Dwarkesh Patel: observation

Transcript context

…again is young people being impatient for evil to end, but also empowering themselves to be in charge. They love the state. They love the state as an instrument for social justice, social engineering. They love to empower themselves as the decision-makers because, after all, they're the intellectuals. They've studied the theory. They know better than others. Workers and peasants and the downtrodden, the lower classes, sometimes have false consciousness. They don't understand why, for example, we have an imperialist war. They get sucked in. Bread and circuses fool them. They have this false consciousness. But I know better, and I can be in charge. I can get us to a better place. Even along the way, bad things are going to happen. Some people who are innocent are going to die or be arrested. But this is the march of history. This march of history is to peace and justice. Who is going to stand in the way of that? Especially when it empowers you personally so that… You could never do this in the private sector. Nobody could afford you this kind of power in the private sector and in a decentralized political system, in a federalized political system where nobody accumulates that much power. Social engineering is always coercive, always coercive. The issue is how much of the coercion is necessary that we accept in the tradeoff to right some of the things that are obviously wrong. All the anti-Marxism, I totally agree with. But still, just purely analyzing the system there's still something to be explained. There are many ideologies. You have this line that you can't explain Stalin by saying that he was beaten as a kid or he's a Georgian or whatever, because many other people are Georgians or beaten as a kid and they turn out not this way. There's many different kinds of ideologies, and very few of them end up as amenable to dictatorship as Marxism. Another thing that's really confusing here is that all of these Old Bolsheviks who abet the system and whom eventually Stalin purges, whatever you might say about them, they're not weak men. They were willing to face down the Tsar. They were able to organize the revolution against the Tsar. They're willing to live in exile, to potentially get shot… I guess not shot by the Okhrana, but whatever. They're willing to go through hardships for their beliefs. At the same time, you might think they might just go along with Stalin's doings because this serves what they think is the end goal of communism. But we know that after Stalin died, Khrushchev, who was one of the key people in the regime, gave a Secret Speech where he said that, “No, Stalin was going against it. He was destroying the building of socialism and the building of Marxism-Leninism.” So people did believe that Stalin was actually going against this end goal that they had. At least Khrushchev believed that. In many cases, they themselves are being implicated and they know they're innocent. In many of these cases, there's this period in between when they're a dead man walking—because Stalin has started putting the feelers out that this person is a Trotskyite or something—but they're still in their positions of power. They're still the editor of Pravda or in charge of the military or something. It's mysterious why these people who were able to… They're not cowards, they were able to organize a revolution against the Tsar. But they are not using this period that’s like a chicken with its head cut off in order to organize some sort of defense of themselves. Maybe the next time they have the Party Plenum, instead of just confessing or giving the obligatory speech where you're castigating yourself, you just say, “No, I think Stalin's leading the revolution wrong. I'm going to die either way, but I might as well say this.” The same thing happened in China. Liu Shaoqi, when he's a dead man walking as the premier under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, he doesn't use that opportunity to go up… It’s very strange. There are very few, but there are some people like that. They're arrested and executed, all of them. Very few of those kinds of people are going to survive. The ones who publicly decry the failures of the system and its perverse and unintended consequences, the ones who decry the dictatorship as opposed to the freedom that Marx predicted would happen, there are some people like that. They're extremely courageous. They're known to us. I'm not the only one, but I feature some of them in my book. But again, you're creating a new world. It's going to be messy because it's about class struggle. And class struggle means there are going to be winners and losers. The bourgeoisie have to go. They're inherently evil. They're an evil class. They have to not just be retired to a farm somewhere. They have to be eradicated, liquidated as a class. They're going to resist and therefore there are going to be enemies everywhere. You're not going to know who they are. So are you on the side of the enemies?…

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