The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Disruption: Why Things Change by David Potter

Episode Date: June 26, 2021

Disruption: Why Things Change by David Potter How do things change? The question is critical to the historical study of any era but it is also a profoundly important issue today as western democracies find the fundamental tenets of their implicit social contract facing extreme challenges from forces espousing ideas that once flourished only on the outskirts of society. This books argues that radical change always begins with ideas that took shape on the fringes. Throughout time the "mainstream" has been inherently conservative, allowing for incremental change but essentially dedicated to preserving its own power structures as the dominant ideology justifies existing relationships. In this tour of radical change across Western history, David Potter will show how ideologies that develop in opposition or reaction to those supporting the status quo are employed to effect profound changes in political structures that will in turn alter the way that social relations are constructed. Not all radical groups are the same, and all the groups that the book will explore take advantage of challenges that have already shaken the social order. They take advantage of mistakes that have challenged belief in the competence of existing institutions to be effective. It is the particular combination of an alternative ideological system and a period of community distress that are necessary conditions for radical changes in direction. The historical disruptions chronicled in this book-the rise of Christianity, rise of Islam, Protestant reformations, Age of Revolution (American and French), and Bolshevism and Nazism--will help readers understand when the preconditions exist for radical changes in the social and political order. As Disruption demonstrates, not all radical change follows paths that its original proponents might have predicted. An epilogue helps situate contemporary disruptions, from the rise of Trump and Brexit to the social and political consequences of technological change, in the wider historical forces surveyed by the book.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this boss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in be sure to refer the show to your friends and relatives hey have you reached out to someone and said,

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There's lots of fun stuff to go and there's no Kool-Aid. So anyway, you can go to youtube.com for just chris voss hit the bell notification follow all the great authors and interviews that we do on the chris voss show and great reviews of products as well too go to goodreads.com for just chris voss you can see everything we're reading or reviewing over there you can go to all of our groups on facebook instagram twitter linkedin is just the chris voss show is everywhere and so am I. So just search for us there. Today we have an amazing author. Every day just amazing authors come to us. We're just

always so honored and so blown away and we learn so much. My mind has grown at least five inches in the last year or so that we expanded the podcast to include all authors, including romance ones. But today we have a history author on and we're going to learn a lot. He's written a lot of books. David Potter is on the show today with us. He has written the new book that just came out hot off the presses, July 1st, 2021. The book is Disruption, Why Things Change. And I think it's going to be a pretty good insightful thing. And we're going to find out what man's history did and what it tells us about probably today's workings or our future. David Potter is the Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and the Republic to Hadrian, Constantine the Emperor, The Victor's Crown, A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium, and Theodora, Actress, Empress, Saint. Welcome to the show, David. How are you doing?

Very good. Thank you very much for having me, Chris. It's an honor to have you, and congratulations on the new book. i'm going to go practice after the show how to say by santium oh i'm not even sure so give us your plugs and people can uh look you up on the interwebs sorry give us your plugs your dot coms uh wherever people you want to have look you up on the uh internet and order your book okay i think sorry but i get my head started around you can you can find me through the department of classical studies at the university of michigan and you if you're looking for a copy of the book excuse me you can find me through the department of classical studies at the university of michigan

and if you're looking for a copy of Disruption, please go to your local bookstore, order it there, or you can order it through the Oxford University Press. So it should be readily available anywhere. There you go. There you go. So what motivated you to want to write this book? You've written other books before. What motivated you to cover this one? It was really the Charlottesville riot that got me to start asking some questions about where are we now and how did we get there? I've been around for a while, but we've never seen anything quite like what we saw in Charlottesville, where the president of the United States is actually encouraging insurrection against the United States. And then, of course, we've seen a lot more from there. Taking as a proposition that the former president was really more of a symptom than a cause of what's going on here, I started asking, when else in time have we seen potentially really big changes?

What causes this kind of breakdown? Does it always lead to a bad end? Sometimes how can it lead to a very positive change? And so what I was trying to do with the book is look at how big disruptions happen, how you can have a positive outcome, how you can have a negative outcome. And so what is the points of history that you cover in the book that you talk about? Give us an overview. The disruptions that we're looking at, first of all, is the rise of Christianity, which is really an extraordinary thing when you come to think about it. This was a fringe movement in the Roman Empire, and all of a sudden, because of the decision of one Roman

emperor, Christianity becomes a driving intellectual force in the Western world. So that's a really huge disruption there. The second one is the rise of Islam. And how did you sweep away states that had been around for a thousand years and replace them with something else? And again, it's a really sudden, dramatic change centered around a series of ideas that, again, were very much on the fringe of everything very shortly before they became critically important. And then we move ahead in time and get to the Protestant Reformation. Now, the Christian church had obviously changed a very great deal. And I'd sometimes like to imagine what would happen if Constantine returned from the grave and wandered around. I don't think he'd recognize what he saw in any way.

And if he found that you were actually electing an emperor, he would run screaming from the room. But what we see is a system of thought that has again become very rigid and a new technology. And this is going to be very important for the rest of our disruptions, a new technology that nobody really knows how to handle, and that is print. And print enables ideas that really wouldn't have gone anywhere a century before 1500 to be spread around Europe with incredible rapidity. And it's a combination of the development of new schools of thought, of questioning conventional orthodoxies, with a new technology, which leads to the Reformation. And we look at that in a variety of different places, first of all with Luther in Germany, and then in England, and then in the Netherlands, as we see the growth of the nation state in Europe as a result.

Our next big disruption is going to be the use of political theory to write new constitutions in the late 18th century. And, you know, today, it's hard for us, I think, to imagine just how incredibly radical the US Constitution was to take the ideas of political theorists and to meld them into a workable political institution. And at the same time, exactly the same ideas are being used in France with completely different results. And so it's a big question, why does one set of ideas with one group of people work very well? And why, on the other hand, do we get a design? And then we're going to move into the 20th century, look at the development of two quite different schools of thought that were very much contemporary with each other, really in the 19th century, that is to say Marxism.

And then on the other side of things, to look at Herbert Spencer and the development of what was known as social Darwinism, not a term that Charles Darwin, I think, would have liked very much at all. And then two movements which derive from these ideas and really shatter, of course, the world they're connected with, the first being Bolshevism, though there are times when I think that Marx wouldn't have recognized Lenin's version of his thought, and then, of course, Nazism. Wow. How do these take on?

How do these take over? And then we'll end by looking a bit at what the world looks like in 2021. So these are all radical things that shape or shake the world or the world social order and make a difference. And what is the theme that you found through the writing on all of them and what it applies to, say, today? It is a loss of faith in basic institutions. That when we look, for instance, at the Roman Empire under Constantine, he comes along after a period of 50 years of total chaos. The system seems to have stopped functioning. The same thing is happening with Islam, with the rise of Islam. The career of Muhammad comes in the wake of a terrible disease, a bubonic plague that arrived in the Mediterranean world. Potentially 50% of the population had powers of the period, Rome and Persia, had gone to war with each other.

Neither side really had the ability to support this war. But the only way that they could think about recovering their strength was go to war with your neighbors. They basically destroyed each other and opened up space for Islam to arrive. And, you know, when we turn to the Reformation, really the Holy Roman Empire is open to the major political institutions, open to question. You've got a teenage teenager about to become emperor in Charles

V. He doesn't even know German. He's supposed to rule in Germany. We've got the Ottoman Turks coming east. People are asking big questions about the sale of indulgences, Catholic doctrine turned to the 18th century. Should you be taxing people who have no representation? Are the colonists getting what they're paying for from British government. And in France, of course, the French king has lost really a great deal of credibility with his own people. And part of it would, in fact, there's a wonderful literature about just how corrupt all French institutions are.

Now, if you want to know what the problem is with a budget, you should look at how the king is spending his money on his mistresses. There's a total loss of faith in these institutions, which is further undermined as the sort of revolutionary process begins. And the destruction of institutions as a result of the First World War. When we look at what happened in 1914, the German Empire, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, these institutions have been around for a while, or at least the kings of Prussia have been around for a long time, and none of them are going to be there at 1918.

And so the space, again, that's opened up in Russia for the Bolsheviks, and you've got to realize just how weird this is. Lenin didn't even live in Russia for 10 years before the revolution. And Hitler wasn't a German citizen. I know that. I just learned something new today. Holy crap!

Was he a Russian citizen when he became Chancellor? He was an Austrian citizen. He was naturalized as a German before he became Chancellor. Is it true he had Jewish lineage in his history? No, it isn't. There were a lot of stories that were made up about him later. Stalin had a field day making up the life of Hitler.

I guess he got the final laugh that Stalin did. Yeah, well, the two of them deserved each other. Yeah, that's true. That's true. So this is quite extraordinary. So it starts with a loss in belief in institutions. Is that loss usually brought on by calamity, like you mentioned the bubonic plague,

or is it usually what we had in the recent five years where someone was programming people to devalue or disbelieve the institutions? That's a really good question. And I think that we can see is it can stem from any number of different causes. What we saw, for instance, in France in the 1780s was an institution that had basically undermined itself through its own incompetence. Oh, wow. A crucial factor in the background to the Protestant Reformation were, again, a series of mistakes that had been made by the people who were in power

that led to people questioning them. Pope Julius in Rome, he liked riding around on an elephant. Where's that in the job description? I mean, that's Wednesdays for me at my house. Yeah. You've got people like Erasmus going down to Rome, saying, what is going on in this place? And writing books about it that are wildly popular. So you don't need a massively destructive war. You don't need

a disease. But what you do need is a lack of attention on the part of government to what it's supposed to be doing for the people it's ruling. You almost have to look at the last four years of Trump. And I know the rise of a lot of Trump, for him, it's really just about globalism and money and unlimited capitalism. Between her and the Betsy DeVos group, they basically just wanted all government removed so they could have their way, which means billionaires could do whatever they want, make whatever they want, and enslave American workers more than they do already. And they just, they use the racism. Although I think Trump is a racist, but they use that as a way to get out the vote. Do you see, do you see us, do you see, are we in another one of these curves? And do you see us getting out? Is there a U effect here?

Or is there a savable turning point? I think we are potentially in one of those curves. And you can see the signs of it, where information is substituted for truth. Somebody told me this. It's got to be right. The system has failed me. Where is the job that my parents had? Why isn't government stepping in to limit the power of incredible monopoly capitalism? With the passage of antitrust laws at the beginning of the 20th century, we pulled out of potentially that kind of social conflict. But nowadays, here, and you look around the European Union, again, politics which are driven to the extremes and the collapse of the center of the area where people can get together and compromise and talk to each other in a reasonable way is something I'm afraid that we're seeing right now. And if half the people who were on the Capitol on January the 6th have now decided that was a tourist attraction, we can see just exactly where we are. So what you do to get out of this is you've got to find a way

of trying to rebuild a kind of center where people can come together. And I think that's what Joe Biden is really trying so hard to do. First of all, with the vaccine rollout, now with his infrastructure bill. But is it going to be possible around legislation, which is looking for the welfare of people broadly in society, to convince people that this is what's really happening and to actually get these bills passed

in Europe? Again, can you maintain the stability of the European Union? Recent local elections in Germany were very hopeful, but then no longer part of Europe. But the Brexit campaign was really, again, a collection of lies, misrepresentations, the idea that leaving the European Union would be good for the United Kingdom, complete nonsense. And it's showing up now. But there is no, there was no central ground in the last election there. You had two extremists running against each other. And Boris Johnson should have been the easiest person to defeat that you could possibly find. The Labour Party couldn't put up. And it was Jeremy Corbyn, a convincing alternative to him. And Jeremy Corbyn sitting there saying, well, this was a great success.

More people voted for a socialist agenda than ever before. Great, you lost 70% of the vote. So let me ask you this. I guess there has to be a mental sea change with the population to be able to make these sea changes that you documented in your book. And one of the natures is, like you mentioned, disbelief or failure of the institutions and people going whatever. which probably explains that terminology probably explains why people adopt fascism, because it makes the trains run on time and that whole thing. What was interesting to me is last time I was talking to somebody about some of these different things that we're talking about, what's going on in our current world, and they referred me to Robert A. Papes. I think I'm pronouncing his last name correctly.

He did a couple articles on how doing a study of the capital rioters on January 6th aren't like other extremists, but he did compare them to Islamic people and other people that go to extreme or are willing to do exact violence to achieve their goals and means. And we're seeing all sorts of wrap-up of that to do a clawback to fascism. Do you see that in your book and in the studies of the people? Does it have to be a real mental sea change of what they adopt or adapt to and belief systems more fantastical or conspiracy theory sort of stuff? Is that one of the things that were part of the aspects of big change you saw in your book? That's usually an aspect of a big change that goes really wrong. I'll say that it was absolutely a feature of Hitler's rise to power.

The mythology, the stab in the back. We weren't losing that war. It was traitors at home. Then again, in Russia, the Tsar basically undermined himself. But Lenin comes in, peace and land. He had a really solid message for people. We're going to end this war and everything's going to be better for you. He didn't.

He wasn't advertising the fact that he was about to set up a dictatorship supported by terror. Stalin comes after him, again, creates a fantasy world that we're under threat from outside that we have to protect each other, ourselves. The only way we can protect ourselves is rooting out the enemies within. Again, there's a whole series of lies. In Robespierre, exactly the same way in France,

he's going to create the new society of virtue, and we're all going to be better people for that. When you're not getting there quite yet, how are you? It's a good thing we invented the guillotine. Help everybody become more virtuous that way. It always does. A little bit of new technology right here. They call it Fridays around my house.

But when you look at the United States or the 13 colonies at that point, you've got a cadre of people who really know each other pretty well. And most of the people at the Constitutional Convention had served in the Continental Army. When George Washington, when their general says,

no talking to the press during this convention, they're going to do what he tells them to do. I mean, there was real leadership there. People had a clear idea of what they were going to obtain. They were willing to compromise to get there, to fix a system of government that really didn't work. Because, of course, the ideology of the revolution was originally, you don't need any big government. We just got rid of the biggest government we could find.

And so forming a new one is really a radical step. There you go. So basically, we have to start trusting institutions on what's going on now. And I didn't really think about that's what Biden's doing, but that's what Biden is doing. He's showing what Trump was trying to show, how government was broken and how they could make it more broken so that people wouldn't want it. I think Reagan tried the same thing. And Reagan used to have that line where he used to say, I think he used to use that line of how the most worst thing you can hear is we're the government, we're here to help you. That or there's some other trope that he used. But they were basically, a lot of people don't

realize that they're just walking, parroting memes that are sent out by these billion dollar networks that just want to control, they want to keep the wage lay low. They want unregulated unfettered capitalism. They don't want any regulations. They don't want any laws. They want to be able to dump, pollute, whatever they can do to make money is good for them.

And the American public will take it on the chin, but they willingly do so because they run around parroting these talking points and they're lost. It's interesting to me. I see more of the hand of what Trump was trying to do by destroying value in government, of course, destroying value in the press and destroying everything. I really think he was going to try and seize power and go full fascist in his second term. He kept telling Bob Woodward, you will know me in my second term.

And I really found listening to those tapes where he said that multiple times, I was really creeped out. And he tried to seize our government. It's becoming very evidently clear what was happening, and he's still going to be trying. And it looks like we have some real fascist, rise of fascism issues over here. But yeah, I see now what you're talking about, where if Biden can stabilize belief in government,

he's trying to end poverty and doing a lot of things. But the Republicans are going to do everything to sabotage them, and they're already changing voting laws. So this should be interesting. And what more can we draw from what you've written in your book in the past and history that teaches us about maybe what the future is and what's going to happen the next few years? Tell me what's going to happen the next few years, will you, David? The one thing I do suggest in the book is historians aren't always the best prophets. But one of the keys that we see in a positive moment of disruption is that there is a really quite narrow group of highly competent people at the center who are trying to drive the policy. When Constantine converts to Christianity, there are a few Christians around. They actually rewrite Christian doctrine with him to create a central doctrine of

Christianity to give something that everybody can latch on to. Okay, this is what we mean. This is what it means to do this. We're not going to tell you you have to do it, but if you will kindly come along with us, it's going to means to do this. We're not going to tell you you have to do it. But if you will kindly come along with us, it's going to be to your advantage. And the critical thing is show people why it is to their advantage to do something that's different. And I think in some ways Biden can succeed in doing that. The Republican Party's open obstructionism is going to undermine itself. There are still some people in the Senate and the Republican Party who want to see a bipartisan government. And I think if their influence can expand

because no matter how many times you try to change the voting laws, people are still going to realize that it's the Republicans who are keeping change from happening. And exactly what you're saying, we're saying earlier, is critical to start reining in the power of monopolistic capitalism. I mean, you know, look at what Amazon offers you, right? The New York Times just ran a piece today on how badly they treat their workers. And people try to unionize. They're lied to. They're threatened. Government needs to be a way to step in and say, no, you have to allow people to organize you can't be the biggest company in america

and nobody is part of a union yeah part of it is the blame too with the people they're just dumb enough not to unionize when georgia was supposed to unionize recently they failed to do it they failed to get enough votes. And so people do this themselves, too. They do it to themselves, but I think they're also scared. Amazon said, oh, we'll pay you $15 an hour. Think about that. That's the best you're going to get out of these people. Now, this isn't, it sounds good because everybody's saying this should be the federal minimum wage. Amazon says, we'll give you the federal minimum wage, except that's going to be your maximum wage.

Yeah, exactly. Don't look for pay raises. You get your pay raise right out of the gate. We had Ruth Bengate on the show, and she did a book called, I think it's called Strongman, if I recall, I recommend it a million times. And she traces the rise of fascist leaders, Duterte, Pinochet, all the right-wing rise of leaders that basically were a white male hierarchy clawback of power from usually times of government where there's a rise of women, power for women, power for disabled people, and power for LGBTQ. And Trump was a real sort of clawback to take back power. And a lot of the panic and fear and racism that comes from the white nationalists, the GOP, that's pretty much what it is now. It's Trump's party. A lot of that is the clawback for power from the male white hierarchy. So is that what you saw in most of these disruptions, or do you track most disruptions as how they disrupted society through different technologies? I usually see it as really since 16th century,

first of all, of being able to control communication, as being able to control the narrative. Now, in a sense, that is what you're saying about Trump. This is the narrative that he is going to provide us with. This is the narrative that the National Front is providing you in France. This is the narrative Alternative for Deutschland is providing. You get a specific racist narrative. You've got to be afraid of immigrants. You've got to be afraid of people who aren't like you because they're going to take away what you have.

Now that is certainly a narrative that Hitler used very successfully in the 1930s. In a way, that was the same kind of narrative. They're going to deprive you of your revolution. They're going to take this all away from you. it's a very powerful line that you can use you know what martin luther and did was actually provide a completely different story and i said

i'm sorry you don't have to pay for salvation god is going to tell you whether or not you're saved there's nothing in scripture that says um that there is a place called purgatory, and there is nothing there that says that you're going to be stuck there until you buy some indulgences, or your family members buy indulgences for you, or you buy them for yourselves prospectively. He said, let us move, let's change the story. And if we change the story about our ideological system, the way we believe in our version of Christianity, we're going to change a whole lot of other things as well. We don't have to take orders from somewhere else. The princes of central Germany can run their own show. King of England, you can run your own show. It really was Elizabeth I who really shaped the

Church of England as a way of government reaching out to its people on a daily basis. The same thing we could see in the Netherlands. The ability to control the story is the crucial thing. And while Trump is telling his story, you've got to look and see whether or not Biden can tell a story that's be a lot stronger it's going to be an interesting road anything we haven't touched on your book yet that you want to cover before you go out i think we've uh got on to pretty much what the book is about without giving away the ending of course the ending is still there to be written the only way you're going to find that out is go get a coffee.

This is a quote from me. I always say the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. Thereby, we just keep going around and around and around. I do find it extraordinary. politics the the making making the other man or that guy over there i forget the other terms for the immigrant or the person that is the stranger in town this has been used for tens of thousands if not at least thousands of years depend upon which scientists you listen to this has been going on probably since being a time of man sincerely tribe there's there's that guy over there and he's not in our tribe and oh she'd be careful and wary of that man or whatever and it's people use it to retain power and and control and

i would it just kills me that people haven't learned this by now they're like we you wouldn't pull that government immigrant thing on us now for 10 000 years i think we can finally let this go but it's interesting how we just keep falling for it every time. I think that's right. And I think one of the really important points I hope that people will take away from my book is that there are no great impersonal forces of history which cause things to happen. Things happen because we make specific choices and we do specific things. It's a great way of escaping blame. Say, oh, we can't really handle this massive economic dislocation. Who's responsible for the economic dislocation?

What choices did you make? What choices have you made in campaign finance laws to enable the wealthy to have an extraordinary influence over the political process. Each one of these things can be traced to a specific moment. We've seen after January 6th, Senator Blumenthal beginning to question what are the pieces of legislation which have enabled tech companies to control communication in this country. Maybe we should rethink that. That's a specific choice you can make, a specific choice Congress can make,

and we can't continue to simply blame all of these circumstances around us for the choices that we're going to be making. Yeah, it's interesting. I think the way I resolve it in my head, though, is probably the head of Barnum & Bailey Circus said it best. There's a sucker born every minute. So I guess that's the overall arcing rule of human nature for the last 10,000 years. Maybe we'll just write it off to that. There's a sucker born every minute.

David, it's been wonderful to talk today and cover your book and everything else that's inside of us. Give us your plugs, your dot coms, where people can find you on the interwebs. Yes, I can be found through the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. And Disruption can be purchased through the Oxford University Press or any local bookstore. Try to use a local bookstore rather than Amazon. That would certainly be in keeping with the message of the book. There you go. Disrupt the disruptors. So thank you very much for being on the show with us, Dave.

We certainly appreciate you being here. I appreciate it very much. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you very much, sir. Disruption. Why things change. July 1st, 2021. It's hot off the shelves. This is David Potter. Order that baby up. Go to your local bookstore, seller, wherever. Fine! Books are sold and you can educate yourself and get smarter so you're not one of those Barnum and Bailey circus people where there's a full born every minute. So you definitely want to read David's book. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time.