4: Timur Kuran - The Economics of Revolution and Mass Deception: Difference between revisions

'''Timur Kuran''': in a different idiom and done by people who had who were genuinely supported by large segments of society now this is not to say that there was no reaction now this is where we come to

'''Eric Weinstein''': yeah

'''Timur Kuran''': preference falsification and the bubble that I lived and so on we'll we'll we'll get to this. So, there are of course, people who are illiterate to have no contact with the with the West, who are very religious, they're suddenly being told by their leaders that they don't have a religious identity, the're now Turks what unites everybody is Turkishness not religion that they and the Christian and Jewish minorities are equal not only before the law but also morally. And they're all they're all Turkish, there to accept this. The education is completely secularized. their religion is no longer being taught that's if you learn religion in the family, that's fine. That's your business just don't but the regime is telling you don't make that public. And increasingly, this new regime is radicalizing itself. So this is building now you have a self sustaining, self reinforcing system of secularization, where people are trying to outbid themselves outbid each other in being secular in public

'''Eric Weinstein''': how, how much toward Western modernity

'''Timur Kuran''': how much how Western, you can look in your dress.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Right

'''Timur Kuran''': How Western you can be in the way you interpret history, how Western you can be in not being Muslim. So people start falsifying their preferences in the direction of being secular. So people who are actually personally religious turn religion into a private matter. They do not fast in public or at least in ways that are noticeable. So during Ramadan, but Islam allows you if you if you miss a day during Ramadan, you can, you can for whatever reason, because you're traveling you can you can substitute for it and it gives you a lot of freedom to do that. So people would, there were people and we find this through memoirs we know about this through memoirs that were published posthumously, because they couldn't express themselves they couldn't say this is happening this is this was happening among top level among some people who were among Atatürk's closest associates who were religious, but who could not have a religious persona.

'''Eric Weinstein''': So while the West is cheering for turkeys modernization, and lots of this is positive, we start sewing this sort of weird undercurrent where people who are genuinely religious are being repressed.

'''Timur Kuran''': People who are genuinely genuinely religious are being repressed and people who are appearing religious and public are denied jobs are denied promotion opportunities. This Is Not Happening explicitly. There are no rules that in any government agency or in any major corporation, that if You are religious and if you are using prayer beads you know when you're sitting at the at the meeting and giving people a sense that you're using that that that you're religious, that this is going to hurt you. But it's well understood by everybody that if you want to advance in the society now you have to appear irreligious, this is generating a lot of resentment. And there's also there is there is a void that the nationalist mythology creates that it's not satisfying to people it doesn't emotionally doesn't resonate with some people who want to want some religion. So you have a lot of religious we might call religious preference falsification and eventually turkey becomes after a period of uh secularists we can only call dictatorship or autocracy, maybe benevolent dictatorship eventually becomes a multiparty democracy. And as you would expect in a democracy, politicians aspiring politicians notice the existence of a constituency of a privately religious constituency that would like to be freer in publicizing its religiosity, and would like to avoid discrimination there they're facing.

'''Eric Weinstein''': So before we get to that one component, I just want to check to see that my understanding is correct as an outsider, is that a weird thing for Westerners to understand is that secularism and supposed modernity is guaranteed not by the democracy but by the army.

'''Timur Kuran''': Yes, so so army follow this is happening. The army has a special position in Turkish society and it owes that to its enormous victories following World War One and the fact that the practically all the leading modernizers were trained in military schools. So the army is considered the protector of the it's part of the checks and balances of the system. That if the system goes off track, the military has a right to intervene to step in and knock some heads of the politicians and push out the people have caused trouble and restart the system. And this is in fact, so you do start getting political parties with the military in the background you do start getting political parties that start catering to the needs and desires and visions of the pious people, the privately religious, some of them also publicly religious, but some of them publicly, irreligious people, and these parties start advancing and they start gradually altering the discourse and things that were unthinkable to say in during Ataturk's lifetime or the lifetime of the next president, İnönü, starts being said publicly and gradually the support of these parties grow. The military intervenes several times when it sees that the that secularism is being challenged too dangerously from their perspective they intervene for a few years the secularists remain dominant but then

'''Eric Weinstein''': the horse keeps coming back

'''Timur Kuran''': the horse keeps coming back and every time it comes back in, it's even stronger. So we get through this this process we come to the Erdogan era, Erdogan forms Erdogan with when the number of other people belongs to a very what, what is even today a very extreme Islamist party that that's where its roots are a party that favors that Islamic common market and and reducing contacts with the West dramatically returned to many old cultural forms, and so on. But are the one sensed that they could never come to power? If they maintain those extreme positions. that yes, they had a core constituency of 10-12%. But they couldn't grow much beyond that. But if they advocated greater religious freedoms, without threatening the secularists and others, that they could actually have a winning majority.

'''Timur Kuran''': And so he formed a new party, which is the AK parti. AK is the acronym AK means white in Turkish was very clever. A clever acronym clever name for a party. The real name is Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party and the development was to was to reassure the business elite that they were so committed to development and justice could mean many things to the different groups but to his core constituency and meant we would get religious freedoms. And so when he first came to power, he gave the impression that he was going to expand the freedoms of the of the pious masses.

'''Timur Kuran''': Without taking away the freedoms of the secularists

'''Eric Weinstein''': At this point I became very mystified because I was watching it from here, and there was this phrase that was invariant in American news, the mildly Islamist stock party. And I kept hearing that and I wanted to get the wax out of my ears. What do you mean mildly Islamist?

'''Timur Kuran''': so mildly Islamist was it it was never a good choice of terminology.

'''Timur Kuran''': But what they meant was that this was a party that had certain Islamist goals. It pursued those, but without

 

 

 

 

'''Timur Kuran''': really in in mod in moderation and without doing damage to the rest of society. And this is precisely what Erdogan did and it was in fact under his watch in his first few years. as prime minister, that Turkey formally applied to join the European Union. And this was something of the party he came from the extreme party this was one of their

'''Eric Weinstein''': anathema

'''Timur Kuran''': absolutely anathema to to them. They wanted not only not to join the the common market they wanted to reduce trade with them, they their their party platform said that they would do most of their trade with the with the Arab world and the Muslim world now what exactly they would be buying from the Arab world and where they would get their machinery and this and that this was

'''Eric Weinstein''': who knows

'''Timur Kuran''': it, who knows this was one of those things that nobody could be getting back to getting back to, you know, truncated public discourse within that milieu. You never asked this question. You know how this was gonna work out.

'''Eric Weinstein''': You were as a secular Turk from the western part of the country that's very, very modern. did not see this sort of welling up of preference falsification particularly concentrated in eastern in the Anatolian region.

'''Timur Kuran''': I didn't I didn't growing up growing up in Istanbul and growing up in a family that been that was part of this westernization movement. my paternal grandfather fought in the Ottoman army and then in the Turkish War of Independence. During that that process while he was taken prisoner by the by the British and spent spent some time as an officer as a British prisoner, came to appreciate the the strengths of Western society he used that time to try to understand why the British war had stronger armies than than the Turks. tried to understand what it is that made them invent weapons that the Turks had not where several centuries before this wasn't the case. And he became became convinced that Atatürk and the people around him who want to westernize turkey make Turkey, anchor Turkey in the West, they were 100% right. after he, After the war of independence, he resigned from the army became a contractor worked for the government for the rest of his life supported the supported Atatürk's party, the people's Republican Party, was to the end of his life, a committed westernizeer as was my father, as we're all my close relatives. I didn't I grew up in a milieu where people didn't falsify their preferences. People were truthful, the people supported the government supported the government supported the direction

'''Eric Weinstein''': they were

'''Timur Kuran''': of the country because they approved of this

'''Eric Weinstein''': and it was a, what they didn't know was that in part, it was a bubble.

'''Timur Kuran''': But they didn't know was that it was a bubble and what they didn't appreciate, of course, they did appreciate that there were these that the were that there was resistance and there were in during the decades from the 1920s to the 1970s 80s, there had been minor rebellions. In parts of eastern Turkey, it was understood that there were people who objected to the country's direction, but it was also understood that they lived in poor parts of the country. They represented it was the interpretation was They represent the past, as Turkey gets more and more educated, they will fade into the past. The next generation will not will not support them. So this is a transitory problem. So it's not that I didn't understand that there were people who objected to the objective direction of the country, and that when they migrated to Istanbul, they brought some of those ideas with them. There were people in poor communities and Istanbul's in the in the shanty towns, who pretended when they worked for major corporations or worked for the post office of the government. They actually supported the the country's direction, but they actually didn't do it. This much I understood but I but I thought that this was a this was a minor transitory phenomenon. This was not something deeply felt by large numbers of people that could actually change the trajectory of the country. This is something that I missed. And there's a lesson in this, that for if I may, just for a moment, jump back

'''Eric Weinstein''': to the United States

'''Timur Kuran''': earlier, jump back to the United States, in the bubbles that we have here in our left bub bubbles on the left and bubbles on the on the right we have people who are talking to each other and just don't realize how many people there are, who don't agree with them and who have very good reasons of their own for thinking differently about certain issues.

'''Eric Weinstein''': if you take it in the US the Anatolia would be analogized to the middle of the country in sub

'''Timur Kuran''': flyover states.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah. Well, I never used that term because I just detest it. But yes,

'''Timur Kuran''': so

'''Eric Weinstein''': no, no no

'''Timur Kuran''': but it. But it is I mean, it means something to to

'''Eric Weinstein''': to coastal elites and then the

'''Timur Kuran''': the coastal

'''Eric Weinstein''': coastal elites is how the the middle of the country demonizes the edges.

'''Timur Kuran''': Yeah,

'''Eric Weinstein''': but but more than anything, you know, it's not until you start seeing the headscarves coming out of a BMW, that you realize that your picture is in some sense, not an accurate one that people are quite well to do, that they are coming at this from a cultural perspective that you may not understand. And that

'''Timur Kuran''': well this is where the word the whole were preference falsification starts starts coming in at various levels, because now the the religious, the genuinely religious people start gaining political power

'''Eric Weinstein''': right

'''Timur Kuran''': and of course, with that political power comes government contracts. Comes a reduction in the various regulations that prevented you from getting rich. So, there are a lot of people who are rich, who are culturally conserve who are culturally conservative, that become rich,

'''Eric Weinstein''': right.

'''Timur Kuran''': And so then you start seeing they start buying BMWs and they start, start, you know, and you start seeing people wearing head carves in BMWs you driving BMWs you start seeing increasingly elegant headscarves. Whereas Initially, the party that that that built up this this movement, and it promoted a version of Islam that involve modesty

'''Eric Weinstein''': cloth coat republicans would be an it

'''Timur Kuran''': yeah, modesty and they wouldn't you know, they wouldn't be flaunting their wealth and so on. Well, we get to a point gradually, where is where those who get rich start spending the money and increasingly expensive cars extremely a more and more expensive headscarves and you get to the point where flash forward to the to the present where you have a president who's living in the largest Presidential Palace in the world 1100 rooms he has something like 15-20 I forget the exact number private private planes flaunts his his luxury all the all the the his the lead members of the government and people close to them all drive cars or have cars driven for them by chauffeurs that are what's what's that?

'''Timur Kuran''': Well this is something that in Turkey is difficult to discuss. If you discuss it didn't get you in, in trouble. anything involving that the president's finances are he spends his money or how his consumption is over the top can get you in trouble. There are many journalists who are in jail at the moment for for saying this, but you get this not here we get into another form of preference falsification within the AK parti movement. Now these religious, the the people who wanted to publicize do want wanted to advance religious freedoms, we jumped over one phase which I should come back to now which is that Erdogan as he's as he provides, expands religious freedoms. initially, he doesn't take away any freedoms from the secularists. He doesn't reduce their opportunities to drink if they want to drink. He doesn't try to close down restaurants during Ramadan if you're not religious, and you want to have lunch during Ramadan, fine. That was Erdogan during his first few years. But during this time he is gradually chipping away at the checks and balances of the system. And the thing, ultimately that he needs to get rid of is this the power of the military to essentially remove a government this was something that was in the Constitution.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Now I'm going to make a parallel here that I wanted to see whether you're going to go or you won't.

'''Timur Kuran''': Yes,

'''Eric Weinstein''': in some ways. I view the military in Turkey as having played a role similar to the sense making apparatus in our universities and our newspapers as the guarantee the sort of meta guarantors of a stable democracy and that my serious concern about the United States is that we are headed down a path that we cannot imagine actually ends in literal dictatorship of some as yet unknown form, as we lose the thing that eroded that dictatorial impulse so that what I see is I see our newspapers our universities our political parties, this institutional class that was supposed to be, quite honestly somewhat elite and somewhat above the fray, increasingly become this completely untrustworthy, weakened version and where Erdogan was weakening the military was the guarantor of secularism, which was in the process of overreaching. Our situation is that our sense making apparatus is weakening itself because its economics is starting to crumble.

'''Timur Kuran''': I think that there are parallels would be when we come back to this and maybe finished the the the Turkish case. So what Erdogan does, I think it's important for readers and watchers to understand this. He disarms the secularists and makes many secularisms, divides the secularists. And people peels off enough of them by making them feel that he will perfect Turkish democracy by getting rid of the role of the military by pushing the military out of politics through a referendum by actually changing the Constitution. And you need that do you need the country vote on a new

'''Eric Weinstein''': so having a military to guarantee a democracy a secular democracy was always a little bit of a kind of a dirty solution?

'''Timur Kuran''': It was it was a dirty solution.It was something that didn't any and Erodgan would always say this. This is not being Western. I mean, this was Erdogan being trying to trying to sell his try to trying to remove this check on his power by appearing Western. And he convinced enough secular

 

 

'''Eric Weinstein''': genius,

 

 

'''Timur Kuran''': enough secular people's the referendum passed by, I think 50 and a half to 49 and a half or something got through this and the margin, the 5% margin that he needed came from secularist and I have many friends who voted for him, saying, He is Erdogan we hate to say this, but he is the one bringing true Western democracy. You cannot have a democracy have you ever heard, point show me one European country where the military has the power that it has in Turkey. Yes, the problems with Erdogan we'll deal with that within democracy. And but let's get, this is our opportunity

'''Eric Weinstein''': This is, in the US context, I find that both Trump and AOC are telling me some of the things that have an inexorable logic that no one will say, and I'm watching my friends peeled off in both directions towards Trump and AOC. And I keep sort of saying, Don't you see what's coming next in both of those situations, but there's something about this kind of appeal to it. It's almost kind of a self hating nature of the secular that or maybe that would be more in the case of AOC. And this is sort of appeal to oh well we'll just let Trump in to do enough mischief to shake things up. And I keep thinking that that these entreaties are clearly going to go to super dangerous places, which I can't convince either side.

'''Timur Kuran''': Well, the parallel was the parallel here is that Edrogan was taking removing one of the checks and balances in Turkish democracy and preventing it from from going in any direction towards in any ideological direction towards dictatorship,

'''Eric Weinstein''': right.

'''Timur Kuran''': He was removing he he removed this without putting in place some other checks and balances

'''Eric Weinstein''': perfectly said

'''Timur Kuran''': now so here's the parallel with the United States we have right now two extreme groups that hate each other that consider the other side inhuman and who are willing to suspend all sorts of democratic or all sorts of democratic checks and balances to defeat the other side. Trump is doing this and AOC would like to do this as well. And there are various things that are happening in society that are the equivalent of of that. And they're leading us toward a dictatorship of one kind or another.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, and there are very few people who are willing to say I can see this problem. Both of these are saying things that resonate with me. Both of them are presenting dangers and there's no place to go to say, hey, our problem is our is our extremists in our and our exploitative entrepreneurs who are seeing the turmoil in the country and offering us these solutions. Because what I see is I see bravery and courage on the extremes and cowardice in the middle. And there is no kind of a courageous person moderate perspective that says, what are we talking about giving up all of this great stuff that defined our country so quickly. at the first sign of trouble,

'''Timur Kuran''': yes. And yes, we don't have and within American politics today, the hope is that within the Democratic Party, there will be some moderate candidate who will say what you have just said and defend, compromising with the other side and defend moderate solutions, admit openly the complexity of various issues and start a conversation on how we prioritize solving these, these problems. What's happening is that all of the candidates are afraid of crossing in the case of the Democratic Party AOC and the people around her and so they are not saying the things that could actually form a counter coalition. And the the party is being driven to an extreme. And the people at the extreme, including AOC, and her her squad, they are think of many of Trumps supporters in the same way that ardent Trump supporters think of AOC

'''Eric Weinstein''': and there's an interval way in which I agree with both of their verdicts about the other in thst the extremes of trumpism and the extremes of this sort of, you know, Justice Based Thinking that throws out civil society. I have to say that I understand the fear of closed borders of open borders of people just saying such dumb stuff. With no adults anywhere in sight,

'''Timur Kuran''': and nobody pointing out the implications, laying out all the implications of any of these, whether it's whether it's completely closed borders having no immigration or,

'''Eric Weinstein''': which would never happen or totally open borders which can't ever hapen

'''Timur Kuran''': which can which can can never happen. And there are and most americans believe in a policy package somewhere in between

'''Eric Weinstein''': well,

'''Timur Kuran''': that involves that involves some immigration

'''Eric Weinstein''': right.

'''Timur Kuran''': With restricted with restrictions with certain certain rules. They're not for closed borders or open borders so you cannot be a xenophilic

'''Eric Weinstein''': well, so so I've been trying to figure out there's a game that gets played by demographers who are trying to help a candidate get elected, which is can we identify a sector of the economy that nobody's found yet that can be swayed? So soccer moms was an example of one of these sort of Democrat. Demographic discoveries. Another one was the exurb. So you had rural you had suburban but nobody noticed that before. You got to sorry. Before you got to urban from rural there was the exurb between rural and suburban and that had a voting bloc. To me one of the largest voting blocks, which is there for anybody. I talked about this all the time. And it's it's amazing to watch people falsify that it even exists. I call it xenophilic restrictionism. People who are fascinated by other cultures, they've got foreign friends. They're interested in having immigrants as being a vital part of our society, but they're not coked up on this sort of beautiful, nonsensical dream at the base of the Statue of Liberty, which somehow has this mystical old on a immigration expansionism. now of course, immigration expansionism is a weapon for transfer of wealth among Americans. That is, if you can selectively open borders and increase certain groups share the pie George Borjas has showed mechanisms by which you can transfer wealth you claiming to take a tiny little bit of efficiency called Harberger triangle. But what you're really trying to do is transfer a giant amount of wealth, which we might call the Borjas rectangle from American labor to American capital. Now, you can't have that conversation about the misuse of immigration as a tool of transfer, because our media will instantly set upon you and say, well, the only reason you're talking about restricting immigration is your hatred of foreigners and you can't disguise it form me restrictionist

'''Timur Kuran''': restrictionist so that that cannot exist by definition it cannot exist

'''Eric Weinstein''': right of course, because in so this I introduced this thing called the four quadrant model and the idea DIA's is that the media in particular enforces a narrative that all restrictionism 100% essentially, is motivated by fear of foreigners. And then you get to fear of brown people and fear people who are not like us or people with accents. And it is the largest dumbest lie.

'''Timur Kuran''': That is a huge lie. And even you could minorities talk about brown people and black people. Many of them would be among the people hurt by open borders