uh, whereas the urban middle class is more educated, less religious, more accepting of a, of a, of a secular national. So that's the problem with populism and nationalism is, you know, okay, populism in favor of national identity, but there's always gonna be shades of it and disagreements between that. And if you say, well, people who accept my version of the national identity are the real Americans. They embody the real national identity this country. Whereas those who don't embody that, or don't accept that are not real Americans, uh, then that's where you start to have a problem, right? Because you, you, you and you're cruising in the direction of these sort of irreconcilable conflict where declaring, uh, your fellow citizens to not be real citizens. And that's the problem with populism as I see it,
Speaker 0 00:46:17 But there is a left wing version of that that says if we're too SI normative, we have no place in their future.
Speaker 1 00:46:25 Oh, oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah. And now there's this more of, not of a populous, but there is more of a, their style is more, I would say, um, BOL Vic or, uh, Leninist, right? Cuz Lenon had the idea Solen had the extra twist that he added to it. And this is the Leninism and Marxism oneism Lennon had the idea. Well, look, you know, the, the people, you know, the, the old Marxist theory was that people will rise up and have a revolution. And the Russians kept looking around saying, well, the people aren't rising up, they're not having a revolution. What's the problem. And Lenn get state me so well, the problem is that this, you know, the people don't really know what they want. They don't know how to organize what they need is a bunch of coffee house, intellectual elites to, to organize together and create a revolutionary Vanguard.
Speaker 1 00:47:12 And they will propagandize and control things and make the revolution on behalf of the people. And that's sort of what that, that style of, of, of, uh, politics is in the DNA of the American left. Right? And it's this idea that what we, we will claim that we're actually for the people, but, you know, well, pretty openly we're gonna be actually acting on behalf of the, uh, the revolutionary Vanguard of people who are more progressive than the rest of the people who, who have, we're a step ahead, we're, we're heading into the future. And, you know, we're just waiting for the rest of you old Foggie to die off so that, you know, the young people can rise up and we can go into the unobstructed into this future where, you know, uh, things won't be CI normative anymore or whatever the, the latest fad is.
Speaker 0 00:48:02 Yeah. That, uh, that definitely exists. Uh, and again, Patrick,
Speaker 1 00:48:07 The Patrick has something to say,
Speaker 0 00:48:09 I think he's on the phone. Is
Speaker 1 00:48:11 That, oh, okay. You didn't know what that symbol was.
Speaker 0 00:48:14 Um, Lawrence, I, I was gonna go ahead.
Speaker 2 00:48:18 Uh, yeah, just sort of a follow up question sort of in regards to Europe, that I was curious to hear your opinion on Rob. So it seems like when I came to the street Lanka, there was, uh, much larger, perhaps just, it had more impact in terms of an actual, uh, the citizenry uprising. And that historically really doesn't seem to be a thing that happens, I guess, from my perspective, looking that doesn't seem to really be a big thing in Europe. I mean, I know France had the yellow vest protests mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, couple years. And that seems to be, I think the most ramped up thing in recent note, but usually I don't and I might be wrong, but it usually doesn't seem like Europeans are ones prone for, uh, violent revolution.
Speaker 1 00:49:05 Well, on the, by the same token either are Americans. I mean, we've, we had a civil war, but that's a hundred right. Little over 150 years ago. Part of it is that these are countries that have, you know, Sri Lanka has only been a country since I think around, I think it was 1949. Same time India got its independence. So it's only been a country for like 70 years. Uh, and, uh, also you have, so you have countries with less well developed, uh, less, uh, mature political, uh, organizations, political systems, and also countries that are much poorer and, uh, less technologically advanced. And I think that makes a big, a big difference because with something hits the farmers in the Netherlands, right? It hits it, it has an impact on the average per average person, but not that big of impact because how very few, very small percentage of population is either a farmer or dependence on farming.
Speaker 1 00:50:03 You know, the <inaudible> is, it's a very advanced, it's a very industrial economy, uh, same, you know, to a certain extent within in America. Um, so I think, you know, in, in, uh, in Sri Lanka where you have an agricultural crisis, a very large percentage of the population is dependent directly or indirectly on agriculture. So it would be much more equivalent to, and, you know, the, the downturn in Sri Lanka, it's much more equivalent to something like the great depression, uh, in, in America, in Europe. And, you know, last time we had something that size, what happened in America, in Europe, right? We had, uh, strong man politics. We had violence, political violence in America. They had much, much worse in, uh, uh, in reaction to the depression in, in Germany and, and, and Italy and places like that. So, you know, it ha it it's the part of it is just that the magnitude of the economic crisis in Sri Lanka and the amount of impact it had, and the fact that they were poorer to begin with, it had less reserves, less ability to absorb a crisis like this, that, that leads to that sort of level of, uh, popular uprising.
Speaker 1 00:51:10 I, I, I think that, you know, we do have more mature political systems. We're healthier and politically in some ways, but I think that if we had a downturn of equivalent size here, which we haven't had since the great depression, uh, you know, who knows what, who knows what would be unleashed
Speaker 0 00:51:30 I'm, uh, you know, there were stories about Justin Trudeau still pushing ahead with climate change stuff, that's gonna dramatically reduce Canada's fertilizer. And, you know, the same thing happening in the Netherlands, I mean, is, it's like, they're, they're just so driven by this religious agenda. It's like, it'll work if you want it to work. And I think they believe that on a certain level when they were telling Sri Lanka that
Speaker 1 00:51:58 Yeah. Yeah. And, and, uh, you know, but it's, it's the religious, the most religious part about it is that a apocalyptic aspect of it is this idea that if we don't do this, we're all gonna die. The earth is gonna, you know, the earth will burn <laugh>, uh, Cox back, back in the day when Coxin fork, some people still remember, uh, Coxin for, uh, John Coxon, Allen foram did, uh, editorial cartoons. Um, I sort of got them, started out them. They did 'em online. Yeah. And they did one of the first ones they did was Al gore as a, a fire and brimstone pre from preacher telling you to do, you know, recycle, reduce, reuse from site. I think it was reduced reuse and recycle less G burn <laugh>. And, uh, uh, it, it, it's very much that apocalyptic style of rhetoric that I think that's what gives it as real sort of quasi-religious character is this sense of there's an apocalypse that's going to happen.
Speaker 1 00:52:53 Uh, if you don't go along with this agenda and yeah. People, they will, they will not listen <laugh> to, to practicality or scientific arguments, or you, you can be the world's greatest expert on nuclear power or, uh, uh, or organic, uh, or, or, or agriculture, or, uh, you know, you could point out all the problems with, with wind power and solar power and all the, the, the inadequacies, and they just will not listen to you because to them, it has raised to, to this sort of cosmic, theological level of, you know, repent of your sins, less you burn
Speaker 0 00:53:30 Well along those lines, uh, Sri Lanka's asking for urgent help to feed children. Uh, do you think, uh, Schwab in the world, uh, economic forum should be, uh, <affirmative>
Speaker 1 00:53:44 Well, I, I, you know, I think they should, they should definitely be doing it. If they, you know, out just out of a guilty conscience, they should definitely be doing it. But I think, you know, aside from the immediate help, that is going to be needed for a place like that is, is the ideological reversal. I mean, you know, Germany is augering a big advanced industrial economy. They're arguing themselves into the same hole on the issue of energy that they've made themselves. You know, they, they still won't restart the nuclear power plants. They're shutting down nuclear power plants having made themselves totally dependent for, for NA on Russian natural gas, which is turning out to be a complete disaster to be dependent on Russian natural gas, but they won't listen to it because it has this theological element to it. Uh, I mean, for the, and I think essentially for the, the green party in, uh, which is very strong and powerful and in German politics, the green party was basically built not around global warming.
Speaker 1 00:54:39 They came along before global warming became the big issue. They were founded essentially to shut down nuclear power. And so they can't say, oh, well, you know, it makes more sense instead of going to natural gas, let's, you know, reduce our use of, uh, fossil fuels by going to nuclear power. They can't do that because it's like in their founding, uh, it's their founding DNA. And that's like a thing I keep returning to when I talk about politics is you have to realize the long after effect that bad ideas have that when bad, you know, a certain idea gets drummed into people's heads even long after it's refuted long after it makes no sense whatsoever long after it ought to have been abandoned, people will keep clinging to it because, you know, the, I think the, the source of 90% of our problem is the refusal to be able to alter your basic ideas in the, in the light of evidence.
Speaker 1 00:55:32 That sort of lack of mental flexibility, which I think is, you know, we keep talking about religion. I think that is the, the fundamental sort of inheritance we got from religion is this idea of the importance of faith, the importance of belief, and of clicking to belief and shoving away doubt and doubt is evil. And it, it, it's one thing that it causes people to take bad ideas that have already been repeatedly demonstrated to me bad and clinging to them against all evidence, because that sort of underlying, underlying religious epistemology of, I must believe and have faith and push away all doubt. That's still there operating in their, in their minds.
Speaker 0 00:56:13 That's fascinating. Uh, just about how, uh, kind of dogmatic certainty, um, you know, can just lead it, it, it harms basic objectivity, which is what there's such a dearth of today. I, I was also, um, going to mention, there were, uh, similar attempts to impose a green economy on Spain at 10 years ago in the other pigs countries. I mean, this has been tried.
Speaker 1 00:56:46 Oh yeah. It it's, it's like, it's, it's sort of like, you know, the, uh, they used to talk about the experiment. Communism is a great experiment and of course, you know, <laugh>, they tried to give it a scientific gloss by saying it's an experiment, but of course, you know, if you were a scientist and you conducted an experiment repeatedly <laugh> and it, it failed repeatedly, you would, you would actually draw a conclusion from that and say, well, that's the dead end. We should stop doing that. Uh, you know, communism became the experiment that would never die. The experiment could never be allowed to fail. There always had to be some excuse. Well, it didn't work this time because of this. And it didn't work time this time because of that. And of course, they tried it in every possible variation. They had, you know, uh, Indian communism and Chinese communism and Russian communism.
Speaker 1 00:57:31 And, uh, uh, uh, you tried in every, in every continent with every kind of different political system, uh, with, with every kind of different local cultural conditions, you tried it agrarian communism and industrial communism, and it just failed miserably every single time. But like I said, it's, it's the, it, it took on that aura of being a political faith where belief in the ideal was so important. And we just saw this a couple years ago, um, in 2017, uh, the New York times celebrated and celebrated the right word. They celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the, of the Russian revolution, both a series of essays on communism. And they all were emphasizing how idealistic the communists were and how wonderful it was that they had these high ideals and, you know, hardly any of them talking about, well, you know, this high, ideal kill a hundred billion people. So it's, again, the same thing of like, wanting to believe and wanting to have wanting to have faith in the ideal and not wanting to adjust that in the, in the light of any kind of evidence,
Speaker 0 00:58:38 Excellent stuff.
Speaker 1 00:58:38 So, so another, the conclusion of which is we should expect a lot more experiments like Sri Lanka and a lot more failures, like Sri Lanka before, before we even begin to move on from this,
Speaker 0 00:58:49 If they aren't pushing even harder, uh, for their agenda and say, we just, we need to double down. Um, well, this has been great stuff. Uh, I wanna thank you for, uh, doing this topic. Um, we, uh, have lots more happening at the Atlas society this week tomorrow at 5:00 PM Eastern, the Atlas society asks we'll have our CEO, Jennifer Grossman interviewing Jeremy Adams on the threat to the institutions of Western civilization. Uh, Thursday back here on clubhouse at 4:00 PM Eastern, we'll be with, uh, TAs, senior scholar, Richard Salzman for an ask me anything. Uh, I really enjoy those because, uh, you know, you never know what is going to come up. Um, so also why L's revolution 22 as an Orlando this weekend. Um, Jennifer Grossman will be there, Richard Salzman on the morality of capitalism. So we look forward to those and everyone who participated today. Thank you. And we'll see this week. Thanks a lot.
