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=== Political Violence === '''Eric Weinstein:''' Something that sort of fits in here is that, in part I've learned from you, and you can tell me whether you recognize this formulation or not, is start with any appealing social idea. That's step one. Step two, ask what is the absolute minimal level of violence and coercion that would be necessary to accomplish that idea. Now add that to the original idea. Do you still find your original idea attractive? This flips many of these propositions into territory where I suddenly realized that something that people see as being very attractive actually can only be accomplished with so much misery, even if it's done maximally efficiently, that it's no longer a good idea. This has been very influential in my thinking, and what I've- '''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, look. The visceral problem with communism is not its redistributed tendencies. It's the extreme violence. It's that you have to kill tons of people. One of the professors I studied under at Stanford, RenΓ© Girard, was a sort of of great philosophical, sociological, anthropological thinker, and he had this observation that he thought communism among Western intellectuals became unfashionable. You could date it to the year 1953, the year Stalin died, and the reason was they were not communist in spite of the millions of people being killed. They were communist because of the millions of people who were being killed. As long as you were willing to kill millions of people, that was a tell, a sign that you were building the utopia, you were building a great new society, and when you stopped, it was just going to be like the lethargy of the Brezhnev era or something like that, and that that was not inspiring. I mean, people shifted from Stalin to Mao or Castro, but the violence was charismatic, very charismatic, but then also, if you think about it, it's very undesirable. '''Eric Weinstein:''' It's so fascinating that we actually finally get to something like this. I think that that is a correct description of part of the communist movement, but not all of the communist movement. There were a lot of people, I think, and just my own family was certainly involved in far-left politics, and some of it probably dipped into communism. What my sense of it was is that there was a period in the '30s where people realized that there had to be coordinated social action, and that there were people who were too vulnerable, and that that somehow got wrapped up in all of the things that Stalin was talking about that sounded positive if you didn't know the reality. '''Eric Weinstein:''' So, for example, Paul Robeson, a hero of the left, was extolling Stalin's virtues openly. My guess is that he didn't fully understand what had happened, that he had gotten involved in an earlier era, and that as things became known and progressed, there was a point at which many people suddenly opened their eyes and said, "I've been making excuses for the Soviet Union," because at least it had the hope... I mean, there were American blacks, for example, who moved to Moscow because of the hope that it was going to be a racially more equal society. My own family, I would say, was talking about interracial marriage and open support of homosexuality, female access to birth control. Those things were associated with the communist party, and a lot of those ideas are now commonplace, but we forget that once upon a time only the communists were willing to dance with these things. '''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. I don't want to make this too ad hominem, but I want to say that people like your family, were likely very intelligent people, were somehow still always the useful idiots, and there was no country where the communists actually came to power where people like those your family actually got to make the decisions. '''Peter Thiel:''' Somehow, maybe there were indirect ways that it was helpful or beneficial in countries that did not become communist, but in countries that actually became communist, it didn't actually ever seem to work out for those people. '''Eric Weinstein:''' I definitely think that there was some sense that they were fooled and duped in this situation, but by the same token, not wanting to make this too ad hominem, as a gay man, I think that a lot of your rights would have been seen much earlier by the communists who were earlier to that party. I think that to an extent, some of the things that we just take for granted as part of living in a tolerant society were really not found outside, and so if you were trying to dine in a la carte, maybe you could take something from the commie buffet, you could take something from the anticommunist buffet, and you could steal a little from regular party politics. Of course, the Dixiecrats were not exactly the most racially progressive group in the world. Things were very different, and there was no clear place to turn. '''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, it's always easy for us to judge people in the past too harshly, so I think that's a good generalization. I would say that there's something about the extreme revolutionary movements that always seem to be... From my point of view, the violence was always too much, and it's a package. It's a package deal, but I don't like the violence part of the package, and that's the part that, at the end of the day, makes me think the package would not have been worth it. '''Eric Weinstein:''' So, what I would like to do is to take a quick break, and I would like to come back on exactly this point, because it's the point where I feel that perhaps you are least understood by the outside world in terms of what we've been talking about, both growth and progress on the one hand, and violence on the other. So, when we come back, we'll pick it up with Peter Thiel. Thank you. '''Peter Thiel:''' Thanks. [break]
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