Dominic Cummings: belief

Transcript context

…Maybe an interesting question is then if you look at Bismarck, who you’ve done a huge dive on, in that case, you have a system where after him, the system he set up couldn’t survive and yada, yada, yada, World War I. Whereas Lee Kuan Yew, another person you’ve studied deeply, he had meticulously set up a system so that even after he gave up the leadership, it would be a competent, successful government. And I guess we’ll see how it turns out. But Singapore seems to be running fine. They both are these strong figures in the context of a democracy. What is the correct model here? And then how does this solve the succession problem? They are two very, extremely different examples. With Bismarck, you have a system where there’s universal male suffrage, but a kind of gerrymandered constitution written by him personally on a little Baltic island, designed essentially to make him the fulcrum of all of the power, but in a sort of lots of ways, hidden away. You certainly wouldn’t call it a democracy in anything like the current situation. All the deep state stuff, to use the modern terminology, the army, the intelligence service and everything were obviously completely excluded from that whole power structure and completely in the grip of the Prussian king. Lee Kuan Yew has created a system where I think the most important thing he’s created is a certain kind of culture amongst the leadership in Singapore, a genuinely meritocratic culture, a culture where people are actually trying to solve the problems. Not like Washington or London now. And where there’s a kind of moral reinforcement for that culture, without which, everything else doesn’t fly. Therefore, it all becomes about: Generation by generation. Is that moral leadership? Does that moral leadership maintain or does it dissolve? Because it’s very easy for that sort of thing to go. His son’s in charge now and I haven’t studied it very much, but he seems to be preserving the fundamental culture. The people running the different agencies, their job is to actually run the agencies properly. It doesn’t seem to be corrupted. But it’s very easy for that to change, right? Say he gets shot tomorrow or has a heart attack tomorrow, and someone else takes over very quickly. The signals could go out that actually, your job is not to do pandemic preparation properly. Here’s how people would be promoted from now on. You’d always expect that as the default. Because that’s just what entropy does. It brings us back to what is a system in which not only is a leader somebody who understands how to take control of the government and does it effectively, but also reliably hands off power to people?…

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