Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, it's worse than that. They didn't have the fuel to actually train the pilots. And as we learned in 9/11- sorry to bring it back- it's really much easier to learn how to take off a plane and crash it into something, right? That's what those guys were doing. Than it is to teach them how to make safe landings under weird conditions. So, the kamikaze was just an act of—it's a guided missile. And it was an act of having very few assets at the end of the war and not enough fuel to fly anyone anywhere. So it's going to be a guided missile into an aircraft carrier or a battleship, destroyer, or something. One of the things I learned from your book is that the overwhelming fraction of deaths on the Japanese side during the war happened after it was known that they were going to lose. I think in the last 14 months—and this is all from your book—1.8 million of the total 2.1 million Japanese deaths, that's 85% of the total, happened in the last 14 months of the war. A similar thing is true with Germany, where I think 43% of the deaths happened in the last year of the war, I think 2.3 million out of the 5.3 million. Walk me through what is going on inside government – when the higher-level people must know that they're losing, but they're going on to make bigger and bigger sacrifices. Well, you're conflating, I think, Western values about what the purpose of the government is. Well, in common wealth, common weal—common weal is common good—this notion that governments are about the well-being of individuals. Okay, well, we're not in societies where we're talking about individuals for openers, certainly not in Japan. Then there's another: why the deaths so huge? It's at the end of these wars, you've broken the transportation system that gets produce to hungry mouths. And you've also removed so much manpower, literally from the fields, you aren't producing anything. So that you're talking about mass starvation as a result of having done a number of previous years of warfare. And also, this mass starvation helps account for why one side gets shattered and quits. 01:51:46 And then the thing that ought to give everyone pause is, okay, if Japan's economy was, I don't know, a tenth of ours in World War II, and these are the kind of costs that they could inflict, watch it on getting into wars with countries that you think you're vastly superior to. It may not work out. The costs are horrific. You're illustrating the problems with this continental order of taking territories. This is how it goes. But sometimes other people visit wars on you, and then you're into their world of hurt. I mean, I think it's like Angela Merkel or Neville Chamberlain back in World War II, who's going, surely these people don't want to do this. It's going to wind up being a bloodbath. Surely they don't want to. So Neville Chamberlain makes the compromise at Munich, thinking, surely this will be it. We'll compromise them, and they'll go. Wrong. They're going to come in for the whole thing.…

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