Sarah Paine: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, so here's something I'm confused by. You were talking about Mao as a shrewd commander, somebody who had studied not only the military but had also compiled these rigorous records of farm life and agriculture. And then you fast forward to when he's in power, and you go to the Great Leap Forward, and some of the things that he was doing, you just can't imagine that somebody thought this was a good idea: that peasants would take off the harvest, wouldn't attend to the crops, but they're going to make iron in their backyards. They're going to shoot the sparrows and have a locust infestation. How do we square this shrewdness in the beginning and these idiocracy-level ideas in the Great Leap Forward? Well, first of all, you need to think about what his objective is, which number one is to stay in power, right? And number two is probably Communist Party in power and pursue his visions of revolution. So that's one thing. Then you're worried about the welfare of people as if that's the primary objective. It most certainly is not. And then he may have assumed that it came along with these things, and that's a whole problem with communist ideology is people don't believe it because they know it's wrong, they believe it because it's right. There's a whole problem with that about labor theories of value and things. It turns out there are things called services that are also valuable. So the basic theory that he's implementing is incorrect. It just takes the communists a little while—some of them haven't figured it out—but it takes them a little while to figure out there are parts that don't work. But there's a whole other piece to him, if you think about our own world, how much expertise does any individual have? It's amazing the man reunited a continent, and he did all those things. Then to expect him to run a peacetime economy is crazy. 01:03:29 But of course he wants to do it so he stays there. Or if you think about like in Britain, Winston Churchill: a great wartime leader, but he's booted out of office right after that war. If you think about different capabilities of people, don't expect one individual to do everything. So that's a whole other problem. When Mao is running stuff from afar—this is a country with how many people? It hadn't hit a billion then, but it's hundreds of millions and it's been shattered by warlord rule forever. And so how are you going to extend central control to the countryside? Really tricky. I suspect that’s why he puts them on communes, because it lines up with communism, but it also lines up with party control. Because if you put all this vast population—because most people are peasants—on communes, then you control whether they eat or don't. You truly control them. So it's those factors. It's so big when you start putting a policy in place from Beijing. And then how that actually fans out over the whole country, it's got to be a mess. Different localities and things. But when I compare him to other, even other communist leaders.…

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