Vejas Liulevicius: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s step back to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and let’s steel man the case for communism. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the people there, not in this way where we could look back at what happened in the 20th century. Why was this such a compelling notion for millions of people? Can we make the case for it? Well, clearly it was a compelling case for millions of people, and part of this story overall has to do with the faith, conviction, stories of people sacrificing themselves as well as their countrymen in a cause that they believed was not just legitimate, but demanded their total obedience. I think that throughout the early part of the 20th century, the late 19th century, early part of the 20th century, so much of the compelling case for communism came from the confidence that people in the West more generally placed in science, the notion that science is answering problems. Science is giving us solutions to how the world around us works, how the world around us can be improved. Some varieties of that, and watch the quotation marks, “science” were crazy, like phrenology, so-called scientific racism that tried to divide humanity up into discreet blocks and to manipulate them in ways that were allegedly scientific or rational. So there were horrors that followed from those invocations of science, but its prestige was enormous, and that in part had to do with the lessening grip of religious ideas on intellectual elites, more generally, processes of secularization, not total secularization but processes of secularization in Western industrial societies, and the sense that here’s the doctrine that will allow escape from wars brought on by capitalist competition, poverty and economic cycles and depressions brought on by capitalist competition, the inequalities of societies that remain hierarchical and class-based. And this claim to being cutting edge science, I think allows people like Lenin to derive immense confidence in the prescription that they have for the future. And that paradoxically, the confidence that you have in broad strokes the right set of answers for how to get to the future also allows you to take huge liberties with the tactics and the strategies that you follow, as long as your ultimate goal remains the one sketched by this master plan. So ultimately, some of the predictions of someone like Lenin, that once society has reached that stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the notion that governments will essentially be able to run themselves, and that the model he had in mind, oddly enough, was Swiss post offices. Being in Swiss exile must have impressed him so much with the orderliness and the sheer discipline and rationality of a Swiss post office, and he thought, “Why can’t you organize governments like this where you don’t need political leaders, you don’t need grand visions? You have procedures, you have bureaucracy, which does its job in a way that’s not alienating, but simply produces the greatest good.” re you don’t need political leaders, you don’t need grand visions? You have procedures, you have bureaucracy, which does its job in a way that’s not alienating, but simply produces the greatest good.” When you think of the experiences with bureaucracy in the 20th century, one’s hair stands on end to have the comparative naiveté on display with a prediction like that, but it derives from that confidence that it’s all going to be okay because we understand. We have the key, we have the plan to how to arrive at this final configuration of humanity.…

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