Democracy "As Such", Intervention & Colonialism ⓐⓡ⊞ⓘⓞ

this video is going to cover a few
different topics it is in part a direct reply to a question from a patreon supporter about u.s. foreign policy textbook political science these kinds of classical questions and it's in part a little bit more of a broad philosophical discussion of a subtle theme that has run through my channel since day one the question of making I want statements in politics and your personal life in human psychology statements I want blank some think we're culturally discouraged from doing and that consider must be crucially important and then that latter topic links to a whole bunch of other I think salient and meaningful questions in our lives including even the neverending controversy of needleless versus ante natal list versus anti anti Naida list I can't I can't identify as a pro natal esteem an anti ng list so we begin my best girl melissa is sitting here off-camera some of you guys will know I'm having her hang in on the video as I like to say so she's not under pressure to keep up constant witty banter but she can she can come at any time and it gives me somewhere to talk to rather than rather than staring too intensely into the camera what's the wild there's a video don't even knows this that I want to do whatever I really got expressed rage or something at the camera where I don't have her participating that way but I like it gives a little bit more of a conversational tone even if she doesn't say a word in my experience all right so my longtime supporter Muhammad Socrates wrote in we are apparently going to meet Muhammad when we are in Europe when we're in Brussels not Paris I believe so we're making that happen he writes quote thanks to the interesting video which is raised for me a lot of interesting questions about your actual views concerning political theory do you think that spreading democracy is a good thing as such I'd emphasize what makes this difficult question is exactly thrilling as such and that democracy in itself is a virtue regardless of the circumstances of its appearance Oh so if you're if you're a little bit of a cosmopolitan well-educated person that's that's a tough question answer and exactly well we'll get back to why that is do you think the nations should care about this is question two I guess do you think the nation should care about and intervene in other nations affairs so that's really the segue to this broader more subtle philosophical thing I want to talk about here and do you think there is some kind of moral justification or imperative for interventionism as it pertains to the United States in this century so far--and cetera you know yeah see um actually I think question three I can roll into uh roll into question one um all right do you think that spreading democracy is a good thing as such so guys you know just lately we've been reading the reading the classics again I'm doing Aristotle I've been doing Xenophon Socrates played a hole all kinds of all kinds of ancient Greek ancient Athenians stuff um in the real world we have terrifying and fascinating examples like what happens when democracy arrives in Iran now maybe to use one of my viewers will be more familiar with September 11th 2001 happens the United States starts its endless war to reshape the map of Central Asia what if in the year 2002 the United States Army sweeps over Afghanistan and then you create an Afghan democracy well if you did that near 2002 they might well elect the Taliban they might well like the people you just kicked out of power um certainly the vast majority of people in that country if it's a democratic country at that time 2002 were totally opposed to women's education and when I say that I don't just mean they were opposed to women getting PhDs or whatever coming medical doctors they were opposed to women getting basic literacy and you know great creative education so you guys may not know this there's a whole crazy history now and billions of dollars spent of international agencies sometimes United Nations sometimes European Union or other donor nations trying to educate traditional rural Muslims in Afghanistan to get them to accept the basic concept of female education not not even female equality but that girls can go to high school and this it's been a it's been a huge battle so if you have democracy in a country where the vast majority of people are religious fundamentalists who are you know of who are in favor of cutting the foreskin off of every male penis who may be in favor of female genital mutilation so I consider male circumcision general mutilation I consider female circumcision female genital mutilation then the question is what good is democracy in the hands of this this public this disability now sir the reaiiy wasn't just lifting this book for the the exercise that gives to my arm guys you know I put up a graphic on Twitter recently showing just the nut the succession of years as you make the transition from Herodotus to through cities from Thucydides to Socrates and then Socrates to Plato played a pterosaur it's it is all crowded together historically all those lives overlap in dynamic ways um but really Aristotle is kind of half a generation after Plato Plato is half a generation after Socrates you get this you get this fine you know the the passage of time really matters in understanding politically what's going on one of the dig pardon me one of the big differences between Plato and Socrates is the overweening emphasis on public education so if you think about what what is the point of the discourse on democracy well for Socrates officer also all three of these people noted name are basically pretty lukewarm they're critics of democracy Socrates is a critic of democracy played at was a critic of democracy Aristotle's critical democracy in different ways and we could digress for hours on us however if you even look at the structure of the organization of Aristotle's politics politics Paris though is really a thesis on the necessity of public education and I see in Plato Plato's just prior to Aristotle he comes out of the crisis of seeing the execution of Socrates with this conclusion that yeah the the ultimate priority we have to have for the future of the future of Greece is public education now the the political context for this is at that time Athens did not have any system for education whatsoever and Athens had just won that pardon me Athens had just lost the war against Sparta Sparta the country that won the war was the one country that really did have a system of government mandated state controlled centralized public education now that system public education was horrifying it was kind of a cartoonish super villainy made into public education it's it's unbelievable but they could see certainly people like Plato sat back in amazement and looked at the military if not cultural and organizational spirity of sparta sparta who didn't have a lot of other advantages and they saw wow this is what having universal public education will do and they saw so public education is creating equality in a sense that democracy in Athens was all about equality equality still a huge theme an era so what is equality really mean well equality is also linked to to this issue of public education so in the era of Socrates his whole discourse is about virtue virtue and voluntary poverty and manliness and that carries on with the the cynics and the Stoics and other schools of law secure that on but you get in the amongst the academics Plato's Academy and then the Lyceum of Aristotle is it's a very different political discourse that is where ultimately the point of politics or the plea of politics is to make a shift to a system public education and that is exactly the crisis you age so you asked me this question totally great question is is democracy a good thing as such is democracy a virtue regardless of the circumstances of experience okay so let's say the year is 2002 really the question is almost the same now in 2018 if the year is 2002 and we are suddenly the conquistadors of Afghanistan we find ourselves we've just conquered Afghanistan sorry in reality how many years to take seven states to conquer any significant portion of Afghanistan this was took a long time sorry I remember I remember just a few years ago a detailed military report from the US dealing with highway by highway how little control they had of the country it was like ten years into the conflict and you know major highways and you know farmers can't sell their produce in Swan because they you guys don't control the highways so it was a long hard war that I think some might say ended with with mixed results or a steal but let's say hypothetically America rolls tanks and and in the year 2002 they conquer Afghanistan instantly what what really are the options for democracy this this is so I mean this is why I say I'm gonna answer question three part and parcel of question one the pursuit of democracy in these conditions of inequality of education has almost always led to the creation of an elite and a left where could say a vanguard who then rule in the name of democracy through completely non democratic means so now in the reality of Afghanistan who are the people you're going to select and cultivate and make into this ruling elite they're going to be the most westernized people so there's a technical term for this in political science it's called a comprar door elite so I mean if you are Spanish colonists in South America or something and you promise you're gonna give people native self-government who are the natives you're gonna choose together and they're not gonna be the examples of native religion aid there's gonna be the most westernized the most intermixed with Western Europe those who have received or appropriated the most of Spanish culture Western culture over you you want to put it so likewise you have a situation where you're creating an elite in the capital city of people who are willing to work with the Americans probably people who can speak or read a little bit of English memory they can speaker read something but possibly also people who maybe went away and got a technical education and something like engineering or medicine they might not have got in the West maybe they went and got an education in Saudi Arabia and came back they went somewhere and and now you have an elite in the capital then you entered so this is really textbook political science you get into what are called classical center periphery conflicts this happened in the Sudan seven too many Muslim countries did also many many non-muslim countries where you have people in the center even though they claim they may rule in the name of democratic values they are so alienated from the people of the countryside or maybe even maybe even poor people in the capital city the poor people in the countryside perhaps still support the Taliban or other Muslim fundamentalist groups like the Taliban they represent a set of values what have you that are utterly incompatible these people they look at the ruling elite they say who are these people I mean look at even just look at photographs of what the ruling elite was like in Iran before they had their their revolution there were European suits you know there were dressed up like Western Europeans there and they many of them have gone away to study in Western Europe and come back you know I remember in the lecture from an Iranian guy was you know you could tell politically where some was about what kind of what kind of cup they drank coffee out of you know they drank coffee like Europeans they were westernized in European eyes and of course involved in the oil industry and where that money comes from so you you have normally you get worsening and worsening center periphery relations and sorry as I've said just in alluding to the Spanish as a parallel something you get a situation in which what is called democracy and name is in fact heated and resented as Western colonialism whether or not it wants that wants to wear that name so you know there were again I've seen scholars you know agonizing over this at some points there was to some extent a sincere attempt to create democracy in places like Vietnam Laos and Cambodia I'd really have to get into details well how do you do that if the Communists are really a very popular choice if you have votes and people want to vote for communists now you know obviously if you really believe in democracy you should let let them elect communists you know that's their culture of those are their values that the Communist Party stands for election and they get elected you know let them that was not the attitude of the CIA that was not the attitude of a series of American presidents you know including Dwight Eisenhower a lot more blame has to be placed on Eisenhower's head for everything that went wrong in the 20th century but including Vietnam War and what-have-you we had some legitimate elections in Laos in which the Communists were a minority party they didn't win outright but they want some seats in parliament in a certain role government certain level of representation in in their parliamentary systems that it and the CIA in the States they couldn't stand for it and they freaked out and they tried to shut down Parliament and have fake elections instead yeah they really destroyed the democratic process so you know democracy and this isn't even this isn't even talking deeply but this died with the shallowest form this is talking about an imitation a second-rate knockoff imitation of the British parliamentary tradition we're not talking about Athenian democracy direct democracy or what have you um he asked you know is democracy in itself a virtue well democracy has some virtues when democracy when you true democracy not necessarily just shallow democracy no parliamentary democracy not this kind of compra de lete ruling in the name of the democracy but it's actually colonialism real democracy means that people learn from their own mistakes right power remains in the hands of the public and they're gonna make bad decisions and then regret them and then make different decisions the next time five years later or what have you so I mean you know if you really believe in democracy the question is do you believe that Afghanistan could within 50 years if they had meaningful democracy do you think they could progress their way out of you know religious fundamentalism that's a that's a really meaningful question if a place like Vietnam or Laos had meaningful democracy say right after the end of World War two when the French Empire is falling apart even if communism was a popular it was maybe one of several popular you know political ideologies do you think they could have had that debate and maybe experimentally tried some of those methods of farming and realized Society and gotten disillusioned and moved I say hey people are starving to death because this economic system isn't working let's let's let's try you know I mean I think that really is the question is you know is democracy and self virtue of assertiveness those parents and the the counter-argument is what you already see I mean this is not the this is not the only issue dealt with in Aristotle's politics by the way but it's it's a big one in Aristotle in broad brushstrokes how can you have democracy how can you have no more brother how can you have polity how can you have a real political community how can you have a working political system without quite a high level of education right mmm you know so look I mean and I you know is there a level so low like you know maybe Afghanistan and in 2002 in terms of illiteracy and religious religious fanaticism what have you that that democracy can't work so you can you know you can you can draw a dotted line there I mean democracy in theory is an anti elitist ideologies but I think it deserves to be criticized to say it actually has a form of implicit elitism well you by the way Aristotle tries to recognize and make explicit that's why he Healy coins the term I looked into but he wasn't the first person used the term he changed that if he basically gave a totally new meaning to the term timocracy he has democracy and timocracy uses with a totally different meaning than anyone else who who used it before and this is actually recognizing the economic inequality and and and I would say it's not really in that section I would say also this issue of educational inequality and how that how that relates to democracy okay say you can jump anytime babe but you you don't seem to be you don't seem to be yeah I'm happy to have you here it's cool much all right so uh question number two that's where I get this issue of what we want and desire and why it's important to say this I think in political and personal discourse do you think that nations should care about and intervene in the affairs of other nations okay so I'm gonna start by answering this with a with a want statement a statement what I want um okay look even even better even more fundamental why is it so important to make statements of I want blank one of my first videos to do this in a big way it's as I say it's kind of a subtle issue with in many of my videos about politics was my video title on community V that's been translated in many languages and I remember just thinking look what is the most honest cutting deep way for me to you know address this it's like okay no I've just I've got a set-aside to make and I want statement um well you know statements if I want they state your objectives blah blah blah there's a certain kind of utility to them but above all else statements of I want let us evade and discard what I would call the the the the discourse of false necessity so a lot a lot of political discourse a lot of ethical discourse a lot of identity politics is framed in terms of necessity right see many vegans will try to construct an argument this way x y&z are necessary or you can be a feminist who tries to argue well x y&z are nesting and you know what what what does necess what does necessary really mean in this in this sesame you know if we try to make the argument that recycling is necessary and of course I know what you mean but sorry so I mean veganism is maybe the easiest and simplest example you you try to construe an argument that society can't exist at all that it can't survive if it doesn't become vegan or something you know where you're trying to create a notion of necessity that obviously is false no of course mean society has always existed by exploiting animals what's currently the vast majority people are but you know I understand they're trying to kind of make an indirect moral argument by appealing to an idea of necessity but I think this is ultimately a kind of intellectually insincere way to proceed with an argument you know sorry so patriarchy if a feminist is talking about the necessity of abolishing the patriarchy and the counter-argument I don't know look at the dark ages look at the extreme gender inequality we had for centuries and centuries it's not necessary now the question is you know I think it's more honest and direct and useful what is it you want what is the society you want to create and why is that and what are gonna be the advantages of disadvantages that I think is just a more useful way to approach it rather than to talk about what mean the ultimate the ultimate you know phony dishonest form of necessity were the Communists who tried to construe that there was gonna be this revolution that would tear society apart that this was something they knew you know they could see the future the world that was necessary and then all these other crazy interpretations creep in due to that that myth of false necessity so creating an ideological abstraction to create a sense of false necessity I think is a dishonest way to see what this kind of argument and I'm saying it's it's more honest if we talk about you know what we want so you know this question should foreign nations care about and intervene in one of those affairs it would be so easy to say oh well this is necessary due to human rights this is necessary due to the United Nations Charter you know we can we can spin out all kinds of phony false shallow claims about necessity what what is it we want or was that I want um the in one word what it is I'm hoping for here is scrutiny right I mean scrutiny I mean this this came up for me even in the recent video talking about the nature of peer review I write something I come up with an idea if I only have yes-man or only my own employees looking at it at what point does it get scrutiny one of the real questions is you know if I come up with a business plan when I present it to the bank is the bank really gonna evaluate you know is this a viable plan for a business do these go at what point is scrutiny brought to bear on something whether it's academic political economic or what-have-you I mean recently I told this story at length I don't know if you heard it in the podcast about the the rubber industry in Laos yeah it's the rubber tree and a guy like me is standing there like well look I've scrutinized these reports I've noticed there are some contradictions you know in in the financial projections and so on well who else who else is going to do that job I mean there I am I'm a I was a all of Buddhism I wasn't is not remotely my job but I was capable of bringing scrutiny to bear on that when nobody inside the bubble was doing so either because they couldn't they were not incentivized to write so you know scrutiny is something tremendously valuable and scrutiny can avert terrible problems it can also redress terrible problems with it once they've started and there is this kind of advantage that detachment brings with scrutiny where you know France can look at what Canada is doing and Canada can look at what France's doing and we can learn from one another's mistakes we can point out one of those mistakes so it may seem as if and many people say this self-righteously no no no scrutiny must be domestic within a democratic system well look I would I would love to think about human nature and about democracy that there's so much scrutiny within a given society within a given culture that you don't need scrutiny across cultural lines across national lines during World War two the United States was producing all this propaganda about human equality propaganda against racism when their enemy was Nancy Germany or in an even more subtle way that was harder for Americans to deal with they were also doing propaganda against Japanese racism because the Japanese are racist against the Chinese a Mongolian it's harder for Americans to relate to right so stuff about racial equality and the brotherhood of man the US Army itself internally with me at the racism against black people unbelievable I heard a very moving autobiography as a radio documentary a black man the United States and during World War two she was African American man and the oh he managed to get into the submarine service he was in the Navy and they move he might have moved on submarines after I forget if he was in submarines during World War two but it was in the Navy and submarines and you he had to work really hard to get that to get that posting and the only job they let him do this is during the the segregation of the Army was polish boots he was a bootblack he was polishing boots all these stories with the unbelievable race of white officers against him as a black man in the army and he knew because he saw it the white man in the army treated German war criminals better than they treated him they treated the German POWs German prisoners of war people they cut better than he was treated as a black man in the army and he had specific anecdotes showing this he literally wasn't allowed to eat at the same table as the white soldiers and the German POWs were the German POWs that so the German prisoners of war were eating better food than he was eating as a black man America so I'll come out of the stories just briefly this shows I mean scrutiny and detachment I wish it wasn't true I wish you could say well the the the hypocrisy here was obvious to everybody obviously Americans just saw Wow Nazi Germany is the enemy racism as the enemy fascism is the enemy and here within America we have this graces amande fascism so therefore before put all the pieces of the puzzle are laid out on the table for you therefore segregation is wrong therefore how is it you know this this this lie about separate and equal I mean you know gee why do black people not go to the same schools as white people do black people really have a separate but equal Harvard or something you know these questions should have been incredibly obvious to everyone but it's not obvious it's not obvious because you're not detached the people involved are a part of the culture they're internal to the culture there's an etic versus emic thing going on here because you're within the culture you deeply buy into these cultural values you don't question it at the same time that you're participating in this war and and and spouting this this propaganda zone so for this this particular black man himself I'm sorry I do not know the guy its name maybe someone's gonna email me this guy's name because I think he published a book and he you know he did I forget it was but he did he did tours and lectures you know talking about his story and you know he made he made a statement about this there was a museum exhibit about his life and some things of this but you know for him the moment when he questioned the culture he was a member of was that his boat or submarine I forget which was shipwrecked and he washed up on the eastern shore of Canada so somewhere like Nova Scotia New Brunswick one of those places and he had grown up in segregation America and he was terrified so he also when he when he washed up you know he had hypothermia she actually appeared to him when he could see and hear people around him but he actually couldn't speak and couldn't really move his limbs he was in this rubbery state where core temperature has dropped so low that you're not wearing probably and you know white people cluding white women they stripped him naked you had that they had to scrub off oil he had you know there was oil spill you know from the boat and someone they they had to clean him and then you know put I think they had to put him in hot water and then wrap him up that you know they went through this thing and these people these are you know these were probably know Presbyterians on the east coast of Canada I don't know they were but they weren't racist against black people they had most had never met a black person and they just they were not at all like the white Americans he'd known in the American South or within the American army and they treated him like anyone else you know of course at first you know okay that's funny he'll in this appointment and they invited him into his home sorry into their home you know each novice each soldier was each of the people rescued from the shipwreck were put in different homes and he was in a home with a white family that had a white daughter and he said the first night he was there he didn't sleep at all he was wide awake all night because he absolutely assumed that the KKK or a similar group would come and lynch him because where he was from for a black man to be in a house with a young white woman was just a death sentence he was absolutely terrified that he was gonna be killed and in the contrary in the morning when the family got up they invited him to sit and eat with them at the same breakfast table you know they they just treated him like anyone else and they had you know meaningless chitchat with him and no white person had ever treated in that way before and it was shocking to him and gave him this you know parallel in his own mind where suddenly he was treating he was comparing the way he was treated in this town in small-town Canada to the way he was treated within the United States of America within the US Army and it influenced his life in a whole bunch of ways among other things he actually applied for and eventually got a promotion within the Navy to stop just shining shoes he became a radar technician you know he had a long career and went on to question the races in the society is that so this is even even for the people who are defending our oppressed by it he got a jarring perspective from the outside of questioning his cultural assumptions I mean he was shown in the most visceral way possible you could live with white people as equals he had that he spread in all of us for two weeks or something he wasn't there for that long but you know this is during the war so they weren't rescued right away they didn't the army didn't have the resources to go pick up shipwreck victims straight away something he did live in that community for some some length of time and got to know those people and it was possible for black and white people I mean there was no reason to hysterically fear that everyone was a rapist during this crap this is possible it's also possible form to be a radar technician well you know he started to question the dogma he was raised with he was raised with the dogma that black people were you know intellectually not capable that that kind of work you know and that kind of thing that he was doomed to just polish shoes and so on so look there is something in practice to the outside perspective you know for people within Saudi Arabia they think they can participate in the Olympic Games and not have any female athletes have a male-only it's like team and the outside country saying them know this is actually unacceptable and then they think well we can have female athletes but they're not going to wear bathing suits no it's not acceptable you can't swim in a burqa and the Olympic Games you know so this is a coach no this is the shallowest type of cultural challenge but still you you get my point through this kind of international mutual scrutiny there's a there's a tremendous impetus towards progress to recognizing or noticing flaws in your own society and system and you know I think what gets worked out as a set of minimum standards now again within Canada within my generation the terrible situation of our First Nations our native people or indigenous people what I'm going to say you know the vast majority were just blind to it they just didn't want to know didn't want to hear about it they didn't want to think about it we would have benefited enormously if some other country were scrutinizing we're saying hey you don't you don't live up to this minimum standard I know with Turkey you know those questions were asked us Turkey was applying for membership in the European Union and the European Union would then point out on a probable look at how you you treat your own ethnic minorities the Kurdish minority being the most obvious and at that time it was literally illegal to buy or sell like an audio CD with a song and Kurdish you know their their music and their language was actively being suppressed or theoretically driven into extinction is gonna think well you think you meet European standards of human rights or democracy or diet and you don't so some people say I think sincerely that Oh Human Rights is a domestic affair or democracy is the mr. fair no outside country you should interfere in another country it's democracy and what I'm saying here with this lengthy introduction is no the exact opposite is true and I think one of the most fundamental advantages Europe has is just that it's divided into kind of medium-sized and small units of countries that get to scrutinize one another um a country like Norway is in a position to learn from the mistakes made by England and France and Germany and there may be in a position to admire and look up to something going on a Denmark that's correct or you know they have all these competing examples of legal and social systems it's easy to do for Canada you know it got got this one giant neighbor next door and I I don't think we we learned a whole lot sadly I mean anyway getting getting into Canadian politics is isn't a thing but you know we're not in that kind of situation of healthy mutual scrutiny and in this sense healthy mutual competition it's not really competition talking here it is really just scrutiny so it's hard to have scrutiny in a democratic society um you know I mean we're not even really talking about non democratic societies we're not gonna talk about scrutiny and a feudal society it doesn't seem to me that that relevant to our discourse but democracies they're they're very good at ignoring problems I mean it's we ignored the situation for the Cree in the Egypt and the Mohawks and so on and so forth for decades and decades um you know America during World War Two and during I would say the whole Eisenhower period ignored you know the status of black people even though these were kind of enormous ghettos was really obvious there's really embarrassing UNIVAC under segregation you'd have like the you'd have dignitaries visiting from India and they wouldn't be able to go to restaurants in the downtown core let's see you couldn't think they were they counted as black people and you're racially surveys yeah what are you gonna do so you have the Ambassador ambassadors from India or something like this so India didn't get have its independence thumpy of some kind of representatives coming from India or something coming to visit a university or something oh sorry well actually you know you're not allowed to you're not allowed to drink from this water fountain you're actually not allowed to use the bathroom here at the University you're not allowed that is ridiculous you know you can't eat at this restaurant you can't do any of the things you you might presume you you do yeah so anyway if for any if for any foreign dignitary u.s. baseball league under segregation you know they had a lot of talented Hispanic baseball players sometimes you'd have two brothers full-blooded brothers one would count as being a member of the Negro League and one would be in the white League because it was based on their complexion how dark-skinned you were as an Hispanic person it's you what baseball league it was totally sure nobody's he's probably okay I'm good can see nobody there was a vocal minority of people who saw problem offense but I mean look in Canada you try to find the vocal minority of people in the 1930s who saw the problem with what we were doing the First Nations what we were doing to Korea they J away the Iroquois you know it's it's a it's a small minority you know it's unbelievable how small that that might already is and then as you move for but even into the 1960s and so on yeah really really great and yeah we would have benefited enormous Lee but that kind of mutual scrutiny if you want to pop in Bay pop in okay good that's mortifying my girlfriend year so yeah so I said before talking this in democratic system there are some examples of non democratic systems we can we can talk about that really matter one of them is the university sorry this is all under the heading of things I want I want scrutiny so I want it to be possible you know in within a university to say hey hey the Chinese language course is not working right so people are paying thousands of dollars to learn Chinese they're sitting in a classroom with 40 students one professor the professor presses play on a cd-rom and they fill out photocopied worksheets guess what at the end of this process after four years I speak this much Chinese you know and believe me I did detailed research on this believe me there are quantifiable measures of how ineffective this is as so the university system nobody's elected in Canada nobody's public honorable they're not accountable to Parliament they're not accountable to anyone they're not accountable of the students nothing and if you say someone to that which I did it's a real world you know I took the complaint forward through all of the democratic and non-democratic means open to me including and what the Parliament with it so Parliament's and the Ombudsman and the president the University in the head of the department and so on you know this is a really glaring case and of course it was in all of their interest to try to shut me down and sweep it under the rug and not you know I was the problem and and what-have-you so who can exercise scrutiny in university system right can the students scrutinize the professors can one professor scrutinize another professor in reality this is parallel to what I'm pointing out about national international polls in reality scrutiny tends to only creep into the system when it's one university competing with another university right when as University said my University of Canada might say oh wow look at how they teach Chinese in Berlin they have this really good program and it's winning awards is better than us and they compare in this oh wow maybe we got to catch up in Berlin they have just one teacher with five students and they do this different method and their kids actually learn Chinese or something you know thoth that's hypothetical but normally that's that's how it's true so that's that's tragic I wish it wasn't true and I think one of the challenges for real-world parliamentary democracies that I don't regard as democracy in the true sense of the term but in you again uh universities are actively non democratic but one of the questions is how can you foster scrutiny meaningful scrutiny within a non democratic system how can you do it within a democracy how can you in an item criticism within the US military how can people report corruption within the US military how can people report incompetence no I have actually read a little bit about that you do have some some methods you have you know whistleblower policies and what-have-you it's tough right so because this is supposed to be a chain of command and you're going to report your own superior officer is corrupt is taking bribes is stealing or is isn't common it's tough so there is runs against the authoritarian culture of the military of the university and what have you um mentioned really briefly one of the most influential delusions in political science comes to the work of Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant said oh well we have all these wars and conflicts that arise from one country vying with another so therefore the solution all we need to do is Immanuel Kant said create a group like the European Union or like the United Nations create a group of nations his reasoning was the same way that an individual relates to a king you'll then just have a next level up where the Kings relate to a king of kings the nations relate to uh to a super nation and then that'll that'll solve the problem right and my view in a sense here is is the exact opposite the more you aggregate into one massive political unit the less potential you've got for a meaningful scrutiny and obviously strudy that was also that the principle that the United States was built on tragically I mean I think it's failed but the idea of the separation of powers that begins in begins in France with the their own de Montesquieu believed um and then as transferred to the United States that was the idea was that by separating the judiciary from the Congress by separating things into separate stages each would scrutinize the other each would hold the other to be accountable I would say it has not worked out all right so what I've done here in this analysis again I've orderly rejected talking about this in terms of necessity there is no necessity there's nothing in electable that the people of Afghanistan have to emerge from medieval superstition into modernity there's no ineluctable progress from feudalism to democracy there's no necessity to it the people of China can remain in a state of dictatorship forever there's no necessity you know to to which even democracy on the contrary when you look at the history of the world you have brief periods when governments had real democracy or little bits and pieces of democracy was it in Rome maybe 27 years of them having just a bit of democracy under a republic that was in some ways you know aristocratic and in some ways taranta coal but well piece of democracy for a few years there and then centuries of rule by emperors it's ridiculous so you know um I'm mentioning this because there's a view that was made even more popular by the success of Francis Fukuyama Francis Fukuyama published a book hold the end of history but the reason why that book was so popular was that people already wanted to believe that there's an inevitable progress to this to the world from peasant societies to modern Western democracy that this was an inevitable and natural progress and that we can we can look at these things in terms of in terms of necessity anyway that was it was popular because that was something that that people already wanted to believe and instead and so I think sir that's a classic example what I said sorry 30 minutes ago in the video of creating an ideological illusion and then arguing in terms of a false necessity you know relative to that illusion and I think the way to move forward in all honesty instead is just to say this is what I want and what I want you know what what does it entail you know better and worse with what advantages and disadvantages so sorry it's it's now getting late I can see was yeah my girlfriend's falling asleep but I was gonna say so look look briefly but briefly briefly briefly I'm sorry uh you know it's a topic I'm passionate but that's why it's worth doing the video about but you know you had people respond to your video about having a baby so having a baby raise the issue of natal ISM a natal ism you had people respond to that video by saying you're just speaking in your own self-interest they use some other words of that like selfishness or something I don't know if you remember the term the egoism and this kind of thing right ok so I want to live in a democratic society that's what I want it's my self-interest oh it's my selfishness it's my ego ISM I am NOT gonna lie to you like this is a force of nature like gravity or this is a necessity or this is you know what am i no this is what I want no is it good or bad we can talk about that I would like to see a genital mutilation of babies abolished I would like to see circumcision abolished male circumcision female circumcision how are we going to accomplish that you know obviously you can talk about public education you can talk about all kind of things you could talk about you know you whether you use human rights discourse or not however you you want to advance that but what am I gonna tell you that this is this is ultimately something I want this is about desire and whether or not I can convince people other people to you know recognize my desire to go I'm not gonna tell you it's it's selfless you know I'm not gonna tell you itself have negating or is self-sacrificing you know no we're ultimately you know we're talking about questions of what we want and what we don't want talking about desires and animus and all these things so this is a deeply phony attitude that desire is something outside of real politics that real politics is always world of just managing necessities and that human desires are something something quite outside that now you know sorry just to briefly kind of go over the the other categories but you know I want to live in a society where twelve-year-old girls can go to McDonald's unaccompanied you know I mentioned this that always struck me you know living in downtown Toronto and I know many many people go to Japan for more dangerous parts the world they noticed that in Japan you know children can go places without their you the three when sure when we move to a certain part of China Melissa will Melissa comes from Detroit Detroit Detroit pretty banged up and you were amazed the extent to which children just you know with their friends we're going places and doing things alone unaccompanied by the adults so probably going to buy a buy ice cream or something you know yeah yeah now of course anyway I'd prefer if these thirteen-year-old girls were buying vegan food at McDonald's but this is unrelated to my car discard what whatever whatever it is they're buying at McDonald's we don't need to know for this you know now what when you even just think about that desire and all the societies that don't have it you know a lot of implications come out of that right there are a lot of requirements you know if you want to have a society where twelve-year-old girls can go to you know McDonald's unmolested or without fear without parents you know disallowing it think about what's built in that situation culturally in terms of crying in terms of poverty in terms of drug addiction you know in terms of infrastructure and I think frankly in terms of levels of education obviously you know women's education you know enroll in the workforce included actually I mean this one kind of fragment of what it means to have a modern Western parliamentary type society which does I mean it's it's a big difference between life in Canada and life in some other parts of the world there's a lot you know built into it and you know I mean sir I mean that that's a very real very tangible example with a human face now if somebody says to by contrast they want to destroy the patriarchy I don't really know what that means though I don't really know with what that entails you know but that's that's something you know and indeed for Afghanistan today that may be unattainable for you know many years to come how can you get to being in a society where some of that some of that is attainable so you know it's been a subtle but I think for me profound point that's come up in many other videos of wanting to switch from a discourse about necessity to a discourse about desire and one of the differences is there's a kind of ineluctably self-critical what's the word mover there's there's a kind of there's kind of vulnerability you open yourself up to when you say this is what I want you know and as I said even in my video on on community my vegan manifesto video I said look I want this and I don't have it and maybe I can't have it maybe this isn't gonna happen in my lifetime but this is this is my goal that puts you in a vulnerable place and I think the reason for building up these towers of abstraction and ideology is exactly that people don't don't want to admit that to themselves this is just about your desires and your desires may be pathetic or unattainable or what have you and people today okay health care in the United States you know I want to live in a country where access to medical care is not based on the ability to pay I can state that inversely I want to live in a country in which poor people are never refused surgery due to their lack of ability to pay I well okay but you know I'm just I'm simplifying it I mean I'm just trying to simplify down to a work I don't want to live in a country where one person will die of a heart attack and another person will live because of their ability to pay I want to put it this way you know they have the same condition and one person gets good treatment and the other person gets none and what person gets good treatment the other person gets worse treatment for heart attacks cancer you know you know that's what I want you know I can't sell you this myth of fake necessity there isn't going to be a revolution if we fail to provide it America for very long time right it can carry on this way for four centuries more tragically or what have you right you know I'm not I'm not gonna sell you on any of these other notions of necessity but as you know also coming back to the other themes of this video the main way people engage in this discourse even within the United States is to say why is it America can't have that when Portugal has it Scotland has it Taiwan has there all these other countries Japan to some extent still have a working healthcare system that takes care of the poor different story in each place one way or another whether you think Denmark is better than Scotland maybe it said well this is attainable for one else so again it actually still is this issue of mutual scrutiny across cultures and across borders with some sense of detachment because when you live within that bubble when that's when that's the only thing you know it's maybe harder to come to that perspective and and harder to to come to that judgment okay guys I think this video has gone on long enough but ultimately it is a fallacious argument to say you only want to have a baby because that's what you want and that's that's how the antenatal is tried to refute you right it's it's you know fallacious argument to say you only want to have a democratic society because that's what you want it's tautological I mean you what have you proven or disproven you know you're correct you know this is something I want and I'm willing to talk about that with all the vulnerability that entails you know I'm not gonna take up my position on the sort of you know ilusory stand that you know the inevitability of history is on my side the way to deal the progress of science is on my side it's like no I mean you know I identify as a nihilist I don't believe any of that you know with all due humility and all do vulnerability I'm gonna express to you my vision of what the future society should be like I'm gonna express to you what I want I'm gonna look around say who's with me who can try to make something positive happen what are the next steps we can take if you want this to if you also see cracks in the facade of maybe the things we take for granted maybe the evils in our society that become invisible thus because we we live within that society whether we can challenge that through just the application of scrutiny scrutiny sweet generous within our culture scrutiny looking cross the border to some other society scrutiny by reading science fiction even I mean some ideas the first in that way you know thinking about another society that could be that's the origin of of the word utopia Thomas More's utopia was science fiction of a sort that one way or another we have they use scrutiny to make those cracks to bring out those new ideas to express those desires and find a way forward Mohammed thank you for your question I will see you in Brussels