Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, they’re rational. They’re rational within their own metrics. It’s one of those things — if people do things you don’t expect, it’s probably because you haven’t understood the reason they’re doing it, if you see what I mean. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to fight a civil war. They’re not particularly interested in Israel per se. They’re interested in having legitimacy in a civil war, and one of the ways you get legitimacy in internal Islamic civil war is by attacking Israel. One of the ways in which you get weapons off Iran is by attacking Israel. So if you want to fight civil war and you want to have legitimacy in weapons, attacking Israel helps you. It may not have rationality within our thinking because every now and again, Israel’s likely to strike back, as indeed it did only a few weeks ago. Actually, closing down shipping in the Red Sea doesn’t particularly help you win that civil war, but it does add to your legitimacy and makes you look like a competent military power. So it’s done for a different reason. Now, how should I think about Iran? If I see Iranians abroad, they do so very well, including in Britain. Iran itself has a lot of science, a lot of tech, engineering, great deal of talent and, it seems, energy. Yet the country is somehow fundamentally weak. They have a very bad government; they cannot exercise deterrence. What’s the most fundamental way of thinking about what’s gone wrong there? I think you should think about Iran extremely positively. Iran is an incredible country of an unbelievably rich civilization, as you know. You don’t need me to tell you that. It’s an amazing place with some of the most extraordinary scientists and artists that any culture has ever produced. It’s a remarkable place. You should think about the Iranian regime very differently. That is a cancerous growth on the back of a country that came out of the chaos of a revolution that many people thought was going to go a completely different way and has effectively leached the life out of millions of people in the most horrific way. It’s one of the most brutal and psychotic actors in a dangerous region. What it’s offering now is effectively a millenarian death cult where it sees — when people tell you what they believe, it’s often wise to believe that they’re telling you the truth. They’re telling us very clearly that what they’re doing is they’re preparing for the coming of the Mahdi, and they need to destroy Israel and conquer Jerusalem in order to achieve it. They seem to be acting in that way.…

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