Dwarkesh Patel: prediction

Transcript context

…hem, or if they wanted each other’s musician, send goons to kidnap each other’s musicians. They also used to recreationally murder each other’s servants when the siblings were tiffing with each other. That is what you do when you don’t fear your people and when you feel confident in power. They are much closer to tyrants than the Medici are ever able to be, even after the republic falls. That’s what’s so neat. Because the resistance failed, if we’re looking at it in black and white. The republic fell. There wasn’t a republic anymore. There was a duke. He took over, and the old system was gone. But because the republic fought so hard and because the people really believed in it, the people had a lot more rights, and the tyrant was a lot less tyrannical because there had been that fight. It’s a great example of how even when resistance loses, resistance wins. I think there’s an interesting parallel to today, not to be too on the nose, but sometimes people debate the odds that America becomes a Putinist kind of country within a couple of decades. I think the odds are actually quite low. Just because even though constitutionally, or at least in precedent, the president is very powerful, the republican expectation is so strong. The amount of resistance faced, even when you successfully do something, demotivates the next escalation. The only thing that makes resistance weak in the US is when people feel as if partial victory is failure. Remembering moments like how Florence’s resistance all the way to the end meant that there was more liberty for the next several centuries, even under the tyrant, is what we need to remind ourselves, that partial victory is an important thing. Even if the worst were to happen and there were to be tyranny, that tyranny would be so much weaker because there was a lot of resistance, and traditions of resistance and structures would develop that would continue to exist.…

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