The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Richard David Hames. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Richard Hames. Richard is a philosopher, activist, and strategist. He’s an advisor to boards and governments, mentoring leaders out of their manufactured normalcy. I love that. Welcome, Richard.
Richard: Thank you, Jim. It’s good to be with you.
Jim: Yeah, it really is. Richard is also the author of several books, the most recent of which is Man Made: 50 Failings of Our Own Making, which I have indeed kindled, though I haven’t read yet. I reached out to Richard Hames to come on the podcast based on an essay he published in all ludicrous places: Facebook. And he graciously agreed, and that’s what we’re basically gonna talk about today. But as usual on The Jim Rutt Show, God knows what we’ll actually talk about. So, Richard, what caused you to write that essay? What burr under your blanket caused you to write that?
Richard: Very simply put, probably the state of politics in the world at the moment, which I find so irritating and frustrating because I have this view that we are being governed by the least among us. Secondly, that politics and democracy actually don’t mix. I really don’t think the way politics is practiced, the two can coexist. They’re opposed. And the third thing, which is important for me, is that if that’s the case, and government has kind of subsided into a performance more than anything and a spectacle, then the nature of governance itself is being eroded, and that’s not leaving us in a very good position at all. So it was frustration. I wanted to vent.
Jim: It’s definitely a rant, and it’s polemic. But I went through the thing, and I go, “Damn. Damn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” And in fact, you start off with a pretty strong statement that we may be witnessing the final performance of a civilization in the West. And then, I think the key has forgotten how to distinguish between theater and governance. As you say, the ass-clownery on display every day, and by no means only in the United States, but our ass-clownery is probably better than anybody else’s ass-clownery in terms of being ridiculous.
Richard: You’ve certainly honed it into a fine art at the moment with the people you’ve got in Washington. There’s no doubt about that. But let’s not confine it to the U.S. I would probably, if I were to draw a boundary, confine it to the Eurocentric U.S. empire. That’s what gives me great concern because as a kid, I was educated in England. The British Empire at that stage, you know, all the pink bits on the map were where the sun never sets, and that was inherited by the U.S. And so all of the knowledge, and the colonial knowledge that was inculcated when I was a kid, gradually, more and more, as I grew older, confused me, and I started traveling and actually seeing the reality of how the rest of the world lives. And so that too has been, I viewed, with a degree of dismay.
Jim: Yeah. And then if we think about the West, which we can use as a simple label—an oversimplified label, we know. But the West in some sense is the child of the Enlightenment, where finally we put away millennia of superstition and attempted to live on a road based on trying to understand what is the truth. And as you say in your essay, one of the most startling things that we’re currently seeing, and what you point out that historians have long observed about dying empires, is an almost pathological retreat from truth.
Richard: Yeah. In the historical record, we can see it, and so I include the contemporary West in that category. It’s almost a coming to a rejection of objective reality. I mean, when you look at how facts are increasingly politicized, our most venerable institutions being hollowed out, even the law, truth seems to be being replaced by wishful thinking and outrage. I mean, it’s just extraordinary.
Jim: Well, one that I’ve relatively regularly point out is it’s not a coincidence that the rise of the post-truth world is coincident with the rise and penetration, particularly in our elite educational institutions, of postmodernism. Right? And now, yeah, postmodernism is interesting because it’s both true. Right? The idea of metanarratives is actually false. Yes. But where the lumpen form of postmodernism that is being inculcated in students today, which is “nothing is true, so just emote,” is clearly highly destructive of a functional polity.
Richard: Yes, it is. And you see it. I mean, the thing I see all the time, especially with young people, is a confusion and an almost—I told you before we started recording, I’ve got nine children, so I see this in my own children. The eldest actually is 48 years old, so they’re all grown up. But I see the confusion and the dismay, and this was brought home to me fairly recently, just last year, when I was actually working with a group of school superintendents in the United States and the problem they have with teen dropouts and the extraordinary survey where really only three out of 10 wanted to be at school. So seven out of 10 didn’t. And out of those three, only one out of those three felt a sense of a positive future, not just for them, but generally speaking. So that sense of angst is almost hanging in the air, and it infects us.
Richard: Yes, it is. And you see it. I mean, the thing I see all the time, especially with young people, is a confusion and an almost—I told you before we started recording, I’ve got nine children, so I see this in my own children. The eldest actually is 48 years old, so they’re all grown up. But I see the confusion and the dismay, and this was brought home to me fairly recently, just last year, when I was actually working with a group of school superintendents in the United States and the problem they have with teen dropouts and the extraordinary survey where really only three out of 10 wanted to be at school. So seven out of 10 didn’t. And out of those three, only one felt a sense of a positive future, not just for them, but generally speaking. So that sense of angst is almost hanging in the air, and it infects us.
Jim: They had this conversation yesterday, actually, and, you know, I pointed at a person who was ten years older than I was, who went to university in 1981. I went in 1971. And I said, in 1971, despite the fact we had the bomb hanging over our head—people forget, you know, they talk about global warming—my generation, you know, we thought there was a fair, reasonable chance that the bomb would fall, and that would be that.
Jim: And we had Vietnam. We had Nixon. We had riots. We had the Weathermen. I mean, all kinds of crazy shit going on. But we were all optimistic, could foresee reasonable futures both for ourselves and society. And while we were not entirely right, we were far from entirely wrong about it. But today, even though we have far more material wealth than people had in those days—obviously, the technological capability of humanity has increased very substantially—there is this complete pessimism about the future.
Richard: I mean, I think it comes down to how do you identify what’s the truth and what’s not? Because the traditional anchors of truth—as in universities, journalists, science—all those things are being dismissed or they’re being degraded. So it’s creating an intellectual void where belief and emotion are supposed to replace evidence and reason. And then I think that’s absolutely fundamental.
Jim: You know, you mentioned the fact that these institutions are falling into disrepute, but, of course, at least I would argue—and many other people would—they’re falling into disrepute at least in part, and sometimes overstated, for good reason. Right? The sciences have become corrupted by their own institutional structure. How many of the dollars that get invested into elite university R1 research are actually money well spent by the commonweal, I would say? Mhmm. If we’re lucky, 40% is the careerist track for the scientists today, which means you’re not actually a freestanding researcher in the community of scholars till you’re 42. You know, after you’ve gone through two postdocs, the five or six-year doctoral program, an assistant professorship where you’re basically sprinting to try to get tenure. And then at 42, you can actually do what you want. Yeah. We know most great science is done by people in their late twenties and early thirties. You know, there’s a lot, a lot wrong with the current science. You know, the media world has become—you know, it’s always been a surprise, but is now completely captured by economic returns on attention hijacking. Right? Yes. Yes. And I read some of the UK newspapers regularly. Even they’re full of the worst clickbait, trashy articles. Right? Because they’re in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers, et cetera. And governance has fallen in great disrepute for good reason. I mean, the American Congress can’t do anything. Right?
Richard: No. What’s astonished me is that, again, when I was growing up, the BBC was where I turned to for the truth. And the BBC nowadays, I mean, it’s as bad as any other medium and outlet. I mean, it really is. You can’t rely on mainstream media any longer to know the truth. But if you turn to social media, that’s probably worse because their opinion takes the place of—as I say—evidence and reason just goes by the board.
Jim: Well, again, as I mentioned, you know, the ethos of postmodernism basically says reason is the white Western man’s tool of oppression. Right? Literally, a lot of young people were taught that and unfortunately believed it. Now, just as the worship and the canon were tools of the white man’s oppression of people around the world, reason was as well. But it doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing reason is good for, and that’s the huge mistake that these radicals have made: throwing out reason and rationality along with its misuses. And, you know, where do you end up with a society that basically refuses to acknowledge that there is something called reason in reality?
Richard: Yes. I mean, I think that’s an enormous trap, isn’t it? When division works that way in terms of knowledge and knowledge systems. I mean, I do believe that the knowledge system we have is now based too much on objective facts and reason and has eliminated ancestry, connection, relationship, and different kinds of knowledge. And what I think we need is to re-include all of the various knowledge systems in the world to make it far richer and not just reliant on one kind of knowledge.
Richard: Yes. I mean, I think that’s an enormous trap, isn’t it? When division works that way in terms of knowledge and knowledge systems. I mean, I do believe that the knowledge system we have is now based too much on objective facts and reason and has eliminated ancestry and connection, relationship, and different kinds of knowledge. And what I think we need is to re-include all of the various knowledge systems in the world to make it far richer and not just reliant on one kind of knowledge.
Jim: Absolutely. But I think what I took away, at least from your essay and certainly my own belief, is that we should do that, but we should not throw away the important parts from the Enlightenment: rationality, reason, that there’s a real world out there that we’re trying together to figure out. But to extend that, including participatory knowledge, which is not propositional, which is what we get from the things that we do with our hands, the relationships we have with our friends, the love affairs we have. These are participatory. These are real learnings. These are real knowledge. Right? And perspectival knowledge as well, where you put yourself in the shoes of others and say, all right, how does my good friend, the Australian Aborigine, Tyson Yunkaporta, how does he see the world? I’ve had incredible change in how I see the world from my conversations with him and reading his books. And, you know, those things are outside of the traditional Enlightenment perspective on what constitutes knowledge. But to have a world where you eliminate the rational and reasonable and realistic basis of thinking, you know, you risk what we have right now, which is nihilism and a shit show.
Richard: Yeah. That’s right. I mean, I don’t think we should reject anything or just going back to the Enlightenment, the one thing that does alarm me slightly is not scientific realism, but Cartesian logic. That framing of duality in politics where you get, in your country, Democrats and Republicans, effectively trying to differentiate themselves when they’re actually the same relative to the deep state. They’re the same. There’s no difference at all. And, also, the tools we use in conversation, I think debate is irrelevant. I think we need to move beyond debate and use a greater sophistication, understanding the complexity of the world and not just think you can just summarize it into two camps.
Jim: Yeah. And, of course, the two camps thing is an artifact of our institutional structure to a substantial degree. And there are a lot of countries that have many camps. You know, think of places like Italy or Israel where they have 10 parties competing typically. Switzerland, I think, has a number of parties. The Anglosphere has tended to choose institutional structures with first past the post voting in single member districts. In the US, at least, I don’t know what y’all do in Australia, but we have partisan primaries, which accentuate the votes of the most extreme members of each party. Our curious institution, Electoral College, all produced from a game theory perspective, a dynamic where it’s very difficult to have more than two sides. And if you operate an institutional structure where it’s difficult to have more than two sides, you’re gonna have two sides, and they’re gonna fight relentlessly for the 50.1 percentile voter. And that’s the game they’ve been playing.
Richard: Yes. I’m in Australia. I’ve been watching very, very carefully because of the recent election. And the primary vote for both parties is just collapsing, and we’ve got independents coming through. But I think the Australian system is slightly more intelligent than yours is at the moment.
Jim: Wouldn’t be hard. Right? Even the UK is, you know, more intelligent. There’s a little bit more room there for third parties. Also, perhaps the system of a parliamentary government where the executive and the legislature are unified may be better for our current very rapidly changing world where the brilliantly designed for the eighteenth century balance of power system devised by James Madison in the U.S. Constitution is really good for avoiding tyranny. I even think the current clown in chief is not gonna be able to hijack it, but it moves slowly by design. And we’re now in a world of exponential change that’s been going on for a long, long time, but we’re now at the sharp point in the knee where the rate of change is so fast that our institutional ability to adapt seems to be breaking down.
Richard: Yeah. And another factor which disturbs me is the politicians have stopped listening to the community. The political class generally believe they are the crème de la crème in society, and they have all the knowledge. All the answers are vested in their knowledge, and I think that’s a real danger.
Jim: Or they just don’t care. Right? That’s no longer a reality-based decision-making process. It’s now based on, as you’ve pointed out, essentially entertainment and popularity. I mean, think of some of the clowns that we have had in government. These people are not serious people. They’re not interested in the truth at all.
Richard: I think they’re interested in their truth, and that too is a problem because a lot of them are sociopaths. Let’s face it. This is what I really meant when I said we’re governed by the least among us. I think their self-interest overrules everything else.
Jim: Or they just don’t care. Right? That’s no longer a reality-based decision-making process. It’s now based on, as you’ve pointed out, essentially entertainment and popularity. I mean, think of some of the clowns that we have had in government. These people are not serious people. They’re not interested in the truth at all.
Richard: I think they’re interested in their truth, and that too is a problem because a lot of them are sociopaths. Let’s face it. This is what I really meant when I said we’re governed by the least among us. I think their self-interest overrules everything else.
Jim: Though I would say, in my experience, politicians tend to be narcissists as opposed to sociopaths because they don’t really have much power. If you’re a congress critter, you don’t have a lot of power. But where we get our sociopaths in our society is, and you should know this, at the C-level suite in our major corporations. True. I’ve gone on the record. I’ve been there numerous times, is that perhaps ten percent of C-level executives are clinical sociopaths as compared to about one percent in the general population. And the combination of narcissists in politics and sociopaths in business. And I’ve also said that in finance, high-level finance, the level of sociopathy is probably more like 30% rather than 10%. And you combine those two things, sociopathic business with narcissists who just want attention and tenure in office, and you have a very bad situation where the powers of money can corrupt governance. And as, you know, Ralph Nader said, we basically have two corporatist parties. We have a pro-abortion corporatist party in the United States and an anti-abortion corporatist party in the United States. I think these psychological attributes have a fair bit to do with that.
Richard: I think you’re right. I think you’re right. It’s one of the reasons I live where I do. We should explain to your listeners that I live in Thailand. I’ve been living in Thailand for the past eighteen years, and there was a pragmatic reason for that. But Thailand has become very much my home, and I work in the region. I work in China. I’m in China every month. I work in Singapore, a lot in Vietnam, and I just find the energy and optimism in this part of the world far more grounded in reality. There’s a willingness to innovate. That’s certainly, the entrepreneurial energy is very strong indeed, but there’s also this willingness to innovate in a very serious way, not just merely reinvent something that we have already and call it a breakthrough.
Jim: In another conversation I had two days ago, in the West today, again, and I would argue at least and have in the pursuit of short-term money-on-money return, a whole lot of our investment in the future is around small-scale optimization. Right? How do I squeeze an extra 2% out of this? How do I take this piece of cost out of the business? And maybe less than in the past is invested in real breakthroughs. Unlike the competitors to the West, which you point out are in a quite different place, you know, and I often like to point out that the Chinese Communist Party Politburo, at least last time I checked, more than half the members were engineers or scientists by academic training as compared to the United States where it’s 60% lawyers and miscellaneous other things. I think there’s one Ph.D. scientist in the U.S. Congress or two or three, a very small number.
Richard: Well, I’ll probably say something now that will shock some of your listeners because I’ve realized looking very closely at China, and I’ve worked with some very high-level people both in the government and at regional government levels and in the private sector, is that China today is probably more democratic than a lot of so-called democracies in the West.
Jim: Yeah. Say more about that because I did read a book on the governance structure of China, and I was somewhat surprised that, you know, there is this hierarchical method of voting up several layers before it becomes a party-driven kind of authoritarian system above that. So there is quite a bit more actual democracy in China to my surprise. Maybe, but tell us more about what you see there.
Richard: The real meritocracy. I mean, you have to perform at a local level and then a regional level before you get a look in at the national level. And so it means that when you get elevation to the Politburo or close to it, your experience with large numbers and great numbers of people has been really in-depth. It’s not superficial at all. The other thing that’s a misnomer very often that you see in Western media, which is sheer propaganda, is the lack of ability to protest. As long as it’s not political protest, you can protest about almost anything in China. I mean, I think just last year, there was something like 1,700 different protests of citizens saying, we want this or we don’t want that. And so I think the deeper understanding of Chinese society is missing in the West.
Jim: Though, of course, it is still true that you dare not protest the Communist Party or you may not advocate Falun Gong or whatever the fuck that religious thing was they were out to suppress. So it is still a totalitarian top-down regime, which tunes how much protest is allowed, but there’s more than the typical American might understand.
Richard: Yes. And I think the overwhelming majority of Chinese citizens support the government.
Jim: And perhaps the reason for that, unlike ours, is it can actually get things done. If you look at the statistics of how much high-speed rail China has built, how many houses China has built, how many airports China has built in the last thirty years compared to the West, it’s unbelievably insanely staggering. They still know how to do things there.
Jim: Though, of course, it is still true that you dare not protest the Communist Party, or you may not advocate Falun Gong or whatever the fuck that religious thing was they were out to suppress. So it is still a totalitarian top-down regime, which tunes how much protest is allowed, but there’s more than the typical American might understand.
Richard: Yes. And I think the overwhelming majority of Chinese citizens support the government.
Jim: And perhaps the reason for that, unlike ours, is it can actually get things done. If you look at the statistics of how much high-speed rail China has built, how many houses China has built, how many airports China has built in the last thirty years compared to the West, it’s unbelievably, insanely staggering. They still know how to do things there.
Richard: It is staggering. I mean, I started working in China many, many years ago, and I was in the room when the premier, Wen Jiabao, signed with Siemens the contract for the first maglev, which was the only maglev train, from Shanghai Airport to Pudong. And the plan at the time was an extensive maglev network throughout China. Now that didn’t happen. The fast train network happened instead. But now they’re actually going back to the maglev idea, and the plans for the next five to ten years for maglev are almost double what we’ve got in high-speed trains at the moment. It’s just absolutely mind-blowing.
Jim: Yeah. They’re not afraid to think big. Right?
Richard: It’s not just big, Jim. It’s the time scale. So their plans are 50-year plans.
Jim: And yet they execute in the short term at a high rate of speed, which the two together is really quite interesting and makes me somewhat pessimistic for the West’s ability to compete over the longer haul.
Richard: I would agree with you if the West can’t open their minds to understanding the benefits of working with China instead of using the language of warmongering all the time.
Jim: Yeah. And I’d like to get your thoughts on what strikes me as a kind of dumbass policy, which is the attempt to restrict advanced chips to the Chinese. I mean, we are not in a warlike situation with the Chinese. Why shouldn’t we engage in trade with cutting-edge chips? Because if we don’t, they’re just going to develop them themselves, of which they’re perfectly capable.
Richard: Well, okay. So I’ll give you a practical example. I’ve been advising an event which is being held at the end of this month in Singapore. And it’s in this region. It’s being labeled as the first world summit on quantum computing. And we invited people from all over the world. The majority of the leading scientists in AI and quantum computing are coming either to demonstrate new applications in quantum computing, which are about ten years ahead of what we’ve got in the US. But very disappointingly, all the people we wanted from the US who initially said, “Yeah, we’ll come,” for some reason—and we don’t know where the pressure was coming from—but almost to a man, and within a couple of days, they were all crying off saying, “I’m very, very sorry. We can’t come.”
Jim: Interesting. You suspect that’s from the NSA or somebody like that?
Richard: My suspicion is the CIA.
Jim: CIA. Okay. Because NSA is the one that’s really pushing the envelope on quantum computing in the US for code-cracking purposes. As we all know, one of the first and easiest applications of quantum computing is basically breaking RSA encryption. Could have been that.
Richard: I think the fundamental thing we’re talking about here is the overwhelming sense in the West of competition, competition, and relentless growth on a planet which cannot sustain either of those. I think the future has to be in cooperation, collaboration, and in terms of growth, inclusive growth, which means more equitable growth for countries that need it and societies that need it rather than just relentless growth everywhere as reflected in GDP. For me, that simply does not make sense today.
Jim: Indeed. In fact, you say the fantasy economy of endless growth on a finite planet, very much to the chorus of my own thinking, which is that “just ain’t gonna work.” And here’s the issue about us not being a learning society anymore. When modernism started to come together around 1700, the population of the world was only 600,000,000 people. It’s hard to believe that in 325 years, we went from 600,000,000 people to eight-plus billion, heading for nine or ten, but we did. Further, the intensity of extraction of energy and materials, roughly a tenth per capita of the current global average. So we got 12 times as many people, 10 times the intensity for each person on average, including the poorest and the richest—a 120 times the imposition on Ma Nature. And it turns out Ma Nature has a limit, and we’re right about at it. And yet the institutions of the West seem to be able to do nothing about that.
Richard: Well, they’re not listening. I mean, again, that comes back to the science, doesn’t it? Because I just wrote a piece the other day on the nerve of the so-called climate skeptics. I mean, there was the—I forget the group that’s come out with this paper—1,900 scientists, and none of them are climate scientists. They have Nobel Prizes in mathematics or something else. And then there are General Lord Viscount Monckton from the UK and people like that who has got no credentials in science at all. You know, to put that kind of person up against Jim Hansen, for example, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s nonsense.
Richard: Well, they’re not listening. I mean, again, that comes back to the science, doesn’t it? Because I just wrote a piece the other day on the nerve of the so-called climate skeptics. I mean, there was the, I forget the group that’s come out with this paper, 1,900 scientists, and none of them are climate scientists. They have Nobel Prizes in mathematics or something else. And then there are the Lord Viscount Monckton from the UK and people like that who has got no credentials in science at all. You know, to put that kind of person up against Jim Hansen, for example, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s nonsense.
Jim: Yeah. Actually, Hansen has agreed to come on my podcast at some point when he finishes his next book. So I’m looking forward to that conversation.
So this actually ties back to this issue of disconnect from reality and truth. Right? If we started far from the boundary in 1700, and then steam, and then electricity, and then internal combustion, and then rockets and nuclear power just increased our ability to extract, and we’ve now reached the boundary. Why is it so hard to realize that? Right? Because what is your thought about that? What is it that causes us to—is it the ostrich in the sand, we just don’t want to change, so therefore we’ll pretend it’s not true, or is it something even more wanton? Okay, it’ll hang together for my lifetime. Fuck everybody after me. Speculate on what’s going on there.
Richard: I think it’s a lot of different things, to be honest. I don’t think it’s one thing. I think certainly there is a discomfort with confronting the truth. To think of it, the rate of extinction of some species, especially in terms of insects, for example, bees, bee colonies, that’s very uncomfortable when you understand the links between the human food chain and those kinds of extinctions, that becomes really, really desperately uncomfortable.
Then I think it’s a matter that we’re unable to abandon the illusions we have that give us comfort. We tend to think, “Oh, you know, things won’t be as bad as that. They can’t be, because it’s never happened to humanity before, so that can’t be right.” And I think those illusions are a problem. And so I think it’s a number of different things. But until we recommit to the real truth and the situation that the human family is in—I mean, it’s all this confrontation and war at the moment, which is really such a distraction away from the things that really matter. Until we can turn the corner, I think, we’re in trouble.
Jim: Yeah. I regularly say that war is the stupidest activity of the human race, especially at this late date. It’s particularly disturbing that we seem to be back in the vortex of more war, at least more spending for war than we had been for a number of years.
Richard: But it’s also ignorant, isn’t it?
Jim: Because there hasn’t been a winner in a war since 1870. I think the Prussians won the Franco-Prussian War, got some indemnities from the French, and it probably paid. I don’t think a single war has paid for either participant since 1870, basically.
Richard: No. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s been detrimental to everybody. You’re right. There have been no winners. But for me, the whole idea of solving a problem through confrontation rather than dialogue and fighting rather than diplomacy is just sheer insanity. And surely, we’re past that. Surely, humans, given everything that we’ve achieved—you look at the arts, music, dance, architecture, science, the inventions in health care, for example, the extraordinary initiative and inventive capacity of humans. Do we really have to resort to fisticuffs and throwing bombs at each other? I mean, it’s just insane.
Jim: Yeah. Well, it’s, I guess, useful to remember we’re descended from a very aggressive, very obnoxious species called the chimpanzee. We also have some probable descent, or we actually have a common ancestor with the bonobo as well, or are a little nastier than their PR firm puts out. But chimps in particular are, you know, vicious, hierarchical, territorial, murderous, et cetera.
So, you know, and I sometimes when I mentor young people in business, they’ll come to me and say, “You know, I was in this meeting at my company, blah, blah, blah. It made no fucking sense to me.” And I say, “Ah, use this rhetoric. Just visualize the participants as apes with clothes. It’ll make a lot more sense.” And people report back. So, know, more seriously, the issue is that we are an aggressive, killer species, and we need institutions and personal change if we’re going to escape this bad attractor of fisticuffs again. Even the Chinese, they just seem to refuse to rule out the use of force to settle the Taiwan situation when in reality, the answer is Taiwan does not want to be part of China at all. And yet the Chinese refuse. It’s like, what, 3% of the people want to merge with China. And yet China continues to wave the nuclear stick at Taiwan. And then, you know, that’s another example of this regression, even of seemingly a better managed state than in the West, falling back to that old chimpanzee bad habit of hitting the other chimp with a stick.
Richard: Here, we might have a point of disagreement, because I don’t think there’s any reason for China to go to war with Taiwan or the other way around. I think, inevitably, there’ll be closer and closer relationships, because it’ll come through trade. It’s there at the moment. It’s growing. And I don’t know anyone in either of those two countries who would really seriously say, “Oh, we’ll have to go to war in order to get what we want.”
Richard: Here, we might have a point of disagreement because I don’t think there’s any reason for China to go to war with Taiwan or the other way around. I think inevitably there’ll be closer and closer relationships, because it’ll come through trade. It’s there at the moment. It’s growing. And I don’t know anyone in either of those two countries who would really seriously say, oh, we’ll have to go to war in order to get what we want.
Jim: Well, Xi keeps saying it, but you’re right. It makes no sense. Right? Particularly if we could back off of that. Right? Say, Taiwan, do what the fuck you want. We don’t care. And we have ethnic, linguistic, and economic, familial links, and we’ll be like Canada and the US. They’re nominally separate countries. But hey. I know the Canadians get pissed off at this, particularly at the moment. They’re basically the same people plus or minus 10%. And that would be a perfectly good trajectory for Taiwan and China. But at least officially, that’s not the Chinese line.
Richard: No. I don’t think that’s gonna come to anything. I mean, all the talk about the potential war between China and Taiwan, I’ll put on my futurist hat and say, I don’t see that happening in the next two to three decades.
Jim: Putting on my military strategist hat, I say, if the Chinese don’t make a move by 2027, it’ll be too late because the long-term change in the balance between the offense and the defense has now switched to the defense, due to smart weaponry. And Taiwan will be basically unconquerable by 2027 as the, you know, the first hedgehog state where they’re investing so heavily in smart munitions that there’s no way that either an airborne or seaborne invasion could possibly carry off in just a couple of more years. So, the Chinese aren’t probably ready to do it anyway. So, if we could pass that window of vulnerability (’27, ’28), probably won’t happen at all, irrespective of what people’s motives might be.
Richard: So in this case, in this instance, the futurist is agreeing with the militarist.
Jim: Yep. Exactly. And I am both a futurist and a militarist.
Richard: But we should go back, though, to this notion of women. Now you mentioned my latest book, which was actually written with a friend, Adam Jacoby. It’s called Man Made, and it’s literally looking at the problems that have been caused by men, not just through design, not just through politics, but through a whole range of approaches that deny women the opportunity to have an equal voice. And going back, you were saying, well, you know, that’s changing. Thank goodness. And it has changed, but it’s not nearly sufficient at the moment, I think, to counter the weight of the patriarchy in effect.
Jim: Yeah. And I say this regularly that I believe when historians look back at the 20th century, it won’t be the two world wars. It won’t be the automobile. It won’t be nuclear energy. It won’t be landing on the moon. It won’t be the internet that will be the number one accomplishment of the 20th century. It’ll be the beginnings (and I better understand the underlying beginnings) of the real liberation of women from at least ten thousand years of oppression by the patriarchy, showing real signs of progress by about 1975. And of course, that journey is nowhere near complete, and it’s also very important to remember that it is far less complete outside the West. Right? You know, consider China, Korea, Japan. I have no idea what the relationship between the genders is in Thailand, but outside the West, there’s still a lot more legacy patriarchy. And so patriarchy, you know, leads to, know, sociopathic, chimp-like competition for status, which it does. Then, until the rest of the world can evolve out of its patriarchy, we’ll continue to have those problems. And all the societies are changing with the West way ahead, and none of them have completed the journey yet. So at least I think that’s an optimistic vector for the future, as women become, you know, more front and center. And, you know, there are now countries in the West where 50 percent of the legislature are women. Right? That’s pretty interesting.
Richard: We’ve got a woman prime minister in Thailand, although she’s just been suspended by the constitutional court. But the matriarchal knowledge and application here is, in the region—I mean, in ASEAN generally—very, very strong and growing.
Jim: I think that’s a good thread, and an optimistic vector for the future.
Richard: Yes. It is. Oh, yes.
Jim: But to your point that we still have a fair bit of legacy patriarchal, chimp-fighting, alpha-male bullshit that has led us to the place we are.
Richard: Well, the other factor, Jim, there is that the women that have made it so far have tended to make it because they’ve played men’s games.
Jim: That is very true. I actually had that discussion recently as well. I mean, go to Wall Street, for instance. There are plenty of women on Wall Street, but a lot of them are playing a very masculine game. You know? They speak with a masculine vocabulary. They think, you know, scorekeeping, just like a 14-year-old boy shooting hoops with his buddies. Right? So I think there is some truth to that, that because of
Richard: Well, we do need the feminine energy coming through in politics and business.
Jim: Yep. And in the West, at least, the electorate is 51 or 52 percent female, so the opportunity exists over time.
Richard: Absolutely. Absolutely. No doubt.
Richard: Well, the other, the other factor, Jim, there is that the women that have made it so far have tended to make it because they’ve played men’s games.
Jim: That is very true. I actually had that discussion recently as well. I mean, go to Wall Street, for instance. There are plenty of women on Wall Street, but they are, they play—a lot of them are playing a very masculine game. You know? They’re, they speak with a masculine vocabulary. They think, you know, scorekeeping, and, you know, just like a 14-year-old boy shooting hoops with his buddies. Right? So there is, I think, some truth to that, that because of…
Richard: Well, we need, we do need the feminine energy coming through in politics and business.
Jim: Yep. And, in the West, at least, the electorate is 51 or 52% female, so the opportunity exists over time.
Richard: Absolutely. Absolutely. No doubt.
Jim: Alright. Let’s move a little bit. In your essay, it’s only like a page and a half, but it’s rich with stuff. You do mention that history shows that such cycles of decline are not inevitable. Societies may reverse course. Did you have some examples in mind of empires or systems that have reached the state of, say, the West that were able to turn it around and come back?
Richard: The obvious one, I suppose, is what happened after the Second World War. You know, the Marshall Plan, everything that happened in terms of the institutions that were created, League of Nations, then the UN. I mean, that was extraordinary. That was a real reversal because at the time, it wasn’t expected. You know, we didn’t know where we were. So that’s the most obvious recent example.
Jim: Yeah. And, in history, I’ve recently read a history of the Eastern Roman Empire, and they had their ups and downs and various changes occurred in their governance structure. And frankly, a lot of it was just the luck of the draw who happened to be the emperor at the time, and their fortunes fluctuated over time. So it is useful to recall that we can change.
And I do like that post-World War Two world because the world looked pretty screwed up from World War One through the end of World War Two. You know, fascism, communism, you know, wars of ever-increasing intensity up to World War Two, the most intense worldwide war ever by a bunch, punctuated by the nuclear weapon. Now what, people?
Somehow we managed to invent a sufficient series of institutions that were appropriate for that time, though not necessarily ours, that got us through till, probably by luck to some degree, when the Russians made the mistake of appointing Gorbachev. But the collapse of the USSR—when I say mistake from their perspective of appointing Gorbachev, that the USSR fell—that was a very interesting, highly contingent node in the trajectory of history and could have allowed us to build an even better new world, but we failed to do so. We failed to build new successor institutions that actually worked.
Richard: Yeah. I think if you’re looking at empire collapse in history, the things that worked to reverse the collapse were two things: reform, obviously, of institutions. But the other thing was innovation. And the other thing in our favor today is technological innovation and the rate of change in terms of technology, and how that can be a real plus for us if we don’t allow the latest technologies to get into rogue hands or become misused, which is always a great danger, of course. I’m very, very aware of Geoffrey Hinton’s concerns about where AI might be heading if we don’t put the guardrails up soon.
Jim: Yeah. There’s a very two-edged sword. We talked about the fact that the accelerating rate of change and the accelerating complexification of society has now seems to have exceeded the ability of our political institutions, at least, to make sense of the world and to act correctly, again, at least in the West with our cumbersome eighteenth-century institutions.
And so I suspect some of the things that are coming from the current technological revolutions are going to actually continue to increase the stress on our governance institutions. For instance, The Guardian just posted a story the last two or three days that since ChatGPT came out in November 2022, there’s been a 37% reduction in entry-level positions in the UK. That’s crazy.
Now, of course, correlation is not causation, and some of it may be Brexit related, some of it may be other macroeconomic things related. But that’s a if it has anything to do with ChatGPT and the use of LLM-style AI in business, it could really stress the system.
Richard: In your knowledge in the field of complexity, it far exceeds mine. My background doesn’t come from a scientific background. It comes from the fact that I was in a bunch of composers where our music was called the New Complexity. And so my understanding and experience of the science of complexity comes from an arts background. But I think, going to complexity, when you understand how different it is from complication—you know, different roots, plexa and plica, very, very different roots—that one of the things we lack at the moment, especially in politics, is the ability to visualize patterns. So, unless you can do that, you don’t really grasp what the complexity is and what the dynamics are.
Richard: In your knowledge in the field of complexity, it far exceeds mine. My doesn’t come from a scientific background. It comes from the fact that I was in a bunch of composers where our music was called the new complexity. And so my understanding and experience of the science of complexity comes from an arts background.
But I think, going to complexity, when you understand how different it is from complication—you know, different roots, plexa and plica, very, very different roots—that one of the things we lack at the moment, especially in politics, is the ability to visualize patterns. So, unless you can do that, you don’t really grasp what the complexity is and what the dynamics are.
Jim: The complexity has actually been increasing very rapidly as we have debureaucratized, right? Think about the changes in American businesses, and again, I’m somebody I know pretty well. There were a lot of big, gray, dominant bureaucratic structures in 1960, you know, General Motors. “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” and vice versa.
And the radical reforms in finance, driven by going off the gold standard in ’71, I believe it was, and the deregulation of the stock market soon thereafter under the Carter administration—similar things happened in the UK—has produced an explosion of complexity in the economic sphere, which has been good for productivity because those big gray bureaucracies were self-serving. You know, the agent-principal risk was manifest in those big organizations. They were run for the benefit of the managers, not for the shareholders.
And they did take better care of the employees than the complexity-based competition, related market-driven economies that emerged in the seventies and eighties. But the total level of complexity in society, with products not even asked for that just came out at an incredible rate, is yet another aspect that has caused the total complexity in the system to rise by huge amounts, way beyond the ability of our extremely old institutions, which are oriented towards a more complicated world. And indeed, that post-World War II structure was basically a complicated structure, not a complex one.
Richard: That’s right. Another thing that I’d pick up on something you’ve just said, that the organization was geared for the manager’s benefit. Absolutely right.
But that industrial ethos happened in healthcare. I remember I started life as a medic, and the whole system was geared to the convenience of doctors, not patients. And the same thing in education. It was geared to the teachers, the professors, not the students.
Jim: Yep. It’s interesting. The market has its huge pluses and its huge minuses. Its huge pluses, in theory, are that it at least makes business accountable to the customer first. On the other hand, it’s extraordinarily hard to understand what the second-order effects are.
For instance, something like ChatGPT, an incredible technological triumph and, interestingly, totally unexpected. I’ve followed the field of AI closely since I was an undergraduate back before electricity, right? And nobody expected, except for a tiny number of people working on them as late as 2015, 2016, nobody was expecting this explosion of this particular vector of AI. And it suddenly appeared and manifested in the public eye with ChatGPT.
If The Guardian story is correct, and it may well be, the implications of just this one technological vector in terms of radically restructuring everything about how we make a living, how families are structured, etc., could well be immense, and there’s no ability to plan for it. It’s, you know, we just have to deal with the emergent effects as they come.
Richard: The notion of emergence, and also perhaps a phase transition, because of its use. For example, with SMS, nobody really understood how it would be taken and then used by the community. I mean, it was extraordinary. So I think we may be looking to a phase transition in AI.
And I like to—I mean, I cribbed this from David Martin, who you probably know, but he’s a very dear friend—he refers to AI as “augmented insights” in terms of what it is at the moment, rather than “artificial intelligence,” which is an interesting definition. But what I know is happening at the moment, there are two kinds of branches happening.
There’s the pathway of LLMs in terms of what, for example, what Sam Altman and Jony Ive are working on at the moment, which I think will be radical or even revolutionary within that framework. But then there are others working on a totally different pathway for AI, working at evolving community conversations more deeply, translating languages more effectively, the whole communitarian aspect of what AI could become.
Jim: Yep. And it, as always, we’re at a cusp, and whether it’s unbalanced towards the good or unbalanced towards the bad is unknown. And I think the thing that we, you know, the sort of the root of your conversation, is that our current institutions aren’t up to the job of dealing with something at this level.
Richard: They’re not. And the problem, of course, is with incumbent power, they won’t vote themselves out of power. So how do we deal with second and third-order change in particular? And the only way to do that is not just top-down, or perhaps not top-down at all, but grassroots.
Jim: Yep. And it’s, as always, we’re at a cusp, and whether it’s towards unbalanced to the good or unbalanced to the bad is unknown. And I think the thing that, you know, the sort of the root of your conversation is that our current institutions aren’t up to the job of dealing with something at this level.
Richard: They’re not. And the problem, of course, is with incumbent power, they won’t vote themselves out of power. So how do we how do we deal with second and third order change in particular? And the only way to do that is not just top down or perhaps not top down at all, but grassroots.
Jim: Right. In fact, that’s our Game B thesis is that we need to move from a fundamentally top down but also competitive dynamic to a more cooperative and bottom up dynamic. But that’s a six-hour conversation to explain all that, so we’ll pass that by today and talk about that another day.
Let’s move on to another aspect, which I’ve found growing resonance with, which is not only do we have an institutional problem, but I would argue through the infection of postmodernism, a complete dismissal of the idea of character, morality, and even nobility. Right? Those are now laughable virtues. You know, you say “character, virtue, and nobility,” and most people will assume, accurately in my case, “You’re an old fart.” You know, “We don’t think that way anymore.” It seems like you and I share the belief that matters of character, virtue, morality, and even nobility of character matter.
Richard: Yeah. We were both brought up to believe that. But in our day, there were individuals we could look up to and admire and respect. There are very few of those today. If you go outside of celebrities, that’s a problem, I think, a different kind of problem. Within public life, there are very few people compared with in the days we were growing up where you could say, “I really admire and respect this person and can model my behavior on that person.” Very few.
Jim: Yeah. And even those who’ve accomplished tremendous things. I mean, I still have tremendous respect for Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial career. You know, I’ve got something I haven’t published on comparing Elon to Napoleon. And if anything, Napoleon was even more outrageous. I mean, Musk was even more outrageous than Napoleon, what he accomplished. But the way he did it is to my mind not the right way. You know, the, you know, he just burns the people relentlessly. You know, let’s just go on and on about that. He’s an optimizer for the game he’s in, but not an optimizer at all for character, virtue, or nobility. And that is a real problem.
Richard: I’ll ask you a question then because do you see his wealth as part of the problem? Do wealthy people tend to be more dismissive? Because I must confess that in something I said a few years ago now, I was talking to a government, the cabinet, of a particular country. And I was saying in policy terms, I believe every additional billionaire is a policy error.
Jim: I’m a strong believer that we need a vastly more egalitarian form of economics. Right? In the bureaucratic days, the CEO of General Motors made 20 times what the guy on the factory floor made. Now it’s probably 500 times. This is just, you know, getting out of hand.
And then you get the compounded explosions for people who are also playing serious financial games, you know, leverage, etcetera. And you end up with these not just billionaires, but now we have centibillionaires. Right? What the fuck? Right? Extremely dangerous. The asymmetries, and then the power that comes from those asymmetries, are not what we really would need or want.
I also point out on the historical record that at the time of the signing of the Constitution, the largest free enterprise outside the slave plantations in the United States was a shipyard in Philadelphia with a hundred employees, maybe as many as 200, but it was basically what we now call a small business. And that’s what we designed our institutions for. Our institutions were not designed for somebody with a, you know, net worth of $300 billion who, with a broken campaign finance system that’s been totally gutted by the courts, can then, you know, help buy a presidency. You know, that’s obviously wrong. And the fact that we can’t fix that shows that our institutions are deeply wrong and flawed, that we can’t see that as an obvious problem and fix it.
Richard: I agree with you totally, and this is another advantage I have sitting in this part of the world because with my own family, for example, my Thai family, my wife’s family, are subsistence rice farmers in the far northeast of the country. And I see it firsthand when I travel still right across this region. I do a lot of work still in Africa, for example. I’m the patron of a small orphanage just outside of Kampala. And I remember that first time I went through Soweto, the thing that struck me most was the entrepreneurial nature of the kids, the young kids in Soweto, and even then, the big broad smiles and optimism in spite of the poverty. If those people can’t see the contrast between the life they live and the bottom 10% of the population, then there’s no way they can actually appreciate the difficulty of that, and the need to close that gap.
Jim: Yeah. And it’s not just, I mean, the point oh one percent for sure, but there’s also the top 10% upper middle class people in the Western societies at least, who, particularly over the last thirty or forty years, have insulated themselves from everything else with private schooling, gated communities, fancy condos, etcetera. Even the food they eat is now quite different than the working people. I grew up in a working class, lower middle class community. My dad dropped out of high school after ninth grade. He was a cop. My mother left home when she was 14. You know? Crazy story. But in those days, lower middle class, upper working class people drove similar cars to the doctors and the lawyers. Right? They might have driven Cadillacs, and we drove Chevys. But what’s a Cadillac but basically a Chevy with a fancy body and a little bit more sound insulation and more chrome? But now we have, you know, $300,000 Lamborghinis and all this horseshit. Right? The wall between the social classes has gotten so strong that the people in the top 10% basically no longer feel coupled to the other 90% of the population.
Richard: Well, this takes us back, of course, to, again, the Industrial Revolution and mass production and what that has given rise to today in terms of excess consumption, excess production, and consumption. But, again, with incumbent power, how do you tell people? How do you tell major corporations that they’re producing too much or too much variety, you know, when the whole system is geared to profit?
Jim: That’s the fundamental flaw that so long as the society is based on one dynamic, which is money on money return in the relatively short term, this is the emergent result and emergent result you should expect, particularly with the ability for wealth to hack the political system. This is, I could put this on a whiteboard. This is three connected lines and three boxes. You know, we have what we have because we have the system that we have.
Richard: Well, yeah. And of course, a lot of people blame the system for not working, but actually the system’s working as it’s been designed to work. It’s working perfectly.
Jim: Exactly. It’s, I wouldn’t say perfectly, but it’s doing what it is intended to do. Right? Which is extremely sad. I just did a little side search, which sometimes I do. You mentioned Thailand and billionaires. Turns out Thailand has 25 billionaires and a population of 71 million, which means it has slightly more billionaires per capita than average. Isn’t that interesting?
Richard: It is interesting, isn’t it? I know a few wealthy people here, and they are stinking rich.
Jim: Yeah. And the interesting thing about South Asians in particular, they don’t at all mind flaunting their stinky richness.
Richard: You see a lot of that in Hong Kong, though.
Jim: Yeah. And in India too, surprisingly. Right? So it’s not just the West that has been infected by this disease. Most of the world is infected by it.
Richard: Most of the world is also looking for solutions because there’s, I sense wherever I travel that there’s a dis—it’s more than discontent. It’s a feeling that something isn’t right, that we’re not being told the truth, that life could be better.
And this came home to me even a few years ago when I was mentoring the CEO of one of the world’s largest and most successful banks. And it was our second meeting. And this guy is in the press all the time, very powerful, good decision maker, was actually a very good CEO.
And five minutes into our second meeting, he started to cry. I don’t know what question I asked him, but he started crying. And I was taken aback. I couldn’t believe it. But after about five minutes, I couldn’t get a question in because he was literally sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. I said, “Are you okay?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “But, Richard, there must be more to life than this. The pressure I have is destroying my marriage. I don’t actually believe in the principles I have to adhere to, and it’s tearing me apart. What do I do?”
And I’ve come across so many people, not necessarily as important or as famous as he was—a well-known and wealthy fellow—but there are lots of people all over the world feeling pressure at the moment and can’t really describe why or what they can do about it.
Jim: Exactly. Actually, I think that is surprisingly hopeful. In the Game B world, we refer to the fact that we’re in a liminal period between two worlds. In fact, Zach Stein, one of the people who I would say is part of the Game B movement, has written a book called A Time Between Two Worlds. Right? More and more people every day are starting to feel this way. And, you know, fifteen years ago, it was a tiny, tiny fraction of people. Today, it’s even CEOs of big rapacious banks. So I think we could end on a hopeful note here, which is if we’re in a time between two worlds, what does world famous adviser of governments and businesses, Guest Ames, suggest for what we ought to do to make sure that the next world is a good world? Because just because we transition between two worlds, no guarantee it’s a better one, could be worse. What do we do as a civilization to increase the probability we end up in a good new world on the other side of this very distressing liminal period?
Richard: I think, Jim, we have to go back to first principles in a great many respects and ask a fundamental question in the Anthropic Age: What does it mean to be human? And we have to go back to first principles to really look at ourselves and what we value and what we want to become, and think very seriously about what we therefore need to change.
Richard: I think, Jim, we have to go back to first principles in a great many respects and ask a fundamental question in the anthropic age: What does it mean to be human? And we have to go back to first principles to really look at ourselves and what we value and what we want to become and think very seriously about what we therefore need to change.
Jim: From your lips to the world’s ears. Thank you, Guest, for a very interesting, wide-ranging conversation based on a recent Facebook post. And as usual, the link to that essay and the other things we’ve referenced will be on the episode page at jimruttshow.com. Thanks.
Richard: It’s a real pleasure.
Jim: Thank you. It really is.