Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, there’s a couple different ways, I think, it happens. I really am interested in the relationship between the thinker and then the reader and the interpreter of the ideas, and then the conditions on the ground that make that idea resonate or not resonate. I think a lot. As an intellectual historian, I’m studying the ideas. I’m always putting them in their historical context like, “What is happening that is making these things resonate? That is making them… People seek them out. For Rand’s case, she has this credibility because of her experience of communism. She’s one of these defining moments of the time. Then I think the idea comes out in a pure form, and then other people rework it and reshape it as they read it. And I’m really interested in how people form communities around these ideas. A bunch of people started calling themselves objectivists and getting together to read Rand’s work. That was spontaneous and ground up. It wasn’t supported by any money. Nobody planned it. It just happened. Friedman’s a different case in that he joins an established tradition of thought that’s been institutionalized in universities. So people are signing up and paying money and getting credential to learn these ideas. To my mind, these are two different ways but really emblematic ways of how ideas spread. Rand, I think of as more bottom up. People encounter the idea in a book. They’re blown away by it, or they imbibe it without even realizing they’re imbibing it, and then they’re like, “Well, maybe I don’t like Franklin Roosevelt so much.” Or, “Maybe I’ll look at another time at Barry Goldwater.” Then whereas Friedman, you get the idea more top down. I know I’m getting the idea. I know I’m being positioned within a elite discourse of economics. I think they go top-down and bottom-up, and then they hit the events, right? Friedman’s ideas wouldn’t have gone anywhere without that episode of stagflation that really made people think they proved out. And I think Rand’s ideas really caught fire in Cold War America, that’s looking for a statement of like, “What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to live in this mass society?” Because it’s also a time of great social conformity, where people are suddenly… They’re working for large corporations. They’ve been served in a large military. The United States is stepping out onto the world stage. Everything is bigger. What does it mean to be an individual in that world? That’s where Rand’s ideas catch fire. I think a lot about that. About how they trickle through different levels of society, and then how ideas collide with experience I think is critical. What do you think about when they actually take power in government? I think about ideas like Marxism and how that evolves into the Bolshevik Revolution and how that takes hold in its implementations. Or you can think about Nazism and with Hitler where it goes from a small number of people that get real excited about a thing and then somehow just becomes viral and takes hold in power, and then that has its consequences. When I think about this sort of historical path of communism and the logics and dynamics of communism, in many ways it has some echoes with Rand in that the ideology in its purest form is almost… It’s a rationalist ideology of some ways. It’s an analysis of history and how things are supposed to be. I think you mentioned Hannah Arendt. I think she is one of the most penetrating analyses of communism, which she really puts in category, like it’s a logical ideology. Logic leads inexorably to its conclusions, and then experience crops up and experience is different. And what does a cult of rationality do when it hits experience? Well, it tries to bend experience to its will. That, I think, is really the story of communism writ large. The question though is why does it catch fire? Why does it draw people into political allegiance? I think in the case of communism, it’s this dream of a more ethical world, dream of equality, dream of the powerless rising up against the powerful. That’s drawn in so many. Then you had the whole edition of Leninism, which gave a international cast to that and helped people think about what are the relations between poorer and richer countries and what can we expect out of them and what might happen. Gave us a framework for thinking about that in a time when the world was becoming more interconnected and those differences were becoming more obvious. Fascism to me is unleashing more something dark and primal within people, and it’s more a permission structure to indulge in that that is normally not there. Those impulses are normally channeled or held down, and it seems that when the fascist regimes come into power, they give people permission to let those forces out.…

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