Predictive History - The Story of "Civilization", "Secret History", "Game Theory" and more - Secret History #8: Death by Bureaucracy

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Secret History #8: Death by Bureaucracy

Okay, so welcome back from the break. Today, I want to talk about an incident that happened in October 2015 at Yale University. What happened was this? Halloween is coming up. In Halloween, people like to dress up silly, get drunk, have a good time. and a university department called the Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an email to students saying it's Halloween you guys want to have fun that's fine but please be sensitive about the feelings of other people so for example do not dress up like a panda because we have Chinese students

and they might be offended if you dress up like a panda. So this email went out to all the students at Yale. And one teacher who works at a residential college called Silliman. So Yale, the university is divided into dormitories called residential colleges. And she is a dean with her husband of this college called Silliman. And to her students, she writes an email and says that she didn't agree with the university email she says that a university is a place for you to explore experiment and make mistakes so yes be sensitive about the feelings of others

but we trust you to make mistakes and to recover from them okay so So the debate was essentially over safe space versus free space. The university said that safe space is important. We must respect the feelings of others. But the Dean of Silliman, her name is Erica Kastakis, she believes an idea of free space. So a university is a place for debate, for questioning, for experimentation. yes feelings will be hurt that's part of the growing up process intellectual process so let me ask you a question do you guys agree with number one who argues for

safe space or number two erika kristakis who argues for free space what do you think okay okay can you speak into the mic please of why yeah why do you think why do you think believe number two is number one and number two is correct because I think that university is a place that you could explore yourself you know jump out of your comfort room and try the things that you never had experienced before okay who disagrees who believes it's more important to respect the feelings of others like it did the college prohibit these on dressing that maybe us be at office instead of other students.

It's just in a campus, if you work out in the society, it's still will have the people like wants to dress, maybe like a panda or something. So, I think it's, I think it's like necessary to, like to, well, yeah. Okay, all right. Any other opinions? Any other opinions?

Okay, so you say respect the rules, right? I think it depends on who decided. It feels like for myself, I think free space will be more important. I need to explore what I want. But for being as a leader, being as a head of the college, I think safe space will be more important for them because they need to take in control. Okay, right, but the problem is this is a conflict, right?

if the teachers care about safe space, you cannot have free space. So the question then is, what do you think in principle is more important? Free space or safe space? Safe space. Okay. Okay, all right, okay.

So, yeah, so most students believe safe space is more important. And this marks a generational shift, because when I was growing up, there was no debate. It was just assumed that free space, is more important because if you're not allowed to make mistakes, if you're not allowed to explore, if you're not allowed to argue with other people, if your feelings don't get hurt, you will never grow as a person.

Okay, so this marks a generational divide or a generational gap. Okay, so we're going to look at what happened because of this debate. So the students who read the email were offended that Erica Christakis were. arguing for free space because they believe that by doing this you're going to hurt our feelings all right and so let's look at what happened and remember this is Yale University so what's happening is that when Nicholas Christakis the husband of Erica Christakis went to meeting you're surrounded by students and they're confronting him okay because like a hundred

It is. Right, you know, poor racism. No, you're telling you that you are being racist. You are being offensive. You admitted that you hurt us. Why can't you say sorry? I'm sorry. I think that you have the right.

No. No. No. One at a time, please. It's very easy for any trivial world of mine to be misinterpreted. So I'm one at a time. I'm happy to speak to you as much as you. Well, I can't speak as much because I have other students that need time as well.

So. unfortunately a little bit okay so look I'm not saying which side is correct okay both sides have legitimate points both sides have problems but you will notice that he the professor he's much older than the students and the students are treating him you can see their faces right They're treating him with some contempt. And that's not appropriate. And when I was growing up, we didn't do this. If you didn't like a professor, you thought, well, he's an asshole.

But you know what? Most professors are assholes because they're professors. You did not go and stalk the guy and complain to him. That's kind of disrespectful. All right so the question then is why is this happening so I want to show you another video and this video is kind of crazy Okay this video understand that as your position and master is your job To create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Hillman You have not done that by sending out that email that goes against your position as master

Do you understand that? No, I don't agree with that Then what the fuck did you accept the position? Why the fuck hired you? Okay, so this is not appropriate. Again, both sides have legitimate points. But this is not appropriate, right? Because what she's saying to him is, you work for us.

Your job is to make us feel at home. And his response is that my job is to help you learn. My job is to help you learn. My job is to help you grow and that means openness. That means debate. That means pain. And her response is, I don't want that crap. I want to feel good.

I want to feel at home. I don't be challenged. And if you think to think about it, that defeats the entire point of university. So again, I'm not saying who's right. I'm not saying who's wrong, But clearly there's a problem here. And when I went to Yale a long time ago,

we didn't have any of this. In fact, this sort of incident where a student would curse a professor, it was unimaginable to us. So the question then is, why is this happening? And there are three explanations for why this is happening. The first explanation is parenting. These kids grew up in very privileged household and their parents are very protective of them.

And their parents treat them like friends. And so these kids are spoiled, okay? That's the first explanation. The second explanation is the idea of a consumer's mentality. So in a university, the idea is that the students are consumers, their customers, and the customers are always right what the customers want you have to give them so if the customers want a safe space they want to come and enjoy their time of university and they don't really challenge the professors have to meet their demands otherwise

he should not have this job okay and this is a mentality that we call neoliberalism or consumerism okay that's the second explanation okay now third explanation is ideological. So the idea is that at universities, universities are overrun by left-wing professors who teach students that society is racist against minorities, who happen to be black and female. And they must overturn the white racist supremacist structure. And you do that by telling what professors who are privileged that they are racist.

Okay, so these are three standard explanations for why this is happening, because this sort of stuff is happening quite a lot in America. What I want to argue to you today is that there's actually another explanation, which I think is much more compelling. And the explanation is that universities have become bureaucracies. Before universities existed to teach you how to think, to help professors do cutting-edge research that helps a society improve or innovate. But today, universities, including Yale, Harvard, all the universities have become bureaucracies

that exists in order to promote the interests of the administrators who want to sit in their office, get a really big salary, and feel good about themselves. Okay? That's the argument I will make to you today. And what I will show you is that this is not just true for universities, it's true for every major organization in America and in the Western world and arguably all around the world.

That's the argument I will make to you today. Any questions before I begin? All right, okay? So today's lecture is death by bureaucracy, how the idea of bureaucracy, the bureaucratic mindset, is taking over the world. All right, so let's talk about another incident at Yale. This is Yale Law School, and a student named Trevor Colbert,

he says an email. He has a party, he says an email, to all the students at Yale Law School. school and there are actually not that many students at year law school there's maybe 300 okay but all the students get it and he says that he's going to organize a party it's a trap house party and you know it's it's a bit of a joke because trap house means actually a drug house a place where drug dealers sell drugs but black students African-American students read the email and they're offended and they're like are you making fun of black students so they write a letter of complaint to

the deans of Yale Law School, and there are two deans who investigate, okay? Their names are Eldik and Koskroff, okay? And what Trevor Korber does is, he actually records the meeting, okay, secretly. For 20 minutes, they talk. And basically, Colbert does not believe he did anything wrong.

He said an email, and he said, it was a funny email, he thought it was funny, okay? But the deans tell him, You think it's funny, but other students found it offensive, so you need to apologize. And corporate's like, okay, well, I'll tell you what. If these students thought that what I wrote was offensive, then I will talk to them. We will talk together about why they found the email offensive and we will settle this amongst ourselves. And the dean's like, no, no, no, we want to help you guys out. We want to protect you guys. We're afraid that you guys meet, you guys will fight even more.

And Trevor Corbord's like, well, I want to hear what they think. I don't want to hear this from you. I want to hear what they think. Okay. And then what happens is that the deans start to threaten Trevor Colbert. They basically tell him these things amplify over time. So you must apologize right away for your sake. Okay. And they tell him, listen. If you do not apologize, then this might affect your career. This might affect your social circle. So they're threatening him. And what they say is, we're doing this for your sake.

Okay? Eric says he worries about the email affecting the student's reputation, not just here, but when you leave. You know the legal community is a small one. And he says, you know what? I will write the email for you. for you. I will craft the apology for you. And

Kodscarf warns that escalation is a possibility if the student doesn't apologize, okay? So this is coercion. And again, the student, is that clear what the student did wrong? Some students found offensive, but it's not clear what rules or laws or what regulations for ever COVID broke, okay?

It's not clear. So why is this happening? Okay. Markerman to you is that it's happening because these guys, Costco and Eldick, they need things to do because being a dean of a university, it's not a real job. They're professors who teach, there are researchers who do research, but deans actually don't do anything.

So when you have a bureaucracy, bureaucrats go make problems for everyone in order to create solutions for everyone. Okay? So, another saying this is, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when I was a student at Yale, if you had a problem, you had to go talk to a professor because there was no one else to talk to. Nowadays, you can talk to like 20 or 30 different deans,

Dean of Student Affairs, Dean of Student, Faculty, Who knows, okay? But they're like all these offices they can go to. And quite honest, it's the same at the school as well, right? If you don't like me as a teacher, there's like four or five different people you can complain you can complain to. And quite honestly, a lot of you do complain, okay? So I know about this. And what this is happening is these universities have become bureaucracies. Now question then is why they're bureaucracies.

And the answer is in the beginning as university you have to build your reputation, right? So you work hard, you focus on teaching, you focus on research. So it's a struggle to become a global brand. Once you become that global brand, there's something else to do. There's no more ideology. There's more struggle. So what happens is the people in charge start engaging in rent-sicking behavior. They take advantage of the position in order to make their life easier.

And then they pass on this privilege to their friends and then to the children. And this creates a bureaucracy. the university starts to exist in order to empower these people at the expense of students and professors. Okay? All right. So to show you how ridiculous this has become, here's another example. This is from CNN, and this is the year 2020.

A university of South Conference professor is under fire for using a Chinese expression students allege sounds like an English slur, okay? So there's a Chinese word that sounds like an English slur. sounds like a racial slur, an insult in English. These two words actually do not sound the same. Okay, you know what the word is, right? Nega, Nega, Nijer, Dioz, Nekh Diannau, okay?

It's not the same as the English word, but it sounds a bit similar. So what happened was some black students, African-American students, who were not in this class, okay? Wrote a letter of complaint. And honestly, if you read it, it sounds like a joke. It sounds like a prank.

All right? So let's read it together. Let's let's, okay, so this is a professor, Greg Patton, and he's just teaching communication Chinese. He's just teaching Chinese to his students on how to communicate in China when you do business, okay? And he says, look, Nega, it's just a feeler. It doesn't really mean anything. And he says it a few times.

But there's no, there's no bad intention what he's saying, right? I mean, he's just pointing out a fact. So what these students write is. this phrase clearly and precisely before instruction is always identified as a phonetic hominand and a racial derogatory term and should be carefully used especially in the context of speaking Chinese within the social context of the United States okay so this is a ridiculous idea and honestly it sounds like a joke okay it just sounds like these students are playing a joke and and the and the administration

just ignore this right guess what happened The dean, the head of the business school, announced that a different professor would take over teaching Patton's class. He fired Patton. And then he said, Professor Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that, I am deeply sorry.

It is simply unacceptable for faculty use words in class that can marginalize, hurt, and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better. Okay? He's being retarded. It's a joke. It's a prank. And he's taking it very seriously.

Why? Because he's trying to protect his job. He's trying to look good. He's trying to explain why I'm the leader because I protect everyone. Okay? So then again, why is this happening? Well, again, the idea of bureaucracy. So this is the University of California, San Diego.

This is student enrollment, okay? So you can see a slight increase in student enrollment. But look at this. Senior management, deans, administrators, managers, boom, okay? Boom. This is called rent-sicking behavior. This is people in power,

take advantage of them. power to give jobs to their friends who do nothing every day and because of that they're always looking to cause problems for everyone else especially professors who do real work okay so let's just look at universities as you can see the blue is teaching so what's really interesting is that the investment in teaching has gone down okay The investment in teaching has gone down, the blue, okay? But look at this.

The red is administration. So over the past, from 1980 to today, over the past 40 years, the universe have put less money into both administration as well as maintenance, but I've put more money into administration, into bureaucracy. This is where your money is going, guys. So this is Illinois. You see a massive search in managers, at the same time, student enrollment is going down.

It went down to 3%. So this is a paper written about the Swedish education system, the higher education system, okay? It's no different anywhere else. All right, so let's, so the argument is that Broccoli is ballooning in Swedish higher education. So let's look at some interesting. interesting statistics.

All right, so what's happening is that this chart tells you that teachers are teaching more and more students, okay? Teachers are teaching more and more students, but administrators are managing less and less students. And the reason why is teachers are fewer and fewer, but managers are more and more. That makes no sense. Okay? Okay.

So you can see that teachers and researchers, it's pretty flat, okay? It hasn't really spent that much. But secretaries, people who do work, it's going down. But managers are going up. Okay, so the university is facing problems. The first thing you should cut are the people who do no work, right? But it's the opposite. People who do no work, the managers keep their jobs.

And in fact, they pay themselves more. The professors and the maintenance and the secretary. lose their jobs to cut costs. Okay? This is how much they're paid. As you can see, over the same time period, secretaries are getting paid less and less, teachers are getting paid less and less,

but look at this. Managers are getting paid more and more. These are the different departments, okay, of a university. So as you can see, okay, the jobs, the departments that do real work, IT, HR, they're going down, but management is going up.

it's going up. So the people who do absolutely no work, their jobs keep on going up and up, and they get paid more and more. And as I said, the problem of bureaucracy is not only do managers to do nothing every day, but they expect others to do more work. Okay, so professors, researchers, teachers,

they're doing more work because the manager are given them more paperwork to do, like evaluations and all that. professors spent almost 20% of their workday on paperwork given to them by managers and this paperwork is not necessary it's given to them to justify the jobs of the managers okay this is America we go back to America and as you can see this is a university called Gallaudet debt and as you can see over a 20-year period there's the blue are the salaries of professors and it's pretty stable okay you went from 72 to 86 not a huge increase but look for managers okay

the president it doubled from 141 to 280 it doubled right now the salaries are over three times as much as faculty um this is Connecticut at Yale the president makes two million dollars a year and Westland he makes three million dollars a year Okay, this is a private university called Stratford University, and they went bankrupt. Right now, more and more universities are going bankrupt because obviously you have too many managers and all they do is get huge paychecks for doing nothing. Eventually, you're going to go bankrupt, right? So, yeah?

Sorry to interrupt, but the school board is not stupid. So, I mean, this is a fact, and so why don't they just change anything? That's a great question, okay? The reason why is they're all friends. The school board, the president, the vice president, they're all friends. And that's why they can do this. Because they control all the power. They're all friends.

And it's in the best interest to steal together. Because if you're still by yourself, then you might get caught. But if you still together, then you're untouchable, okay? So this is exactly what happens at Stratford University. The university was bankrupt because the president and the vice president, are stealing from the university, stealing because they are not only collecting huge paychecks, but they're also expensing everything to the university.

So for example, they buy a car or they have a gym membership, they charge the university. And if the university can't pay for it, what they do is they lend money to the university. Okay? All right? So Schultz is the president. He lists himself and his wife as the biggest creditors

claiming that the university owes a couple 2.5 million for eight promising notes. Okay? So the university could not pay their cars or the house mortgages and they say, and the social are like, don't worry about it. We'll lend you the money. And then when the university went bankrupt, it was like, okay, now you have to pay me back. All right. So, so again, how were they able to do this? Because the filings also shed light on payments to university insiders in its final year of operation. The college paid out of over over 30,000 in Cypore into seven trustees. So the people at the top were getting paid off,

even as the university was going bankrupt. Though the filing doesn't differentiate which expenses were Richards and which were Mary Annes, the filings for 2020 alone showed over 18,000 in lease and insurance payments for the Shultz cars, okay? So they had cars and they were making the university pay for these cars. Over 4.7 million in loan payments

and collateral returned to Eagle Bank on behalf of Shultz, okay? So they're also making the university pay for their houses as well. And then you're like, how can they do this? Well, the answer is because in America, the rich always wins in the court system. So whoever is able to hire the best lawyers always wins out. And they have a lot of money. The university is bankrupt. They don't have a lot of money.

So they will win out. So I point this out because this is what's going to happen to many universities of the next five, ten years. over the next five, ten years in America. Because you have a system where you have the managers at the top, they are all best friends, they're all stealing from the university together. And eventually the university will bankrupt.

So that's America. Okay, but again, it's not just the universities. It's every bureaucracy, every organization is happening like this. So you look at Canada. In Canada, you can see a rise of 9% of the population. But look at the government, okay? It's went up by 26%. In America, you can see a stark decline in manufacturing jobs starting in about the 1980s,

because these jobs are being offshore to China. But at the same time, you see this steady increase in government jobs. Okay? So people in America are doing less real work, and more people are becoming bureaucrats. Okay. So as you can see, the growth of the growth of the growth of people are becoming bureaucrats. The growth in the government is usually in management, okay?

People who will work? No, it's pretty flat. But look at the managers, look at the administrators, okay? They're going way up, and it's a pretty steady increase. All right, so how do we know the government doesn't really do anything? Okay, so there's a study that shows us that it's looking at rules, okay? So rules help society be more efficient.

So as you can see, the number of rules have gone down, actually. A number of significant rules, rules that actually impact you day to day, have gone way down. But this is interesting, the paperwork has gone up. So this tells us the managers, the administrators in the federal government of the United States, they don't do anything but produce paperwork that's meaningless. That's actually no impact on the lives of ordinary people. Okay? Okay, let's look at the military.

So everyone believes that America has the world's greatest military. where it's military, because it spends the most on the military. Now it's all these high-tech weapons, right? The problem is the bureaucracy in the military right now. So you see what's happening is an increase in management because the ratio of manager-officer to soldier is going down. So you have more officers and less soldiers. That's a problem you're fighting a war.

All right, so in a civil war, and this is the 1860s, you had one officer for every four, 14 soldiers. Now it's 1 to 4. Okay. The biggest problem is the increase in generals. Okay, so you can see 3 and 4 star generals have increased the most. In World War 2, America had about 12 million soldiers. They had seven generals who were 4 star. Today America has about 1.2 million soldiers. They have 40 4 star generals. And this is a huge problem. Why?

Because if you're a four-star general, you have a lot of privileges beyond your salary. So this is from Raymond Dubas, who works in the Pentagon, and he writes about the perks of a four-star general. A four-star has an airplane. A three-star often doesn't. And a three-star get an airplane when he needs it?

Not always. So a four-star general always has his own personal, airplane. What is this personal airplane? It's called G5. This is what a G5 is, guys. This is what a G5 is. This is an own personal plane. It's always there for him. If he doesn't want to fly, it's waiting on the tarmac for him, okay? You can see how luxurious it is. This costs $50 to $60 million per plane. Every four-star general has this plane. At the same time, guys, what's happened to soldiers? The soldiers don't have enough to eat.

There's 1.2 million veterans on food stamps. That's 8% of all veterans in America. The people who actually fight, the people actually make sacrifices for their country don't have enough to eat while the generals fly around in like these really nice planes. That's a state of the American military. All right?

So it's as to the military. It's every single U.S. government department, okay? All the administrator, you see massive increase in administration. All right, so people who do real work, is the red. People who do actually no work is the blue. So people who do science, math engineering, 621, people who do administration, 1782. So in every federal bureaucracy you have bloat.

You have managers who do nothing, and you have very few people who do the actual real work. It's true for every single federal organization in the world. organization in in America so this just shows you how the racial managers and supervisors to other employees what's really funny about bureaucracy is evaluation who does the evaluation managers do the evaluation so at the end of the year they do they do performance review and what happens is they tell they evaluate themselves in the friends that you really did a great job may then look at other

people who do the real work and says you guys can do better okay so outstanding is the highest performance reveal for the government right 62 64% got outstanding okay managers who do nothing every day 47% got outstanding for every other job all right so it's a wig game same same thing with hospitals the brown is the growth in doctors you can see it's pretty steady, but look at the administrators. Okay, the yellow are the administrators. It's blowing up, okay?

And so it forces healthcare costs to go up. The reason why healthcare is so an affordable United States is not because it has the best health care in the world, it doesn't. It's expensive because it's got so many administrators who do nothing every day. All right, so what do these managers do? always think of new ways to screw everyone else.

Okay, so these are health insurance companies and this is their denial rates, okay? So you work hard for 40 years, you pay your health insurance, okay? And then maybe you get cancer. And then you go to a doctor, the doctor charges you like a million dollars. And you're like, you don't have a million dollars,

but you have insurance, so you go to an insurance company, it's like, hey, I paid 40 years of insurance fees. Can you help me out? And look, the insurance company, United Healthcare, about a third, 32% of all claims are denied. And they do this as practice, because if you fight them, they'll say, okay, you know what, we'll agree to pay you back, okay? But if you don't fight them, then they're like, great, okay?

So it's extremely unethical. And so that's what managers do every day. Think of new ways to school over their patients and doctors. All right. So why is this happening? All right? Why is America like this? Why is the West like this?

Why is the entire world like this? So this is France Kafka. And he was writing before World War I. This is his most famous book called The Trial. I'm not sure if you guys have read this book or heard of this book. Okay, it's very good. And the novel, it's a very interesting novel, because the main character, Joseph Kay,

he works at a bank, he's a bank clerk, and he has never gone into trouble his entire life, okay? He's very obedient, he's very nice, he just sticks to himself. And then one day, the police come and arrest him. The police don't tell him why, and Joseph Kay tries to figure out why, but he does not know what he did wrong. He does not know why he's being arrested.

And then he's put on trial. And the judge doesn't tell him what he did wrong. Okay? And just in case trying to figure out why this is happening to me, okay? And this is his answer. Its purpose is to arrest innocent people and wage pointless prosecutions against them, which, as in my case, lead to no result. How are we to avoid those in office becoming deeply corrupt

when everything is devoid of meaning? Because society has become a bureaucracy. And bureaucrats need things to do. So they go, the police go and arrest innocent people and then send them to trial. Now what he doesn't say is the police could arrest criminals, right? But the police don't want to do that because the criminals might fight back or the criminals might be mean, okay? They rather arrest an innocent person because they know the person will be compliant.

Okay, that's the logic of bureaucrats. How do I just find my existence by doing as little work as possible? So this sounds strange, but let me tell your story. This is a true story. I'm in Toronto with my two boys and I let them run around the park, okay? And we've been doing this for two months. So I trust them. One of my boys, he's four years old, he runs too far.

and I lose track of him, okay? A stranger finds him and starts talking to him, but my boy doesn't speak any English. So people now surround my boy, like where are your parents? And he is scared because he doesn't speak any English. So he faints, okay? That's what he does, he faints to protect himself.

So they call the police and they call the paramedics, they come and they make sure he's all right, okay? Now I find him. Okay, and now the police interview me, they interrogate me, and I explain to him what happened. And at this point, they just let us go home, right? But they insist on taking us to the hospital. I'm like, if we go to the hospital, we can be stuck there for like 12 hours. We can be in line and like the paramedics, the MAT has already told us there's been wrong

with him. Okay, it's not he's stroke, he just fainted, but he's fine. vital signs are fine but the police kept on insisting meanwhile there's a fight going on at the park okay and I'm thinking myself why are you guys bothering me and not going to arrest those guys who are fighting somewhere else and the answer is because it's easier to deal with me then let's go arrest those guys okay that's how their guys think they're always thinking of ways to justify the existence but not do real work And that's the message of the trial.

Eventually society becomes so bureaucratic that the bureaucrats only think about how to make problems for ordinary citizens because life becomes easier for them. Does that make sense? Let's move on to the origins of terrorism by Hannah-Arant. Hannah-Orant is one of the 20th centuries most

powerful intellectuals. And she's writing about how Nazism came to dominate Germany. Now, communism came to dominate Soviet Russia. And how these two regimes led to the deaths of tens of millions of people. How they start World War II, how they create the Holocaust, how they create the famine. And in her book, she says that these two regimes are religious cults. cults, they're evil cults.

And they have three defining characteristics. The first is that they're removed from reality. They don't care about reality. They have a religion, they have a faith, they have a mindset, and they want to impose their faith on reality. They don't care about reality. They're removed from reality. That's the first thing, okay?

Second thing is that when you remove from reality, your only logic is movement, expansion. You only know you're right if you're growing. So if the Nazis, their faith, their religion would lead to the destruction of Germany, but their membership was increasing. So they were right. They were winning these wars against European countries. Therefore, they're right. They cannot use logic to explain their actions, so they use movement to justify their actions. That's number two.

1 and 2 means number 3 which is the Nazis and the Soviets hated reality they defied reality they fought against reality so even though the Nazis were losing the war even though it's clear they cannot defeat the Soviet Russia they double down because in their religion movement is what matters defying reality is what matters and that's what led to the destruction of Germany okay all right so So, and she explains that totalitarian regimes have these three characteristics. They're removed from reality. All they care about is expansionism and they want to defy reality as their true test of faith. What she does not say in the book is that these three can apply to all bureaucracies, all governments, that over time all governments all bureaucracies will tend towards totalitarianism because they have that's the only way they can justify their existence okay does that make sense all right so let's talk about this concretely okay what do I mean

by this so this is a book by James Scott it's an excellent book by the way called seeing like a state and he's trying to explain to us how brokeries Baroquecies work, how governments function. And for him, governments actually create more problems than they solve. Why? Well, he lists four reasons. The first is that he, all they care about is the administrative ordering of nature and society. So another way of saying this is, a bureaucracy is a machine, it's a hierarchy, it's static, it's mechanical, but so, so, so, so, society is like a forest it's diverse it's an ecosystem it's organic for a state to exist it must turn the forest into a machine like itself so it destroys

diversity it destroys spontaneous spontaneous it destroys imagination okay all right so let's let's use an example of this all right so my question to you is like who are you can you can you can you can you can you can you can you can you can you can you Tell us who are you? Like, who are you as a person? Tell us who you are as a person. Yeah, yeah, just use one or two minutes to introduce yourself. Who are you as a person? Hi, my name is banker and I grew up in Beijing. And I came to Moonshot this school in 2004 last year. Okay, wrong, wrong, okay? That's not the correct answer. The right answer is,

you're a teenage boy okay that's the correct answer all right you believe that you are an individual with individual aspirations ambitions with a past with history the state doesn't care the state needs to classify you in a way that can that i can use you okay you're a teenage boy which means like two years time you can be employed in a factory or i can send you to war okay that's all i care about okay i don't care about your name i don't care about who you are i don't care who your parents are, I don't care about your path, I don't care what you like. All I care about is the fact that you are a teenage boy and therefore I can exploit you for labor. Okay, that's how states think. Okay, so the burglarization of society. Second

is the idea of high-martinist ideology. So because the state is a monopoly, the Barclos is a monopoly, it becomes arrogant, it has hubris, it's overconfident, and it wants to impose its ideology on everyone else. It believes that through its own planning it can achieve paradise okay um so it becomes authoritarian meaning it refuses to listen to criticism to feedback to questions it does it is not open to debate it and it imposes its will on people okay which creates a weak civil society and if if as an organization you're not getting feedback you're not allowing for openness then you will wither and die Okay, and that's why states, governments will always fail in the end.

Okay, so he uses two examples. The first example is what happened in the late 19th century Germany. So in Germany there's lots of forests. And the state is thinking of ways, how can we best monetize the resource of the forest? Well, there's certain trees that you can cut down. for lumber right the problem is that in a forest most space is occupied by useless shrubs or greenery or trees okay so their bright idea is you know what here's a simple solution we'll burn on the forest and just plant trees that we can

harvest for lumber right brilliant that's a burnt use of space it's more efficient The problem though is that when you do that, the trees are now susceptible to disease, to weather changes. A forest is resilient because it's diverse. So that's what Scott says. Monocultures are as a rule more fragile and hence more vulnerable to the stress of disease

and weather than polycultures are. Any unmatched forest may experience stress from storms, disease, drought, fragile, soil or severe cold. A diverse complex forest however with its many species of trees its full complement of birds insects and mammals is far more resilient, far more able to withstand and recover from such injuries than peer stands. So nature has diversity because it allows for resilience. Okay, some part of the forest can die but the rest of the forest will recover from anything whether it's disease or droughts or

or weather, okay? And we humans are the same way. If you let humans do what they want, we are resilient. So some communities might die off, but other communities will adapt. The problem with a state, of a government, is that

it refuses, it sees diversity as an enemy. So if there's a natural disaster, it's very likely that a lot more people die off than otherwise, okay? Another example is force communism in Tanzania. Okay, so it's a top-down system. And their idea is, okay, these farmers, they have their little small farms,

and they grow their crops, but that's not efficient. What if we just got all the farmers together and had coffee? And they all, you know, had coffee or wheat or whatever. And then we can sell this to other countries. Okay? And of course, you can imagine that this will lead to starvation. Because it's the same principle as the forest. If there's a weather crisis or if there's a disease, then all your crops die off and

then your people die off. What these planners carried in their minds eye was a certain aesthetic, what one might call a visual qualification of modern world production and community life. So the problem with bureaucrats is they have no imagination. everything to them has to be mapped out. They like things that can be mapped out, that can be a blueprint, okay? They like to brag about these things,

because that's how they see the world. But real world, nature requires diversity, it requires organic, okay? All right, so he gives examples of how the state transforms society. So before, What happened is that people would just come together and they were organized the communities according to their needs Okay, it's a bottom-up process, but the state wants to create

permanent cities where people are just in one place all the time, right? That's why you have cities Before what's natural is just for people to live on small farms and share stuff with other people to trade with each other The problem with this is the state cannot tax you. So what the state does is it brings you to cities, makes you work in a factory so it can tax you. The point of giving you a wage is so it can tax you to exploit you. Property, before it was very common for people to share property together.

Now it's all owned and controlled by the state. are the same thing. Before, people just use resource according to needs. But now the state wants to centralize these resources. So it can tax and exploit people properly. So that's what the state proxy does. So what are the consequences of the over bureaucratization of society? Well, what's happening in America is that while consumer goods, like cars, clothing, and cell phones are going down. What's going up are hospital services. schooling, housing. Why because these are monopolies controlled by bureaucrats? Right? So what's happening is with the over bureaucratization of society, it's almost impossible for

middle-class people, ordinary people to have a good life now. Okay. Here's another really interesting chart. The black shows you the growth in the stark market, okay? And you think, you think, wow, this is a good thing okay the problem is first of all only 10% of people in the United States control most of the stocks not over 90% of the stocks the other issue is this the other issue is if you look at prices yeah it's gone up but if you just turn but if you look at stocks as a units of gold if you just go to buy stocks guess what the price of stocks have gone down that's a blue okay if you use money to buy stocks it goes up but if you use gold to buy stocks it goes down what this is

telling us okay very simple is we are living in a lie all this wealth generation it's all a lie it's not real we just think it's real we're living in a fairyland created by bureaucrats to fool us to believe that we are prosperous okay does that make sense the amount of gold that you can buy with stocks has gone down Okay? And so the blue is the gold, the black is money. The money is worthless.

Okay? All right. Another problem that bureaucratism has created is people don't want to work anymore. So in America, this is called quite quitting. In China it's called Tang Ping or Ba'an, okay? Lying flat, let it rot. People don't want to work anymore. Why?

Because it's pointless to work in a bureaucracy. Right? Leaders don't care. The organization doesn't need you. You are alienated. You are told what to do and you cannot negotiate. You cannot rise with an bureaucracy. You're being asked to work too much.

You feel as though you're just a machine. And so you're, and so the way you rebel is lying flat, or quite quitting. So your over-prejudication of society means that, people now have become more lazy, more complacent, more indifferent. And what this also means is that democracy is declining because people's voice, people's power is declining, okay? So you can see that people feel as though democracy is in the decline.

In fact, experts estimate that democracy, the capacity for people to participate in politics, The capacity for people to influence politics has declined rapidly these past 10 years. Okay? So we are living in a world that is becoming more and more bureaucratic and it's killing us. Okay? All right. Questions? So as you say, we now live in a very corrupt world.

We live in a bureaucratic world. Yeah, a bureaucratic world. So what, so I can't really see the future of the future. of no matter it's the mankind or like are there any good side of the current world? Okay. What are good things about the current world? Well, the good side is that because things have become so corrupt, people now are forced to think for themselves, right? Before you can just trust your teacher, you just trust your parent, you just trust a thought,

trust authority figures. But now you see them for the bureaucrats that they are. And so now you're forced to think for yourself. And so you're now forced to educate yourself. You're now forced to explore different opinions. So people's minds are opening. And that I think is a very good thing in today's world. Okay?

Any more questions? So will it help if we cancel most of the managers and just keep one or two of them? Yeah, okay. So that's a really good question, okay? If this is a problem, why not just get rid of the managers? And the answer is they have all the power. They would much rather send you to war and kill you off than to lose their jobs.

So go back example of Stratford University. Their mentality is how do I maintain my privilege? They don't care about society. All they care about is maintaining their privilege. So they are bankrupt society and then when society becomes bankrupt, they expect society to still continue to pay them off okay so these are parasites and there's nothing we can do about it yeah as we just said other less teacher and less professor or like like most people were choose to quite quitting then who are

they going to control if there's less people to work for them you know okay Okay, that's a really good question. The problem is they don't think like that. Don't think about how efficient is my organization. Don't think about like, am I going to have a job next five years? All they care about is maintaining the position right here and now. The way they do that is they hire their friends or people like them into other management positions. So they become like a cabal or a network onto themselves.

And for them, they become parasites. And what parasites want to do is they want to feed off the host. And the host dies, what's going to happen? They will switch to another host, right? Why? Because they're all part of larger networks as well. So that's how they think. They're thinking, well, you know, as long society survives, I will continue to have a job.

Okay, so maybe this university goes bankrupt, but there's another university I can go to and exploit. And you know what? It works. Okay? Because people at the top protect each other. All right? Okay, doesn't make sense.

They don't care about this whole, this organization. They don't care if it goes bankrupt because they can always move on to another organization to bankrupt. Okay, what matters is to maintain, their patronage, their political networks. So they all help each other. Okay, that doesn't make sense. Okay, great. Any more questions?

Is there any possible to stop or even reverse this corroborating system? Yeah, I keep on explaining this, okay? They are the ones in power. And so what has to happen is, often society has to collapse before society can regenerate, before society can rejuvenate okay but before society can collapse they have a lot of tricks of their sleeves okay so for example they can create civil wars where the left and the right fight each other and they're left alone or they can use AI to control you right AI is God guys listen to God okay or they can fake an alien invasion okay or they can send you to war these all these pointless wars okay

but whatever it takes in order to maintain a privilege and their power, that's a mentality. And that's how they got to where they are. And that's how they lead to think. Any more questions, guys? Okay, Mr. John. My question is, so I'm a 12th grader. So if you are in my shoe,

if you are in a 12 grader nowadays, what would you do? Are you still going to pursue for a further education, a higher education, or will you going to just drop out? Yeah. Okay. That is a great question.

So you are, you guys are about to go to university, and as I told you in this class, university is a complete rip-off, okay? All you're doing is you're paying for the nice salaries and perks of these administrators at university. You're not really paying for the professors, all right? You're paying for the administrators to have their nice lives.

And so what I would do is maybe not go to university. What I would do is focus on education, on learning, by reading a lot of books, by, asking a lot of questions and doing my own research by learning real skills okay so in a side like this where the game is rigged going to university means that you'll just lose okay maybe before like 20 30 years ago it was good to go it was good to go to university because you might become a manager but now all those slots have been taken taken up by the elite and the children okay there's no space for you so no one can do in this context

is to really start educating yourself in real knowledge. All right? Reading books. Meeting lots of different people. Exploring the world. Like really develop real knowledge. That's the best solution. Any more questions?

Doesn't matter to the major. No, it does not matter the major. It's all a scam. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It's all a scam. It's all a scam, okay?

Doesn't matter what university you go to, liberal arts, Ivy League, state, it's all a scam. Doesn't matter what your major is. Economics, psychology, humanities, computer science, it's all a scam. Okay? The system exists so that the managers, administrators can continue to feed off the system. All right? Okay guys, so we'll continue this next week, okay? All right.

But thank you for the questions. Thank you.