Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…So the concept of a deep state, I’ve had discussions about that with experts who work on the idea of the deep state, and I’m not sure that I would characterize the Roman Empire that way, in part because while you do have big government, you do have bureaucracy, you have, you have bureaucrats who are buried in various echelons, and you know, nobody knows exactly what they’re doing and things like that, I have not come across the idea of some sort of sinister elements, you know, who are working within the administrative apparatus to undermine the emperor. Like, from a distance occasionally, you might get glimpses of this kind of thing. Diocletian, for example, once complained that, “Nobody ever tells me anything.” In other words, like, he’s so removed- … in part from the realities of what’s going on on the ground that he felt sometimes he’d lost touch. But I don’t find this kind of idea of undermining imperial power from within the bureaucracy. Yeah, I think the, one of the ways to explain that is because, so, you know, in the modern day, democracy in quotes, there’s a kinda temporary nature to the leader at the top. So it’s incentivized the deep state to form. That, so the deep state thinks of themselves as a thing that propagates long-term periods of time, and then the leader is a very ephemeral short, short-term thing. With a, with an emperor, technically- … you can go for a long time, so it’s best to be integrated deeply. With, the bureaucracy should be integrated with the leader. It makes sense. Yeah. But al-…

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