Tom G. Palmer - How to Love the Freedom of Others

31:28Okay, that's a very scary future in my mind. Where do you think we're going? That's the one that's being offered in many cases. The Chinese Communist Party already makes this an explicit offer. We monitor and watch you every place all the time, but you're safe and you get to have games on Weibo, just as long as you're not critical of Xi Jinping or the Communist Party and so on. But you can have a superficial life so long as you don't step out of line, so long as you don't practice Islam, so long as you don't practice Christianity, so long as you are not in a religious movement that might threaten the monopoly of the Communist Party, and so on.

32:13But it's a false bargain. You actually end up being less safe under those circumstances. So it's true that the proliferation and decentralization of technology can have scary aspects, but that's true of lots of other technologies in the past. Allowing these things to emerge and then trying to come up with standards for governance of them within a democratic framework is much safer in the long run than succumbing to a dictatorship like that of the Communist Party. And we even saw, even when it came to COVID, for example, uh the chinese communist party asserted we be our hand they locked up huge numbers of people and with real brutal force yeah some of the lockdowns i think uh we saw in europe and north america were were scary and unjustified but they were very mild compared to what the chinese experienced of being literally fenced in not allowed to leave buildings and so on and it was a failure It was a simple failure.

33:20As it turned out, this technology that got out, I'm not talking about the COVID virus, wherever it came from. I'm talking about the vaccines, the mRNA vaccines. Astonishing change in the world. Hungarian-born biochemist who gets the Nobel Prize, who struggled for years as an outsider, laughed at. She was the one who was the co-inventor of this technology. And then two Turkish-born German scientists who set up a company, and they figure out in a very short period of time, using computation, how to defeat the virus. Then working with the Greek president of a major pharmaceutical company who was trained as a veterinarian.

34:08So this global community of scientists and entrepreneurs created vaccines and rolled them out. And then they were made available around the world. I was in Thailand, which got them a bit late because of some poor policy decisions by the government here. They said, we have a monopoly on vaccines. And when other people were being vaccinated, no one in Thailand was. They didn't get down to getting any. Social pressure built up, and finally they relented. And frankly, the business community said, we will pay for the vaccines, which is what they did on Phuket and Koh Samui. They said, we'll vaccinate everyone at our own expense because we can't be shut down like this anymore.

34:56This turned out to be a much more robust approach saved a lot more lives than the Communist Party centralized dictatorial approach. And I think that's a general model for the world. Yes, emerging technologies can be scary. They will have consequences that you and I cannot now imagine. But we're much better off having social pluralism, freedom of speech, freedom to criticize, to ask questions, Yeah. Freedom movement, freedom of trade and free democratic conversation. It's a more robust response to those problems. I'll give you an example of things that that change social life in ways that were hard to anticipate.

35:43the telephone, the ability to talk to people far away, and for lovers to have long conversations with each other, though, despite being separated. It used to be the case in middle class, wealthier homes that you went courting and there was a parlor in the house. And there, the boy and the girl could sit and talk supervised by chaperones. That was the dating experience. Well, the automobile sure changed that, the automobile and the telephone. And now all kinds of other socialization, including romantic socialization with telephone, text messaging, apps, Tinder, Grindr, all those sorts of things.

36:28And these have consequences. Some we might applaud, some we might regret. They're often unintended, but they have responses. People emerge with better solutions rather than having a tech dictator telling us when and how we're allowed to use this technological improvement or not. So if you were to think of the future, I mean, from our conversation so far, there has been a decline in the last 20 years in liberties in general. This is not restricted to the dictatorships of the world. This also happens in every part of the world because of social mobility and the relative positioning of people. It seems more and more that it is divide and conquer that if you're not like me, you're the enemy.

37:21And I can get an identity by being rude to the enemy, being violent to the enemy. This seems to me as a very dangerous future, if you even add to it a bit of the nation state control and so on and so forth. What is the answer? I mean, is the answer a push for democracy? Is it at the political level? I think my question is two sides. You know, what should the people do, you and I and everyone listening, but also how should we use technology so that technology, I mean, that doesn't work against us because I think also there is a wave of technology really getting into disinformation and misinformation and really not telling us the truth anymore.

38:03So, and without truth, there is no liberty. There are a couple of questions embedded in that that I think could be teased out. And the first one, a little bit uncomfortable for me because for my adult life, I have been what I would consider a peace activist. And I still consider myself a peace activist. War is terrible and you should do virtually anything to avoid it. When it's brought to you, you were not able to avoid it. Yeah. And I think that we are at a time when I believe in a strong military response to heinous aggression. So I was just in Ukraine about 10 days ago and working with Ukrainians.

38:55Most of my work is on humanitarian relief and helping them get ambulances, field hospitals. the suffering has been quite extraordinary there and you see that the russian army destroys everything if they can't take it or steal it they destroy it if i can't have it you won't have it is the the mentality of the state there and so i'm very strongly supportive of the ukrainians being able to defend themselves they don't want to conquer russia they don't want to take any Russian. They just want not to be conquered, invaded, annexed, and then have the knock on the door at night because your daughter was heard speaking Ukrainian.

39:39Not to have all the books in the library taken out and burned because they're in Ukrainian language and then replaced by Russian. Not have the local town council members disappear, or in the case of Crimea, the Tatar population has been decimated now by the Russians. They killed their top leaders, they disbanded their modulus, their parliament, and so on. And so I think that I'm very strongly supportive of the Ukrainians being able to fight back. But it's not just Ukraine. If Ukraine falls, the dictatorship in Moscow is an aggressive dictatorship. It really is borrowing from the 1930s and 40s, from the page book, and they will attack more states.

40:30And then they are trying, when I say they, I mean Putin and Shoigu and Lavrov and this clique at the top in Russia. But the October 7 attack, I believe, was very strongly supported by the Kremlin as well as by the Tehran regime. Knowing exactly what was going to happen afterwards and the suffering and the destruction and the tens of thousands of people, this was known. Then the Venezuelan threat to invade Guyana. And then the attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. and there are going to be more of these. So I think at one level, a military response is appropriate, not to send soldiers to Ukraine, but to send the resources for the Ukrainians to defend themselves.

41:21And I have known people who have already lost their lives in Ukraine defending themselves, and people whose family members have been killed by Russian occupiers, went to recently liberated villages, and women came out just to talk to someone, what they experienced. One said her son had been executed, taken out and shot by the Russian occupiers. And then the unspoken element for many of the women was the experience of sexual assault and gang rape as well. So I do believe that we need that support of the Ukrainian struggle, and I'm very strongly in favor of that. Then the second question is, how do we support the institutions of liberal democracy, a pluralistic society, one that has a space for people, regardless of their religion or creed or color or language, and so on, that says, you have a life to lead.

42:23You can lead your life too, but we need some common rules that make that possible. Rule of law, toleration, and so on. I think that we need to step back and focus on exactly that, on rules, on the constitutions, the constitutional order. So not just in the United States, Americans are very proud of their constitution for good reasons, I think. not perfect, and it's been amended to make it better over time, but it's done a pretty good job. But other countries have constitutions, even unwritten ones like Great Britain has an unwritten constitution, but people know what it is. Focus on the constitution and not on the policy outcomes you prefer.

43:09And that's a very important thing. It's a little hard for me. I mentioned the issue of the minimum wage. I think minimum wage laws are a bad idea. They make poor people unemployed. That doesn't help them. However, I would not support someone who said, I'll be your dictator and I'll get rid of the minimum wage or whatever, legalization of marijuana. I'm very strongly in favor of legalizing pot. I don't smoke it. I don't like it. I don't want to be around it, but I don't want people to go to prison for owning a plant. But I wouldn't support someone who said, look, I'm the pro-pot dictator. Put me in absolute power and I'll legalize pot, which is what you want.

43:51Well, what I also want is not just this outcome. I want the system of rules that generates outcomes. And that's constitutional respect. Even if, let's say, you and I run for office and we campaign hard. Well, imagine. It's a thought experiment. We run for the same office, dog catcher or state senator or member of parliament or whatever. And you get more votes than I do. I'm supposed to say, congratulations. we fought a tough campaign and i criticized you but i congratulate you and now i become the loyal opposition and i'll criticize you and i'll ask hard questions and i'll be tough on you but i will respect that you are the one who has the office and by the way office comes from the latin term for a duty yeah when you get office you don't get power you get a duty a responsibility and now that's in your hands and I respect that and that is what we have missed in the United States Mr.

45:04Trump said whatever you think of his policies before the election he said it's already rigged and I and I refuse to accept that that horrible person could ever win well that's just an that is what leads to dictatorship in my opinion just that And we need to be able to say, we followed the rules. I may not be happy with the outcome. I got my less preferred outcome. But what is more important to me is the process by which the outcome was generated. I pre-warned at the beginning of our conversation that I know nothing about this. So I'm going to ask the most maybe naive or stupid question you probably ever received.

45:49So your belief is still in governance. I don't believe in government at all. In my culture, there is some proverb, I think it's a religious saying, but it basically says, as you are, so will your leader. Okay, which in my mind is actually where the core of the issue is. The core of the issue is that if the people don't change and expect that government and rules and laws and regulations and so on will put them in place. yeah, there is a chance of success, but it's unlikely going to be the case if the people are rude to each other, if the people take away the liberty of the enemy, if the people, is there a way?

46:33I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe if we tell people, I mean, I remember a time in my country, Egypt, where there was a head of the police that basically said, you know what, from now on, there is not going to be jaywalking. There is not going to be running through traffic lights and so on. And literally within a month, everyone complied and you know the streets were so much more smooth and everything was wonderful but eventually what ended up happening is as you are so you will be so will be your leader he was kicked out and you know and things went back to normal right and if you've ever been to egypt i'm sure you have you know the the there is you know traffic lights are sort of like guidelines if you know if you wanna it's decoration really you know it's all about uh negotiating who crosses the the the crossroads right and and and so it's quite interesting in my mind that we by us expecting to get governance to work we're sort of letting go of our own responsibility of us shaping up so that we get the leader that matches a shaped up people well there are a lot of deep issues involved in that i know when it comes to the first question about believing in government that word to that term to believe in is equivocal that is to say you can use it in at least two different ways believe in means i put my faith in it or believe in means i think they exist

48:04yes it's like it's like i believe there is a god i believe there is a government yeah believe it or not i actually don't believe there is a government i believe there is a bunch of politicians that are hungry, that are following the system to get into power, and that this system is so antiquated that it is actually not functional at all. And because it's dysfunctional, and because they have to play it to get to their power, they sort of reinforce it in a way that's becoming more and more dysfunctional. There needs to be a reset in my view. Be careful about resetting things. I know. it's it's like a mutation most mutations turn out not to be favorable to the survival of the creature or they're irrelevant to it it's only a few turn out to have advantages and evolutionary process is those that have some advantage reveal themselves the plant or the animal is more likely to survive and have more offspring and so on so if i were to say you know we need a reset i'm going to irradiate you and cause a lot of mutations in your genetic material, that's probably not going to turn out well.

49:16It might. It might irradiate you in some way that would allow you to do cool things like glow in the dark when you want to or things like that. But probably, almost certainly, it's going to be negative. So we have to be careful about the resets that we ask for. Now, then the other question is, we do have governments. They're out there. They're states. So they're not people. The government is not a big person. It's not a creature or an animal or something like that. It's made up of people, as you mentioned, politicians, but also filing clerks and meter maids and people who write tickets and tax collectors and everybody and all of their complex relationships.

50:02So it's a thing. It's an entity in some sense, like a chess club. A chess club isn't just a bunch of individuals. It's individuals who come together in a relationship. They have a function. They like to play chess. They elect a secretary and the chair who then decides when the meetings will be held and so on. So we can speak meaningfully of a chess club. It's not just a heap of people. It's an entity of a kind made up of people and their relationships. And governments are like that too. And those institutions, those entities, can cause enormous suffering and harm in the world. When they go bad, they're really, really, really bad.

50:42Exactly. But here we are. How can we make them less bad and possibly adding some value to the world? So for that, I think we need to actively embrace some principles of liberal democracy. So I'll give you an example of a dear friend of mine who died in 2014. Some suggested possibly poisoned by Mr. Putin because he was a critic, but he also was in poor health. His name was Kaja Bendukidza. He was a genius businessman. He was a biochemist in the Soviet Union, very high-level, brilliant scientist. and as the Soviet Union collapsed, he set up a company in biochemistry to develop anti-venom for bee stings, but one of his colleagues stole all the bee venom, and as he said, you know how many bees it takes to get a liter of bee venom?

51:37So it was a disaster, then he went into other businesses, became very prosperous, and then when Putin began to create his dictatorship. He said, we don't need people like you. And he was Georgian ethnically. Georgians fell out a favor. They deported them from Russia in cargo planes, by the way, to indicate they were trash. Wow. And he became Minister of Economics of Georgia for basically a dollar a year. And he began to reform the state with the government there. He said, what do you want? They said, we want to be independent of Russia. He said, then make Georgia rich. How do you do that? He said, here are some things.

52:21The police there were so corrupt. They were probably the most corrupt of the post-Soviet states, which is saying a lot. They were just bandits. They would just steal from you. People had two wallets. The bribe wallet was just enough that they wouldn't beat you, and then the real wallet that you would hide. And what Kaka did is he said, okay, we're firing them. He just fired all of them in one day. He said, go home. Do something else. Then they hired a much smaller police force. They gave them different uniforms and different cars that were painted differently. And then they had police trainers from Denmark and other countries to give police training how to arrest a drunk driver without beating him to death.

53:09which is an important skill that the previous police didn't understand. But that's something you need to learn how to do. I don't know how to arrest a drunk driver and stop him from hurting people. You'd need training for that. So they did that. And then they went to all the police stations and they dynamited them. They blew them up. They destroyed them. And they built new ones made entirely of glass. so when the police these new policemen we had no previous police experience but were trained by european and canadian and so on officers if they arrest me they take me in all my friends can see and everyone was now having cell phones with cameras so if they begin to beat me it's on video.

53:58It created a totally different dynamic, and the police changed. They changed so much so that if a policeman was approaching you, you no longer immediately felt fear, which is what you experienced before. That was a huge improvement, and it came about by thinking carefully, what are the incentives that people face? Why do they engage in bad behavior? How can we change the context of that behavior, the incentives economists talk about, and transparency, literal transparency, was one of the ways to do that. So that was an improvement. And it's one I'm happy to say, I knew the people who were behind it, and it worked.

54:45Now, Georgia's had other problems since that time, but the results that they brought about, many of them have been lasting. And it's been just astonishing improvement. So I'll take that. I'm happy to get those kinds of improvements. It always takes one leader, doesn't it? Just a leader. I don't think that's true. Actually, it takes something more. And I was at a conference I organized in 2014 with Kaha in Ukraine, immediately with the invasion, the Russian invasion. It didn't start in 2022. It's been going on for 10 years now. But we organized an emergency summit in Ukraine, Kaha and I, and he was going to be up to be in the cabinet as the minister of anti-corruption efforts, because he was not Ukrainian, and they passed a special law to allow him to come.

55:39He was already a wealthy person, and he got paid no salary, and he was going to take that, but he died before that could happen. But we organized that. And he said in his speech, you need three things. You need to have someone who can speak to the public in a convincing way and explain, not just we're going to do these things, why they will make life better. And go on television, radio, and explain these things. The second person is someone who knows how to assemble political coalitions. That's your really political person. The one who can say, come on, join or go, okay, okay, we'll concede this to you, but let's assemble a working majority in the parliament or congress.

56:29And the third thing, he said, you need someone who's willing to be hated. And he said, that's me. He said, everybody hates me in Georgia because he said, you're taking away their ability to be corrupt. Well, and because everyone comes, says, I want a special favor. And I say, no. And they hate me. They hate me as a consequence. He's made a funny joke once. I heard him. He was a very dear person, if you ever want to look up a remarkable person. He said, when I'm walking to my office, and he was a very, very big man. When I say big, I mean really big, big, overweight, obese person with a huge mustache.

57:10I mean, like a giant Georgian mustache. And he said, when I'm walking to my office, if someone says, good morning, I stop and I think, what did I do wrong? That person doesn't hate me. There must be some special favor I haven't eliminated. So those three are needed, not just one person. You need a team. And then very importantly, and I think Egypt, some of the reforms there have shown this, you need to have public engagement. I'll give you a simple example. One of the long-term harmful things governments do is to subsidize some commodity like gasoline or petrol. And Egypt had huge petrol subsidies.

57:56I think it ended up being about a quarter of the state budget was just subsidizing petrol. It was incredibly wasteful. and it leads to uneconomic decisions. People were exporting petrol. They would buy it cheaply at the subsidized rate, just drive it to other countries, and so on. But if suddenly the government stops that, what do people do? Well, they burn down the petrol stations, as if that's going to make petrol easier to get. It doesn't. You need to have a public campaign to explain why the prices should reflect supply and demand and why we'll all be better off. Even though in the short run, I don't like the fact that my petrol price just went up.

58:37In the longer run, it'll be better for everybody. Yeah. If you just do it, you're going to get pushback, riots, and anger. So you need to have an engagement with the public and actually talk to them, debate it, be on radio and television and talk to people who want to keep the subsidy and debate them publicly in a fair way and get enough of the population majority but maybe just a critical minority to say yeah that's right even though i don't like the fact my petrol price is going to go up next week i understand in the long run it's better for the whole country not to be just pouring money down the drain with petrol subsidies.

59:23Examples of good governance. I'll shut up but still don't believe in government. Can I ask you a question Tom? So overall if you look down 10 years let's say 2035 do you think we'll have more liberties or less? Can I return very quickly and Say one last thing about your previous question about government. I'm not a good government person in the sense that the government can do wonderful things all the time. I believe in limited government, limited to a narrow range of activities, and then watch it. Like smoking the beer in the American commercials, you have to watch that campfire all the time and put it out, make sure it doesn't spread.

1:00:10And government is like that. It's very dangerous. The other element is, in some ways, much of our lives, we govern ourselves. In a certain sense, anarchy, in the sense of no government, is just all around us. Whenever people organize themselves without having a dictator telling them… That is a kind of government I would support. Well, my own view, and I've written on this topic in academic papers and history journals and documents and so on, is we have seen stateless societies, and we may see them again, that function at a high level. Yeah. In a certain sense, every time people organize themselves without a command, that's what it is.

1:00:54We live in that world already. Government doesn't consume all of our relations. But it is there, I believe in that sense that it exists, and I want to minimize the harm it can do. and when it can do something good, direct it to that limited sphere. Now then, this deep question, is the world going to become freer or less free in the future? I have to admit I'm a longer-term optimist. These have been hard times in recent years. We have seen the reemergence of scary dictatorship in China and in Russia and aggressive expansionism on the part of these powers. We've seen systematic information attacks through disinformation on freer societies and disruption of democratic processes by the proliferation of multiple false narratives, all from the same source.

1:01:51That's how they do it. Peter Pomerantsev has written and studied this very carefully and written extensively on how the Russian state does this. They don't say one lie. They say 17 lies in four minutes. and I don't know what's true anymore. Yeah. Right? So we're going through a difficult time. I think this is a pivotal moment, certainly in my lifetime, but I'm a long-run optimist and for two reasons. One is I think the free societies are more resilient than the advocates of dictatorship think. And second, pessimism is self-fulfilling. If you want to have a good outcome, be optimistic. Just do the best that you can in the hope that things are going to get better.

1:02:42So I believe in optimism in that sense. And then the third point I would make, looking at the last 225 or so years, for much of humanity, which means the overwhelming majority, life has gotten a little bit better. There have been down times, many people and so on. Stephen Pinker in his book on Enlightenment Now, I think, does a marvelous job on this. The website humanprogress.org documents this in great detail across a huge range of experiences. Life has gotten better. And it's connected not just to having more stuff, more washing machines. I'm a big fan of washing machines compared to hand washing.

1:03:31My mother had the crank thing. I remember that, yeah. When I was a little boy, she was clever enough to make me consider it a cool thing to be allowed to crank it. But now we don't have that anymore. I have a machine. I just pop things in, push the buttons. It's all computerized. It has its own Wi-Fi. It's astonishing. Life's gotten better, and I think it will continue to do that. But I do think that we also need to take a self-aware stance on behalf of liberty. And here's the hardest thing to do. Not just my freedom, but yours. Everyone's. Everyone's. That is it for me. Yeah. By me taking away your freedom, I'm setting an environment where I allow my own freedom to be taken away by you.

1:04:22Oh, absolutely. Bingo. But there's even a deep psychological level. So that's a kind of risk analysis. It's the useful idiots who create dictatorships, and they're the first ones lined up against the wall and executed. It's happened so many times. And you think, like, why do they understand this? But there's a psychological level also. One of my figures that I really admire was a man named Joaquin Nabucco. He was Brazilian. He was an abolitionist. He worked all his life from being a student until success in 1888 to eliminate slavery in Brazil. He said it was unbearable that here he was a free person.

1:05:03But he said what was unbearable was to live in a society when other people are not free. And in his book on abolitionism, which had a big impact at swaying the opinion to get rid of this evil institution, He wrote something I've committed almost to memory. He said, educate yourselves and educate your children in the love of the freedom of others. For only when you love the freedom of other people will you truly appreciate your own. You will not see it as a gratuitous gift from fate, but you will truly appreciate and embrace it. And that I've taken as my personal motto. I mentioned I don't smoke marijuana.

1:05:47I don't even like being around it at all. But I've worked for 50 years to legalize it. Not because I want to smoke it, but because I think it's wrong to put other people in cages. I don't have to be a member of this religious group or that sexual minority to favor their equal freedom. Their freedom is connected to mine at a deep, deep level. That's it. We end there. I think that truly in my mind, if you value your freedom, learn to believe in the freedom of others. I think that truly to me is a world-changing societal direction that actually delivers on everyone's freedom. Tom, I'm so grateful.

1:06:36I'm more educated, but also so connected to your views and your actions and your activities. It's so kind of you to share your time. It really is a lovely conversation. You sort of tempted me to sort of follow politics a little more because you look at it from a loving way, an empowering way. I'm so grateful for your time. So grateful for this conversation. Thank you so much. Well, thank you. It's been a real delight. And are you giving me a lot to think about in the coming days and months? Thank you. Okay, that's an honor. I mean, in a very interesting way, I think the most useful reflection you can get is from someone who's completely ignorant about the topic.

1:07:22Thank you for allowing me to show what I don't know. And thank you all for being part of this. As I always tell you, it's my biggest, biggest joy to have a guest that I can learn from here, which is almost every guest, but so many, so much variety because of you listening to Slow Mo. Tell me if you want me to have more conversations on such topics. At the end of the day, I think we closed at what I believe in my heart is a world changer. If you want your own freedom, believe in the freedom of others. this to me is the core of everything really. If you want to be treated ethically, treat others with ethics.

1:07:58Remember that the next time you comment rudely on someone or hatefully on someone's comment on social media, because yeah, if you take away their freedom, you're taking away your freedom at the same time. And while you're there on social media, why don't you just post about this podcast and tell people that you like it? Perhaps go to your podcast player and rate this five star. Go to YouTube, watch our video content now and subscribe and share and all of that lovely stuff that we do on social media. Your support will help me grow this podcast. And as you do, will help me get more of those interesting conversations.

1:08:41Whatever you do this week, take a little bit of time to slow down and reflect because it doesn't matter how busy you are. There is always a little bit of time to slow down. I love you all for listening and I will see you next time.