254 - The Yale US-China Forum: Slavoj Žižek, Richard Wolff, Yannis Varoufakis, Robin Visser, Yascha Mounk, Pei Wang, Daniel Mattingly

37:25I don't need to explain this. Thank you, Yanis. I really appreciate you virtually chatting for a long distance and sacrificing your bedtime for us. I didn't sacrifice anything. It's fun being with you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Yanis. I think you can go to bed. No, I'm going to listen to Rick. and to the rest. Sure. And be like for a seat. If you see me nodding off, just excuse me. Yeah. So I think Yanis raised a very, very interesting and pivotal question about socializing cloud capital and socializing the technological innovations we have there. And Wolf, you are very prominent Marxist and also a Marxist economist.

38:12So that is what I call a very rare thing because we haven't seen many Marxian economics breakthroughs. We have a lot of Marxism philosophical breakthroughs. We have people like Stavros Zizek. We have people like Badio who make breakthroughs in philosophical theories, but not so much in economic theory. And I think we can borrow your dance in how you're inheriting the Marxian, especially American Marxian economics legacy to expand what is happening today in China and America. And I'm particularly interested how you and your theory may help us understand what Yanis is saying, how to socializing the capital without, I would say, going too fast into central planning economy.

39:10OK, well, let me begin a couple of introductory remarks. Thank you very much for inviting me. um i am familiar with the building in which you are holding this since i was both a graduate teacher a student and a professor at yale for a while earlier in my life um i understand your comments but let me be a little bit mysterious and tell you that marxian economists are a lot more numerous in the United States than you might imagine. And there's no difficulty in explaining why. It's dangerous. And so it's important not to be very open about that. I am in a special position, which is why you know me.

40:04And that's because I'm a graduate of the elite schools of the United States. And when confronted about my Marxism, I simply waive my pedigree. And in the United States, that works. And that's why you know of me and not of the many others that are there. I am going to approach this a little differently. I'm going to begin by reminding us all of the decades leading up to World War I. That was a period of time when there was tremendous tension among the great powers of that time. The European countries, especially Germany versus Britain, with the United States playing a growing role, and tremendous tension, conflict, and eventually a terrible, perhaps the most terrible, world war.

41:05Throughout that time, there were intense class struggles in every one of the contending superpowers. They were obvious. They were clear. It was capitalists versus socialists of one kind or another. And the lesson of that time was that the class struggles had their own dynamic, but they certainly helped shape the great power struggles and vice versa. It was a complex interplay that produced what? A dramatic change in the whole class configurations in every one of the contesting countries. Russia went off in a new direction with the Soviet Revolution. There were similar efforts, as I'm sure many of you know, in many other parts of Europe around that time.

42:10That was where Georg Lukács comes from. That's where Antonio Gramsci comes from. Lenin, I mean, all of them. The whole Marxist canon was shaken to the core. Why am I telling you this story, which you know? Because I think something similar is going on now. And here the two key stories are the United States and China with a secondary role played by Europe, as Giannis has taught us over the years, both by the roles he played and by the comments that he made. Here is what I think is going on. The United—let me preface it one more. Marx has a wonderful remark somewhere about no system disappears until it has exhausted all the forms in which it can function.

43:16That's a remarkable insight and lends itself nicely to what I want to say. Western capitalism, from its inception in England in the 17th century, or whenever you want to make the break, has gone through an immense array of forms. One of the most important, of course, the colonial form, when it was able and took this step to carve up the rest of the world, to feed it the raw materials, the food, and all the labor that it needed, the markets that it needed to expand beyond what it could, and that could at least postpone for a while the clash that it eventually worsened by virtue of that postponement.

44:15But there was a very powerful sequence of forms that it took. I think the United States and Europe are now at a point where they can't see and cannot envision the next form, which is becoming urgent because the form they're in looks like it's heading into the toilet. I think it is important to understand that they don't know where to go next or how to go. Yes, cloud computing, of course. The high tech, one of the only sectors, certainly here in the United States, that looks anything other than dead or dying. And the terrible fear here is that the Chinese have caught up and are in the process of surpassing the U.S.

45:16in just those areas. And that produces a very strange behavior. They can't provide work at a decent wage. Otherwise, they wouldn't be Donald Trump. He is the product of the failure to handle the last phase of the old system. when the U.S. Capitol left the United States, went to China, India, Brazil, all over, Vietnam, all over the place, and produced such a level of disorder in the United States that the conventional, comfortable politics of the Democratic and Republican Party collapsed. The middle dissolved. Meanwhile, something very similar was hollowing out capitalism in Europe. And here is then my notion.

46:20What you are seeing in the effort of the United States is a desperate, and I use that word intentionally, and if it frightens you when I use it, that's partly why I'm using it. I can assure you that the American people feel now a sense of desperation about their situation and a sense of desperation about the Trump government a mere two and a half months after it took over. It is a sense of a vortex, of a spinning out of control. Now, let me put that to the side. And my focus now is on China. China has outdeveloped the United States in the last 30 years. We all know that. The GDP growth that the IMF predicts for the United States this year is 2.5%.

47:27And most people don't think it'll make that. The Chinese predict 5%. And that 2 to 1 to 3 to 1 ratio has been the norm for decades now, and there is no suggestion that it will stop. This is a terrible problem, number one. Number two, China has figured out how to make a socialism unlike the other socialisms that have so far been tried. For simplicity, let me distinguish very quickly European socialism, or what is sometimes called Scandinavian socialism, although obviously it doesn't apply very well to Scandinavia these days. And it was what? It was an economy that was basically privately capitalist, but with a fairly strong dose of government regulation, high levels of taxation, and the provision of a social welfare state, more or less adopted in Germany or France or Italy and so on.

48:46That was the first model. Second model, the Soviet Union. There the government takes over everything in industry and a good chunk of agriculture and runs it like a state enterprise. China is neither of these. China decided to try something else, a hybrid. 50 % one, 50 % the other. with a strong government run by a strong communist party in order to control and shape and limit what this odd hybrid would do and how it would develop. Leaning on Confucian ideas from the past and leaning on a pretty good critique of both the Scandinavian and the Soviet systems. So China was able to do what no other socialism was able to do.

49:57And its hybrid model outperformed every person's expectation. I wrote my master's thesis at Stanford University on the Chinese economy many years ago. And the distance China has come, which I have followed ever since, is nothing short of spectacular. If you want to be a poor country that stops being poor, then China is the obvious model to use. and has been for years and will continue to be. And that's a very powerful social force to be able to say what I just said. But here comes the irony as I close. China, too, is at a point where, having gone through a variety of efforts, let me remind you, in the late 50s, the communes.

51:02That was my dissertation, was about communes in China in the early days of Mao. Then we have the Cultural Revolution, and we have all kinds of experiments. Then the reversion back to letting people become rich. Then the whole notion of a 50-50 private state. In a way, China finishes this, by now, stale debate of capitalism, the private versus the state. And it puts China at a point of questioning, I hope, its own class structure. And here, let me explain what I mean. I know that Marxism is interpreted in different ways. like all great orcs of great thinkers. There are lots of interpretations. But when I read Marxist Capital, which, by the way, I have taught in American universities every year since the 1970s, my classes are full and no one has ever interfered with me doing that.

52:16And I'm doing it now, this semester, as I talk to you. In my interpretation, the class structure Marx was interested in was the one that organizes the workplace between a tiny minority of people who are the capitalists, the employers, and all the others who aren't. The United States Census today says that the employers in this country represent 3 % of the people. The other 97 % are not. A revolution that Marx, therefore, foresees is an end to that way of organizing the workplace. So it isn't employers and employees. Why is this important? because this is an earth-shaking change that would implicate both the United States and Europe on the one hand and China on the other.

53:28It is something they have in common, that way of organizing their enterprises. And that's what's got to change in both of them. They come at it from a different history, in different ways, with different consciousness. But the problem is the one Marx set himself. Let me close with a quote, since I'm a Marxist, you will forgive me, from Lenin. After the revolution, in the short number of years he had before he died, He made the following comment. What we have achieved, he said, is state capitalism. His words, the working class seized the state and we now operate a capitalism. What we haven't done but is our next stage is to make use, and then he used this word, of worker cooperatives, which existed all over Russia at that time, as they existed elsewhere.

54:49That is the direction we have to go. Well, that's, of course, a recognition that the problem is the employer-employee relationship and the genuine democratization of the workplace is the agenda for revolutionaries. And when I ask myself, what alternative story could I tell rather than the one in which the United States keeps provoking the Chinese with one limit, with one exclusion, with one sanction after another. And I'm mindful today that Mr. Trump has discovered the concept of the secondary sanction. He used it at first for Venezuela. Here's what it means. Anybody who buys oil or gas from Venezuela will now be subject to a sanction.

55:56And he specifically threatened Russia and China. China gets a lot from Venezuela, if you're not familiar with that, that he would apply it. these are steps which to go back to my beginning in world war one led to one of the worst wars the human race has ever had i wish i were as sanguine as jan is about the prospects for that i'm real worried but then again i live here and as i watch the sinking of europe This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

56:51Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. hey Chicago class it up with Crocs you know back to school is coming in fast so why wait to find your new fave footwear step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look try it style it make it yours because the right pair doesn't just show up it shows off first day fits handled Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Croc store today.

57:33I get worried and as a Marxist I need to understand how and where I can think about a class change in both of the conflicting countries that I might be able to advance as a place for both of them to go other than the mutual slaughter that these people are capable of. And believe me when I tell you that the leadership in this country was under Biden and is under Trump capable. Do not forget we remain the only country that ever dropped a nuclear bomb on other people. It should not be forgotten. Last point. When Giannis tells us, as he does, and I couldn't agree more, about the sad, tragic, and I use tragedy in its Greek origins, of Europe.

58:45Let's remember how much of the world Europe dominated for so long. and look where it is now, desperately trying to hold on with its fingernails as it falls down the cliff. There is something unspeakably sad, and yet also there's an element of justice. That empire or those empires are over, unquestionably done. They passed the baton to the United States, which is now for the first time feeling itself in the last 15 years that its empire is also dissolving. That is what makes Trump Trump so crazy, so extreme in what he's doing. He's throwing around tariffs. It's a lifeline for him. It's a magic wand that will somehow make the disparate parts that Jan has sketched for us come together.

1:00:01Here in the United States, here's my last point. We have a metaphor we often use. It comes out of the American game of football. When you're losing and you're in the final seconds of a football game, the team that is about to lose often chooses to tell the quarterback, throw a Hail Mary pass. What that means is you throw the ball to a predetermined corner of the field. You tell all your players to run down there. You throw it down there, and you hope as it bounces around, it comes down in the hands of someone on your team rather than the other team. You know what it means? It means you've given up rational policy, rational strategy.

1:00:52It's all a matter of luck. Our government throws Hail Mary passes. people like Giannis and me try to make a rational strategy. It's right for us to try, but it misunderstands where we are if we don't realize that they've given that up. They are now in desperation mode. And the class struggle I think we need to wage is to tell them that the solutions to the problems on both sides might well be to question the organization of production in just the way Marx originally tried to get us to do. Thank you so much, Rick. And I apologize to everyone for the artificiality of this moderation. But given that we have all these different time zones going on, And before we open it up to those of us who don't have these time constraints, I'm just wondering if...

1:01:57Giannis, do you have a question for Rick before you turn in for the night? I just wanted to say goodbye. And I want to say that, you know, I agree with everything that Rick said. And since you asked me to ask a question, I'll ask him one more or less in jest. But isn't the Hail Mary strategy, at the moment when you feel you're losing the game anyway, the only rational strategy that is available? Yes. So it's so... And Hail Mary's, when you've reached a situation where China is more than twice as productive as you are, it has the manufacturing sector, and where it's all a matter of preserving your rents when you don't have...

1:02:37And they know that. You know, Trump is at least honest in that. The United States no longer has the productive capacity, not even to build nuclear submarines, let alone super fast trains. So their Hail Mary strategy of maintaining for another 10, 20, 30 years, if they can, the hegemony of the dollar while devaluing it and continuing to accumulate some rents. Well, you know, this is the best they can do. The question is, what will the American people do? Because they are going to be sold down the drain whether that Hail Mary works or not. If it works, they will still be thrown. Well, someone at the beginning, I believe, mentioned Hegel.

1:03:19And what Janis does as a good student of Hegel too, is remind us quite rightly that the irrational is the rational. It's not either or. It is that strange combination, which is the only way to understand all of these things. It reminds me of when people hear say about something that happened, it happened for no reason. The Russians invaded Ukraine for no reason, an unprovoked attack, as if that exists. Every attack is provoked. You either understand it and find the provocation, or you avoid it. But the notion that it isn't there, that says something about your reasoning if you understand what Hegel taught us.

1:04:13And I want to come back. Yes, the class struggle is getting very intense here in the United States. We have a revival of our labor movement, the likes of which we haven't seen for 75, 80 years. We have a revival of the left. Every Saturday now, there are mass demonstrations in front of Elon Musk's Tesla showrooms. You can't buy a Tesla here. You can't get through the demonstrators to get into the room to negotiate the purchase. The government has to promise severe penalties to people who deface the Tesla on the street, which they're, of course, doing anyway. They can't stop it. There are movements here.

1:05:06Again, you know, I don't know how long I will be able to speak freely anymore because things are really, I mean, Giannis knows he's had to live through these half a dozen times. But for Americans, this is very frightening. You hear the word fascism in this country more often now than I have for a long, long time. There is a question I want Daniel Matindi to address. It's like sometimes harmony can be in the form of oppression or in the form of controlling. And that is where your research is mainly about, about how Chinese Communist Party and the government interact with social forces and military.

1:05:55So what's your take on this statement, especially when it comes to how the sociological evolution and the social interaction between the government and the society in China, and how you are going to respond to the future of China and U.S.? Great. Well, thanks for this. And thanks for the invitation here to speak with this distinguished panel and participate in this conference. Well, I'll answer your first, the direct question, and then kind of pull back to think a little bit about U.S.-China relations. I'll try to be brief because I know people want to hear the Aosha speak. I think when it comes to thinking about what the Chinese system is, I think for a political scientist studying in the West, so I'll say, first of all, I'm not a philosopher myself.

1:06:47Now that Dr. Wolf is gone, I'll say I'm not a closet Marxist either, but I'm mostly an empirical social scientist, right? Studying China, China's relationship with the United States and the rest of the world. So I think for a political scientist like me, I would describe China's system as being authoritarian rather than democratic, right? There's a strong Leninist party state run by the Chinese Communist Party that governs most aspects of society, which isn't to say that everyday life in China is, particularly for people in the kind of heartland of China, is, you know, a repressive totalitarian state, but rather, you know, it's a country whose leadership is not democratically elected at the national level.

1:07:35And this does, I think, set up a potential contrast in systems around the world. So if you think about the United States and China and how the rest of the world sees China and the United States, the world does see China and the United States in different terms. I think, first of all, views around, some of my own research has been doing surveys of people around the world to try to understand how they perceive China, how they perceive the United States. I think people know a lot about the United States and what they know about the United States, of course, is not always favorable. When you think about the history of the United States in a lot of the rest of the world has included attempts to export democracy and liberal democracy around the world, but the United States has not always done so consistently or in a principled way.

1:08:24So views of the United States around the world are certainly varied. People around the world don't know as much about the PRC, about China. And so this provides a kind of interesting situation, I think, for U.S.-China global competition. First, if you ask people around the world, would you rather live under the American political system or the Chinese political system? The majority of people, I think 16%, say that they would prefer to live under the Chinese system and the rest of people say under the U.S. political system. More people would like to live in the Chinese economy. 30 % of people around the world in the 19 countries we surveyed would prefer to live in the Chinese economy versus about 70 % in the U.S., which does suggest that baseline, you know, people have a more positive perception of the American political system than of the Chinese political system.

1:09:18But what I will say is that people around the world don't know as much about China, about the Chinese Communist Party and the PRC compared to the U.S., which provides a kind of opportunity for China and for the U.S. to shape global perceptions about China. So in projects that I did with some grad students here, we also asked people to watch some clips from CGTN, China's kind of answer to CNN. And it really shifted people's attitudes. We were able to get people from about 16 percent of people preferring to live under China's political system to 54 percent after people had watched some of these CGTN clips.

1:09:53And what it did was it changed people's perceptions of what China's political system is. It changed people's perceptions of China's political system, not as being a kind of necessarily like a democracy in the same sense as the United States, but that China was a country where the government was responsive to people's needs and the economy was was dynamic compared to the United States. So I think if we pull back and think about what this competition is, there's a possibility that it could be this kind of competition between political models and and potentially between a kind of capitalist liberal democracy and a more socialist, but still with mixing elements of market economy and authoritarian political system.

1:10:37And I think if it's on these terms, it potentially works in the favor of the United States. But I think arguably what we've seen is potentially a move in the Trump administration to making this less about competition between political systems and more just kind of great power competition in which these distinctions between political systems are less important. And one view is this is potentially kind of less hypocritical. So but it certainly feeds into a different way of thinking about what U.S. Sino competition is. Yes. The second thing or the kind of second main thing that I'll say, and I'll be brief, is just to talk a little bit about how I see how China sees itself and particularly how General Secretary Xi Jinping, as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, talks about the Chinese political system.

1:11:33So again, I'm not a philosopher. I'm an empirical social scientist. Some of the work that I've done is spending a lot of time reading some of these speeches, but also using speech, using the text of the speeches and Texas data methods to try to understand in a systematic way how Xi Jinping is talking and how the rest of the political system is talking. So I've also collected data on tens of thousands of speeches and reports by local officials. And I think here you do see a contrast between Xi Jinping and his predecessors, particularly in the degree to which he talks about the importance of socialism and socialism with Chinese characteristics in a way that I think is different than how Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin talked.

1:12:15And so in the kind of reform era, maybe we're not in the reform era anymore. We're in the Xin Shida, we're in the new era under Xi Jinping. But it's clear that he started to talk less about market economy and more about socialism than his predecessors. And you've seen the system under General Secretary Xi Jinping kind of snap into line with his way of thinking and his way of talking about the Chinese political system. And you see this filter down even to policy at the local level. So I've collected data on thousands, tens of thousands of policies at the local level.

1:13:14Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it, style it, make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Crocs store today. And you see policies at the local level starting to follow the general secretary's line. And I think that the system, you know, kind of mixes really three elements. The first element is there is a kind of socialist element to it.

1:13:58But I think it's not it doesn't look like socialism under Mao, socialism under the Soviet Union. But there is a strong guiding hand of the state in the economy. You see this with industrial policy and a lot of other areas in life. It's mixed with a market economy. I think the second key area is nationalism, patriotism, and Chinese culture, right? People have talked about the importance of patriotism, of traditional Chinese culture, and a certain kind of Chinese traditionalism underlying, I think, the administration of General Secretary Xi Jinping. I think the third element is the leadership of the party, right?

1:14:37You go back to, of course, Mao, but also the four corner principles of Deng. It was all in the end about the leadership of the party. And of course, this is a key element of what Xi Jinping sees as a core to the party's political system. And so political scientists would call this authoritarian. And so I think the Chinese political system under Xi Jinping is authoritarian. But to pull back to this bigger question of, you know, what is the U.S.-China relationship now? Is it about a competition between political systems or is it a competition between great powers? My own personal view, kind of stepping outside of the own research that I've done, but I think some of my research kind of would back this up, is that the degree to which this is a competition of political systems, it potentially plays into some advantages of the United States.

1:15:27and, you know, for all its faults, the remaining popularity of liberal political systems around the world, especially liberal democracies. But as under the second Trump administration, arguably the world has moved more towards a paradigm of great power competition. And I do think that this is a context in which there are a lot of potential advantages for China as China remains, is popular in a lot of the world, particularly places like Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, where, you know, everything from Belt and Road to China's bilateral diplomatic relationships are positive in a way that might be hard to see from Washington, D.C.

1:16:07So I'll stop there. Thanks so much for the organizers. Thank you, Daniel. I think you raised a very, very interesting point about if the U.S.-China competition is about the competition between political system, U.S. will have the age. So I want to hand the mic, virtual mic, to Yasha to talk about this question. Because Yasha, you research a lot on the decline of the democracy or the decline of liberalism in the U.S. as well as in Europe. And you made a very famous statement about illiberal democracy and the undemocratic liberalism, which correspond to the decline of the Democratic Party and the rise of the MAGA.

1:16:55so how do you see like why the u.s channel competition has stopped to be a competition of a political system at least in some degree and what's the relationship between that to the political dynamics within the u.s yeah thank you so much for this question thank you so much for your generous invitation to to this fascinating conference and to this uh panel which i think is going to be one of the more memorable I've served on recently. To bring the question back to the fundamental kind of motivating one of this conversation, how should we think about the nature of a competition between the United States and China today?

1:17:36It is obvious that there is some form of competition between those countries, but it's very hard to think about the right frame within which to understand the nature of that competition that I think is what we're all trying to figure out at the moment. So, you know, what's obvious is that there are some relatively straightforward dimension to the competition between, you know, the United States as the reigning superpower and China as the challenger to that hegemony. There's a military dimension in which both countries are trying to out-compete each other. There's obviously a technological dimension that was discussed in part in the last panel on artificial intelligence, but also when it comes to electric cars and other kind of key technologies of the future.

1:18:21And there's obviously a geopolitical dimension in terms of competing for influence, whether it is in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa or in other parts of East Asia. The question that this panel seems to ask goes a little bit deeper than that, right? It is whether those dimensions of competition also translate into a deeper form of ideological competition between the United States as the kind of avatar of liberal democracy and China as the avatar of some kind of alternative political system whose definition is perhaps a little bit complicated. And the obvious analogy, both in terms of how people have talked about this increasingly over the last years, but also in terms of the last time that the United States had its hegemony challenged by a country that called itself communist, is the Cold War.

1:19:14And there's a kind of obvious analogy here, but I think that the analogy actually turns out to be wrong for a number of very important reasons. When you go back to the Cold War, the economic systems of the United States and the Soviet Union were really mutually exclusive. And as a result, there was virtually no trade between the United States and the Soviet Union, and virtually no trade between the countries that were integrated into the Western economic system and the countries of the Warsaw Bloc, as well as other communist nations. The Soviet Union had an explicit ambition for world revolution, an ambition that went well beyond liberal universalism and explicitly had as the purpose of its state that each country should be ruled in a Marxist-Leninist way.

1:20:01And as a result, from early on, policymakers on both sides of the Iron Curtain understood themselves to be diametrically opposed to each other. I think for all of the ideological differences and, of course, for all of the rival material and military interests between China and the United States, it is far from clear that these two countries are similarly opposed. They can trade with each other and, of course, do trade with each other even today to a very, very considerable degree. China does not have a comparable ambition for world revolution. It doesn't seem to me that one of the key tasks or ambitions of a CCP is for Canada to be ruled in the same way that China is ruled today.

1:20:51and it may not even particularly care about what the political system of countries around the world is. Indeed, the CCP is perfectly happy to create alliances and forms of cooperation with democracies that are tempted for one reason or another to become more friendly to China in trade policy and other dimensions. And of course, the same is true for the United States, for all of the talk about liberal universalism or the claim that America wants to democratize the world, in practice, American foreign policymakers are very happy to have close cooperation with countries like Saudi Arabia, for example, that are very far from being democratic.

1:21:30So this raises the question of whether philosophical perspective actually matters. Perhaps we're all making a mistake and we should have just added ourselves to the panel on international relations and not thought about these vexing complicated philosophical questions. So to answer the question of whether that's the case, I think we need to analyze the governing philosophy in each country a little bit more deeply. And though I have a burgeoning interest in China and I'm trying in a very amateurish way to pick up some Chinese, I'm certainly much more expert on the culture and the philosophy of the West.

1:22:07So I'll start by talking about the United States. And I'll start by citing one of the most influential texts for understanding our political situation from a Western perspective. And that's Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, a text that has been much mocked, often misrepresented as claiming that there is no longer going to be any kind of historical events in the world. But his fundamental claim is a little bit more subtle and interesting than that. His fundamental claim it is that for much of the 20th century, there was a fundamental ideological competition between different kind of regime forms.

1:22:44The ideological competition between the United States and the Soviet Union that I talked about earlier, but also, for example, the ideological competition between Western liberal democracy and fascism as represented in Mussolini's Italy and the Third Reich. and his claim is that fascism and communism now no longer exist as viable alternatives to liberal democracy. He has the nice line that there may still be a few true believers in communism in Pyongyang and North Korea and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but other than that, the ideology is dead. In light of today, I think he might want to amend that line and say that there may still be some true believers in communism in Pyongyang, North Korea, and New Haven, Connecticut.

1:23:29But we'll leave that for another day. I think that that effectively remains true today. Despite the presence of some charming Marxists among us today, I don't think that there is a realistic worldwide movement, whether in the West or elsewhere, for Marxist revolution. The same is true when you think of other kinds of potential challenges to liberal democracy, certainly outside of China, such as Islamic theocracy, which may have a certain amount of appeal in parts of the Middle East, but which is facing real internal challenges of its own and which doesn't have any real appeal beyond the Muslim world.

1:24:12However, even Foukiyama turned out to be right about the absence of true challenges to liberal democracy. I'll come back to why I think that China doesn't count as that in this context. he underestimated the extent to which Western liberal democracies themselves would face internal challenges to their legitimacy. So the problem for liberal democracy today is not the presence of a compelling ideological alternative. It's that Western liberal democracies have proven to have much more struggle, much more difficulty than Fukuyama anticipated in gaining legitimacy in a sustainable way within their own countries.

1:24:53Now, I want to suggest that that has two effective reasons. The first has to do with failures of what political scientists tend to call output legitimacy, which is to say with the ability to live up to the straightforward material and other expectations of their own citizens. We have seen in many countries in the developed West, a stagnation of living standards, such that during the time when they really could solve these internal contradictions, they had very, very rapid increases of the living standards, with a doubling of living standards in each generation for the last 30 or so years, that has been much more stagnant.

1:25:32We see that in the difficulty of having straightforward good governance. There's been a lot of debate in the last weeks, rightly so, about the difficulty of building fix in the United States. Why it is impossible, for example, to have high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco, or between Boston, New Haven, New York, and Washington, D.C. It should take about an hour to get from here to Washington, D.C. if we had real high-speed rail here. And all of that has contributed to deep political instability in the rise of populism, which we see in the form of a Trump administration in the United States, but in many other countries around the West as well.

1:26:12So there's a real problem of internal political legitimacy. I think that's also, just because we're on a philosophy panel, a kind of philosophical reason for why liberal democracy is being challenged internally. I'll keep it brief and happy to speak more to that in the question and answer session. But I think that for the last three or 400 years, a lot of what is structured political competition in the United States are debates over formal equality, debates and causes fights for the formal inclusion of people who are formally excluded from the political system. So you go back to the time of the French Revolution, and Emmanuel Sieres is arguing for the inclusion of a third estate of everybody who is not an aristocrat or a cleric, and that was 90 % of the population.

1:27:06In later political struggles, there are fights for the inclusion of women in the political system, who are about 50 % of the population. You have a very important set of fights in the United States for the inclusion of enslaved people, of African-Americans in the political system. That at the time was perhaps 10 or 15 % of the population. In our own century, you have fights, for example, for the inclusion of sexual minorities, of gays and lesbians in the political system. That's, let's say, about 5 % of the population. I think once you've managed to include all of those groups, that structuring device no longer works.

1:27:45And I think a lot of ideological confusion of our age has to do with the difficulty of recognizing that and of substituting for that. And so instead, you get these sort of strange phantom fights. Either phantom fights in which struggles for formal inclusion are artificially extended, either by making them about groups that are too small a part of the population to play the same functional role. You see that, for example, in the recent fight for trans equality or in fights for the inclusion of groups, but just cannot sensibly be included in a democratic polity, such as that of animal rights, understood not as fights to avoid the cruel treatment of animals, that of really having them be considered in some kind of formal way within the political system.

1:28:37Those are interesting ways of trying to extend that old set of fights about formal equality, but I think they're doomed to fail. And that's part of the ideological confusion that is, I think, happening in the background of Western societies today. So what I want to suggest is that West's problem is not ideological competition from China, and it's not even military and economic competition from China in the first place. It is an ideological crisis brought on both by its failures of output legitimacy and by the running out of steam of one of the structuring philosophical movements of the last 300 years.

1:29:14Okay, so that then brings us to the question of China. Is China any better able to manage its own internal contradictions? And does the rise of China contradict Fukuyama's thesis of the end of history? That seems to be the view of some of our distinguished panelists today, of Yanis Varoufakis and Rick Wolf. As Varoufakis said, China is the only source of hope that cloud capital can be socialized. Forgive me for being a little bit more skeptical about that question. I think there are four challenges to the view that Yanis formulated. four challenges to the idea that China will be better able to manage its own internal contradictions.

1:30:00The first is that China has its own serious problems with output legitimacy. China has, of course, undergone a very, very impressive economic trajectory in the last decades. I've visited China a number of times in the last years and have been very impressed with how well and functional things are, how affluent a society it is, how many, of course, cultural riches it has. I think we're all aware that this is a wonderful civilization, a civilization we should all hope will succeed. But that shouldn't make us overlook some of the problems that China also faces, whether that is the high rate of youth unemployment in China today, whether that is the fact that China's GDP per capita does remain about a fifth or a sixth of that of the United States, depending on how you correct for purchasing power parity.

1:30:55The rapidly falling and very, very low birth rates, which means that China's population is going to shrink even more quickly than that of Western and Southern European countries and much more quickly than that of the United States. Or something that has come up surprisingly rarely in a panel that has featured some prominent socialist voices, namely how radically incomplete the Chinese welfare state remains, to what extent Chinese citizens remain on their own when it comes to making sure that they're going to have a decent life and retirement, but they can access healthcare and so on. A problem that is, of course, all the bigger if you have a one-child policy or the legacy of a one-child policy where one person might have to look after four grandparents.

1:31:42the second problem has to do with the recent transformation of china's political system china for a number of decades between the reform era and perhaps what now is called the new era had what political scientists would refer to as a form of institutionalized autocracy which is to say that it was, as Dan was saying, not a democracy, but it was a political system that distributed political power in a real way and therefore limited the power of any one individual. And that was a good part of its success during those decades. Well, it now appears that China is in the middle of a transformation to, or has perhaps completed a transformation to, what political scientists would call a personalized autocracy.

1:32:35And we know from much research in political science, that doesn't mean it's going to happen in China, but it does mean that there's a real risk of that happening in China, that personalized autocracies tend to fare much worse than institutionalized autocracies. But they are much less likely to have good economic management, to solve their practical political problems, to avoid high rates of corruption, to avoid other kinds of pitfalls that come from too high a concentration of political power in the hands of one person. The third reason to doubt, the third and fourth reasons to doubt that China is a proof of Fukuyama being wrong are more philosophical.

1:33:22They are first that, to a remarkable degree, China doesn't claim to be an ideological alternative because it actually claims to be a democracy. Dan and I as political scientists have claimed that China is not a democracy. You might agree or disagree with that, but it is actually an interesting fact that China's political leadership... This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, But Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. Like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

1:33:59Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+. Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up. It shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Crocs store today. Talks of its own country as a true democracy in a way that still pays lip service in a way to the ideological supremacy of the idea of democracy in the 21st century.

1:34:53The fourth problem is, I think, the most important. And forgive me a little quip here, which is that China works reasonably well in practice, but it is a mess in theory. And what I mean by that is that China's development has clearly been incredibly impressive over the last decades, but it is wholly unclear what it would mean or what it would take to export that political system to anywhere else. If you asked people, and Dan has done very interesting research on this, in Zimbabwe or in Kenya, whether they would swap their lived reality today for the lived reality of a citizen in Beijing or Shanghai or even in a second or third or fourth tier city in China, they likely would say yes, because life is on the whole better for people in those places in China than it is in Zimbabwe or in Kenya.

1:35:45But if you ask those citizens whether they would trust their political leaders or even some upstart political party to implement the Chinese political system in Kenya or in Zimbabwe, they'd say, of course not. How on earth would you do that? We don't have a 2 ,000, 3 ,000-year history of bureaucratic meritocracy. We don't have a political party that claims to be socialist, but actually rules in some kind of complicated capitalist way. If we tried to implement the Chinese system here, we would get all the worst things of the Chinese systems and none of its good elements. So why on earth should we do that?

1:36:22And how would we even go about trying to do that? So all of that is to say that I have my doubts about whether the philosophical dimension actually helps us understand the nature of a competition between China and the United States today. It can sometimes take a long time to recognize the nature of a shape of ideological competition. By the time of Cannon's long telegram, the Soviet Union had been around for three decades, not much less long than China has been shaped by the policies of Thanks, Xiaoping. But what we may ultimately face is not a new form of that kind of competition. It is rather a world that is different from what Fukuyama envisaged.

1:37:10One in which no country can fully resolve its internal contradictions and serve as the world's ideological hegemon. So perhaps we should have gone to that IR panel after all. another major aspect of the u.s china competition is about ideology it's about philosophy it's about what people believe in and that is where i think uh robin vitter uh the china expert from unc trouble hill can weigh in because her studies on chinese literature chinese philosophy as well as modern philosophies and ideologies on america and europe can really help us understand and the nuances that lie underneath the grand political economy on the surface.

1:37:59So let's welcome, Visser, and hope we can learn. Well, thank you so much, Carl, for inviting me to speak with this panel of illustrious intellectuals. And I do appreciate Yanis's economic analysis about cloud capital, And I really appreciated Richard's concerns about nuclear weapons and the level of desperation felt in the U.S. right now. So the question you pose, what is really at stake in U.S.-China competition? I would say, yes, it's economic dominance, of course. there's also a civilizational clash around defining so-called use universal values and there is more that i'll elaborate on here now so first of all in a global system where hierarchies in a global system of hierarchies where status matters the u.s and china are obviously vying for the top spot economically and in turn the right to define values This goes beyond a struggle between capitalism and socialism, in my opinion, though the different perspectives are nicely captured.

1:39:21in this 1952, one of the first feature films from the People's Republic of China, called Window to America, Meiguo Zhutuong. And it's in the film with some leading Chinese film stars. The entire American cast is Chinese actors in white face. And here's a short pitch for the film. Are current conditions in the U.S. making you want to jump out the window? Not so fast. There's money to be made on your death. So in the film, the window washer, Charlie Kent, has just finished cleaning the last window of a Wall Street skyscraper, and now facing indefinite employment, he plans to jump to his death from that very window on the 42nd floor.

1:40:12Mr. Butler, the capitalist from whose office he plans to jump, persuades Kent to jump, to stop long enough to allow his, Butler's company to turn his suicide into a live radio spectacle and sell advertisements. Ostensibly so Kent can leave his family a legacy. So you can watch this film on YouTube. It has new English subtitles on it. And it's both hilarious and depressing, like the TikTok riffs about Elon Musk or Luigi Mandioni's trial. So it's a prescient perspective on American values rooted in a brute capitalist system that profits off from death. But predating Marxist thought, there's also evidence that all civilizations tend to quote-unquote universalize or naturalize their worldviews.

1:41:02My colleague, who's Danish at UNC, the linguist and early China cultural historian Ufa Bergeton, in his book Emergence of Civilizational Consciousness in Early China, uses big data analysis with English, French, and classical Chinese, and finds the same universalizing discourses regarding civilization, racialized others, or quote-unquote barbarians, policing, and laws that we see emerge in early modern Europe, those same terms occurred millennia earlier with the rise of civilizational consciousness in 4th century BCE, China, pre-teen China. So because still, even though there are these universalizing tendencies among both civilizations, a universal concept of human rights doesn't follow.

1:41:59So what we see today is a conflict between a civilization that prioritizes harmony and stability and one that prioritizes justice and freedom. um jemmei liu in her forthcoming book called chinese third space the paradox of moderate politics talks about chinese intellectuals that embrace long-standing intellectual frameworks where paradoxical elements are not seen as irreconcilable but as complementary and interdependent and that lack of a consistent principled stance such as the kind you see in Calvinist puritanical theology at the basis of U.S. thought has driven some to near death. There's a story, for example, about the Korean revolutionary and Chinese Communist Party member Kim San or Jin Shan in Chinese.

1:42:54He nearly took his own life in despair at what he called the ma ma hu hu or kum si kum sa approach to revolutionary doctrine adopted by most Chinese communists. He eventually concluded, however, this disinclination toward doctrinal purity was key to Chinese civilizational survival over so many millennia. Ultimately, though, because we live in an era of nuclear weapons and climate change, civilizational evolutionary paradigms are limited. For example, in the U.S., we now see three strains of thought coming together. Late-stage capitalist neoliberalism, Christian nationalism, as we see in Project 2025, and what's been alluded to already, but the tech bro accelerationism, where you have J.D.

1:43:47Vance invoking thinkers like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land's views of anarcho-capitalism, rooted in libidinal, sadistic desires and inspired by science fiction and online gaming. So is this a global phenomenon that transcends civilizational worldviews and priorities? Will we see the demise of the nation-state altogether? In Crack-Up Capitalism, Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, intellectual historian Quince Labodian discusses how the zone, as a subnational legal category, ended up fertilizing far more far-reaching radical political imaginations. We're aware that there were the export processing zones in Ireland around Shannon Airport in the 1950s, and then in Puerto Rico and Taiwan in the 60s, and later you have the special economic zones in China.

1:44:47These zones were used quite candidly by political leaders to create areas of unaccountability and accelerate economic activity for their own interests. And what you see is the economic accelerationism and lack of accountability now widely extends to the political and legal arena. So though the Biden administration was seeking strategic competition against China for world dominance, according to former State Department official Jessica Weiss, the public in the U.S. and China don't want world leadership. We can see the fragility of the world dominance narrative now under Trump. Some other think tank thinkers like Ryan Haas think that Trump wants industrial dominance, sovereignty, hence his tariffs and border control, and to avoid war, especially with nuclear powers.

1:45:43But I, on the other hand, tend to agree more with Richard and also with Naomi Klein, who in a recent podcast said, Trump and Putin share a common theory of power. She said, if you have nukes and you're the dominant power in your neighborhood, you get to do what you want, right? You aren't governed by any international system, any rules-based system. So I'll return to that in a moment. But where's China in all of this? From China's perspective, as we've sort of heard already, it may be best to just wait and see. They're not bloating, nor are they cowed. Xi Jinping is likely using Trump's flexing to advance his own agenda, the slow, systematic advance of regional and global power.

1:46:33Whether he'll have the luxury of moving slowly is yet to be determined. So in his opening remarks, Curl made the important point that from its modern inception, China has been deeply connected to the U.S. This is essential to understand. The elites of both nations have always understood their mutual interdependence. But I found his statement about the ontologically self-contradictory nature of both countries to be particularly perceptive. And now most today understand clearly that the U.S. in particular is ontologically contradictory. We see this. Trump is fully revealing the hypocrisies of the U.S.

1:47:20as espousing liberal democratic values. There's no longer any pretense. But he also talks about fewer recognizing China's Hegelian tendencies towards self-negation, which I agree with. So while Jiemei Liu argues for a Chinese third space, those moderate politics haven't been the dominant forces in the modern era. Sociologist Khuf Hong Kong suggests the Doge hackers are the red guards of the great GitHub cultural revolution storming the headquarters and confronting the party in the name of a pure reading of the master's texts. But if we think back to the cultural revolution, just as wiping your ass with a newsprint that happened to have reciting Moe could get you killed, there's no real ideological purity at play anymore.

1:48:12The days of ostensible doctrinal purity are gone. So what I see today is the millenarian theology of Christian nationalists has dovetailed into the prevailing anarcho-accelerationist thought. This intersects the social Darwinist thought of Chinese nationalism and techno-capitalism. So we see at the prestigious Fudan University, historically a bastion of the humanities, AI is now mobilized, and we hear that half of its humanities enrollments are slashed. So Xi Jinping's mock title of accelerator-in-chief is typically used satirically. He referred to the concept, Xi is hastening the demise of the Chinese Communist Party by doubling down on his authoritarian rule.

1:49:04Yet in its original sense, Jia Su Zhu Yi holds that strengthening the growth of the techno-capitalist state, not resisting it, will bring sweeping social change. Here we think of Shanghai-based accelerationist philosopher Nick Land's espousal of ideas like human biodiversity, capitalist human sorting, this kind of popular far-right pseudoscientific idea that different races naturally fare differently in a modern world, and about the supposed inevitable disintegration of the human species when artificial intelligence improves sufficiently. Accelerationism informs many white supremacist groups which hold that violence and discourse will topple the current political order and pave the way for their vision of the future.

1:49:56So whether it's the social Darwinism at the—so this is my final point—whether it's the social Darwinism at the base of some Tianxia philosophies of Chinese ecological civilization, as I discuss in my recent book, Questioning Borders, or the white supremacy at the base of Christian nationalism, such worldviews are obviously anti-democratic and based on pseudoscientific race theory aimed at producing quality populations that, among other things, view women as breeders. You can look no farther than a conference at UT Austin that just is just finished up. It's the pro-natal conference attended by a lot of Doge supporters.

1:50:44So the U.S.-China competition not only transcends the ideological and geopolitical facets of the U.S.-Soviet conflict, as Carl put it, but in some senses works together hand in glove. The two regimes are deeply interconnected. The rhetoric of enmity is in part, is at times rhetorical. Not that they aren't both playing a game, not that they're both vested in winning that game, but in game theory, a player's actions depend on those of the other participants. And although Baudrillard said that accelerationism is a science fiction about the system returning to destroy itself, as Audre Lorde reminds us, the master's tools do not break the master's house.

1:51:33Thank you. Thank you, Professor Visser. You made so many of a very interesting and intellectually rigorous statement to us. and i just want to catch one point of your statement is about you say chinese philosophy and chinese leadership they value harmony in a sense so you made a really wonderful i would say intellectually engaging lively statement about that and i particularly like like your idea of like each country each nation each has many has its own problem within and our priority is to find way to solve that. And I also like your idea is like, no, China is not going to export its political model, not in like any way we can foresee in the near future.

1:52:32Neither Chinese government is saying that you will be doing that, nor will other countries expecting that. So that is a major difference compared to Soviet Union or other Marxist nations in the history or in the present. So that may lead us to more, I would say, like you said, because Kenya or other countries, they will say, I don't have 2 ,000 years of bureaucratic meritocracy. And that is shaped by China's very civilizational and inherent legacy, which no other country can really replicate. So that really leads us to Pei Wang's work in Chinese classics and Confucius philosophy and also her research and training.

1:53:20This episode is brought to you by Credit Karma. When it comes to your money, Credit Karma keeps you ahead of the game. You can count on Credit Karma to keep up with your financial needs as they evolve, helping you monitor your progress and giving you personalized recommendations so you can make strides towards your goals. Make sure you're on the right track, no matter where you are on your financial journey. Intuit Credit Karma. Karma you can count on. Download today. In European philosophy and feminism, and I believe Pei Wang will give us another wonderful statement about how she thinks the roots of the United States and also more broadly the whole Greek to Roman to European legacy comes into play with the civilizational roots of China.

1:54:09I already learned a lot from our distinguished panelists today. and I do like the question you and Robinson raised. It's a compelling one. What truly lies at the heart of US-China competition? So today I would offer a comparative perspective from the lens of Jungian psychology, suggesting that the competition between China and the US at the level of leadership is a clash of two distinct archetypes, the hero and the father. so the title of my statement would be Hero and the Father, Contrasting Leadership Styles in the U.S.-China Rivalry. I'll explore the archetypes of the hero and the father within the historical context of both the West and China, and then offer insights into their influence in the political sphere.

1:55:00In ancient Greek culture, the father and the hero were two distinct archetypes, each representing different values and principles. The distinction is vividly illustrated in Homer's Iliad, especially in the iconic duel between Hector and Achilles. Hector, the tragic hero of Troy, embodies the archetype of the father, symbolizing duty, family, and the protection of his city. In contrast, Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Greek army, represents pure strength and individual heroism. In their confrontation, Hector faces the overwhelming might of Achilles, ultimately scumbling to defeat and suffer the tragic fate of being slain and his body discarded.

1:55:51Hector's tragic demise further undercours the distress of the father archetype in the world dominated by heroism. In the Confucian tradition, the archetype of father far surpassed that of a hero, a reflection of Confucianism's deep earring of a virtuous father figure. Emperor Shun, one of the most reverent sage king in Confucian legends, was chosen by the Emperor Yao as his successor. precisely because of his filial piety. He loved his father deeply, even though his father did not love him in return. At least two other important figures in Confucianism, Confucius and Mancius, also shared a profound longing and silent sorrow for the father figure.

1:56:44According to Sima Qian's record of the grand historian Shi Ji, Confucius' father died shortly after his death, and his mother never even revealed where his father was buried. It was too cruel for a child. This absence of a father during his early years undoubtedly had a profound impact on Confucius. Similarly, Moses also lost his father during his early childhood, and his mother single-handedly raised him through immense hardship. So what did these fatherless children discover? They discovered the ritual and music, liyue, symbolizing their longing for their absent father. and devoting their lives to learning and practicing them.

1:57:35Shun served as a minister to Yao for decades, learning from Yao, the king's father, Jun Fu, how to become a sage king. In the Confucian classics, Confucius discovers Duke of Zhou, a Confucian saint who lived 500 years before him. According to Analects, Confucius dreamed of the Duke of Joel frequently, who clearly served as his spiritual father. And for Moses, in return, he discovered Confucius. So in Moses, we saw Moses repeatedly quoting Confucius during his debate with others. Early on this foundation, we can grasp three fundamental characteristics of Confucianism. First, why ritual and music, liyue, are paramount.

1:58:26They foster harmony and peace within family, clans, and society. And that's a symbol of their longing for their absent fathers. And second, why lifelong learning is central. In many cultures, for example, U.S. society, learning is seen as the dominant domain of childhood. doesn't lifelong learning imply a forever childlike mindset? Precisely so. It reflects the attitude of one who earnestly identifies with and aspers to the father archetype. And the third, filial piety is the most fundamental virtue for Confucianism. In the classic of filial piety Xiaojing, the filial piety towards one's parents, is extended and transformed into loyalty towards the ruler.

1:59:18This differs from the love and the respect for parents in their civilization. In other civilizations, as Confucian filial piety arises from a unique context, it is a way of life created by those who carry unspoken sorrow of fatherlessness. Okay, so in the field of politics, what are the unique features of the hero archetype and the father archetype? Hero-style leaders are often filled with determination, courage, fearlessly facing crisis and challenges, always ready to defeat their enemies. Father-type leaders, on the other hand, are usually the protector of the nation, upholders of order and rules, and process of wisdom and virtue.

2:00:11We can observe the aesthetic difference between the U.S. and China regarding these two distinct types of leadership. For the U.S., father-type leaders are often perceived as weak and conservative. For China, a hero-type leader would be labeled as a solitary man, du fu. For instance, Man Siu once criticized the last king of Shang Dynasty as a solitary man, who was solely concerned with his immediate desires and interests rather than the welfare for the people. However, in Jungian psychology, each archetype naturally contains a negative potentiality, referred to as its shadow. You call it a shadow of the archetype.

2:01:06When individuals refuse to acknowledge the shadow dimension of an archetype, they paradoxically become more possible to be dominated by its unconscious forces. Another critical concept would be archetypal inflation. Archetypal inflation, a state where excessive identification with a particular archetype, such as the hero and the father, causes the ego to be overwhelmed by archetypal energy. This will result in distorted sense of reality and psychological imbalance, manifesting delusions of grandeur, paranoia, and messianic fantasies. So in political sphere, what potential negative effects might the archetypes of the hero and the father engender?

2:02:03When an individual over-identifies with or incorrectly integrates the hero archetype, several issues may arise. First is achievement addiction, characterized by continuous risk-taking in pursuit of constant success, using external victories to mask inner emptiness. Second is attention craving. where the individual becomes excessively focused on whether they are receiving enough immediate attention to the point of being unable to consider long-term perspectives. The third issue is arrogant blindness, marked by delusions of omnipotence, leading to the denial of personal limits and rejection of rational and reasonable advice.

2:03:01The fourth issue is the justification of violence, where aggression is rationalized and glorified as a sacred mission, often under the guise of violence for justice. And the fifth issue is the creation of dragons, where the individual demonizes all opponents as dragons that must be slain, since without dragons there can be no hero. The sixth issue, though a bit more subtle but already extensively discussed in Jungian Psychology, Peter Pan Complex. While the hero's journey must eventually end, an individual who incorrectly integrates a hero archetype may refuse to complete this journey, hoping to forever prolong their glory because they cannot face the reality of being a limited mortal being who still needs to learn and grow.

2:03:58And there is also negative manifestations of the father archetype in political sphere. The first would be excessive control, characterized by the imposition for strict rules and order to enforce comprehensive social regulation, severely suppressing individual freedom and diverse development. Second, authoritarianism, whose core features include worship and absolute authority and the maintenance of unjust hierarchical systems. Third is dogmatism, where the traditional wisdom represented by the father archetype, if it refuses to evolve with the times, devolves into ideological rigidity. a knowledge monopolization and the systematic suppression of innovative ideas.

2:04:57And finally, isolationist protection, a form of protectionism justified in the name of security, often leads to the implement of exclusionary policies and obstruction of international exchange and cooperation. As for the competition between the leadership styles influenced by the hero and the father archetypes, it's difficult for me to draw a definitive conclusion. What is clear, however, is that both the hero archetype and the father archetype are rooted in patriarchal characteristics and carry the original scene of patriarchy, strengths and conquests, authority and order. Carl Jung once pointed out that the feminine principle has been systematically developed throughout history, a suppression that is not only evident in political system, but also deeply embedded in spiritual domains such as religion and philosophy.

2:06:06From the perspective of Jungian psychology, the leadership style that first integrates the feminine principle, emotion, intuition, care, corruption, and nurturing, will be the one to emerge victorious in this competition. And that's my statement. Thank you. Thank you, Wong Pei. I should really thank you for adding this forum into a different and more, I would say, civilizational level. And I think everyone here can see the comparison you make between the father and the hero. we can clearly see like Donald Trump is the hero archetype. He's and he's craving for attention and the Peter Pan syndrome.

2:06:58He always craves others to see him as a very useful and a very not powerful in the sense like maybe like Chinese perceived in our own tradition, like the father should be silent. Like many younger generation of Chinese like myself, Like when we talk about our family issues, we talk about like our fathers, they do things, but they don't speak with us. They don't hug with us. They don't say, I love you. But that is exactly how the fatherhood in Chinese civilization demands. And here it comes to, I'm really so sorry, Slovo, we cannot be here today because there will be another debate between Lacanian and Yongian psychoanalysis.

2:07:42psychoanalysis, but I think you are a better young man psychoanalysis than Jordan Peterson. So I would just say the father archetype is very much similar to the Lacanian concept of the big other. So the big other, it doesn't say anything. You are not trying to sing YMCA every time and trying to do the dance every time. It is silent, just like Lacan's famous saying before he's dying like therefore i die so i become the big other so that is that is pretty similar with the chinese leadership today like despite uh um maybe the professor mattingly will say the propaganda of the chinese leadership is ever so immersive you will see a lot of books in a lot of bookshops and a lot of different kinds of propaganda but i think uh just like wong just said, beneath all that currents of the bureaucratic propaganda, there is a very strong need for the current leader of China to be invisible, but to be so powerful by being invisible and by being in a way unspoken and therefore to be true big other of China.

2:08:56Well, since we received our five-minute warning sign probably about 10 minutes ago. I just want to thank our remaining panelists as well as those who were not able to remain with us and the audience for joining us here tonight at Yale for this forum.