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Video Description
Universities once stood for free speech and the search for truth — but this lecture from Professor Jiang shows they have quietly turned into offices run by administrators chasing salaries rather than scholars chasing ideas. From the Yale Halloween meltdown to the professor fired over a Chinese word that merely sounded wrong, he traces how bureaucracy manufactures problems to justify its own growth. The same bloat has spread to hospitals, the military, and every government — and with Kafka, Arendt, and Scott as guides, he explains why a society run by rulebooks slowly forgets how to think for itself.
Full Video Transcript
okay so welcome back from the break today i want to talk about an incident that happened
in october 2015 at yale university what happened was this um halloween is coming up
and then halloween people like to dress up silly get drunk have a good time and a university
department called the intercultural affairs committee sent an email to students saying
it’s halloween you guys want to have fun that’s fine but please be sensitive about the feelings of
other people so for example do not dress up like a panda because we have chinese students and they
might be offended if you dress up like a panda okay so this email went out to all the students
at yale and one teacher who works at a resident residential college called silliman okay so yale
the university is divided into dormitories called residential colleges and she is a dean with her
husband of this college called silliman and to her students she writes an email and says that
she didn’t agree with the university email she says that a university is a place for you to
explore experiment and make mistakes so yes be sensitive about the feelings of others
but we trust you to make mistakes and to recover from them okay so um the debate was essentially
over safe space versus free space the university said that safe space is important we must respect
the feelings of others but the dean of silliman her name is erica kristakis she believes an idea
of free space so a university is a place for debate for questioning for experimentation and
yes feelings will be hurt that’s part of the growing up process the intellectual process
so let me ask you a question do you guys agree with number one who argues for safe space
Or number two, Erika Christakis, who argues for free space.
What do you think?
Sorry, can you speak into the mic please?
Yeah, why do you believe number one and number two is correct?
Because I think that university is a place that you could explore yourself,
you know, jump out of your comfort room and try the things that you never had experienced before.
Okay, who disagrees?
who believes it’s more important to respect the feelings of others um like if did the college
prohibit these on dressing that maybe us be an offensive to other students it’s just in the
campus if you like work out you know the society is still have the people like wants to uh dress
maybe like a panda or something so um i think it’s i think it’s like necessary to
like to um well uh yeah okay all right any other opinions any other opinions okay so you say
respect the rules right i think i think it depends on who decided it feels like for myself i think
free space will be more important i need to explore what i want but for being as a leader
being as a head of the college i think safe space will be more important for them because they need
to take in control okay right but the problem is this is a conflict right if the teachers care
about safe space you cannot have free space right so the question then is what do you think in
principle is more important free space or safe space safe space okay okay all right okay so yeah
so most students believe safe space is more important and this marks a generational shift
because when i was growing up there was no debate it was just assumed that free space is more
important because if you’re not allowed to make mistakes you’re not allowed to explore you’re not
allowed to argue with other people if your feelings don’t get hurt you will never grow as a person
okay so this marks a generational divide or generational gap okay so um we’re gonna look
at what happened because of this debate so the students who read the email were offended that
erica christakis was arguing for free space because they believe that by doing this you’re
going to hurt our feelings all right and so let’s look at what happened and remember this is yale
university so what’s happening is that when chris nicholas christakis the husband of erica christakis
went to meeting you’re surrounded by students telling you that you are being
racist you were being offensive you admitted that you hurt us why can’t you
Okay, so, look, I’m not saying which side is correct, okay?
both sides have legitimate points both sides have problems but you will notice that he the professor
he’s much older than the students and the students are treating him you can see their faces right
they’re treating him with some contempt and that’s not appropriate and when i was growing up we didn’t
do this if you didn’t like a professor you thought well he’s an asshole and but you know what most
professors are assholes because they’re professors okay you didn’t you did not go and like stalk the
guy and complain to him that’s kind of disrespectful all right so the question then is why is this
happening so i want to show you another video and this video is kind of crazy okay this video
as your position as master is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that
Okay, so this is not appropriate.
Again, both sides have legitimate points.
But this is not appropriate, right?
Because what she’s saying to him is,
you work for us.
Your job is to make us feel at home.
and his response is that my job is to help you learn my job is to help you grow and that means
openness that means debate that means pain and her response is i don’t want that crap i want to feel
good i want to feel at home i don’t be challenged and if you think about it that defeats the entire
point of university. So again, I’m not saying who’s right. I’m not saying who’s wrong. But
clearly there’s a problem here. And when I went to Yale a long time ago, we didn’t have any of this.
In fact, this sort of incident where a student would curse a professor, it was unimaginable to
us. Okay. So the question then is, why is this happening? And there are three explanations for
this is happening the first explanation is parenting these kids grow up in very privileged
households and their parents are very protective of them and their parents treat them like friends
and so these kids are spoiled okay that’s the first explanation the second explanation is
the idea of a consumerist mentality so in a university the idea is that the students are
consumers their customers and the customers are always right what the customers want you have to
give them so if the customers want a safe space they want to come and enjoy their time at university
and they don’t really challenge the professors have to meet their demands otherwise he should
not have this job okay and this is a mentality that we call neoliberalism or consumerism okay
that’s the second explanation okay the third explanation is ideological so the idea is that
at universities universities are overrun by left-wing professors who teach students that
society is racist against minorities who happen to be you know black and female and they must
overturn the white racist supremacist structure and you do that by telling white professors who
are privileged that they are racist okay so these are three standard explanations
for why this is happening because this sort of stuff is happening quite a lot in america
what i want to argue to you today is that there’s actually another explanation which i think
is much more compelling and the explanation is that universities have become bureaucracies
before universities existed to teach you how to think to help professors do cutting-edge research
that helps a society improve or innovate but today universities including yale harvard all the
universities have become bureaucracies that exist in order to promote the interests of the
administrators who want to sit in their office get really nice uh get a really big salary and feel
good about themselves okay that’s the argument i will make to you today and what i will show you
is that this is not just true for universities it’s true for every major organization in america
and in the western world and arguably all around the world okay that’s the argument i will make
to you today any questions before i begin all right okay so today’s lecture is death by
bureaucracy how the idea of bureaucracy the bureaucratic mindset is taking over the world
all right so let’s talk about another incident at yale okay this is yale law school and a student
named trevor colbert he says in the email he has a party he says an email to all the students at
your law school and there are actually not that many students at your law school there’s maybe 300
okay but all the students get it and he says that he’s gonna organize a party it’s a trap house
party and you know it’s it’s a bit of a joke because trap house means actually a drug house
a place where drug dealers sell uh drugs but black students african-american students read the email
and they’re offended and they’re like are you making fun of black students so they write a
letter of complaint to the deans of yale law school and there are two deans who investigate
okay their names are eldick and koscroft okay and they said and what trevor corporate does is
he actually records the meeting okay secretly for 20 minutes they talk and basically colbert does
not believe he did anything wrong he sent an email and he said it was a funny email he thought it was
funny okay but the deans tell him you think it’s funny but other students found it offensive so you
need to apologize and corporate’s like okay well i’ll tell you what if these students thought that
what i wrote was offensive then i will talk to them we will talk together about why they found
on the email offensive and we will settle this amongst ourselves and the dean’s like no no no
we want to we want to help you guys out we want to protect you guys we’re afraid that you guys
meet you guys will fight even more and trevor colbert’s like well i want to hear what they
think i don’t want to hear this from you i want to hear what they think okay and and then what
happens is that the deans start to threaten trevor colbert they basically tell him these things
amplified over time so you must apologize right away for your sake okay and they tell him listen
if you do not apologize then this might affect your career this might affect your social circle
okay so they’re threatening him and what they say is we’re doing this for your sake okay eric says
he worries about the email affecting the student’s reputation not just here but when you leave you
know the legal community is a small one and he says you know what i will write the email for you
i will craft the apology for you and cost growth warns that escalation is a possibility if the
student doesn’t apologize okay so this is coercion and again the student it’s not clear what the
student did wrong some students found offensive but it’s not clear what rules or laws or what
regulations to recover broke okay it’s not clear so why is this happening okay my argument to you
is that it’s happening because these guys costco and elder they need things to do because
being a dean of a university it’s not a real job right there are professors who teach there are
researchers who do research but deans actually don’t do anything so when you have a bureaucracy
bureaucrats go make problems for everyone in order to create solutions for everyone
okay so another saying this is 20 years ago 30 years ago when i was a student at yale
if you had a problem you had to go talk to a professor because there was no one else to talk to
nowadays you can talk to like 20 or 30 different deans dean of student affairs dean of student
faculty relations who knows okay but they’re like all these offices they can go to and quite honestly
the same at the school as well right if you don’t like me as a teacher there’s like four or five
different people you can play you can complain to and quite honestly a lot of you do complain okay
so i know about this and and what is happening is these universities become bureaucracies another
question then is why the bureaucracies and the answer is in the beginning as a university you
you have to build your reputation, right?
So you work hard, you focus on teaching,
you focus on research.
So it’s a struggle to become a global brand.
Once you become that global brand,
there’s nothing else to do.
There’s no more ideology, there’s no more struggle.
So what happens is the people in charge
start engaging in rent-seeking behavior.
They take advantage of the position
in order to make their life easier.
then they pass on this privilege to their friends and then to the children and this creates a
bureaucracy and the university starts to exist in order to empower these people at the expense
of students and professors okay all right so to show you how ridiculous this has become
here’s an example this is from cnn okay and this is the year 2020. a university of south
korea professor is under fire for using a chinese expression students alleged sounds like an english
slur okay so there’s a chinese word that sounds like a racial slur an insult in english these
two words actually do not sound the same okay you know what the word is right mega mega
okay they it’s not the same as the english word but it sounds a bit similar
so what happened was some black students african-american students who are not in
his class okay wrote a letter of complaint and honestly if you read it it sounds like a joke it
sounds like a prank all right so let’s read it together let’s let’s okay so it’s a professor
greg patton and he’s just teaching communication chinese he’s just teaching chinese
to his students on how to communicate in china when you do business okay and he says look nega
it’s just a filler it doesn’t really mean anything and he says it a few times but there’s no there’s
no bad intention what he’s saying right i mean he’s just pointing out a fact so what these students
write is this phrase clearly and precisely before instruction is always identified as a phonetic
homonym and a racial derogatory term and should be carefully used especially in the context of
speaking chinese within the social context of the united states okay so this is a ridiculous idea
and honestly it sounds like a joke okay it just sounds like these students are playing a joke
And the administration just ignored this, right?
Guess what happens?
The dean, the head of the business school,
announced that a different professor would take over teaching Patton’s class.
He fired Patton.
And then he said,
Professor Patton repeated several times a Chinese word
that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English.
Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students.
And for that, I am deeply sorry.
It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize,
hurt, and harm the psychological safety of our students.
We must and we will do better, okay?
He’s being retarded.
It’s a joke, it’s a prank, and he’s taking it very seriously.
Why?
Because he’s trying to protect his job.
He’s trying to look good.
He’s trying to explain why I’m the leader because I protect everyone, okay?
so then again what is why is this happening well again the idea of bureaucracy so this is
the university of california san diego this is student enrollment okay so you can see a slight
increase in student enrollment but look at this senior management deans administrators managers
boom okay boom this is called rent-seeking behavior this is people in power take advantage
of their power to give jobs to their friends who do nothing every day and because of that they’re
always looking to cause problems for everyone else especially professors who do real work
okay so let’s just look at universities as you can see um the blue is teaching so what’s really
interesting is that the investment in teaching has gone down okay so the investment in teaching
has gone down the blue okay but look at this the red is administration so over the past from 1980
to today over the past 40 years universities have put less money into both um administration
as well as maintenance but i’ve put more money into administration into bureaucracy okay this
is where your money is going guys all right so this is illinois you see a massive surge in
managers at the same time student enrollment is going down it went down to three percent
all right so this is a paper written about the swedish education system the higher education
system okay it’s it’s no different anywhere else all right so let’s so the argument is that
bureaucracy is ballooning in swedish higher education so let’s look at some interesting
statistics all right so what’s happening is that this chart tells you that teachers are teaching
more and more students okay teachers are teaching more and more students but administrators are
managing less and less students and the reason why is teachers are fewer and fewer but managers
are more and more that makes no sense okay um so you can see that teachers and researchers
it’s pretty flat okay it hasn’t really explained that much but secretaries people who do real work
it’s going down but managers are going up okay so the university is facing problems the first thing
you should cut other people do no work right but it’s the opposite people who do no work the
managers keep their jobs and in fact they pay themselves more the professors and the maintenance
and the secretaries lose their jobs to cut costs okay um this is how much they’re paid as you can
see over the same time period secretaries are getting paid less and less teachers are getting
paid less and less but look at this managers are getting paid more and more uh these are different
departments okay of a university so as you can see okay the the jobs the departments that do real
work it uh hr they’re going down but management is going up all right so the people who do actually
no work their jobs keep on going up and up and they get paid more and more and as i said the
problem with bureaucracy is not only do managers do nothing every day but they expect others to do
more work okay so professors researchers teachers they’re doing more work because the managers are
given more paperwork to do okay like evaluations and all that so professors spend all now almost
20 percent of their work day on paperwork given to them by managers and this paperwork is not
necessary it’s just given to them to justify the jobs of the managers okay this is america we go
back to america and as you can see um this is a university called gallaudet debt and as you can
see over a 20-year period there’s the blue are the salaries of professors and it’s pretty stable okay
you went from 72 to 86 not a huge increase but look for managers okay the president it doubled
from 141 to 280 it doubled right now the salaries are over three times as much as faculty um this is
connecticut at yale the president makes two million dollars a year at westland he makes
three million dollars a year okay um this is a private university called stratford university
and they went bankrupt right now more and more universities are going bankrupt because obviously
you have too many managers and all they do is um get huge paychecks for doing nothing eventually
you’re gonna go bankrupt right so yeah sorry to interrupt but the school the school board is not
stupid so i mean this is a fact and so why why don’t they just change anything that’s a great
question okay the reason why is to all friends the school board the president the vice president
they’re all friends and that’s why they can do this because they control all the power they’re
all friends and it’s in their best interest to steal together right because if you’re still by
yourself then you might get caught but if you’re still together then you’re untouchable okay so
this is exactly what happens at stratford university the university was bankrupt
and because the president and the vice president are stealing from the university stealing because
they are not only collecting huge paychecks but they’re also expensing everything to the
university so for example for example they buy a car or they have a gym membership they charge
the university and if the university can’t pay for it what they do is they lend money to the
university okay all right so schultz is a president he lists himself and his wife as the biggest
creditors claiming that the university owes a couple 2.5 million for eight promising notes okay
So the university could not pay their cars or their house mortgages and the social are
like, don’t worry about it, we’ll lend you the money.
And then when the university went bankrupt, it was like, okay, now you have to pay me
back.
All right.
So again, how were they able to do this?
Because the filings also shed light on payments to university insiders in its final year of
operation.
The college paid out of over $30,000 in stipend to seven trustees.
the people at the top were getting paid off even as the university was going bankrupt. Though the
filing doesn’t differentiate which expenses were Richard’s and which were Marianne’s, the filings
for 2020 alone showed over $18,000 in lease and insurance payments for the Schultz cars. So they
had cars and they were making the university pay for these cars. Over $4.7 million in loan payments
and collateral return to Eagle Bank on behalf of the Schultz. So they’re also making the university
to pay for their houses as well.
And then you’re like, how could they do this?
Well the answer is because in America,
the rich always wins in the court system.
So whoever is able to hire the best lawyers
always wins out.
And they have a lot of money,
the university’s bankrupt, they don’t have a lot of money.
So they will win out.
So I point this out because this is what’s gonna happen
to many universities over the next five, 10 years in America
because you have a system where you have the managers
At the top, they are all best friends,
they’re all stealing from the university together.
And eventually the university will go bankrupt.
So, that’s America.
Okay, but again, it’s not just the universities,
it’s every bureaucracy,
every organization is happening like this.
So you look at Canada.
In Canada, you can see a rise of 9% in the population,
but look at the government, okay?
It’s went up by 26%.
In America, you can see a stark decline
in manufacturing jobs starting in about the 1980s,
because these jobs are being offshored to China.
But at the same time, you see this steady increase
in government jobs, okay?
So people in America are doing less real work,
and more and more people are becoming bureaucrats.
Okay, so as you can see,
the growth in the government is usually in management, okay?
People who do real work, no, it’s pretty flat.
But look at the managers, look at the administrators, okay?
They’re going way up, and it’s a pretty steady increase.
All right, so how do we know
the government doesn’t really do anything?
Okay, so there’s a study that shows us that it’s looking at rules, okay?
So rules help society be more efficient.
So as you can see, the number of rules have gone down, actually.
The number of significant rules, rules that actually impact you day to day, have gone way down.
But, this is interesting, the paperwork has gone up, okay?
So this tells us the managers, the administrators in the federal government of the United States,
they don’t do anything but produce paperwork that’s meaningless that’s actually no impact
on the lives of ordinary people okay okay let’s look at the military military so everyone believes
that america has the world’s greatest military because it spends the most on the military and
has all these high-tech weapons right the problem is the bureaucracy in the military right now so
you see what’s happening is an increase in management because the ratio of manager officer
two soldier is going down okay so you have more officers and less soldiers
that’s a problem you’re fighting a war all right so in a civil war and this is
the 1860s you had one officer for every 14 soldiers now it’s one to four okay
the biggest problem is the increase in generals okay so you can see three and
four star journals have increased the most in World War two America had about
12 million soldiers. They had seven generals who were four-star. Today, America has about 1.2
million soldiers. They have 40 four-star generals. And this is a huge problem. Why? Because if you’re
a four-star general, you have a lot of privileges beyond your salary. So this is from Raymond Dubas,
who works in the Pentagon, and he writes about the perks of a four-star general. A four-star
has an airplane. A three-star often doesn’t. Can a three-star get an airplane when he needs it?
Not always, okay? So a four-star general always has his own personal airplane. What is his personal
airplane? It’s called a G5. This is what a G5 is, guys. This is what a G5 is. This is his own
personal plane. It’s always there for him. If he doesn’t want to fly, it’s waiting on the tarmac
for him okay you can see how luxurious it is this costs 50 to 60 million dollars per plane every
four-star general has this plane at the same time guys what’s happening to soldiers the soldiers
don’t have enough to eat there’s 1.2 million veterans on food stamps okay that’s eight percent
of all veterans in america the people who actually fight the people actually make sacrifices for their
country don’t have enough to eat while the generals fly around in like these really nice planes that’s
the state of the american military all right so it’s not just the military it’s every single
u.s government department okay all the administrator you see massive increase in
administration all right so people do real work hey is the red people who do actually no work is
the blue okay so people who do science math engineering 621 people who do administration
1782 so in every federal bureaucracy you have bloat you have managers who do nothing and you
have very few people who do the actual real work it’s it’s true for every single federal
organization in in america so this just shows you how the ratio of managers and supervisors
to other employees what’s really funny about bureaucracy is evaluation is very important
who does the evaluation managers do the evaluation so at the end of the year they do they do
performance review and what happens is they tell they evaluate themselves and their friends that
you really did a great job they then look at other people who do the real work and says you guys can
do better okay so outstanding is the highest uh performance reveal for the government right
62 64 got outstanding okay managers who do nothing every day 47 got outstanding for every other job
all right so it’s a wig game same same thing with hospitals the the brown is the growth in doctors
you can see it’s pretty steady but look at the administrators okay the yellow are the
administrators it it’s blowing up okay and so it caught it forces healthcare costs to go up
the reason why healthcare is so unaffordable united states is not because it has the best
healthcare in the world it doesn’t it’s so it’s expensive because it’s got so many administrators
who do nothing every day all right so what do what do these managers do well the managers always
think of new ways to screw everyone else okay so these are health insurance companies and this is
their denial rates okay so you work hard for 40 years you pay your health insurance okay and then
maybe you get cancer and then you go to a doctor the doctor charges you like a million dollars
and you’re like you don’t have a million dollars but you have insurance so you go to insurance
company it’s like hey i paid 40 years of insurance fees can you help me out i mean and look the
insurance company united healthcare about a third 32 percent of all claims are denied and they do
this as practice because if you fight them they’ll say okay you know what we’ll we’ll we’ll agree to
pay you back okay but if you don’t fight them then they’re like great okay so it’s extremely
unethical and so that’s what managers do every day think of new ways to screw over their patients
and doctors all right so why is this happening all right why is america like this why is the
west like this why is the entire world like this so this is france kafka and he was writing before
world war one this is his most famous book called the trial okay i’m not sure if you guys have read
this book or heard of heard of this book okay it’s very good and the novel it’s a very interesting
novel because the main character joseph k he works at a bank he’s a black bank clerk and he
has never gone into trouble his entire life okay he’s very obedient he’s very nice he just sticks
to himself and then one day the police come and arrest him the police don’t tell him why and
joseph k tries to figure out why but he does not know what he did wrong he does not know why he’s
being arrested and then he’s put on trial and the judge doesn’t tell him what he did wrong okay and
just in case trying to figure out what is happening to me okay and this and and this is his answer
its purpose is to arrest innocent people and wage pointless prosecutions against them which
as in my case lead to no result how are we to avoid those in office becoming deeply corrupt
when everything is devoid of meaning okay because society has become a bureaucracy and bureaucrats
need things to do so they go the police go and arrest innocent people and then send them to
trial okay now what he doesn’t say is the police could arrest criminals right
but the police don’t want to do that because the criminals might fight back
or the criminals might be mean okay they rather arrest an innocent person because
they know the person will be compliant okay that’s a logic of bureaucrats how
do I justify my existence by doing as little work as possible okay so this
sounds strange but let me tell you a story this is a true story I’m in
Toronto with my two boys and I let them run around the park okay and we’ve been
doing this for two months so I trust them one of my boys he’s four years old
he runs too far and I lose track of him okay a stranger finds him and starts
talking to him but my boy doesn’t speak any english so people now surround my boy like where
where’s where your parents and he is scared because he doesn’t speak any english so he faints okay
that’s what he does he faints to protect himself so they call the police and they call the paramedics
they come and they make sure he’s all right okay now i find him okay and now the police interview
me they interrogate me and i explain to him what happened and at this point they just let us go
home right but they insist on taking us to the hospital i’m like if we go to the hospital we
can be stuck there for like 12 hours we can be in line and like the paramedics the mat has already
told us there’s something wrong with him okay it’s not heat stroke he just fainted but he’s fine
his vital signs are fine but the police kept on insisting meanwhile there’s a fight going on at
the park okay and i’m thinking myself why are you guys bothering me and not going to arrest those
guys who are fighting somewhere else and the answer is because it’s easier to deal with me
than this to go arrest those guys okay that’s how bureaucrats think they’re always thinking of ways
to justify the existence but not do real work okay and that’s the message of the trial
eventually society becomes so bureaucratic that the bureaucrats only think about how to make
problems for ordinary citizens because life becomes easier for them okay does that make sense
all right let’s move on to the origins of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt
is the 20th century’s one of the 20th century’s most powerful intellectuals and she’s writing
about how nazism came to dominate germany now communism came to dominate soviet russia and how
these two regimes led to the deaths of tens of millions of people how they started world war ii
how they quit the holocaust how they quit the famine okay and in her book she she says that
these two regimes are religious cults they’re evil cults and they have three defining characteristics
okay the first is that they’re removed from reality they don’t care about reality they have
a religion they have a faith they have a mindset and they want to impose their faith on reality
okay they don’t care about reality they’re removed from reality that’s the first thing okay second
thing is that when you’re removed from reality your only logic is movement expansion okay you
You only know if you’re right if you’re growing, okay?
So if the Nazis, their faith, their religion would lead to the destruction of Germany,
but their membership was increasing.
So they were right.
They were winning these wars against European countries.
Therefore, they’re right, okay?
They cannot use logic to explain their actions.
So they use movement to justify their actions, okay?
That’s number two.
one and two means number three which is the nazis and the soviets hated reality they defied reality
they fought against reality so even though the nazis were losing the war even though it’s clear
they could not defeat the soviet russia they doubled down because in their religion movement
is what matters defying reality is what matters and that’s what led to the destruction of germany
okay all right so and she explains that totalitarian regimes have these three characteristics
They are removed from reality, all they care about is expansionism, and they want to defy
reality as their true test of faith.
What she does not say in the book is that these three can apply to all bureaucracies,
all governments, meaning that over time, all governments, all bureaucracies will tend towards
totalitarianism.
they have that’s the only way they can justify their existence okay does that make sense all
right so let’s let’s talk about this concretely okay what do i mean by this so this is a book
by james scott it’s an excellent book by the way uh called seeing like a state and he’s trying to
explain to us how properties work how governments function and for him governments actually create
more problems than they solve. Why? Well, he lists four reasons. The first is that all they
care about is the administrative ordering of nature and society. So another way of saying this
is a bureaucracy is a machine. It’s a hierarchy. It’s static. It’s mechanical. But society is like
a forest. It’s diverse. It’s an ecosystem. It’s organic. For a state to exist, it must turn the
forest into a machine like itself so it destroys diversity it destroys
spontaneous spontaneity it destroys imagination okay all right so let let’s use an example of
this all right so my question to you is like who are you can you can you tell us who are you like
like who are you as a person tell us who you are as a person yeah yeah just just use one or two
minutes to to introduce yourself who are you as a person hi my name is banker and i i grew up
in beijing uh and i came to moonshot this school in 2024 last year and uh okay wrong wrong okay
that’s not the correct answer the right answer is you’re a teenage boy oh okay that’s the correct
answer all right you believe that you are an individual with individual aspirations ambitions
with a past with history the state doesn’t care the state needs to classify you in a way that can
that can use you okay you’re a teenage boy which means like two years time you can be employed in
a factory or i can send you to war okay that’s all i care about okay i don’t care about your name i
don’t care about who you are i don’t care who your parents are i don’t care about your past i don’t
care what you like all i care about is the fact that you are a teenage boy and therefore i can
i can exploit you for labor okay that’s how states think okay so the bureaucratization of society
second is the idea of high modernist ideology so because the state is a monopoly the bureaucracy
is a monopoly it becomes arrogant it has hubris it’s overconfident and it wants to impose its
ideology on everyone else it believes that through its own planning it can achieve paradise okay um
So it becomes authoritarian meaning it refuses to listen to criticism to feedback to questions
It does it is not open to debate it and it imposes its will on people
Okay, which creates a weak civil society and if if as organization you’re not getting feedback
You’re not allowing for openness then you will wither and die
Okay, and that’s why states governments will always fail in
the end okay so he uses two examples the first example is what happened in the
late 19th century Germany so in Germany there’s there’s lots of forests and the
state is thinking of ways how can we how can we best monetize the resource of the
forest well there’s certain trees that you can cut down for lumber right the
problem is that in a forest most space is occupied by useless shrubs or
greenery or trees okay so their bright idea is you know what here’s a simple
solution we’ll burn on the forest and just plant trees that we can harvest for
lumber right brilliant that’s a burnt use of space it’s more efficient the
problem though is that when you do that the trees are now are susceptible to
disease to weather changes a forest is resilient because it’s diverse okay so that’s what this
is what scott says monocultures are as a rule more fragile and hence more vulnerable to the
stress of disease and weather than polycultures are any unmatched forest may experience stress
from storms disease drought fragile soil or severe cold a diverse complex forest however
with its many species of trees its full complement of birds insects and mammals is far more resilient
far more able to stand recover from such injuries than pier stands so nature has diversity because
it allows for resilience okay some part of the forest can die but the rest of the forest will
recover from anything whether it’s disease or drought or weather okay and we humans are the
same way if you let humans do what they want we are resilient so some communities might die off
but other communities will adapt the problem with state the government is that it refuses
it sees diversity as an enemy okay so if there’s a natural disaster it’s very likely that a lot
more people die off than otherwise okay another example is force communism in tanzania okay so
it’s a top-down system and their idea is okay these farmers have their little small farms
and they grow their crops but that’s not efficient what if we just got all the farmers together and
had coffee and they all you know had coffee uh or wheat or whatever and then we can sell this to
other countries okay and of course you can imagine that this will lead to starvation because it’s the
same principle as the forest if there’s a weather crisis or if there’s a disease then all your crops
die off and then your people die off okay what these planners carried in their mind’s eye was
certain aesthetic what one might call a visual codification of modern world production and
community community life okay so the problem bureaucrats is they have no imagination everything
to them has to be mapped out they like things that can be mapped out that can that can be a blue
They like to brag about these things because that’s how they see the world.
But in the real world, nature requires diversity, it requires organic.
So he gives examples of how the state transforms society.
So before, what happened is that people would just come together and they would organize
the communities according to their needs.
a bottom-up process but the state wants to create permanent cities where people
are just in one place all the time right that’s why you have cities before what’s
natural is just for people to live on small farms and share stuff with other
people to trade with each other the problem with this is the state cannot
tax you so what the state does is it brings you to cities makes you work in a
factory so we can tax you okay the point of giving a wage is so it can tax you to
exploit you property before it was very common for people to share property
together okay now there’s it’s all owned and controlled by the state resources
are the same thing before people just use resources according to needs but now
the state wants to centralize these resources okay so we can tax and exploit
people properly okay so that’s what a state proxy does so what are the consequences of the
over-bureaucratization of society well what’s happening in america is that while consumer goods
like cars clothing and cell phones are going down what’s going up are hospital services schooling
okay housing why because these are monopolies controlled by bureaucrats right so what’s
happening is with the over-paralyzing of society it’s almost impossible for middle-class people
ordinary people to have a good life now okay here’s another really interesting chart the black
shows you the growth in the stock market okay and you think you think wow this is a good thing okay
the problem is first of all only 10 percent of people in the united states control most of the
stocks not over 90 of the stocks the other issue is this the other issue is if you look at prices
yeah it’s gone up but if you just turn but if you look at stocks as a units of gold if you just go
to buy stocks guess what the price of stocks have gone down that’s a blue okay if you use money to
buy stocks it goes up but if you use gold to buy stocks it goes down what this is telling us okay
Very simple is, we are living in a lie.
All this wealth generation, it’s all a lie.
It’s not real.
We just think it’s real.
We’re living in a fairyland created by bureaucrats
to fool us to believe that we are prosperous.
Okay, does that make sense?
The amount of gold that you can buy with stocks
has gone down, okay?
And so the blue is the gold, the black is money.
The money is worthless, okay?
All right, another problem that bureaucrats
has created is people don’t want to work anymore so in america this is called quite quitting in
china it’s called tongue ping or by line okay lying flat let it rot people don’t want to work
anymore why because it’s pointless to work in a bureaucracy right leaders don’t care the organization
doesn’t need you you are alienated you are told what to do and you cannot negotiate you cannot
rise within the bureaucracy you’re being asked to work too much you feel as though you’re just
a machine okay and so you’re and so the way you rebel is lying flat they are quite quitting okay
so your over fair credit system society means that people now have become more lazy more complacent
more more indifferent and what this also means is that democracy is declining because people’s
voice people people’s power is declining okay so you can see that people feel as though
democracy is in the decline in fact experts um estimate that democracy the capacity for people
to participate in politics the capacity for people to influence politics has declined rapidly these
past 10 years okay so we are living in a world that is becoming more and more bureaucratic
and it’s killing us okay all right questions so as you say we now live in a very corrupt
world we live in a bureaucratic world yeah very credible so what so i i can’t really see the
future of no matter it’s the mankind or like are there any good side of the current world okay what
what are good things about the current world well the good um side is that because things have
become so corrupt people now are forced to think for themselves right before you could just trust
your teacher you just trust your parent you just trust authority figures but now you see them for
the bureaucrats that they are and so now you’re forced to think forced to think for yourself
and so you’re not forced to educate yourself you’re not forced to explore different opinions
so people’s minds are opening and that i think is a very good thing in today’s world okay any
more questions so will it help if we cancel uh most of the managers and just like keep one or
two of them like yeah okay so that’s a really good question okay if this is a problem why not just
give it the managers and the answer is they have all the power okay they would much rather send
you to war and kill you off than to tend to lose their jobs okay so go back to example of strafford
university that’s that their mentality is how do i maintain my privilege they don’t care about
society all they care about is maintaining their privilege right so they are bankrupt society and
then when society becomes bankrupt they expect society to still continue to pay them off okay
so these are parasites and there’s nothing we can do about it yeah yeah um as we just said
other less teacher and less professor or like like most people would choose to quite quitting
then who are they going to control if there’s less people to work for them you know okay
that’s a really good question the problem is they don’t think like that don’t think about
how efficient is my organization don’t think about like am i going to have a job next five years all
they care about is maintaining the position right here and now okay the way they do that is they
hire their friends or people like them into other management positions so they become like a cabal
or or a network onto themselves and for them they they become parasites and what parasites want to
do is they want to feed off the host and the host dies what’s going to happen they will switch to
another host right why because they’re all part of larger networks as well so that’s how they think
they’re thinking well you know as long as society survives i will continue to have a job okay so
maybe this university goes bankrupt but there’s another university i can go to and exploit and
and you know what it works okay because people at the top protect each other all right okay
does that make sense don’t care about this whole this host you don’t care about this organization
they don’t care if it goes bankrupt because they can always move on to another organization to
bankrupt okay what matters is to maintain their patronage the political networks so they all help
each other okay that doesn’t make sense okay great any more questions um is there any possible to
stop or even reverse this uh corroborating system yeah um i keep on explaining this this okay they
are the ones in power and so what has to happen is often society has to collapse before society
can regenerate before society can rejuvenate okay but before society can collapse they have a lot of
tricks up their sleeves okay so for example they can create civil wars where the left and the right
fight each other and they’re left alone or they can use ai to control you right ai is god guys
listen to god okay or they can fake an alien invasion okay or they can send you to war
they can start all these pointless wars okay but whatever it takes in order to maintain their
privilege and their power that’s the mentality and that’s how they got to where they are okay
and that’s how they lead think any more questions guys okay mr john my question is um so i’m a 12
grader so if you are in my shoe like if you are in a 12 grader in nowadays what would you do like
are you still going to pursue for a further education a higher education or
were you going to like just drop out yeah okay
that is a great question so you are you guys are about to go to university and
as i told you in this class university is a complete
ripoff okay all you’re doing is you’re paying for the
nice salaries and perks of these administrators at university
you’re not really paying for the professors
all right you’re paying for the administrators to have their nice lives
and so what i would do is maybe not go to university what i would do is focus on education
on learning by reading a lot of books by asking a lot of questions and doing my own research
by learning real skills okay so in a site like this where the game is rigged going to university
means that you’ll just lose okay maybe before like 20 30 years ago it was good to go it was
good to go to university because you might become a manager but now all those slots have been taking
taken up by the elite and the children okay there’s no space for you so the only thing you can
do in this context is to really start educating yourself in real knowledge all right reading books
um meeting lots of different people exploring the world okay like really develop real knowledge
right that’s that’s the best solution all right any more questions doesn’t matter to the major
no it does not matter the major it’s all a scam okay yeah okay okay it’s all a scam
uh it’s all a scam okay doesn’t matter what university you go to liberal arts
ivy league state it’s all scam doesn’t matter what your major is economics psychology humanities
computer science it’s all a scam okay the system exists so that the
managers administrators can continue to feed off the system all right okay guys
so uh we’ll continue this next week okay all right but thank you for the questions
Source: Predictive History