Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…It doesn’t mean that it will work, but I think history has enough examples of things that you thought. I mean, it explains why certain figures are so inspirational for generations of activists, that people read. There’s a reason why people talk about Václav Havel. Whereas if Václav Havel had died in 1988, people would’ve said, “Oh, maybe he was a great writer,” but his political project, he didn’t live to see come. But then he lives to ’89 and becomes against all expectations. So Rebecca Solnit, she’s got a new book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, and she’s talking about taking a longer view of some struggles that achieve things after the point when people might’ve imagined that they had run into dead ends. And she’s talking about keeping your eye on the gains that happen, even incrementally, and the ways in which the need to take a longer term perspective on some of these things. And I think it’s a strange thing because there’s also often an impatience in movements of people wanting immediate results. But as a historian, looking at situations, I’ve mentioned Eastern Europe and Central Europe, but Europe, Taiwan was a right-wing dictatorship under a version of martial law for decades. And at each stage, it would seem that people struggling to change it were on a quixotic, impossible mission, or South Korea was in a similar situation. And then in the late 1980s, you start to have those things unravel. And it’s partly because of a steady resistance. It’s partly because something in the world changes, but there’s often a combination of those things. So I’m interested in that whole, we know that what happened in Hong Kong in the short run didn’t work, and I don’t see a way in which the national security laws reversed or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean that it was a completely impossible effort, even though we know the result in that case was to have this failure. So the protests are generally worthwhile. I mean they do give, as I look at the description of the migratory routes ideas take, they do seed ideas in the minds of people and then they live with those ideas and they share those ideas. They deliberate through those ideas. They might travel to different places of the world and then those ideas return and rise up again and again and again. There’s two parts of the world that I think are fascinating … and unpredictable. So one is Iran, which the trajectory that place takes might have a complete transformative effect on the Middle East. Then the other one is China, where the protests, whether it’s in Taiwan or Hong Kong or maybe other influential parts of China, those ideas percolating up and up again might have a completely transformative effect on the world. So maybe this is another case where, so the Chinese Communist Party, leaders in the Chinese Communist Party, they do know about history and they care about history. And one history they know is the Chinese Communist Party was almost destroyed in 1927. I mean it was if you were taking odds on what are the chances that this ragtag group that’s being pursued by Chiang Kai-shek to try to determine, and yet over time, they somehow managed to ride it out and eventually come to power. There’s an awareness of the ways in which the seemingly impossible can happen. It doesn’t mean it will. I mean, this is why I think, and one of the really tragic or heartrending things is you can have situations in which movements that seem to be pursuing an impossible end result, they achieve that result. And then after another period, the country goes into another really difficult period or it seems that the successes are being rolled back. And my new Milk Tea Alliance book that I’ve just written, I dedicate it to two people who’ve lived through a variety of these things. One is a Burmese activist who was involved in a failed uprising in 1988. He then was an exile who didn’t know whether he could ever see his brothers who he loves back in Burma. And then something magical changed. And in the 2010s, it seemed that there was a democratization that turned out to be a false dawn. He was able to go back and now he’s, again, when there’s been a coup and a crackdown, he’s now again cut off. And at one point, I was asking him about how he feels about this when he’s still trying to raise awareness globally about what’s happening in Myanmar. He said, “I feel helpless but not hopeless.” I think how does somebody maintain hope in that? And the other person I dedicated to Miklós Haraszti is a Hungarian friend of mine who was an activist before ’89 and saw this amazing thing happen was communism, a communist party rule ending. He was part of the process that came and he was friends with Havel, and Havel’s there and Poland’s changing and all of this exhilarating moment, but ends up being a critic of Orbán and following a tightening of controlling, a rolling back of many of the things that were victorious then. But this, the no straight road, that actually there’s something about, it can be disquieting when these unexpected things are blows to where you thought direction history was going. But history just shows you that history doesn’t have a direction. There isn’t a straight road.…

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