Episode #046 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Alright, so this is part two of what might eventually go down in the annals of history as a series of episodes on how to build a society from scratch. Now, I was thinking about all the stuff that we have coming up in future episodes. I’m excited about it. And I really do think that this is what we’re doing. We’re building a society from scratch. My wife and I own a cupcake shop in Tacoma. Tacoma’s a city in the state of Washington. Anyway, the point of this is that when you talk to my wife about how she comes up with new seasonal, gourmet cupcake flavors or what goes into all of the classic cupcakes that she makes, she doesn’t think about it in terms of a recipe. I mean, there’s a recipe now for the sake of consistency, but before there was ever a recipe for any one cupcake, there was an elaborate test-baking phase where she made tiny adjustments. She made one batch of cupcakes; she dialed back this ingredient, added some sugar, twisted a knob a little bit here. She understands the function of each ingredient in every cupcake that she makes. It’s incredible.

Like, for any of you guys that don’t know, the process of baking something is actually a really delicate science. It’s something I had to find out the hard way. All throughout my life, baking was simple. It was just, get a red box out of the cabinet. Put it in a bowl. Add water. Mix it up. Put this brown paste mixture into the oven. Come back in 20 minutes, and congratulations, you just baked something. But for my wife, she is just on another level. She’s like a mad scientist. That’s actually unfair to say. Like, what do you even do if you’re a mad scientist? You make weird beakers full of multicolored liquid that’s smoking. Nobody wants that. My wife makes cupcakes, cupcakes that—I contemplate obesity on a daily basis over these cupcakes. It’s incredible.

And you talk to her about it, and she understands everything. Like, if we think of a cupcake as just a delicious chemistry experiment, she talks about things like how the eggs interact with the baking powder on this one flavor of cupcake. She talks about how and when to add certain ingredients, like, where in the oven the cupcakes need to cook so that they get the right dosage of heat at the right time. It’s out of control, out of control! Anyway, the point of we wasting the last 60 seconds of your life with this long-winded example is to illustrate the value of building a government from scratch.

We’re all born into a world where, when it comes to government, there is a very clear recipe book that we could follow, right? But by forcing ourselves to pretend as though we’re stranded on an island, building one of these recipes from scratch—by pretending that there isn’t a recipe book available to us at birth, we not only have the opportunity of arriving at a customized, personalized batch that we think is great, but by thinking about it in these fundamental terms, we can better understand the role of each ingredient in these government recipes that we’re looking at today and during the episodes in the future. We’re trying to become more like my wife making cupcakes and less like me making cupcakes. And if that’s not enough of an incentive for you, you guys have never seen me make cupcakes before.

So, real quick, last episode we all got aboard the Philosophize This! cruise ship. Our ship crashed into the side of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And before we knew it, we were hopelessly stranded on a desert island and forced to establish some ground rules. Now, when we crash land on that island with no hope of rescue on the horizon, there isn’t a government in place. There’s no police force or fire department or court system. Life on that desert island during that interim between when our ship sunk and when we come to some sort of arrangement is like the Wild West, for all intents and purposes. It’s a situation that political philosophers often call the state of nature, the state that things were in before humans made any of these arrangements to have a government—pre-civilization.

Last episode, we spent a lot of time talking about the giant differences between how these political philosophers thought this state of nature played out, most notably the differences between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes thought the state of nature was a terrible state of constant war, everybody at war against everybody else. And Rousseau didn’t agree. In fact, this is one of his biggest critiques of every political philosopher that came before him, that they’re dishonestly projecting their own biased, post-civilization views of what humans are onto these pre-civilization humans who are in their more natural state and live nothing like what Thomas Hobbes said they did.

Well, I guess it’s good to ask right now, what do you think the state of nature looked like? Did it look like the picture that Hobbes painted? Did it look like what Rousseau was talking about? Is that even a dichotomy? I mean, is that even a real spectrum? Regardless of where you fall between Hobbes and Rousseau, you have to appreciate what Rousseau’s doing here. He’s questioning assumptions. He’s questioning a fundamental assumption that we make about human nature. Are humans inherently violent, selfish, brutish, whatever adjective you want to use to describe them? Are they? This is a really interesting place to pause and think about human nature and just how brilliant this critique by Rousseau is.

The state of nature that Hobbes talks about is a very common way that people think about humans in modern times. We’ve all heard people say it in today’s world. You know, “Look at human history. What is it? It’s just one war after another. It is human nature to be uncaring and selfish and just to conquer land at the expense of everybody around you. That’s what being a human is.” Well, is it really fair to label that as human nature? Is it really fair to just brand that into the side of what it is to be a human? After all, when we look back at that human history that you’re referencing and we see all this obviously terrible stuff, what are we really looking at there? We’re looking at the decisions that were made by a very small handful of ambitious men making decisions at the top of civilizations during their respective time periods.

Now, bear with me for a second. It’s very easy for me to start sounding like a white knight at this point in the conversation. People think that I’m bashing men and exalting women. That’s not what I’m doing at all. I just think it’s a really interesting thought experiment. How would human history look different if instead of men being at the helm of all of these societies if instead women were in charge, if we were a matriarchal species? Would there be as much war throughout human history? Would there be as much opportunistic exploitation of people? I’m not even saying that there wouldn’t be.

And look, you can replace women with any other subdivision of human beings that you want to. The point is, why is it fair to conflate the decisions of a few hundred ambitious rulers from history with human nature itself? I mean, if we’re talking about what it means to be human, women are 50% of whatever that thing is. So, when we think about what the nature of a human is, when we think about how we expect humans to act in the state of nature, we need to be very careful of not doing what Rousseau thought other political philosophers were guilty of—painting human nature with too broad of a brush.

Nonetheless, when our cruise ship crashes and we’re all stranded on this island, this conversation that we’re having doesn’t really matter that much, because in the eyes of Rousseau, everybody listening to this has already been corrupted by society since birth. Nothing changes about the fact that we can all imagine a world where it might be beneficial to make some sort of agreement where a third party ensures certain things for us as citizens on this island. And Rousseau thinks that no matter how hard we all contemplate this, no matter how long we deliberate about what this government is going to look like, what kind of government we’re going to have, ultimately, it’s going to be one of three types. And keep in mind, Rousseau isn’t saying here that every government that’s ever been created throughout history neatly falls into one of these three categories. There’s tons of obvious examples that don’t—governments that fall in between these three categories, governments that are a combination of two out of the three. But to Rousseau, every government is ultimately derived from either a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy.

Let me just explain what he means by all three of these. When most of or all of the citizens of a society are what he calls magistrates, the government is a democracy. When half the citizens or less are magistrates, the government is an aristocracy. When there’s only one supreme magistrate, that government is called a monarchy. So, he’s making a distinction here very similar to Aristotle before him—he obviously read his Aristotle—that the three ways we should think about how government is structured is government by the many, or a democracy, government by the few, an aristocracy, and government by the one, monarchy.

So, right here, it’s important to note, Rousseau doesn’t think that there’s one end-all-be-all correct answer for what the best form of government is. But he does think that certain types of government lend themselves to certain situations. He gives several ground rules here. Generally, he thinks that the more people you’re dealing with, the fewer number of people should be making all the decisions for them. So, to put it simply, very broadly here, he thinks that large societies are best off with a monarchy. Medium-size states are best off with an aristocracy. And smalls states are best off with a pure democracy. We gave the example last time of the hunter-gatherer tribe. When there’s only 50 people that you’re making decisions for, it’s possible for everybody to vote on every single issue. It’s also a much more simple society.

But just because Rousseau thinks that certain types of government lend themselves to certain types of societies, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a favorite form of government. And it definitely doesn’t mean that when he’s looking at these different options for how a government should be structured that he doesn’t see glaring problems with the ways that certain ones are designed. Case in point, democracy.

For us on the island, now that we’ve decided that we need a system of government, now that we’ve decided that having a government would be beneficial to us, our next task is to do what? Well, we got to know what it’s going to look like. What if we chose to have a democracy? What are the problems with that? What are the pros and cons of having a democracy? If we all went up to wise-man Rousseau and we asked him, “Hey, on our island over here, we’re thinking about making a democracy. What do you say about that?” what sort of advice would he give us? What would he warn us about?

Well, to put it short, Rousseau doesn’t like democracy that much. He thinks it’s one of these things that sounds really great in theory, but whenever it’s put into practice, things never really go that well. And look, let’s all keep in mind before you start sending in the angry emails, Rousseau’s not talking about democracy as most of us think of it today. He’s not talking about a system where we elect people who sit on a panel and make decisions for us. He’s talking about the system of the hunter-gatherer tribe where the citizens themselves are the people that are sitting on the panel making the decisions—most of if not all of them.

He says, “There has never been a true democracy, and there never will be.” And he gives a few reasons for saying this. One big issue that he has is that simply by structuring society in this way—a democracy—you are instantly fighting an uphill battle from the very start. He says that governments by nature always tend to deviate towards having less people in charge than more people in charge. He says that if we lived in a world where no one was ambitious, no one was greedy, no one was power-hungry, there’d be nothing to worry about. Democracy would be great. But as the world exists now, eventually that power that was originally spread across all the citizens will become funneled down into a smaller group of people and then a smaller group of people until eventually the democracy is either a complete sham or it ceases to exist all together.

This is why he thinks it’s suited to smaller populations. It’s not that Rousseau thinks democracy can’t be implemented literally. It’s just a very volatile system of government once it’s in place. Not to mention the fact—another big problem with a democracy to Rousseau is the fact that it doesn’t do a very good job at accomplishing what he thinks is one of the most important goals that a government should have: to maximize and ensure the freedom of the citizens.

Rousseau would say, look, sure, it sounds great that every citizen is going to be part of the decision-making process. No one is ever going to feel like they’re not included. Everybody gets a say! But just think of what that means for you. Is that really what you want? Do you really want to be a full-time politician or a full-time congressman on top of having a full-time job and a family and hobbies and friends and all the things that come with being a good citizen of the government? Think about it on the island.

Do you really want to go out in the blistering sun all day collecting coconuts and firewood and trying to conjure up enough food to survive for the day? And then you come back to your makeshift shack in the clearing, this hovel that you’ve constructed for yourself. You set down your work tools; you do an about-face. You march on down to where we congregate every single day to make the decisions in the world, and you put on your politician hat—eight more hours of work every single day. Is that really what you want? Now, the only reason I’m framing it this way is because Rousseau thinks—and we can understand where he’s coming from here—that if part of the reason we have this government to begin with is that we want some sort of freedom insurance, this design of government when it’s all said and done doesn’t leave us with much freedom to work with. We have to spend most of our time maintaining it.

Now, on the other side of the spectrum is a monarchy. And it probably won’t come as a surprise to you people that Rousseau didn’t like the idea of a monarchy very much either. Just like a democracy, it’s very similar to how he describes a democracy. It’s not that it could never work; it’s not that we can’t sit around and imagine a potential world existing where a monarchy would be great for a period of time. On the contrary, on the surface it may be the greatest form of government. I mean, think about it. Hey, one really smart, altruistic person making all the decisions for us! Talk about a level of efficiency that we’d never see in modern times. Like, there’s never going to be any sort of bipartisan gridlock; executive power is just going to run smoothly and quickly. Things will always get done in a monarchy.

But again, Rousseau thinks, it’s one of those things that sounds really great in theory, but when put into practice, there’s always problems that rear their ugly heads. Again, if there weren’t any ambitious, greedy, or power-hungry people in the world, this system of government might be perfect. But as long as you have an inordinate amount of power in the hands of one person, as long as what the government sees as best is restricted to what one single person sees as best, you’re setting yourself up for failure, not only because of the obvious, by the way. It’s not only because that one person might end up being a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot, but also because it’s just not the best way to make decisions. Their decision-making is always going to be limited to one set of experiences, right?

One guy can’t be an expert on every single subject out there. Yet he’s making decisions in every single field? Come on. You can be an expert on one subject in your life if you really work hard, maybe two subjects if you’re really smart. But have you ever run across somebody who always has the answer to every question that you ever ask them? They’re probably pretending and in desperate need of therapy, by the way. Refer them to a local mental health practitioner immediately. The idea that a monarchy isn’t the way to go about things probably isn’t going to take much convincing of you during our time period. You’ve seen the evils of a monarchy firsthand. But it was a much tougher sell in the time of Rousseau.

I just want to run through a couple of these reasons for the sake of being comprehensive in this episode. Rousseau thinks that one of the other problems that presents itself when you have one guy at the top making all the decisions is that one guy can’t do all of the jobs. So, what eventually needs to happen is he needs to appoint people to do these jobs for him. He appoints princes and officials and people to oversee all the various aspects of a kingdom. But the problem with that is he’s appointing all those people with that same limited set of experiences. How can he possibly know who’s best for the job? Not to mention, Rousseau talks about, that usually he’s appointing people that promote his agenda. He’s not even thinking about the person that’s the most qualified for the job. And that’s not the best recipe for a successful government.

Now, I’m sure all of us at some point in our life have had some dead-end job with terrible management, and that management has given a promotion to somebody that’s not necessarily the most qualified person but the person that goes along with whatever their plan is, the person that doesn’t really question them that much. Well, what happens in that case? The company starts running less efficiently. People start resenting these appointed officials. And whatever the function of that business is, it starts doing it much worse than it did before. These are the kind of problems Rousseau thought were inevitable for a monarchy.

And to extend this example, he also thought that because of this ruler dynamic—you know, one guy in charge at the top, one vision—a monarchy is never going to have a clear vision or goal for any significant length of time. The reason why is because if the vision or goal of a society is restricted to the will of one person with a crown on his head, what happens when that guy dies? What happens when he gets overthrown or he stubs his toe and he can’t be the ruler anymore? When that new monarch takes the throne, he’s going to have a completely different agenda than the last guy. And then think of all the wasted effort. Think of it, like, the last 50 years you’ve been working towards one guy’s goal; he falls off the side of a mountain, and then all that work’s wasted. It’s a mess, alright?

And we can all easily imagine these things going wrong on our island. We’re probably not using a monarchy on our island. I’m going to go out of a limb and say that. We’re probably not electing some supreme leader to deal with everything for us. And I think Rousseau does a really good job in helping us imagine what might go wrong in that case.

So, for all these reasons and much more, by the way, this is why Rousseau’s favorite form of government would be an aristocracy, a government by the few. Now, don’t confuse this with the way that we might typically use the word “aristocracy” in modern times. You know, it might refer to a handful of rich people running the show, a handful of culturally elite people running the show. No. Rousseau would have been using the word “aristocracy” in the same way that the Greeks used it where it literally translates to “rule of the best,” or rule by a handful of people who are the best to rule.

Now, there are three types of aristocracies to Rousseau: natural aristocracy, which he paints as a sort of primitive form of government where the leaders of factions rule people or a council of elders rule over people; a hereditary aristocracy, which in his opinion is the worst type of aristocracy because the rulers consist only of the offspring of any one given family—like, not much explanation needed there. What do you think’s going to happen? There’s absolutely zero merit involved at all when choosing your rulers.

Like, just imagine going in for an operation somewhere. Like, imagine going in and getting an organ transplant. And the surgeon comes up to you, and he says, “Hey, nice to meet you. I’m the surgeon, but I actually just retired today. Don’t worry. You’re still going to get your surgery. My son’s going to do it. Yeah, he never went to medical school. Yeah, he’s got the club foot. His hands are a little shaky, and his eyes don’t really work that well. But you know what? I was a great surgeon. He’s got to be great too!” No, obviously not.

The best kind of aristocracy is the third kind, an elective aristocracy—the government by the few where those few are elected by the citizens. To Jean-Jacques Rousseau, there is way too much of an upside here to ignore. Think about it. All the weaknesses of a democracy and a monarchy are taken into account. The population can still all collectively agree upon stuff—things like laws, things like a vision that doesn’t change just because some monarch falls off the side of a cliff. They can still elect a group of people to rule for them instead of forcing them to spend all their time being a politician. And the best part of all, all the terrible people in the world—all the ambitious, greedy, power-hungry people in the world—they aren’t going to last very long in government because people will see who they are, and they’ll boot them out of office. It’s a perfect system!

Well, it’s far from perfect. Even that system of government relies on a lot of things that are far from guarantees, not the least of which is that it relies on a properly educated populous. This is a tremendous obstacle, one that we’re going to keep talking about. But it’s really an obstacle for any system of government. So, let’s talk about it now. Like, let’s say that we have an elective aristocracy on our island, and I’m elected to oversee some sort of elaborate coconut production that we have going on. What if I’m going behind everybody’s back? What if I’m secretly making backroom deals with other people on the island where we take, you know, one out of every ten coconuts and we horde it in a cave as our own personal stash, just in case if we can’t find any more food or in case if I want to use those coconuts to bribe people and increase my level of power on the island.

The point is, I’m just as ambitious or greedy or power-hungry as somebody in another form of government. I’m just more covert about it. Yeah, theoretically there’s a system in place for citizens to kick me out of office if they ever find out about this stuff. But what’s forcing them to investigate me? The fact is, if I’m really good at hiding my corruption and greed, there’s never going to be a threat to my position. There’s never going to be a majority of people that oppose me. There’s never going to be enough people that know the truth about me to rally together and kick me out of office. I said the same thing three different ways there. That’s my talent.

Oh, yeah, not to mention, if aristocracy directly translates to “rule of the best,” that’s kind of presumptuous, don’t you think? I mean, how do we really know that we’re getting the best people for the job in office? The person that we elect as the best person really is just a representation of who the population thinks is the best at the time of the election, which is fine, but it’s certainly not foolproof. We’ve all seen someone elected to office at some level of government that we think is incompetent or corrupt or doing it for the wrong reasons. And the reason that’s possible is because even though we have the ability to elect the best people for the job, every decision—every decision about who we think is the best for the job is ultimately based only on the information that’s made available to the population at large. And it’s contingent on the fact that the people voting are truly working hard to educate themselves about things.

Think about it. Even on a deserted island, you need to filter information. You need to try to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the information that you’re getting about the people that you’re electing to govern. There’s going to be gossip. There’s going to be biases. There’s going to be misinformation, conjecture, jealousy; people’s agendas are in play. If you’re thinking about voting for me to be in charge of the coconut production, one person says I’m trustworthy; another says I’m the devil incarnate. They say I’m a secret member of the KGB that infiltrated this deserted island. Who do you trust in that case? How can you possibly know who to trust?

The point of this is, let’s think about the challenges we face when choosing this elective aristocracy as our form of government on our island. This task is difficult enough on a small island with just a few thousand people. And now consider it in the context of our modern world. Consider what we go through every single election cycle. Think of how much access to information we all have. For any political issue that you could possibly think of—no matter how confident you are, no matter how many statistics you can point to, no matter how much history reinforces what you think the correct decision is—in today’s day and age, you face a very unique challenge, one that every human before you really didn’t have to face.

You can go on Google right now and find hundreds and hundreds of people that are just as confident as you are while arguing the other side of the issue. They point to different statistics than you do and different moments in history to strengthen their point. My statistics dad can beat up your statistics dad. Does that even make sense? Anyway, look, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I’m not saying that just because somebody disagrees with you that makes their position valid. That’s obviously ridiculous. Not all positions are equally valid. But what this access to information does do is cloud the waters. It makes it a lot more difficult or at least a lot more time consuming to know what the truth is.

So, what people end up doing as a defense mechanism—and on one hand, you can’t really blame them for it—is they deem one source to be authoritative or a handful of sources as authoritative sources, and then they trust them. Fox News, MSNBC—these are very large-scale examples of what I’m talking about here. They both have a very clear agenda that they’re peddling that isn’t based on truth. It’s not really based on reality on reality’s terms. But let’s say that you make the case that you’ve done it. You’ve found the holy grail of political news sources. You’ve found a collection of sources that give you a completely unbiased account of everything in politics. They are still giving you a completely unbiased account, a fair and balanced account, of only one small piece of the truth, a facsimile of the truth. The reason why is because no one source can possibly know everything there is to know about a single issue.

And look, this is not only because they’re human beings, ultimately, and they have a finite set of experiences and flawed senses. That is true, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m also talking about things that really aren’t their fault at all. The information that they’re giving you could be completely unbiased, but it could be extremely limited because certain pieces of information are just not made available to the public.

You know, just an example of what I’m talking about—let’s say that there’s some new geopolitical crisis afoot, and the United States is talking about taking military action, you know, boots on the ground. I know, this is going to take a lot of imagination here. Let’s also say in this alternate world that there is a presidential election coming right up. Let’s say that the person that wins this presidential election is going to be making the decisions of what direction we head into when it comes to this geopolitical crisis. And you, being a good citizen, you want to educate yourself on this issue and make sure that you’re choosing the right guy with the right plan at the right time for this crisis our nation is going to have to face.

Well, even if you spend every second of your life educating yourself on this crisis, even if your TV screen was a constant loop of Bill O’Reilly, Rachel Maddow, Al Jazeera—even if you went online and you read dozens and dozens of blogs and articles and opinion pieces and you consumed every pixel of content available on this issue, you would be the most educated guy in your office. You would be the most educated guy in your city. But you would still only have a solid idea of the information that’s made available to the public.

You know, we talk about the veil of perception in philosophy. This is the veil of classification. You can’t know about information that is classified—all of the intel, all the stuff that they see on satellites, the decades of history of what is actually said behind the scenes when we’ve made these treaties and agreements and everything. You can’t possibly know any of this stuff, yet you are legitimately the most qualified person to be voting on this issue. And by the way, everybody around you watched a 30-minute special on Bill O’Reilly last night, and they feel super confident that they know who the right guy for the job is and exactly the plan that needs to be put in place.

Now, this may seem like a tangent, but it all comes back full circle. When we’re choosing the system of government for our island, Rousseau would warn us about all of the potential downfalls—the potential downfalls of a democracy, of a monarchy. But even his favorite form of government, the elective aristocracy, is riddled with problems that we need to consider. One of the most glaring of those problems is this problem of educating the populous. How do we do it? If we allow the average citizen to vote and elect members of this aristocracy, we better sure hope that a world exists where these citizens at least have access to education. And the other side of that, as we just pointed out, is that even if we give those citizens education, that’s far from where the problems stop.

It starts to raise the question of whether the average citizen going around in the world is the right person to make the decision about who’s going to be making decisions on behalf of them. Interesting to think about. Look, I always say that voting for president in today’s world is like choosing your wife by looking at two online dating profiles that were written by their mothers. The online dating profiles represent the only information we have to work with, you know, things like articles or news reports. And the mothers that obviously have a bias in one direction are people like Fox News and MSNBC, the people that write the articles.

The point is, when it comes to the structure of government, we are by no means at any sort of evolutionary end point here. But the fact remains, we still need to choose a system of government for our island. And in keeping with Rousseau, let’s move ahead with caution. Let’s make our island government an elective aristocracy, and let’s keep in mind the strengths and weaknesses as we go. Because as we continue to add layers to our new society, as it becomes increasingly complex and diverse, us understanding the function of each ingredient in this cupcake recipe is going to make a big difference.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.