Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Well, I'm not an expert on Buddhism, but you've got a lot of things conflated in there. If you're asking about the part of the brutality of the war is, Japan was totally out of resources. You're thinking it's going through a massive area of territory. They actually had no ability to take POWs. Or if they took POWs, they'd have to halt the military operation and then put these people somewhere. So they just slaughtered them instead. 00:58:50 There were POWs and there were cases of hostile civilians who also got slaughtered. I don't know the "because," but they had very limited numbers of people to deal with this. On the one hand, you've got absolute desperation. I don't think any people behave well when they're desperate. The war had been going on for years by the time we get interested in it, right? It starts in '31. So you have desperate people. There's another piece. I can just add little pieces. I can't explain a whole people. In the prison camps in Japan, if I'm going to be — let's say you were Japanese. You and I are looking each other in the eye. That's how you do it in the West, showing that you're paying attention. That's not how you do it in Japan. In Japan, if you're Japanese, I'm looking at your shoulder. It's rude to look people in the eye. It's just too intrusive; you're getting too much information probably from that person's face. 00:59:50 So you can imagine a Westerner in a prison camp looks his guard in the eye, and the guard's going "Oh, who is this arrogant person? You’re a POW-" You can imagine bad things are then going to be happening. These are guesses on what's going on. There are certain values that I've talked about. There's certain desperation that's going on. And then there's the dehumanization of what wartime's all about, right? Initially, conscripts go in of all armies having trouble killing people, and then they get better at it over time. This is the tragedy of human beings. I don't know if I answered your question. I don't know that I know the answer. Here’s another thing that I want to clarify: If you were trying to understand Britain's conduct in World War I, why they initiated it and why they conducted it in the way they did, and you tried to understand it using cultural explanations — what some British guy wrote in the 17th century — I don't know how far you'd get. Maybe the more illuminating thing is just to look at what was happening in the 1910s. What were the proximal strategic objectives? So with Bushido, why are we looking back at what people were writing in the 1700s? I'm going to break up the British thing into two parts. One analytical framework is that you can look at wars in terms of underlying causes and proximate causes. The underlying causes are like the tinder of grievances on both sides, and there can be cultural components to that, or other components. So there's this accumulating tinder where you've got two different sides, at least across purposes. But then there's the match, the proximate cause, which is a whole series of matches. Finally, the last one is Pearl Harbor, and you are off and running to a place you might not want to go to. 01:01:41 So there's that. And then there's culture. Let's look at Britain's strategic culture. I'm no expert on British strategic culture, but these are some basics. They are an island, and they want to be able to trade with the world, but they don't want any one power dominating the continent. This is their strategic thinking from way back. So if there is a power that's on the verge of dominating the continent, you want to back the other side to prevent that outcome. That's very much a part of British thinking, it goes back a long time and you can read things going back a long time describing that situation. There's another piece that goes back a long time in the British: navies are rarely decisive in warfare. What I mean by "decisive" is that you actually get the goal that you're after from fighting, whereas armies can be. If your goal is, "I want to occupy all of France," or better yet, the Holland, something smaller, an army might be able to do that for you, one instrument of national power. But Britain's reliant on a navy and doesn't like to have a big standing army. 01:02:50 So they're thinking in terms of diplomacy and allies, working economics, and making money from trade. They are the ones who coined the term "grand strategy." It is their gift to us, and it absolutely informs their thinking at a very macro level. No one thing is entirely explanatory. Also, we human beings game the system. The moment I tell you you're Japanese and you think this way is the moment you go, "Oh, that's what she thinks? We're going to do something different." Right? So this is the problem with human beings.…

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