Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…The only thing that makes resistance weak in the US is when people feel as if partial victory is failure. Remembering moments like how Florence’s resistance all the way to the end meant that there was more liberty for the next several centuries, even under the tyrant, is what we need to remind ourselves, that partial victory is an important thing. Even if the worst were to happen and there were to be tyranny, that tyranny would be so much weaker because there was a lot of resistance, and traditions of resistance and structures would develop that would continue to exist. I think you should discuss the fact that the Medici are the bankers for the papacy. What does that mean? Why is that necessary? How are they able to make money off of that from the interest on the float? When Cosimo de’ Medici swings the contract as banker for the pope, it’s important to remember that when you can’t wire transfer money in the pre-modern world, collecting taxes is a very difficult and complicated system. It is generally done by the centralizing power that has the right to tax delegating somebody local. If you’re in a town, there’ll be a local tax collector. It’s his job to go around to everybody and collect taxes, send a portion of those taxes home to the central power, and keep a remainder to pay himself. The central power will say, “We expect X amount of taxes from this area.” When you hear about wicked tax collectors, it’s because if you are told, “We want 10,000 florins worth of tax from this town,” but you extract 15,000, you can keep the other 5,000. The 10,000 is what you need to send to the central power, so the more you extract, the more you get paid. This delegate system, in which there’s a local tax collector and even a more local tax collector below him who might collect tax from a particular village, means that you depend a lot upon the person whose job it is to collect your taxes. When Cosimo is papal banker, he is the person collecting and channeling the money from every church in Christendom when everybody puts a coin into a collection box or pilgrims come and put money. All of the wealth that’s supposed to flow back to the papacy is actually flowing to Cosimo. Cosimo is passing it on to the papacy after taking a cut. That is a lot of money moving quickly. There is also a lot of ability to make contracts and contacts. We all know how important networking is. He rises in prominence from a banker to somebody who has enough money to effectively take over his state via manipulating the guys-out-of-a-bag system. To discuss that again briefly, if you have a system where you lottery people, sortition is the technical term for it. This is a very old form of government. Ancient Athens used it. It actually works really well. But like any institution, it is corruptible. In the same way that you can corrupt voting by bribing people or manipulating the machines or manipulating voters, you can also corrupt sortition by bribing the people who pull names out of the bag. Or you can use the simpler mechanism which Cosimo uses first. If you’re a giant bigwig in the city and you employ a third of the people in the city and they’re on your payroll, and nine guys at random are chosen out of a bag, three of them are going to be your guys, just statistically. If you tell all your guys, “I want this policy, this policy, and this policy, and if you have questions, send for me and I’ll tell you what to do,” when the plurality on a random council all have a plan and it’s your plan, you effectively control the city. In that way, the Medici effectively controlled this lotteried system, because they guaranteed that the plurality, in a situation that doesn’t have a majority, will always be them. But of course, there’s a chance to that.…

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