Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…No, it didn't happen too fast. It’s that institutions take a long time to take root. Look at this country; it's been an evolving democracy for hundreds of years. We no longer have slavery- amen- but look at really consequential things about our own institutions. So, now we're going to go pick on the Japanese because they managed in one generation to westernize their political, judicial, legal, educational, you name it, they westernized them, but there wasn't enough time for these things to grow deep roots. And then if you think about who's doing this, they're called the Genrō, this very distinguished generation of Japanese who all knew each other. Their career paths were very broad, covering both civil and military areas. And when they died, they couldn't transfer their prestige to anyone else, nor had they institutionalized it in some kind of cabinet or something that would force all these different groups to discuss things without giving primacy to the military. 01:32:27 Then, understand what is the tradition in Japan: Shogunate. That's what Japan had before. What's a shogun? Shogun is a Japanese word for "general." So the long history of Japan is military rule so when it comes back in World War II, that is a kind of normalcy. It would have taken a long time. So, this comes back to the United States and fooling around with tariff walls, thinking that was such a clever idea. Maybe if the Great Depression had been managed better, it would have given time for these institutions to take deeper roots. No one knows, but I would not criticize the Meiji generation. They're brilliant. They did so much, but you're talking just a number of years. Look at this country. We're having major problems with our institutions, wondering whether we've got a stalemated legislature, whether we've got a skewed court system, or whatever it is and we're sorting these things out. And then to criticize the Japanese because they couldn't do it all in 25 years? One thing I found really interesting in your book is that you were arguing that not only was the military not in charge of the officers, but nobody was even in charge of the military. I think you call it a "system of irresponsibility," that it was basically government by committee. Tell me more about that. Why does that lead to mistakes? I'm going to flip it around and look at how the West has done it. It's all about- it’s supposed to be and of course there are exceptions- that it’s not that it’s about you if you have a particular job, it’s that your job gives you certain authority by law to do things, and then we have courts to adjudicate when you in that position, other people think that you've exceeded your authority, and they start suing about different things. And that's how it goes in the West, it's very legalistic, going all the way back to the Romans. When I think about what is the West, it's Greek logic, it's Roman law, and then it's these Judeo-Christian moral values. Those are essential pillars of what the West is all about. So in Japan, yeah they get laws and they westernize, but they had their own indigenous way of dealing with things and it's very much about different in-groups and out-groups handling things in whatever the committee is. And so we're going, "Well, who actually did that? Whose fault is it?" Because we have this very legalistic way and fault and law. 01:35:07 We're going to either put you in jail or whatever. It's just different ways of organizing ourselves. But we in the West assume, because going back to Roman times, that institutions are going to be a really big thing, that that's how things are going to work. So then when we get into somewhere like Iraq and we think the police is going to still be functioning after we blow the government, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's not an institutionalized- I’m no expert, but you're projecting the kind of institutional setup that Western countries typically have to other people. They may name these things the same thing, police or whatever, but they may function in very different ways.…

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