Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…ent. So it’s not an empire strictly speaking. Now, occasionally, they will conquer other people, right? We talked about the warfare. Sometimes it’s not just defensive. Sometimes it’s offensive, right? In that case, you do establish an imperial relationship. Like we, the Romans, are ruling over this other group. Could be Slavs, it could be Bulgarians for a while, it could be whatever. Or even some Muslims in northern Syria for a while in the 11th century who—and you are not Romans. And that’s an imperial relationship. The question is, how many of these imperial relationships do you need to decide that, well, we’ve reached a tipping point, and now we’re just gonna call the whole thing an empire? Personally, I don’t think we ever reach that point. I mean, all states, even today, have like minorities. Some of them are part of that state because they were conquered once upon a time. But we don’t call those states empires necessarily. Even though… Like, look at the United Kingdom. Well, Wales was conquered. And, you know, the Welsh have their own identity, their own language. I don’t know that you would call that now an imperial relationship. Maybe. I don’t know. I think there’s also a synonymous use of the word empire that refers to the power that the state has- … in the global context geopolitically. So sometimes empire is used synonymously with superpower, meaning it’s one of the primary- … nations in the world, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with the imperial nature of its history. That’s true.…

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