The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Golden Ages ｜ Interview with Johan Norberg

00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone. Welcome to this interview of the Lotus Eaters. I'm very pleased to be interviewing 0.99

00:00:04.620 Johan Norberg. Thank you very much for being with us.

00:00:08.860 And Johan Norberg is an historian, an author, and a commentator, also a senior fellow of the

00:00:15.500 Cater Institute, and author of books like Peak Human, What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall

00:00:21.720 of Golden Ages. And also, you have written a book called The Capitalist Manifesto,

00:00:26.000 and many more books. And The Capitalist Manifesto is called Why the Global Free Market Will Save the

00:00:32.500 World. And as I was saying before, I follow your work for a long time, especially after I watched

00:00:39.120 a documentary you did about Adam Smith. So thank you very much for this, and I'm very pleased to be

00:00:44.020 interviewing you today. Thanks for the opportunity.

00:00:46.920 Right. So the first thing that I'm very happy about is that this book is very optimistic,

00:00:56.400 Peak Human. Everyone can watch it here. And we live in a world that has pessimistic tendencies,

00:01:03.600 and especially on social media and the news, there seems to be too much negativity and too little

00:01:12.100 stress on positivity. So it's good to have some optimistic books once in a while. And I wanted

00:01:19.280 to ask you to start by asking you a personal question. So what made you want to be an intellectual

00:01:26.180 and an author?

00:01:29.560 Yeah, that's a great question. And it depends on how deep you go. It could be just the love of books and

00:01:37.840 of literature and of history and wanting to live in that world. But obviously, you need some kind of

00:01:46.160 message as well. I guess that's one reason why I always wanted to write, do research, learn more,

00:01:55.280 and talk about what I've learned in various ways. And I think that's partly because I

00:02:00.180 learned something important when I was young, and that was that my worldview was all wrong.

00:02:07.280 And my worldview back then, which was very pessimistic, quite anti-capitalist, very much opposed to

00:02:15.300 the modern world generally, and then realizing how much my life, the fact that I managed to grow up

00:02:25.220 in a country free from poverty, hunger and despair was very much thanks to the Industrial Revolution,

00:02:34.180 thanks to trade, to business, to technology. And well, if I could be wrong about that, lots of others

00:02:43.300 could be wrong about that as well. And I wanted to tell that story. So in some way, that's one of my

00:02:50.220 motivations. When you were more pessimistic, did you feel a sentiment of complete hopelessness

00:03:02.220 of the modern world? I think you mentioned the modern world when you described your previous situation.

00:03:08.220 Would you say that before you thought that everything was doomed to an inevitable decline?

00:03:13.180 And if so, how did this change?

00:03:18.140 Yes, no, I think that's a good description of where I was. I thought that the modern world was

00:03:26.140 sort of ugly, hopeless, unjust in various ways. And then you start to think that if you don't fit in,

00:03:35.520 I mean, when you're young, you rarely think you fit in anywhere, right? But you assume that there must have

00:03:40.960 been some past where we lived more in harmony with one another and with nature and only going back

00:03:47.040 there would make sense. What helped me to get out of that perspective was studying history and

00:03:55.120 realizing that there were no good old days back then. Life was nasty, brutish and short. And my ancestors

00:04:02.000 in northern Sweden, they usually starved when the weather was bad. So understanding that they didn't

00:04:08.000 live ecologically, they died ecologically at a very young age, that got me away from that mentality.

00:04:16.160 I suspect that empirical data was paramount in your changing of perspective. Because a lot of the time

00:04:25.120 people think very metaphysically, and they tend to subscribe to some views of history, according to

00:04:31.440 which, like some understandings of Plato, history is just a rapid decline and nothing can halt it,

00:04:38.880 basically. And essentially reading history, but also focusing on empirical data helps. And I think

00:04:45.600 that you have been doing this throughout your work, because especially, for instance, when you're talking

00:04:50.240 about capitalism, you are mentioning data against lots of leftists and lots of people who are too much

00:04:57.680 prone towards statism. Yes, that's right. And, you know, I don't think that every person who is supposed

00:05:04.960 to free markets and to open liberal democracies are driven by data to end up there. It might be that they

00:05:19.840 have completely different values and attitudes to what's good in life. But I think I have a very hard time

00:05:27.280 convincing them. But there are lots of people who reject free market capitalism, because they think

00:05:35.520 that it's bad, that the outcomes are bad, that it hurts the poor, that it hurts the middle classes.

00:05:40.560 And then they're just wrong on a factual basis. And I think it is easier to come up with an empirical

00:05:46.720 case that might actually convince them. Yes. Okay, so I agree with this. And I have met people of the sort.

00:05:56.000 Right. So I wanted to ask you about your northern Sweden and Scandinavia, because I constantly see

00:06:03.280 people, especially from the social democrat left, who present Scandinavia as a sort of social democrat

00:06:11.120 paradise. And I hear also people from who are not leftists who say the exact opposite. Now, where would you

00:06:19.520 fall there? And what do you think about this idea that Scandinavia has been a social democrat paradise?

00:06:27.200 Yeah, no, it's interesting. And what I'm trying to tell people about my own country is that

00:06:32.800 Sweden has been socialist, and it has been a great, thriving, rich society, but never simultaneously,

00:06:41.600 never at the same time. So I mean, the background, when we really grew much faster than the rest of

00:06:47.840 the world and created one of the richest civilizations that has ever existed, that was a 100 year period

00:06:55.200 from roughly 1870 to 1970. And that was when Sweden had a very limited government, a very open economy,

00:07:03.120 very free market oriented. As late as the 1960s, we had lower taxes than other European countries,

00:07:10.000 lower taxes than the United States. And that made us incredibly rich. But then for a brief moment in

00:07:15.760 time, then Swedish politicians thought, we have all this wealth, why not spend it? Why not redistribute it

00:07:21.760 and increase public consumption? And they doubled the size of government, they regulated most things

00:07:27.760 in Sweden. And that's when we got a 25 year period of quite socialist policies in Sweden. But that was

00:07:34.800 not our golden age. That was more like our Atlas Shrugged era, when the great innovators, the businesses

00:07:43.840 like IKEA, they left Sweden, for other places, because they couldn't do business back there. Since then,

00:07:50.640 it ended in a terrible financial crisis in the early 1990s. Since then, Sweden has reformed again and

00:07:56.400 liberalized this economy. So once again, I would say that it's more free market than most European

00:08:03.280 countries. And it's also outperforming most of them again. But this time around, it's a little bit more

00:08:09.920 mixed than it was before. But it's quite easy to see that when we had the most big governments,

00:08:15.520 we did the biggest mistakes. Okay, so in a textbook fashion, lots of statists come in in the 70s,

00:08:23.840 they get the credit, and they try to create a propaganda, whose narrative says that they get

00:08:29.120 the credit for the wealth that the free market produced, or the freer market produced. And they

00:08:35.520 completely destroyed everything afterwards. Okay, that was a bit hyperbolic. But essentially, that was it.

00:08:41.360 Yeah. And I mean, if you have already created a thriving society, very wealthy country with big

00:08:49.280 businesses ranking in the export revenue, it's easy to make mistakes for a while without everything

00:08:56.800 falling apart. But we were quickly losing economic growth compared to others, we didn't create a single

00:09:04.240 net job in the private sector for more than 30 years. We didn't create the new employment opportunities or

00:09:11.120 businesses or technologies. So it was a slow but steady decline during those years. However,

00:09:18.480 compared to other countries, it might have seen that, yeah, we were still one of the richest countries

00:09:23.920 in the world. Only relatively, we were losing out. But it's like that old joke, how do you end up

00:09:30.560 with a small fortune? Well, you start with a large fortune, and then you waste some of it.

00:09:35.440 I remember watching the historian Neil Ferguson telling to people from Scandinavia that there

00:09:44.640 have been issues with Scandinavian multiculturalist policies, and that in some cases, there has been

00:09:51.200 lack of integration of some migrant communities. Would you say that this is a fair criticism?

00:09:58.400 I think it is. I think some of it might be exaggerated, because from a distance,

00:10:04.960 everything seems hopeless. I think overall, integration has worked fairly well in Sweden.

00:10:10.960 But we have also had a very large refugee immigration in recent years, from places, and this is from Syria to

00:10:20.320 Afghanistan to African countries where we've had very low levels of education, sometimes low levels of

00:10:30.400 literacy as well. Harder time to integrate, especially in a country where everything has been fairly

00:10:35.760 homogenous so far in many of our systems. So for example, in a weird paradox, we have

00:10:42.720 more people who've arrived recently without any kind of advanced education, but we also have, as a share of

00:10:51.440 the workforce, fewer simple jobs that don't require any advanced education than any other European Union

00:11:00.160 country. And obviously, if you then combine that with relatively generous welfare policies,

00:11:06.800 it means that you'll see large-scale unemployment, exclusion, many people not ending up in work where

00:11:15.360 they learn the skills, the connections, the language, but instead end up in relatively isolated enclaves.

00:11:24.160 That creates old manners of problems with integration, with crime, and so on.

00:11:30.000 Absolutely, yes. Right, so I think it's a good idea if we go to your latest book, Peak Human.

00:11:37.200 And I want to ask you, what do you think is a golden age? How best should we understand the golden age?

00:11:44.480 And how does discourse about golden ages differ from mythologizing golden ages?

00:11:51.760 That's an incredibly important question, because they're not really the same.

00:11:55.360 To me, a golden age is an episode of creative and a creative explosion, where we see a large

00:12:03.680 number of innovations taking place in different spheres, different sections of life. So it's

00:12:09.920 associated with cultural creativity, technological innovation, scientific discovery, and economic

00:12:16.240 growth. So it's an era with rapidly emergent novelty.

00:12:21.120 That's not the same as the mythology of a particular era and the way in which people lived back then,

00:12:30.240 because that's usually more of the museum version of a golden age, where you think about how they dressed,

00:12:36.880 the kind of art that they produced. It could become quite sterile. And oftentimes when we want to go back

00:12:44.160 there, we just imitate sort of going through the motions rather than going to that sense of exploration

00:12:52.240 and innovation that really made them powerful. So what I would say is that a golden age is something

00:12:59.840 where we don't really envy the particular way in which they lived, because obviously compared to us,

00:13:06.480 all past ages have been very poor and less free. It's not how they lived or how they dressed, but it's

00:13:13.360 the way they look to the future. That's what I envy, the way in which they thought that they could

00:13:18.320 accomplish things, they could create a better life for them and for their societies.

00:13:22.880 Right. I remember Hesiod in Works and Days is talking about the myth of the golden ages. And he says

00:13:32.480 that the land was freely giving goods to people. Essentially, you say that there was lack of economic

00:13:41.520 scarcity. But in your book, I think you mean something a bit different. You are talking also about how

00:13:49.440 people dealt with economic scarcity with an open mind as well, which led to creativity. And in some

00:13:55.840 cases, lots of unpredictable successes, like with the Dutch Republic. Right. Okay. So when it comes to

00:14:05.680 golden ages, do you think that there is a tendency of people right now to look at the past and try to

00:14:14.960 romanticize it? And if you think that this is sometimes wrong, what's the difference between

00:14:20.240 talking about golden ages in the past and romanticizing the past?

00:14:26.720 Yeah, great question. Yes, I think we are in such a situation right now. There's lots of nostalgia,

00:14:32.960 and I can understand that and sympathize with that when the world seems dangerous. Obviously, we want to

00:14:38.160 assume that there was some sort of past when we didn't face problems like this.

00:14:43.120 That's not what I take away from history. When I study the history books and my ancestors, they faced

00:14:50.000 horrible problems and disasters constantly. But what made them get through it was often this sort of

00:14:56.880 focusing minds on how they could innovate around problems and moving on. And that's what I envy when it

00:15:04.960 comes to golden ages. It's not the same thing as romanticizing the past, romanticizing these ages, because

00:15:11.360 that's the way of where we think that that's where we would have wanted to live. I don't think we do.

00:15:17.360 Mary Beard, the classicist, she points out that when people say they would have wanted to live in the Roman Empire,

00:15:23.920 they usually assume that they would have been emperors or senators, which is a few hundred people rather than one of the poor farmers or

00:15:32.240 millions of slaves in various places. So it's not that lifestyle. But the way in which they in these

00:15:39.360 eras managed to constantly be creative and come up with new ways of tackling problems, that's what make them

00:15:47.440 really unique. And that's what we should imitate, not the particular way that they lived. One particular example is, you know,

00:15:54.240 the Ming Dynasty in China in the 14th and 15th century and onwards, they were romantics and nostalgics.

00:16:04.240 They thought that there must have been a golden age in the past. So they tried to retreat to that,

00:16:10.240 burning the boats and the maps, because we don't need foreign trade and foreign ideas and new technologies,

00:16:16.240 and even forced people to dress the way they did 500 years earlier, because that was the way to romanticize

00:16:22.960 what was going on there. That didn't create a golden age, that created 500 years of stagnation,

00:16:28.160 because it turned off the taps of new ideas, innovations, business models.

00:16:34.960 Sounds ill-advised, right? So what do you think are the main causes of a golden age? So if we don't have a golden age right now?

00:16:45.120 Or if a society isn't in a particularly golden state, let's say, in its trajectory, how do we bring a golden age about?

00:16:58.480 Yeah, unfortunately, it's often quite surprising. You rarely plan a golden age, and then it happens.

00:17:07.520 It happens because you suddenly have this surge of energy in a certain place, a certain area. Oftentimes,

00:17:13.760 the basic ingredients are imitation and innovation. You need some ideas to innovate, to imitate, to learn from.

00:17:22.720 Often they appear in the crossroads between different civilizations. Often they're maritime cultures,

00:17:29.680 trading constantly with the outside world and meeting merchants, migrants, missionaries who come up with new ideas,

00:17:38.160 new texts, new methods, new methods. Then you have to do something with those ingredients.

00:17:44.000 You need to have an innovative situation back home.

00:17:47.120 And one key input then is some sort of freedom for surprises, openness to surprises back home.

00:17:57.120 Allow farmers to experiment with new crops or irrigation systems or new ways of building businesses or lending

00:18:06.480 systems without trying to plan everything according to a blueprint. If you do that in the right way,

00:18:14.240 what emerges and that's really a key part is a culture of possibility, some sort of culture of optimism.

00:18:23.120 There are people begin to think that it's worth testing new ideas, it's worth experimenting,

00:18:29.280 it's worth investing in the future because it might work out and I might even get a huge monetary reward when

00:18:36.560 I do that. You need that sense of hope, the belief that it's worth exerting effort to create a better future.

00:18:45.360 Otherwise you won't.

00:18:46.240 Right. So how do you think golden ages end? What should we, if I'm in a, during a golden age,

00:18:54.720 if I'm living during a golden age, what should I guard against? What should I be vigilant against?

00:19:01.360 So what do I not want to see that may signal the end of the golden age I'm living in?

00:19:09.440 Yeah, the first thing that I would be worried about is this intolerance to surprises. You know,

00:19:17.440 all of these golden ages that I've looked at, when they begin to decline and eventually fall,

00:19:22.080 they have some sort of death to Socrates moment. You know, some moment when they sour on their

00:19:28.160 tradition of intellectual openness and innovation and start to execute their great philosophers.

00:19:34.880 And hopefully we don't go that far that we start to poison them or execute them, but it could happen

00:19:42.080 in other ways. A lack of an open debate, trying to implement an orthodoxy at universities or in the

00:19:51.040 the online media. That's a worrying sign. Any kind of shutdown of not just the intellectual openness,

00:20:00.080 but also economic openness. Dismantling or blocking, regulating too much, stopping new business models,

00:20:09.680 or abandoning trade. Abandoning the idea that we can get great goods, services, technologies,

00:20:16.400 and ideas from the outside world is usually a sign that we're in a bad place.

00:20:22.400 I suspect that you're not a fan of the sort of leftist ideology that, to a large extent,

00:20:29.840 has infiltrated universities and creates all sorts of problems about the flow of ideas.

00:20:39.040 No, that's right. When you start to think that this is a place where we only think in

00:20:43.920 one particular way and everything else is disturbing or immoral and you start to shout down speakers and

00:20:53.040 and teachers, if they provoke you in any way, that's the traditional sign that you're

00:21:00.800 you're in a bad place and you're not really open to this

00:21:04.240 this back and forth with people who do not share your ideas. They are your most important teachers,

00:21:14.800 even if they might be wrong. They've seen the world from another perspective and that helps you

00:21:19.760 to learn something that you didn't know before. So that's a bad sign. And the way to contrast a

00:21:29.280 lack of speech is more speech and freer speech rather than trying to implement some sort of

00:21:36.080 right-wing orthodoxy and punish everybody who thinks differently. So that's one thing that I'm

00:21:40.880 worried about with it. The present US administration doesn't make make it right.

00:21:48.880 Right. So I want to ask you something about psychology. It seems to me that the kind of psychology you

00:21:55.200 describe or the psychology that ends the golden age is a psychology according to which life is much more

00:22:02.880 painful than good. So we need to take all sorts of blocks towards the potential goods in order to avoid

00:22:14.640 potential pains. So it creates a sort of, would you say that there is a kind of pessimism towards life

00:22:21.760 itself and the mentality and psychology that ends a golden age or characterizes the ages of stagnation?

00:22:34.080 Yes, definitely. I mean, why do we bother? Why do we go out of bed in the morning or leave the cave

00:22:42.480 and go out there? It's because we have some sort of sense that, first of all, there must be something

00:22:50.160 exciting out there. It must be something to learn from or something useful or new partners, new ideas.

00:22:57.360 You also need some sort of sense in your own agency that you can accomplish things, that you're

00:23:02.960 responsible for the outcome so that it's worth going out there. And that's incredibly useful.

00:23:10.480 And when people are inspired to do that big term, that's really something that helps us to create

00:23:17.040 golden ages. But once we lose that hope, once we lose that conviction, that's when we start to go

00:23:26.400 downhill and ways for different reasons. But one of them is that it might be dangerous out there.

00:23:34.480 When you go out there, when you try something new, you might fail. It might be people out there who

00:23:41.280 don't want to help you out. They might even be dangerous to you. So in times of trouble,

00:23:46.880 you want to retreat to your cave, but you give up. You don't want to experiment with things long term,

00:23:52.640 because who knows if there's any point in doing that. This is one of the great signs right now of

00:24:03.280 cultural decline, I think. This lack of hope, this lack of believing in individual agency and in

00:24:12.640 individual agency. And that's very dangerous.

00:24:15.120 I want to add something now that's completely spontaneous because agency and free agency was

00:24:22.800 part of my PhD. I really think that there is a lot of anti-meritocratic sentiments

00:24:33.280 in the philosophy of the last 50 or 60 years. And this goes throughout the political spectrum. And I

00:24:42.960 think perhaps it is John Rawls who has been perhaps the most vocal opponent of the notion of dessert,

00:24:52.640 because he says, I think, in the theory of justice and then the sequels he made of that work, that

00:25:00.000 essentially that the notion of dessert makes no sense because it's based on free will and free will

00:25:05.680 makes no sense. So at the end of the day, what we do individually doesn't matter as far as what we

00:25:12.880 deserve. So we shouldn't think about what we deserve. And I think that's a disastrous notion.

00:25:18.880 And it also focuses so much on prioritizing just outcomes instead of what leads to these outcomes,

00:25:28.160 because a lot of people focus on power, but power isn't always exercised.

00:25:33.360 So I don't care if people have the same power of the same capacities. I think society needs to

00:25:39.040 prioritize and also promote people who exercise their powers. But for people like Rawls, this doesn't

00:25:45.520 matter because they constantly find reasons why, for instance, someone's agency was undermined,

00:25:54.080 because they start with a sort of egalitarian idea that fundamentally all human beings would do the

00:26:00.960 same thing. And if they act differently, it's something that is not up to them, that is the issue.

00:26:07.600 Would you say that you see this sort of attack on the notion of free agency in political philosophy,

00:26:14.480 but also in ethical philosophy of the last decades?

00:26:19.600 Oh, I do, for sure. And I'm glad you raised this, because this is a very dangerous sign for any society, I think.

00:26:26.960 I think this is partly because of intellectuals who have told us, who have sort of really dissected

00:26:40.000 human psychology and our biological existence to sell us the story that nothing is in our hands,

00:26:49.520 in our grasps and everything is outside influence, whether it be genes or the environment, no free

00:26:56.160 will. But then there's a popular version of it, which is very easy to sell for politicians and often populists

00:27:04.560 from the left to the right, telling everyone that, look, your problems is never your fault.

00:27:11.280 You have no responsibility. You have no agency. If something is bad, it's because somebody did this to you.

00:27:19.440 And we will help you then get to get to what you want, what you need, what you deserve.

00:27:25.040 And both those perspectives are selling us despair. They're selling us hopelessness, that no matter

00:27:36.960 what I do, it doesn't matter. And in that case, why bother? You're going to have to wait for a savior

00:27:43.600 instead of a big government coming in to help you. And obviously then that will undermine that cultural

00:27:52.000 sense of achievement and of optimism that we need. And I would go so far as to say that we need to

00:28:00.080 believe in agency. We need to believe in meritocracy and that we need to believe that we are responsible

00:28:09.200 for the outcomes in our life, even in an exaggerated way. Because obviously we all know this from

00:28:17.120 everything from introspection to studying society and history that, no, we're not responsible for

00:28:24.560 every single outcome. There are such things as a bad starting point or bad luck, obviously. But the

00:28:31.280 problem is if we exaggerate that, people will always give up and end up in a worse place. And there's such

00:28:38.880 strong evidence that people will do better. They will face better outcomes if they believe that their

00:28:46.560 responsible for the outcomes, even if they believe it in an exaggerated way. So whatever we do,

00:28:52.960 let's not sell them an exaggerated story that everything's hopeless.

00:28:57.440 Would you say that this is also part of the philosophy of welfarism, which I understand is a

00:29:02.560 very abstract and general point, but would you say that there are trends of welfarist approaches

00:29:09.280 to social phenomena and ethics that lead to the creation of a culture of dependency

00:29:17.600 and people thinking that, well, I deserve to get this or that good and access to this or that good,

00:29:26.080 irrespective of what I do? Because it doesn't matter what I do and it doesn't matter what the other

00:29:30.640 person does. Would you say that there is a strong tendency of welfarist thinking in that respect?

00:29:36.880 I would definitely say that that's where it ended up. It didn't always start that way. I think often

00:29:46.080 those who try to build some sort of social welfare systems, they still often believed in individual

00:29:54.320 responsibility and achievement, but thought that they could introduce some sort of safety net in times of

00:30:00.240 trouble in your own life or whether there are external reasons for you failing temporarily,

00:30:07.840 whether it be from bad health or what have you. The problem is when you start going that down that

00:30:13.520 road, it's easy to expand on that because there is no limit to what people want in terms of material

00:30:22.400 benefits and safety and security. It's never enough. And then there will always be a temptation to build on these

00:30:32.080 systems and to even encourage a certain degree of

00:30:38.000 of welfarism, selling people the idea that they are not responsible for the outcomes of their lives and

00:30:45.840 therefore they need more and more of government involvement on both the tax side and the benefit

00:30:51.840 side. And that's dangerous because it rarely ends before we end up in some sort of financial misery.

00:31:00.240 It also raises people and habituates them to think that they can get goods for nothing and they don't have

00:31:08.640 to practice virtues of industriousness themselves. Right. So, I want us to go to the Greco-Roman 1.00

00:31:16.560 antiquity because you start your book with ancient Athens and ancient Rome in the first two chapters,

00:31:25.040 if I'm, unless I'm, unless I'm mistaken. So, what would you say are the main cultural achievements of

00:31:31.360 Greco-Roman antiquity that are worthy of trying to retain or at least recapture in their spirit?

00:31:43.280 Well, it's difficult to limit it because they are responsible for so much from language to

00:31:55.200 philosophy, to religion, to our very words and our concepts of law. The fact that in America,

00:32:02.880 senators meet on the capital in a republic or we live in democracies. We got all of those ideas from

00:32:10.960 the Greeks and the Romans. We got the ideas that we should in some way limit the arbitrary powers of 0.91

00:32:19.120 government and give it to either the whole free male population, at least, or to some sort of

00:32:28.160 republican system where it's held in common by the people, even if it's not a democracy as such.

00:32:35.360 And those are all important achievements. But if I had to mention one, I would say the whole idea,

00:32:41.280 the very idea of intellectual innovation, because in previous societies, there had been in Mesopotamia,

00:32:48.080 in Egypt, there had been ideas of novel ideas, obviously. But people always try to say,

00:32:55.840 try to sell them by saying that, oh, I dug this up from my ancestors, or this was handed to us from

00:33:03.120 some sort of ancient god. For the first time in the Greek world, specifically in Athens, it was seen

00:33:11.280 as something that was important and worthwhile and even acquired you with status if you came up with

00:33:22.240 original ideas. If you managed to show, if Aristotle managed to show that Plato was mistaken, that was

00:33:29.920 actually something good. He didn't have to pretend that this is really what Plato meant. And I think that

00:33:36.480 all of our intellectual achievements since then are dependent on that basic insight.

00:33:42.320 There is a healthy emphasis on questions, I think, in ancient thought, especially in ancient Greece,

00:33:50.240 which I don't find in other cultures, at least to that level. And by that I mean cultures of the time,

00:33:58.240 because there was very sophisticated thinking, especially mythological thinking, in many other

00:34:05.440 cultures like ancient India, ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia. But I think that there does seem to be a

00:34:12.480 deviation from this, especially with Socrates and the Sophists, as far as discourse and questioning was

00:34:19.280 concerned. And I think that this did play a part in this innovative spirit that you mentioned.

00:34:25.440 But I think there's also a tragedy, because I remember in Herodotus, no, Thucydides,

00:34:31.760 apologies, who said that the Athenians had a very extroverted and creative spirit, which led them into

00:34:42.240 several adventures, whereas the Spartans were a bit more stagnant. They had a very stagnant soul along the

00:34:50.880 lines we discussed a few minutes ago. But it seems that the Spartans won the war. So when you say that in

00:34:58.160 some cases, there's sort of tragedy there.

00:35:02.640 Yeah, no, I agree with most of the things you said there, that healthy inquiry and constantly

00:35:08.960 challenging things, something like that. You know, Mount the Python explained this perfectly in the

00:35:15.200 Life of Brian movie, where, you know, Brian is talking, trying to come up with a story, you know,

00:35:20.160 there were two brothers. And the challenging Athenian, basically, in his mentality goes,

00:35:25.920 what were their names? What? I don't know. We need to know their names. You don't know these

00:35:32.160 characters you're talking about? Okay, they were called Simon and Adrian. Oh, but you said you didn't

00:35:36.640 know. He's making it up as he goes along. That kind of challenging perspective, I think, is what

00:35:42.640 helps us to get then to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and onwards. And then the question

00:35:49.280 is, is it always useful? Sometimes we have to gather forces and sort of unquestionably,

00:35:56.320 and without questions, just march towards a threat, which happens during the Peloponnesian War, for

00:36:03.760 example. And then, obviously, there are instances, it was a long, brutal war, I would call it at the end,

00:36:10.400 some sort of stalemate, even though the Spartans won that first round. There are instances where

00:36:19.680 authoritarian governments might keep up that sort of will and constantly push people onwards towards

00:36:29.120 certain death in some instances, whereas it might be more difficult in other places. And that, I mean,

00:36:34.880 we see parallels to that today with Russia being able to constantly push more people into the meat 0.91

00:36:43.600 grinder. And that's something that more open, innovative societies have to think about. We have

00:36:49.360 to make up for that by being more innovating, coming up with new technologies and using our resources to

00:36:58.160 really build stronger defenses through ingenuity rather than just authoritarian discipline.

00:37:08.080 It seems to me that just by focusing on openness, we aren't also focusing on the sort of decisions we

00:37:17.520 are making, because it seems to me that the Athenians were way more open than the Spartans. But we could

00:37:23.920 say that to a degree, the Sicilian expedition was at least half of the death of the ancient Athenian

00:37:33.760 democracy. So would you say that in some cases there can be tendencies within very open societies that

00:37:42.240 lead to a sort of stretch or lead them to exceed particular limits, which raises the necessity for

00:37:53.440 being a bit more responsible?

00:37:54.880 No, that's a great question. And in that quote by Thucydides you mentioned, it sounds great with

00:38:04.320 the Athenian constantly exploring to find new opportunities, whereas the Spartans stay at home 1.00

00:38:11.360 to protect what he's already got. But obviously you can go too far in your exploration. There is such a

00:38:17.360 thing as too much adventurism in various places. And yes, the Athenians show that again and again.

00:38:24.000 Some of the involvement in Persia perhaps was a bit too radical, and so was definitely the Sicilian

00:38:31.360 expedition. Too excited and going out too far to try to rearrange the world and

00:38:38.240 and make lots of lots of money, of course. And that happens today in democracies as well. I think we

00:38:46.000 have just experienced in the early 2000s, the American attempt to constantly rearrange the whole

00:38:54.160 of the Middle East, which turned out in another failure. And we will see what happens this time around.

00:38:59.120 We don't know yet, but it's true. You can arouse those sensations. The idea is that our ideas,

00:39:05.600 our systems are so great. Let's go out and try to do everything. That's very hubristic and it might

00:39:12.080 end up in terrible failures. So yes, we sometimes need to retreat. We sometimes need that cautious

00:39:20.560 part of our human nature as well. Even though I would say in this day and age, in Europe at least,

00:39:27.600 it's not that there's not too much adventure and excitement going on. Perhaps we've made the

00:39:34.400 opposite mistake, yeah. Absolutely. There's zero disagreement from me there. Right. Speaking of

00:39:41.040 the Middle East, but the geography of the region, what do you think that made the Abbasid Caliphate

00:39:47.680 have this Golden Age? What ushered in the Golden Age of the Abbasid Caliphate and how was it tragically lost?

00:39:54.160 Yeah, no, that's it. That is a fascinating story. One reason why I wrote so much about it is that

00:40:04.560 I think it's a good counterexample to the idea that it's hopeless to create any kind of open societies and

00:40:13.280 dynamic economies in certain regions with certain cultures. This was a Muslim empire governed by Arabs,

00:40:23.680 even though it was then combined with Persians, Jews, with Zoroastrians, and different peoples and

00:40:33.760 languages and so on. And they were great when they were open to those other ideas. When they invited

00:40:44.880 not just merchants, it was a free trade empire, but also scientists and philosophers from other places

00:40:51.440 translating their works, learning from their science and from their discoveries, from their data.

00:40:58.080 And then you don't have to go further than the letter A to realize how much we're indebted to

00:41:04.160 that Arab civilization. You know, A, arithmetic, algebra, algorithm, Arabic numerals, average,

00:41:12.960 words like that showing how they thrived when it came to science and technology. And Baghdad in the 9th

00:41:21.280 century, at a time when Paris and London had some 20,000 people, they had more than one half a million

00:41:29.920 inhabitants, perhaps as many as one million, according to certain sources. So it was really a golden age,

00:41:35.920 a very, very wealthy society. It began to break down when they had their death to Socrates moment,

00:41:44.880 when they began, the empire started to fracture in different parts, different interpretations of the

00:41:52.080 Muslim faith, which means that the Abbasids who governed, they became fearful, they thought that

00:41:57.600 they had to impose one orthodoxy onto everybody. So instead of having free speech and freedom of religion,

00:42:05.680 they instituted state-run religious schools, where the scholars could get something they didn't have

00:42:14.320 before. They were funded by the government, they had sort of a stable employment. But of course, the

00:42:20.640 other side of the coin was in that case, they had to repeat the orthodoxy, rather than constantly

00:42:26.240 challenging it and discovering something new. So that was a slow but steady decline, which was then

00:42:33.680 also it turned into a more vicious decline as civil war and eventually a Mongol invasion ruined it all.

00:42:46.640 But much of that energy, much of that knowledge, the state of science had already been lost. And that

00:42:52.480 was lost because of their own internal decisions, not by external forces. Thank you very much.

00:42:59.600 Let's go to Song China now. Again, what do you think is really important about Song China and its golden age?

00:43:13.600 Yeah, no, I find it so fascinating that oftentimes we talk about China as this ancient culture, which it is,

00:43:21.600 obviously. And they had all those things, gunpowder, the magnetic compass, paper, and the printing press, a long, long time before we did.

00:43:32.960 You know, Karl Marx said that the three inventions that ushered in the role of the bourgeoisie in Europe

00:43:39.360 during the Industrial Revolution were those things. But obviously, they were of ancient

00:43:44.960 ancient history and they came from China specifically during the Song Dynasty. That's where they had the most

00:43:53.200 innovation, the most rapid development going on. And this is because it was also the era in which

00:44:00.720 they were most open to surprises. They had more of rule of law than they had had under other Chinese 1.00

00:44:07.600 dynasties so that it was possible for scholars and for merchants and for farmers to come up with new ideas, for urban artisans to experiment.

00:44:20.000 And then they really did. They learned about how to grow new varieties of rice and of tea and how to do that in a large scale so that what was previously

00:44:32.080 luxuries for the rich became sort of staples for the average Chinese. The population grew dramatically.

00:44:40.960 And then that was combined with an urban revolution when you don't need as many hands in agriculture.

00:44:48.080 They could go to the cities. And in cities, they have a more advanced specialization.

00:44:53.920 So people come up with all sorts of different trades and technologies.

00:44:59.120 And I would argue they were close in China during the Song Dynasty of really ushering in an industrial revolution.

00:45:07.920 They probably produced more iron than than all of Europe did in the late 17th century.

00:45:16.480 And they had textile machines, which could have continued to show the way to a real industrial revolution.

00:45:24.240 It was an impressive era.

00:45:26.320 So I think you mentioned the two words that don't go well together. It's Marx and agriculture.

00:45:32.400 And the question and the next question I have is, how could the Chinese with such a history 1.00

00:45:38.480 end up with Mao's great famine? What was it? Okay, both of us, I don't think we're a fan of communism.

00:45:47.680 But what was it about Mao's China that was completely deaf to the past as far as this was concerned?

00:45:56.640 Yeah, that is scary.

00:45:59.280 And it tells you again that don't take anything for granted, because you can have a creative explosion,

00:46:07.520 but you can also lose it all if you have the wrong people in charge specifically.

00:46:12.960 Yes, Mao managed to win power through force, and he was like the anti-Song of China's history.

00:46:25.680 Rather than believing in the individual farmers and their families, their local communities,

00:46:32.160 how they constantly came up with new ideas and better ideas that were often surprising to others,

00:46:39.440 because he thought that he knew best. He thought that he knew exactly how to which crops to grow and

00:46:46.800 and how to create a local industrial revolution from the top down by having your sort of your local

00:46:54.720 iron production and things like that. Crazy ideas, but crazy ideas are fine if they are limited,

00:47:01.280 if they are run by individuals and businesses who are also allowed to fail,

00:47:06.240 because then you learn from those lessons, you learn from those mistakes. But when one crazy person like 0.96

00:47:15.040 that is in charge of the entire country, you all make the same kind of mistake at the same time, 0.94

00:47:20.240 and you end up with the greatest famine in world history. It's a huge, huge tragedy and should be a lesson to all of us.

00:47:27.600 I think that this is the distinction between a sort of spontaneous order, as Friedrich Hayek was talking about,

00:47:36.400 echoing the tradition of human smith, and planned chaos on the other, because there does seem to be a sort of

00:47:43.920 conceit when it comes to planners, and they think that they can know enough to redesign society.

00:47:52.320 But it seems to me that golden ages come when we do the exact opposite, when we sort of trust

00:47:58.240 trust humanity a bit more, and we are a bit more decentralized in our societies, and we grant

00:48:08.160 liberties to more people as opposed to opt for authoritarianism and closed minds.

00:48:17.520 So closed minds, I think almost everyone will agree that closed minds are generally speaking a problem, but

00:48:26.560 I'm trying to understand where exactly are the limits of tolerance and where exactly are the limits of

00:48:33.520 of innovation. Because it seems to me that there can be some avenues that are not particularly worthy of

00:48:41.600 exploring. So for instance, innovation could stand for all sorts of things. It could stand for things that

00:48:48.640 violate some lots of ethical precepts that we have, such as running experiments on live humans.

00:48:57.520 So where do you think is, how do we discipline our, I agree with you essentially, I want

00:49:07.760 decentralization, I want a sort of sensible individualism and sensible liberalism. But how do we achieve a sort of

00:49:16.400 discipline that doesn't lead us astray? I understand that this is a very general question. And but I think it's a question that is really

00:49:28.000 interesting.

00:49:30.160 Yeah, it is really interesting. And it creates this, there are paradoxes, both when it comes to tolerance, and when it comes to

00:49:37.840 innovation. Are you tolerant against the intolerant, those who would undermine and ruin your entire societies?

00:49:44.560 It depends. Yes, some errors have to be accepted. But obviously, we cannot accept anyone to tear down

00:49:54.080 the openness, the liberal democracies that we have created. There is a paradox when it comes to innovation

00:50:00.560 as well, because obviously, acquiring new capacity is great. But the ways in which we acquire that capacity

00:50:10.320 can always be questioned, can always be questioned. And also some of the results can be used to undermine that

00:50:16.080 very process. And we obviously face some challenges when it comes to everything from AI to weapons of mass

00:50:23.520 destruction today. So there are limits out there. To me, it's quite difficult to see where you

00:50:34.800 sit in a committee and then trying to foresee the future and declare exactly where the boundaries are

00:50:42.080 being drawn. I think we need some sort of sensitivity to the changes that are going on learning from them,

00:50:49.760 learning from the experiments and the innovation that goes on, and then trying to move the

00:50:56.560 not particularly the goalposts, but the boundaries of what's acceptable and what's not. And for sure,

00:51:06.080 you mentioned experiments on live human beings. That's something that we wouldn't want to accept.

00:51:12.000 And where do we draw those lines? I think that's exactly what open societies need a good,

00:51:19.040 healthy, open conversation about and possibly come up with some clear distinctions.

00:51:24.800 Do you think that there are several sides that try to influence open society and try to run

00:51:35.760 propagandistic campaigns in order to circulate ideas that could contaminate most people's understanding

00:51:44.080 of what is acceptable or not? Oh, for sure. We know that many want to influence us both domestically and

00:51:54.320 externally. You know, there are huge projects by Russia and China trying to influence the way we think in open

00:52:05.440 societies as well. And obviously, more or less organized versions of that back home. Well, we are trying to influence

00:52:14.160 our society's opinion, right? But people can do that in clandestine and more secretive ways as well. What's important to me is that we always that we have as much transparency as possible, that we know who's doing what. And, and the paradox of tolerance is there. Again, if there are closed societies trying to undermine our societies in systematic ways,

00:52:41.360 we need a strategy against that in order to combat that kind of attempt to undermine what is going on.

00:52:49.200 However, however, that what both you and I are engaged in and then people on on the other sides.

00:52:57.920 That's the healthy version of it, because that is the collision between different ideas. And hopefully, from the light of those collisions, we hopefully can see things in a stronger light and hopefully learn something new and better.

00:53:13.360 Right. So, one thing that I'm struggling with is that it seems to me that there have been some ages that have produced remarkable achievements that weren't exactly decentralized and liberalized. So, for instance, some people give the example of the early Roman Empire, particularly during Augustus.

00:53:37.360 They said that there was a kind of stability that ended the clashes and civil wars of the Romans, and that kind of stability was very much good for trade, but also it led several to lots of historians writing, lots of good architecture.

00:53:58.580 And then there are also some people who say that in the medieval era, for instance, there was authoritarian governance, and the minds weren't as open as they were during the Renaissance or before the Middle Ages, at least in some places.

00:54:13.460 But there still were several very important cultural achievements that some people do seem to identify as them being golden ages.

00:54:23.480 So, what do you think about that? Do you think that's fair?

00:54:28.580 First of all, I agree to a certain extent that we don't want too much decentralization, because the useful decentralization, the one in which people can, in a very Hayekian way, come up with new knowledge, technology and business and art and culture from their own vantage points, that's dependent on a certain political centralization rather than decentralization.

00:54:56.300 Because you need a strong and enforceable rule of law that creates the predictable institutions that makes it possible for society to be a little bit unpredictable.

00:55:09.040 Otherwise, you end up in the chaos in which you have no idea which rules are there tomorrow, and in that case, why bother?

00:55:19.240 Why invest in the future if you don't have, say, enforceable property rights or secure trade routes and things like that?

00:55:27.520 And I agree, you know, with the late Roman Republic, it was an era of, even before the civil wars, where you had too many strong consuls who wanted to impress too much in the one year in power.

00:55:41.460 So, they start wars all over the place.

00:55:43.960 You have local governors who just want to tax people as brutally and arbitrarily as possible in their short term in power.

00:55:52.300 In that case, Augustus, for all his faults, he was the guy who set down clear rules that were enforced throughout the empire and made sure that the pirates and the plunderers did not attack the travelers in the Alps or on the Mediterranean.

00:56:14.860 And, yes, you needed that in order to create this flourishing as well.

00:56:19.800 So, there is oftentimes unpredictability and surprises in civil society and in the economy is often dependent on a lack of surprises when it comes to, you know, violence and force and politics.

00:56:36.620 One of my favorite chapters from your book was the chapter about the Dutch Republic, I must say.

00:56:46.500 I really enjoyed it because I wasn't that knowledgeable of that era.

00:56:51.340 And in that respect, I thought it was one of the most novel.

00:56:55.240 At least, you were introducing me to a completely new topic in some respect.

00:57:00.260 And I think you say at some point in the book that the example of the Dutch Republic falsifies Marxist interpretations of capitalism, according to which capitalism necessarily arises from forcing lots of people to become proletarian workers.

00:57:20.960 What do you have to say about this a bit more?

00:57:25.400 I think the audience would really love to hear about this.

00:57:28.060 What was it that Marx got absolutely wrong about capitalism and how do the Dutch falsify him? 1.00

00:57:37.540 I'm glad you mentioned that chapter because it's really a favorite of mine as well because it seems so unlikely.

00:57:44.400 This weird northwestern periphery of Europe that didn't have much, they didn't even have land on which to stand and grow their food.

00:57:54.920 They're up against the mightiest empire on the planet, the house.

00:57:58.060 And after an eight-year war, this is a bit of a spoiler, but they win their independence.

00:58:07.080 But they also create the richest civilization on the planet.

00:58:10.220 And it's also interesting, as you point out, because it completely contradicts Karl Marx's idea, this origin story of capitalism.

00:58:20.340 He thinks that capitalism is created through forcibly evicting peasants from the land, from the common agricultural land.

00:58:31.320 We have some sort of original communism and everything was great, but then suddenly they're thrown off this privatized, enclosed land.

00:58:38.880 And now they have to sell the only thing they have left, their labor, on the market.

00:58:43.960 And then the capitalists and the owners of the means of production, they benefit.

00:58:48.640 But, you know, whatever we think of later examples of capitalism, and I would be, we could challenge Marx there as well.

00:58:57.380 The interesting thing is that the first real modern capitalist economy, and I would argue that this is the Dutch economy in the, even as early as the 14th century, but definitely then the 16th and 17th century, was not created by any kind of forcing people away from their land.

00:59:16.860 It was a very peaceful, because there wasn't much land there to begin with, and few aristocrats, instead, they were farmers and fishermen who got often the right to the land by moving there, by keeping it free from water, from the oceans.

00:59:36.380 And they began to establish commercial transactions voluntarily with others in the local economy, but also through trade links, especially with the Baltic area, because they knew that they would benefit from more food.

00:59:54.160 From there, they didn't have enough land on which to grow their grain, and then started to specialize themselves in the things that they could produce, everything from fish to textiles, later on financial services, and so on.

01:00:12.180 So it's really more of a sort of almost utopian, John Lockean version of how you establish a capitalist economy.

01:00:24.100 You're sort of sitting down trying to solve your problems.

01:00:26.800 We don't have much here.

01:00:27.760 How can we establish peaceful commercial transactions with others?

01:00:31.580 And in this way, they commercialized the whole countryside and also built a very urban society.

01:00:39.540 And this is one reason why Karl Marx didn't like to talk about the Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, because it completely contradicts it, even though I think his mother was from this place originally, or her family, because it completely contradicts his theory.

01:00:57.940 What was it about the Spaniards at the time, during the Eighty Years' War, that led them to declare bankruptcy five times?

01:01:06.320 They're supposed to be the mightiest empire.

01:01:10.480 Silver and gold is flowing.

01:01:13.100 They control most of Europe, not most of Europe, but a very significant part of Europe. 0.71

01:01:20.920 What was it that led them to declare bankruptcy five times?

01:01:23.840 And in opposition to that, the Dutch, who were, as you said, outnumbered, and they lacked resources, at least to the extent that the Spaniards possessed.

01:01:38.660 And actually, they ended that war by being, as you said, a great superpower and richer than before.

01:01:45.940 So, what happened there?

01:01:48.920 I think this is, now we've just talked about how the Dutch Republic contradicts Karl Marx's theories of capitalism.

01:01:55.760 It also contradicts and disproves the very popular idea that wealth comes from having lots of resources to begin with.

01:02:04.980 You have your rich agricultural land and plenty of natural resources, and you have valuable metals like silver and gold.

01:02:15.420 The Spanish, they had all that.

01:02:16.920 And they had a huge army, and they had their huge navy.

01:02:20.020 And the Dutch, they didn't have much except their innovative capitalist spirit.

01:02:27.120 And I think that helped the Dutch because it forced them to become innovative.

01:02:33.220 They knew that it was impossible to sustain their country without constantly coming up with new technologies, better business models, better financial systems.

01:02:44.920 Whereas the Spaniards, and especially the Habsburg rulers, they thought that we have all these resources.

01:02:52.040 Let's just use them to acquire more resources and then hire the armies to invade the Netherlands and try to take that away from them.

01:03:03.700 The problem then is they don't regenerate resources.

01:03:07.260 They don't have a system, a commercial system that makes it possible for them to acquire more resources.

01:03:13.540 So they declare state bankruptcy, and then they just try to steal more silver and hire more armies and go to war again.

01:03:23.380 And they had to declare state bankruptcy again.

01:03:25.820 Whereas the Dutch constantly during this time build new wealth. 1.00

01:03:30.900 They amass new wealth by constantly finding new trade routes, and not just then with the Baltic Sea, but with the rest of the world and with Asia by going out to sea.

01:03:40.640 But also with a more advanced division of labor, specializing in very small and clever ways of coming up with the best ways of building new ships or the most in-demand textiles or pieces of art.

01:04:01.560 Suddenly, the average Dutch household has paintings on their walls, which is unheard of until then.

01:04:08.860 And in this way, revolutionize almost every sector of the economy, making themselves wealthier and wealthier, so that they could more sustainably hire the troops and the ships that they need in order to combat the Spaniards. 0.97

01:04:26.580 Even though originally they didn't have standing armies and the only navy was the fishing fleet rather than anything else.

01:04:33.600 I think we need to move to my last question, and it will be about today.

01:04:41.360 And I want to ask you if you think that the Western world, particularly the EU and the US, have an unhealthy relation to multiculturalism.

01:04:54.020 And I want to qualify this a bit because I don't like being very general and abstract.

01:05:01.780 I want to be a bit more specific.

01:05:03.180 So I think multiculturalism is a beast of a term because we can give all sorts of meanings, we can mean all sorts of things with it.

01:05:13.240 And to a degree, this applies to every term.

01:05:15.660 But I think especially with multiculturalism, there is a kind of semantic volatility.

01:05:20.340 In one respect, I think almost every country is multicultural, even very strong ethnostates of history.

01:05:29.620 Because you could say that there are people or there are kinds of people who practice different ways of living.

01:05:37.100 And if we identify culture like that, we end up with multiculturalism.

01:05:43.020 And on the other bit, I'm going to fast forward to very different societies, like the societies we live in, especially the 20th and 21st centuries.

01:05:52.580 It seems that almost every dystopia, or almost every dystopian fiction novel we have, is an example of a lack of multiculturalism.

01:06:03.000 Everything is just base homogeneity at everything.

01:06:07.580 People are just numbers.

01:06:08.540 So I'm not just, when I'm sometimes criticizing multiculturalism, I'm not criticizing that.

01:06:17.140 I'm criticizing something different.

01:06:19.980 Would you say that in some respects, there have been governments, especially within the EU and the EU as an organization, for instance,

01:06:29.980 that try to try to sometimes put people live together, who have cultures that have vast discontinuities as far as values are concerned,

01:06:41.500 which creates conflict, which then isn't policed.

01:06:45.060 And then there's a whole of media apparatus and narrative that tries to present this conflict through a lens of, let's say, critical race theory, or all the studies of the left,

01:07:01.660 which is invoked in order to justify inaction for actually solving these problems.

01:07:07.780 Would you say that this is, you see this?

01:07:10.740 And if so, what's to be done about it?

01:07:15.720 Yeah, no, I can see this.

01:07:17.940 I'm glad you qualify your questions.

01:07:19.800 Let me qualify my response.

01:07:22.280 Because I think that there's one version of what some people mean to be multiculturalism that I think is the engine of any thriving society.

01:07:33.640 This very fact that we're not walking around all dressed in gray with numbers, but this openness to different experiences and different backgrounds and different ways of thinking and of acting and of producing in societies.

01:07:53.340 That's how we learn.

01:07:54.400 And the combination of these different ingredients is how we continue to be innovative as a society.

01:08:01.000 And I think that's incredibly useful.

01:08:03.180 And this is one of the reasons why I think that open trade societies are much more innovative and stronger than others,

01:08:11.340 because they constantly pick up new ways of enriching what they already have.

01:08:17.420 However, there's another version of multiculturalism where we apply this multitude to the very sort of framework of society,

01:08:28.220 the very institutions that make us thrive.

01:08:32.240 And we begin suddenly to assume that no ways of living, no kinds of institutions, no societies are better than any other society.

01:08:43.600 And they're all kind of equal, except possibly for the Western way of doing things, because that's the worst thing, because we constantly challenge that in every way.

01:08:52.120 This is a problem, because just like we need some sort of political centralization to allow for societal decentralization.

01:09:03.260 I think we need very strict and defined institutions in order to have this openness to various ways of life.

01:09:11.600 And when we begin to second guess our own system, Western liberal democracy too much, then I think there is a risk that everything begins to fall apart,

01:09:26.740 because we need that exact framework in order to make these many colored cloaks to function in a society.

01:09:36.700 So I write about this a little bit in the introduction that there is this assumption that no society can ever, no culture can ever be better than anything else,

01:09:48.760 which I think is a terrible, terrible mistake, because as David Deutsch, the physicist, once put it,

01:09:56.180 if you really think that, in that case, you're also saying that your own society can never improve, can never be better tomorrow than it is today.

01:10:05.440 And in that case, obviously, religious oppression is just as good as freedom of conscience, and slavery is just as good as liberty and democracy.

01:10:16.900 And in that case, we have been so self-questioning that we are risking to lose the very foundation on which we stand.

01:10:29.620 And that's not a good thing.

01:10:31.600 Let's not take it for granted the kind of societies that we've built and the relative successful societies relative to everything else that we've ever seen in world history.

01:10:43.360 We need to cherish and defend those institutions and not be so self-questioning that we question the ground on which we stand.

01:10:53.900 Mr. Knobberg, thank you very much.

01:10:57.620 Where can people find your work?

01:10:59.500 You're a very famous author.

01:11:01.220 In some respects, it's a bit weird that I'm introducing you, because I think most people know you already.

01:11:09.500 But where can people find you?

01:11:12.720 I think the best way is just to look for me on social media.

01:11:19.160 And perhaps they can also look at the Cato website and find me there.

01:11:24.900 This is a very Hayekian insight that the multitude of things about me and my texts or videos are so much larger than I can possibly centralize and understand myself.

01:11:40.160 So, a good search engine is usually better than asking me.

01:11:45.760 A sort of decentralized approach to things.

01:11:48.200 Thank you very much.

01:11:49.740 Thank you.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 02, 2025

Golden Ages ｜ Interview with Johan Norberg

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