John Nye: belief

Transcript context

…Now, there’s a collapse of globalization occurring in 1914, in the First World War. If you think about this in terms of an abstract model, what exactly happened? And was it inevitable? I don’t think it was inevitable at all. I do think World War I was a genuine shock to that. That is to say, I think that you could have imagined a world in which globalization would have received more support and more development for at least a couple of more decades. But it is also true that what you see is that historically, there doesn’t . . . Put it another way: There’s not much evidence that human beings somehow evolve into very liberal political entities. So the periods that promote political and economic liberalism tend to be short-lived, historically. What’s interesting about the last 250 years is how relatively stable political liberalism has been. Whether or not that’s an anomaly, or that’s the beginning of a totally different change in the way human beings organize themselves is, I think, for the future. But I think the assumption that political liberalism, as we’ve seen, that foments both increased individual freedoms as well as increased economic freedoms, plus economic growth, is either stable or sustainable is not clear-cut to me. Particular mistakes aside, what were the systemic mistakes the Western world was making in, say, 1910, 1912?…

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