Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…So with The Great Leap Forward, it has caused this incredible famine, just incredible devastation. One of the things that happened was getting very bad information. There was a sense that officials were afraid that if they gave bad news, if they admitted that they were failing to meet these giant targets that were being set, that would be seen as a political mistake. So it got to be a survival mechanism to pass on unrealistic reports on what was going. So some of it was a culture of fear around a great leader that led to not getting accurate information. So that was one part of the dynamic. Ego was a big part of it. There were all kinds of things that were unmoored. Early in the Chinese Communist Party history and power, there was the connection to the Soviet Union. Mao and Stalin had a connection. After Stalin’s death, Mao was haunted by the move toward de-Stalinization and the moves by Khrushchev, and thus laid the groundwork for the Sino-Soviet split. But there was also this kind of obsession with doing things differently that Mao had in that case as well. And you have factional struggles, you have all kinds of things that are happening simultaneously. There’s something I learned about called Gray’s Law, which states any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. So I would say when 30 to 45 million people die, it doesn’t really matter what the explanation is. That’s a longer discussion. But the interesting discussion that connects to everything we’ve been talking about is how is Mao seen in modern day China? What has Xi Jinping said about Mao? So before Xi Jinping, there was this kind of assessment of Mao as having been, in the early ’80s, of being 70% right, 30% wrong.…

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