Dominic Cummings: belief

Transcript context

…To what extent are things just going to play out the way that they normally do historically. i.e. Slow rot. Elite blindness. Sudden crisis. Collapse. Bloodshed. Chaos. That’s normal. That’s the baseline expectation for our own current situation. To what extent can one try to preempt that? And the only way really to try and preempt it is that you have to change the nature of the elites. And the obvious elite in America to look at is the elite who are most competent at building. So my point was, if you leave the old system in Washington, New York to itself, then it’s going to produce Trump vs Biden 2 probably. Obviously people could have heart attacks or whatever, but left to its own devices, that’s where the system is heading towards. The obvious set of people that could put the country on a different track are the Silicon Valley builders. You should try. But that leads to a basic paradox, which is that the more and more mad the old system of politics and the old media get, the stronger are the cultural, financial, personal disincentives to competent people getting involved. In fact, the opposite is happening. The madder the system gets, the more the competent people retreat to their fish ponds. They look up, they build walled gardens, and they cultivate their fish ponds, they try and build their own companies where they can do things of value. They spend their time on research, they build hedge funds, they do things which are trying to insulate themselves and other people that they care about from the chaos. A lot of them said to me personally, if I tried to do anything about it, then my investors would go mad, my employees would go mad, my family would think I’d lost my mind. I’d have demonstrators outside the house. Who the fuck needs that? The current system is working as intended. It’s closed. The old parties and the old media are driving themselves and everyone more and more mad. But the people who could change it are very highly disincentivized from getting involved. Look at what’s happened to Elon. Elon, generally regarded by the old system as a hero, even up to two or three years ago, as soon as he says — Shouldn’t we take the First Amendment seriously? and by the way, this Ukrainian war seems insane. He’s called a supervillain. I think a perfect way to understand the old political system in America and Europe is that across the political world, academia, in the media, you can see on Twitter, they’re all very happy to give their personal takes on Elon Musk as manager and his startup abilities. And they take each other’s take on that more seriously than they take the historical evidence of Elon’s abilities. Now, for them, they all think that they’re all sensible and they’re all rational. For others of us looking at it, we think that that’s just a wonderful sign of the old system’s complete madness and inability to face the most obvious things. re all sensible and they’re all rational. For others of us looking at it, we think that that’s just a wonderful sign of the old system’s complete madness and inability to face the most obvious things. Why do junior academics and political journalists, who can’t even cheat their own expenses competently, think that they’re competent to make judgments about Elon and his management of SpaceX? It’s completely crackers. But they don’t think it’s crackers. They think it’s perfectly reasonable. Let’s say if you did something in the UK, US, wherever, and suppose it succeeds, and it’s not somebody like Boris, where it’s somebody you have qualms about, but better you than somebody else. Let’s say it’s a handpicked person, you think they’re super competent, and you’re now chief advisor again. Winning the election sounds like the easy bit, given the challenges you’ve talked about in terms of actually taking control of the government. What changes? Because last time, 80 seat majority, COVID crisis, huge mandate on both counts. Yet still, things couldn’t happen. Planning reform didn’t happen. What would actually take on the next iteration for you to actually take control of the government? If you have to do a natural regime change, as you’ve called it?…

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