Lex Fridman: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And it involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. You had the first emperor of China jumping forward a bit in 221 BC. He is anti-scholars, he burns books, and he doesn’t venerate these kind of rituals and things. So he was very much against the things that Confucius stood for. And Mao in a sense of having to choose between Confucius and the first emperor, he said, “Well, maybe the first emperor had the right idea. Scholars can be a pain.” So he said, “If you have to choose between Confucianism and that.” But Xi Jinping I think continually is kind of not choosing. And if he wants to say, “Well, look at the Great Wall, look at this wonderful… In fact that was a symbol of kind of strength and domination related to the first emperor.” Who by the way, didn’t build anything like the Great Wall you see today. He built walls, and they were fine, they were good, but the Great Wall itself didn’t come into being until many centuries later. But still, this idea of anything that suggests a kind of greatness is something that as a, in many ways, a nationalist above all else, Xi Jinping is a supporter of the party and single-party rule. That’s something he clearly believes in, and he’s a nationalist, he wants to see China be great and acknowledge this great on the world stage. Boy, so many contradictions always with Stalin, he was a communist but also a nationalist, right? That contradiction, it also permeates through Mao and all the way to Xi Jinping. But if you can linger on Confucius for a little bit, you write that one of the most famous statements of Confucianism is the belief that, quote, “People are pretty much alike at birth, but become differentiated via learning.” So this sets the tradition that China places a high value on education and on meritocracy. Can you speak to this Confucius’s idea of education, and how much does it permeate to the China of today? Sure. So there’s an optimism to this, there’s an optimism in the sense of a ability that people can be good. And when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, they’ll want to be like those exemplary figures. So it was a form of education through kind of emulation of models and study of past figures and past texts that were exemplary. And it did have this idea, a relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through education. And I think that shows through in all kinds of things, even the fact that while there were lots of killings by the Chinese Communist Party and other groups, there was often an idea that people could be remolded potentially. And China was one of the few places where they didn’t kill the last emperor. The last emperor, the idea was that he could become… anybody could be kind of turned into a citizen of this or a subject of this, a good member of this polity through the kind of education, often it was a very kind of forceful form of education, but I think that’s a carryover from the Confucian times. And over time, this Confucian idea led to the creation of one of the early great civil service exams, an idea that bureaucracy should be run, not by people who were born into the right families, but ones who had shown their ability to master these fairly intensive kind of exams. And the exams were things that could make or break your career, a bit like at some points in the American past, passing a bar exam, a really intensive thing could set you on the road to a good career. In China, you had the civil service exam tradition. So I think this kind of emphasis on education and on valuing of scholarly pursuits, but then Chinese leaders throughout history, including up to Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be tremendously difficult to control. So there’s an ambivalence to it or a contradiction again there.…

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