Speaker 1: Frushkin. Hello there, listeners. My name is R. Vindthan David.
Speaker 1: I'm an author, a playwright, and a screenwriter whose work
Speaker 1: has won Grammy Antonia wards. But more important than any
Speaker 1: of that, I started my career working for Douglas Adams,
Speaker 1: and I'm dropping into your feed today to share a
Speaker 1: preview of my new audiobook about him, Douglas Adams The
Speaker 1: Ends of the Earth, a celebration of his intellectual legacy.
Speaker 1: Adams was more than a science fiction or comedy writer.
Speaker 1: He was someone with deep insights into our world. He
Speaker 1: foresaw the dangers of our current age, from social media
Speaker 1: to chaotic politics, with hilarious clarity, and maybe he even
Speaker 1: had some good ideas about how we might survive these
Speaker 1: dangerous times. In this audiobook, you'll go on an immersive
Speaker 1: journey through Adams's mind. We've never before heard recordings from
Speaker 1: his personal archive, original readings of his work, and interviews
Speaker 1: with those who knew and loved him best, from Stephen
Speaker 1: Frye and David Bidel to leading astrophysicists, conservationists, and political scientists.
Speaker 1: I do hope you enjoy this excerpt, and if you do,
Speaker 1: you can find Douglas Adams The ends of the Earth
Speaker 1: at pushkin dot fm, slash audiobooks on Audible, Spotify, or
Speaker 1: wherever else good audiobooks are found. Thank you. Chapter five Politics,
Speaker 1: People Are the Problem. The next three chapters of this
Speaker 1: book discuss Douglas's views on politics, economics, and government. They
Speaker 1: work as a triptych since the three subjects are interwoven
Speaker 1: at more or less the atomic level. Given the times
Speaker 1: of extreme polarization we live in, it might be helpful
Speaker 1: to give the section a bit of a preface. So first,
Speaker 1: let me say that I don't believe Douglas's politics conform
Speaker 1: simply to a left or right divide. If you think
Speaker 1: at the end of chapter five that he might have
Speaker 1: been a sort of liberal centrist, then I'd urge you
Speaker 1: to push into chapter six, which explores his views on
Speaker 1: the economy. And if that chapter surprises you, then just
Speaker 1: wait for chapter seven. The truth is that Douglas thought
Speaker 1: about things far too deeply to be content with simply
Speaker 1: signing up to one tribe or one political party. That's
Speaker 1: just a way of accepting someone else's thinking, and accepting
Speaker 1: other people's thinking. Was it should be clear by now,
Speaker 1: not something Douglas Adams did.
Speaker 2: Now, most people in my experience are content merely to remember.
Speaker 2: But I can't remember if I don't understand, and I
Speaker 2: would worry away at something and seemed to be dim,
Speaker 2: you know, because I didn't get it. I needed more
Speaker 2: logical support for something before I could accept it.
Speaker 1: Douglas came at politics like he came at everything, from
Speaker 1: first principles, from a need to understand. It is not
Speaker 1: my intention to enlist or conscript Douglas to my or
Speaker 1: to anyone's political agenda. Douglas was a radically original thinker,
Speaker 1: someone who very much made up his own mind. And
Speaker 1: I think we are at a time in world history
Speaker 1: where radical, independent thinkers in politics are desperately needed. Here's
Speaker 1: what Douglas said when asked who he would vote for
Speaker 1: in the US presidential election of the year two thousand,
Speaker 1: between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, it seems to be extraordinary that
Speaker 3: out of two hundred and fifty million people it comes
Speaker 3: down to those two.
Speaker 1: In fact, if you were to ask people who knew
Speaker 1: him what Douglas's politics were, you get a pretty consistent answer.
Speaker 1: He had some causes, particularly of course environmentalism and conservation,
Speaker 1: but He never publicly associated himself with any political party,
Speaker 1: being as skeptical of the excesses of capitalism under Margaret
Speaker 1: Thatcher as he was about the union troubles of the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies under the left wing Labor government. His one
Speaker 1: official quasi governmental role was that in March nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: under a Conservative government, he was appointed to the Department
Speaker 1: of National Heritages newly created Library and Information Commission. He
Speaker 1: made a statement saying that I will.
Speaker 4: Be advocating for a strong IT policy and look forward
Speaker 4: to a future when all our written.
Speaker 5: Records are digitally accessible. The IT move is afoot, and
Speaker 5: not before time.
Speaker 1: Six months later Douglas resigned his post and never came
Speaker 1: near government work again. So resolutely apolitical, perhaps not during
Speaker 1: every election. Over the last twenty years, a line from
Speaker 1: the restaurant to the end of the universe has proliferated
Speaker 1: across social media. It has become a meme. It is this.
Speaker 4: The major problem, one of the major problems, for there
Speaker 4: are several One of the major problems with governing people
Speaker 4: is that of whom you get to do it, or
Speaker 4: rather of who manages to get people to let them
Speaker 4: do it to them to summarize, it is a well
Speaker 4: known fact that those people who most want to rule
Speaker 4: people are ipso facto those least suited to do it.
Speaker 4: To summarize the summary, anyone who is capable of getting
Speaker 4: themselves made president should on no account be allowed to
Speaker 4: do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary,
Speaker 4: people are a problem.
Speaker 1: I met up with Brian Class, a professor of politics
Speaker 1: at University College London. I asked him what he thought
Speaker 1: about this Adam Zien meme, about the idea that anyone
Speaker 1: who's capable of getting themselves made president should on no
Speaker 1: account be allowed to do the job. Rather surprisingly, Professor
Speaker 1: Class had thought a lot about it.
Speaker 6: It is a core of my research, a problem that
Speaker 6: I call self selection bias, and that is where certain
Speaker 6: kinds of people gravitate towards positions of leadership for all
Speaker 6: of the wrong reasons. Right, So, what Adams has basically
Speaker 6: summarized in a very short and punchy way is that
Speaker 6: for many people in the world, power itself is not
Speaker 6: a draw, right, it's a vehicle to enacting change. And
Speaker 6: for those people, they're not obsessed with power, and therefore
Speaker 6: they're not very good at getting it whereas the people
Speaker 6: who are power hungry, which is usually used as a negative,
Speaker 6: are precisely the people who are so obsessive that they're ruthless,
Speaker 6: and they're very effective at obtaining power. And so what
Speaker 6: Adams is basically saying, and I think this is true,
Speaker 6: is that the people who are most drawn to power
Speaker 6: like moths to a flame, by virtue of that obsession
Speaker 6: and by virtue of the things that they have to
Speaker 6: do in order to get to the highest offices in
Speaker 6: the land, they disqualify themselves because they basically prove that
Speaker 6: they're in it for the wrong reasons. And they also
Speaker 6: have to behave in such ways during a campaign that
Speaker 6: make it clear that they should not be trusted with
Speaker 6: any sort of authority.
Speaker 1: Here are some things about Professor Bryan Class. He is
Speaker 1: an expert on democracy, authoritarianism, American politics, political violence, and
Speaker 1: the nature of power. Most of all, he's an expert
Speaker 1: on corruption. He's a professor at University College London and
Speaker 1: a visiting fellow at Oxford University. He pops up as
Speaker 1: a talking head on CNN and the BBC all the time,
Speaker 1: and before he became an academic, he helped elect the governor
Speaker 1: of Minnesota. He also happens to be a massive Douglas
Speaker 1: Adams fan, but we'll get to that.
Speaker 6: I've gone around the world and interviewed a whole bunch
Speaker 6: of leaders, former heads of state, and authoritarian regimes, all sorts,
Speaker 6: and the sort of thesis of my last book, which
Speaker 6: is called Corruptible, takes Adams's idea and uses it to
Speaker 6: attack or sort of undermine the core idea that most
Speaker 6: people have about politics, which is that power corrupts. And
Speaker 6: the reason why the title of the book is called
Speaker 6: Corruptible is because I'm arguing exactly the opposite, in line
Speaker 6: with Adams, that the problem, the real problem, is that
Speaker 6: corruptible people are drawn to power, and that it's not
Speaker 6: that power itself is transforming others, although that does happen,
Speaker 6: but rather the wrong sorts of people end up in
Speaker 6: positions of leadership. And that's what that quote is all about.
Speaker 1: Now in today's politics, with populism on the rise everywhere
Speaker 1: and strong men presidents becoming the norm across the globe,
Speaker 1: this view of leadership seems reasonable familiar, But Douglas was
Speaker 1: writing in nineteen seventy eight. Have things always been thus? Well?
Speaker 6: I think this is an age old problem, right, So
Speaker 6: this is something that the ancient Greeks and Romans and
Speaker 6: Egyptians worried about. This is something that humans have grappled
Speaker 6: with literally forever. So whenever you have hierarchy, which effectively
Speaker 6: is something that emerged in some societies but not all
Speaker 6: of them in the sort of vast stretch of civilization,
Speaker 6: there's this big question of who do you put in charge?
Speaker 6: If you have to put someone in charge, who should
Speaker 6: that person be? And so humans have written about the
Speaker 6: problems of power and abuse for literally millennia. So Adams
Speaker 6: may have been responding to specific headlines or specific players
Speaker 6: in British politics, et cetera. But I think he's actually
Speaker 6: tapping into something much more universal here, something that has
Speaker 6: befuddled humanity for as long as we've been on the planet.
Speaker 6: And I think what he's also tapping into, which I
Speaker 6: think is the fundamental insight of social science, and one
Speaker 6: that is very simple but often overlooked by people who
Speaker 6: are outside of the field, is that the way I
Speaker 6: describe it, as I say, every single group of humans
Speaker 6: that you have on the planet, in a club, in
Speaker 6: a political party, whatever it is, they're a non random
Speaker 6: subset of the population. They're not randomly selected like in
Speaker 6: a lottery, and that means that certain traits are causing
Speaker 6: people to sort themselves. Right, So what Adams I think
Speaker 6: is doing is I think he's astutely saying that the
Speaker 6: people who are sorting themselves towards politics are driven with
Speaker 6: a thirst for power that is unusual among the rest
Speaker 6: of the population. I suspect that he's actually dealing with
Speaker 6: something that's far deeper and more universal, about a problem
Speaker 6: that's played humanity pretty much for as long as we've
Speaker 6: braced the planet.
Speaker 1: Unsurprisingly, Douglas was aware of the ancient nature of this problem. Indeed,
Speaker 1: he specifically wrote about a fictional ancient civilization which was
Speaker 1: having some difficulty managing its political process. What follows comes
Speaker 1: from the final Hitchhiker book, mostly Harmless. Remember, this is
Speaker 1: the bleakest and most deeply cynical of all of Douglas's books,
Speaker 1: so it's fair to say he wasn't feeling very optimistic
Speaker 1: about the world when he wrote it. In the following scene,
Speaker 1: Arthur and Ford witness an alien spaceship which crashes into London.
Speaker 1: Out of the ship comes an immense silver robot one
Speaker 1: hundred feet tall, which holds up its hand before proclaiming, I.
Speaker 5: Come and please technically to your lizard.
Speaker 1: It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see.
Speaker 5: You mean it comes from a world of lizards.
Speaker 1: No, nothing so simple, nothing anything like so straightforward. On
Speaker 1: its world, the people are people, the leaders are lizards.
Speaker 1: The people hate the lizards, and the lizards rule the people.
Speaker 5: Odd, I thought you said it was a democracy.
Speaker 1: I did, it is.
Speaker 5: So why don't people get rid of the lizards?
Speaker 1: It honestly doesn't occur to them. They've all got the vote,
Speaker 1: so they pretty much assumed that the government they voted
Speaker 1: in more or less approximates to the government they want.
Speaker 5: You mean they actually vote for the lizards.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, of course, But why because they didn't vote
Speaker 1: for a lizard. The wrong lizard might get in? Got
Speaker 1: any gin? What I said? Have you gone any gin? Oh?
Speaker 5: Look, tell me about the lizards.
Speaker 1: Some people say the lizards are the best thing that
Speaker 1: ever happened to them. They're completely wrong, of course, completely
Speaker 1: and utterly wrong. But someone's got to say it. In
Speaker 1: this allegory, the lizards are politicians, not any particular party
Speaker 1: or stripe or type of politician, but rather the entire
Speaker 1: self perpetuating, privileged cross party elite that has been governing
Speaker 1: most Western democracies for decades, occasionally just changing who sits
Speaker 1: in which seats. Here, Douglas is being astutely cynical about
Speaker 1: the entire political processing system, left, right and center. The
Speaker 1: system he is saying is broken, It's always been broken,
Speaker 1: and it's set against us. But just being cynical doesn't
Speaker 1: seem enough. More than that, it doesn't seem very like Douglas.
Speaker 1: As we've observed in the sections of this book on
Speaker 1: conservation and the Internet, Douglas was not content to simply
Speaker 1: be a critic of what was broken. It was his
Speaker 1: nature to try and fix problems to create something better,
Speaker 1: whether that was a permanent refuge for mountain gorillas or
Speaker 1: new models of community on the internet. So what would
Speaker 1: Douglas have us do about it? If our democracy is broken?
Speaker 1: Winston Churchill once famously said that democracy is the worst
Speaker 1: form of government except for all those other forms that
Speaker 1: have been tried from time to t But if even
Speaker 1: the least worst form is so terrible, what is there
Speaker 1: to do about it? Tear it down, give up on democracy,
Speaker 1: and embrace plutocracy. Oligarchy, tune out. They didn't seem to
Speaker 1: be anything in Douglas's writing that pointed towards a solution,
Speaker 1: and at that point I was playing out of ideas.
Speaker 1: So I asked Brian Klass, as a fellow fan and
Speaker 1: as a political thinker, if he thought that Douglas was
Speaker 1: just throwing his hands in the air and giving up.
Speaker 6: So you have, on the first part, this sort of
Speaker 6: supply side, which is who decides to become a politician,
Speaker 6: who ends up on the ballot, who volunteers to run
Speaker 6: for office, and those are the power hungry people who
Speaker 6: Adam suggests shouldn't be anywhere near power, right. And then
Speaker 6: you have the demand side, which is why do we
Speaker 6: keep on allowing people who are so manifestly unfit for
Speaker 6: leadership to govern our societies? Because I think what he's
Speaker 6: saying is that we are prone to being seduced by
Speaker 6: powerful people who clearly should not be in charge, but
Speaker 6: continually convince us to hand over power of our societies
Speaker 6: over our societies to them. And those two ideas are
Speaker 6: very complementary when you try to understand things like populism
Speaker 6: the rise of demagogues, which are obviously extremely important as
Speaker 6: we sit talking about this in twenty twenty four, but
Speaker 6: they're you know, it's worth remembering populism and demagoguery are
Speaker 6: something that, again the ancients also dealt with. How do
Speaker 6: you reconcile democracy with the sort of passions of the
Speaker 6: mob and the risk that somebody will convince people through
Speaker 6: emotional ploys and so on, to allow them to govern it.
Speaker 6: And I think Adams again, with this parable of the lizards,
Speaker 6: he's not actually suggesting that this is what happens. He's
Speaker 6: suggesting that the politicians that we allow to govern us
Speaker 6: are like the lizards, who have no business being in power,
Speaker 6: but we vote for one because the other one is worse.
Speaker 6: And I think a lot of people see that in
Speaker 6: modern democracies, where they're voting not for a politician but
Speaker 6: against somebody else.
Speaker 1: I'm recording this in the chaotic first weeks and months
Speaker 1: of the second Trump term, and as the US continues
Speaker 1: to seesaw back and forth ever more violently between two
Speaker 1: different visions of the country, as the population becomes more
Speaker 1: and more divided, between two radically different tribes, each of
Speaker 1: which seem not to just disagree with, but actively hate
Speaker 1: each other, we seem trapped in a war of the lizards.
Speaker 1: In this toxic environment, Douglas's challenge to us seems all
Speaker 1: the more urgent. You can even say that it is
Speaker 1: the great challenge of politics today to find an alternative
Speaker 1: system that provides a fair and decent management of society
Speaker 1: without involving any lizards at all. But how do we
Speaker 1: do that if all the people who desire power shouldn't
Speaker 1: have power, and if all the people who put them
Speaker 1: in power shouldn't be trusted to choose. If we can
Speaker 1: neither trust the supply of leaders nor the selection of leaders,
Speaker 1: what solutions can politics give us? What is left?
Speaker 6: Yeah, so this is one of the key questions of
Speaker 6: modern democracy in the age of populism. But I think
Speaker 6: there's a few things I'd say about this. The first
Speaker 6: is that obviously you want someone who desires power, but
Speaker 6: you want someone who desires power for the sake of
Speaker 6: enacting social change for the benefit of other people. So
Speaker 6: for those people, the power is the means, not the end. Right.
Speaker 6: So you want people who want to rule like that
Speaker 6: is obviously true, but you also want them to be
Speaker 6: clear eyed about the fact that it's a means not
Speaker 6: an end. And the point that I always make to
Speaker 6: people when I'm trying to convince them to get involved
Speaker 6: in politics or to do their bit to try to
Speaker 6: make their own society a little better is to say, look,
Speaker 6: the power hower hungry people will show up one hundred
Speaker 6: percent of the time because the power is enough of
Speaker 6: a draw that, even in a destructive and dysfunctional political
Speaker 6: system like the United States is currently power hungry zelots
Speaker 6: are going to run for office, right, So the question
Speaker 6: that becomes do we balance them out? And the way
Speaker 6: you balance them out is that the people who care
Speaker 6: about the service and view power as a means rather
Speaker 6: than an end. Now, if enough of those people in
Speaker 6: the second category run for office, then will be okay.
Speaker 6: But the problem is that you end up creating a
Speaker 6: self fulfilling prophecy when politics becomes so bad and so
Speaker 6: toxic that the costs of it are so enormous. And
Speaker 6: this is where what I think Adams is hinting at.
Speaker 6: Here is something that I've seen in my own family life,
Speaker 6: which is my mom inspired me to get interested in
Speaker 6: politics because she ran for school board at the local
Speaker 6: level when I was a kid. And you know, more recently,
Speaker 6: I've asked her like, would you run today? And she
Speaker 6: says no way, right, because like the death threats, you
Speaker 6: get the crazy conspiracy theories, the zelots, all this type
Speaker 6: of stuff, the risk of violence and so, and that's
Speaker 6: a sort of parable for the good, decent public servant
Speaker 6: bowing out. And I think what Adams is also hinting
Speaker 6: at is that the ugliness of the arena in many
Speaker 6: political spheres is such that the moral compromises you have
Speaker 6: to make in order to get elected those are the
Speaker 6: ones that he's I think referring to beyond the self
Speaker 6: selection bias that I talked about before. So you know,
Speaker 6: I worked in a political campaign before I became an academic,
Speaker 6: And yeah, I mean you have to make trade offs.
Speaker 6: You sort of like the candidate I worked for who
Speaker 6: went on to become the governor of Minnesota. You know,
Speaker 6: he said to me, Look, we don't want to make
Speaker 6: promises we can't keep because we have to govern if
Speaker 6: we win. But also if we don't win, none of
Speaker 6: this matters, right because we don't could actually do anything.
Speaker 6: So at some point, the whole purpose of your job
Speaker 6: as a campaigner is to win. And when you are
Speaker 6: faced with the choice between not winning and doing something
Speaker 6: that is potentially not what you want to do, but
Speaker 6: you might have to do. Many politicians make the hard
Speaker 6: nosed but often im moral choice, and so you know,
Speaker 6: I think that's where Adams is mixing these two ideas
Speaker 6: together to very very succinctly describe both self selection bias
Speaker 6: and the moral degradation that often comes. It's sometimes called
Speaker 6: in philosophy the dirty hands problem, which is that in
Speaker 6: order to get to power, you've got to get your
Speaker 6: hands dirty. What should we do about that fact when
Speaker 6: we need people to sometimes get their hands dirty because
Speaker 6: that's the only way to solve problems, right, So it
Speaker 6: is the perennial problem of democracy where you have to
Speaker 6: solicit votes. I'm not so cynical as to say that
Speaker 6: anyone who ends up in power is obviously unfit for office,
Speaker 6: but I think he's summarizing something that is extremely apt,
Speaker 6: and to me, is the biggest problem of democracy in
Speaker 6: the twenty first century, which is, how do you convince
Speaker 6: the right people to seek office when the system itself
Speaker 6: is so fundamentally broken and toxic that that prospect is
Speaker 6: just abhorrent and off putting to most people.
Speaker 1: At this point, I just sort of wanted to kill
Speaker 1: myself and all the lizards. I wondered, though surely Douglas
Speaker 1: wouldn't have just identified the problem. Surely somewhere he would
Speaker 1: have suggested a solution. How do we find people whose
Speaker 1: desire is to use power to serve, to deliver meaningful
Speaker 1: and positive change for others, and not just to advance themselves.
Speaker 1: That's when I remembered about the ruler of the universe
Speaker 1: and his cat. In the second Hitchhiker novel, The Restaurant
Speaker 1: at the End of the Universe, Zeyphod and Trillion succeed
Speaker 1: in tracking down the true ruler of the universe. He
Speaker 1: is revealed to be not a president or a dictator,
Speaker 1: not an official of any kind, not somebody who wants power,
Speaker 1: but rather an old man who has been recruit to
Speaker 1: do a difficult job and who lives in a simple
Speaker 1: shack on a deserted planet. Here there's a dramatization of
Speaker 1: that moment, with the ruler played by Samuel Barnett, Trillion
Speaker 1: by Alison Cabanas, and me taking the role of Zafa
Speaker 1: in there.
Speaker 7: Yes, sam shack, Yes, but it's in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 7: You must have come to the wrong place. You can't
Speaker 7: rule the universe from a shack. Hello, I do you
Speaker 7: rule the universe?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 4: I tried not to.
Speaker 5: Are you wet?
Speaker 1: Wet? Doesn't it look as if we are wet?
Speaker 4: That's how it looks to me. But how you feel
Speaker 4: about it might be an altogether different. Better. If you
Speaker 4: feel warmth makes you dry, you'd better come in. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Listen, We've come to ask you some questions. All right,
Speaker 1: you can sing to my cat if you like.
Speaker 5: You like that, you better ask him.
Speaker 1: Does he talk?
Speaker 4: I have no memory of him talking, but I am
Speaker 4: very unreliable.
Speaker 1: Now you do rule the universe? Do you?
Speaker 5: How can I tell.
Speaker 7: How long have you been doing this?
Speaker 5: Ah?
Speaker 4: This is a question about the past, isn't it?
Speaker 7: Yes?
Speaker 4: How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction
Speaker 4: designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical
Speaker 4: sensations and my state of mind?
Speaker 7: Do you answer all questions like this?
Speaker 4: I say what it occurs for me to say when
Speaker 4: I think, I hear people say things more I cannot say.
Speaker 1: Good on you, great ruler. You tell it like it is.
Speaker 5: Listen to me.
Speaker 7: People come to you, do they in ships?
Speaker 4: I think so?
Speaker 7: And they ask you to take decisions for them about
Speaker 7: people's lives, about worlds, about economies, about wars, and everything
Speaker 7: going on out there in the universe.
Speaker 5: Out where, out there. How can you tell there's anything
Speaker 5: out there? The door's closed.
Speaker 1: You know there's a whole universe out there, man, and.
Speaker 7: You cannot dodd your responsibilities by saying they don't exist.
Speaker 4: You both seem very sure of your facts. I couldn't
Speaker 4: trust the thinking of people who take the universe if
Speaker 4: there is one, for granted.
Speaker 7: Don't you understand that what you decide in this shack
Speaker 7: of yours affects the lives and fates of millions of people.
Speaker 4: I don't know. I've never meature all these people you
Speaker 4: speak of, and neither I suspect have you?
Speaker 5: They only exist in words we hear. It is folly
Speaker 5: to say you know.
Speaker 4: What is happening to other people. Only they know if
Speaker 4: they exist. They have their own universes, of their own
Speaker 4: eyes and ears.
Speaker 7: Uh huh, I think I'm just popping outside for a moment.
Speaker 1: Wow, I'll come with you. This particular rule of the
Speaker 1: universe is clearly not motivated by power. Indeed, he seems
Speaker 1: to be motivated by nothing other than the pursuit of truth.
Speaker 1: But surely going and plucking logically minded strangers out of
Speaker 1: their communities and sequestering them in private on distant planets,
Speaker 1: whilst handing them huge responsibility. Surely that isn't a sensible
Speaker 1: or remotely practical approach to governance. I asked Professor Klass
Speaker 1: what he thought.
Speaker 6: There's a sort of aspect to this which, in addition
Speaker 6: to the naivety that is required to make good decisions,
Speaker 6: where you sort of don't take ideology for granted. I
Speaker 6: think that's part of what he's critiquing, right, is that
Speaker 6: this individual really clearly is not a zealot. They're not
Speaker 6: an ideological thinker. There's someone who thinks about the fundamentals
Speaker 6: of truth and so on, you know, queries the logic
Speaker 6: of various premises, rather than accepting them instantly.
Speaker 1: So the ruler of the universe represents a non partisan,
Speaker 1: clear thinker. I can see how we could use more
Speaker 1: those in our politics, more of him, and less power
Speaker 1: hungry lizards or less vainglorious ze Ford Biebel boxes. But
Speaker 1: how would we get these good people to join politics,
Speaker 1: particularly the grinding, difficult, toxic, polarized politics off the modern age.
Speaker 6: What's really bizarre about the way modern politics works is
Speaker 6: that we basically wait for people to volunteer rather than
Speaker 6: trying to select them. And what I mean by that
Speaker 6: is political parties spend small amount of money on recruitment.
Speaker 6: They basically say, Okay, we have an open seat. Who's
Speaker 6: going to run for office? And this is precisely what
Speaker 6: Adams is talking about, right. What happens in that system
Speaker 6: is that all of the power hungry people come out
Speaker 6: of the woodwork. Now, there's a lot of people in
Speaker 6: our societies who have proven that they are service driven leaders,
Speaker 6: and our political parties should be spending a lot of
Speaker 6: money identifying those people and convincing them to run, and
Speaker 6: they don't. They basically just wait for the people to
Speaker 6: throw their hat in the ring, and then they sort
Speaker 6: of say, who's the best candidate among this group.
Speaker 1: The fact that political candidates and modern democracies self select
Speaker 1: and volunteer themselves seem so self evident to me that
Speaker 1: I struggled to imagine any alternative. Professor Klass thankfully had
Speaker 1: no such struggle.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean it's really straightforward. I think it's something
Speaker 6: where you would have a let's say a congressional seat
Speaker 6: opens up. The first thing you would do as a
Speaker 6: political party is you would develop a committee that's trying
Speaker 6: to identify possible candidates. You would then ask for nominations
Speaker 6: from the public of people who they thought were those
Speaker 6: are the proven track record of really pro social public
Speaker 6: leadership in whatever field it was. And then the conversations
Speaker 6: would begin with those people to try to recruit them,
Speaker 6: and with the mentoring that can come with a political
Speaker 6: party apparatus of how to raise money, the guarantee that
Speaker 6: if they were to run, that the party would support
Speaker 6: them with campaign funds and so on. What I'm jesting
Speaker 6: is that there is a way in which a more
Speaker 6: rational political party would identify people through a nominations process,
Speaker 6: with a committee that then vetted a short list, then
Speaker 6: tried to persuade them using sort of big wigs. I mean,
Speaker 6: you can imagine Barack Obama getting dispatched to this congressional
Speaker 6: seat to say, please, we need you. You know, would
Speaker 6: you run person who has cured cancer, you know, whatever,
Speaker 6: this sort of aspect, and if you do that, along
Speaker 6: with the sort of financial apparatus that can support these
Speaker 6: people to ensure they don't have to raise money every
Speaker 6: day of the week, you can start to get people
Speaker 6: who are willing to go into politics for the right reasons.
Speaker 1: In other words, we would select a bunch of selfless, thoughtful,
Speaker 1: impartial experts. We would shield them from the dirty side
Speaker 1: of politics, and you sequested them somewhere, perhaps in a
Speaker 1: remote hut with a friendly cat, and we encourage them
Speaker 1: to think deeply about the decisions that need to be taken. Lovely,
Speaker 1: though this idea sounds, a world ruled by a collection
Speaker 1: of kindly disinterested eccentrics didn't strike me as particularly scalable
Speaker 1: or realistic, so I pushed Brian class for other potential
Speaker 1: solutions to the problem of the lizards.
Speaker 6: Yeah. You know, it's interesting because Adams hasn't, as far
Speaker 6: as I know, written about a concept called sortian, but
Speaker 6: I think he would be interested in it, and it's
Speaker 6: something where I think it should be used more often,
Speaker 6: especially at the local level. Sortician is basically random selection
Speaker 6: of people to make decisions the way that the ancient
Speaker 6: Athenians did this using this device called the claritarion, where
Speaker 6: they basically randomly put in They put in all the
Speaker 6: sort of tokens for every citizen, and they randomly selected
Speaker 6: a row, and those people were selected to join the
Speaker 6: citizen Assembly, as it were, to make decisions. And one
Speaker 6: of the things that I've advocated for is using that
Speaker 6: sort of selection process as oversight for leaders. So, you know,
Speaker 6: in the UK, for example, you had a system during
Speaker 6: the pandemic where a bunch of people in our office
Speaker 6: allocated effectively kickbacks. But you know, government contracts to their
Speaker 6: friends for really poor quality ppe, you know, during the pandemic,
Speaker 6: and all these billions of pounds were dispersed. Now, if
Speaker 6: you had an oversight body of randomly selected British citizens
Speaker 6: to vet some of these choices and to sort of
Speaker 6: give them the thumbs up or the thumbs down, I
Speaker 6: can't imagine that somebody would ever say, yes, well let's
Speaker 6: give it to the Tory, you know, member of the
Speaker 6: government's you know friend, that's the right thing to do,
Speaker 6: right You wuld just obviously be wrong if you had
Speaker 6: a second opinion that came from a random selection process.
Speaker 6: Increasingly this is being used in local decision making for
Speaker 6: less polarizing issues, and so, you know, I don't think
Speaker 6: that politicians should be replaced, but I think that there
Speaker 6: are clever ways of using random selection, which takes away
Speaker 6: exactly the problem that Adams is highlighting here, which is
Speaker 6: the self selection and the sort of mechanisms of campaigning
Speaker 6: and democracy. You know, jurys are select did randomly and
Speaker 6: we turn over some really consequential decisions to them. So
Speaker 6: for certain decision making, certain forms of decision making, it
Speaker 6: might be part of the mix that can help.
Speaker 1: What Professor class is describing as sortician has a more
Speaker 1: everyday name, citizen assemblies. These assemblies are both an ancient
Speaker 1: form of democracy, dating as he says, back to the Greeks,
Speaker 1: but also one of the fastest growing mechanisms in our
Speaker 1: modern democracies. Citizen assemblies are where randomly selected but representative
Speaker 1: group of citizens are brought together to deliberate and make
Speaker 1: decisions on major issues. They have been responsible for, amongst
Speaker 1: other things, passing abortion protections in Ireland, electoral reform in Canada,
Speaker 1: and climate change legislation in both France and the United Kingdom.
Speaker 1: What underlies the authority and effectiveness of citizen assemblies is
Speaker 1: that the decisions are not made top down by an
Speaker 1: authority who thinks they know what's best for the population,
Speaker 1: but from the bottom up by the people actually living
Speaker 1: in the community, or, as the ruler of the universe puts.
Speaker 4: It, it is folly to say you know what is
Speaker 4: happening to other people. Only they know if they exist,
Speaker 4: they have their own universes, of their own eyes and ears.
Speaker 1: One of the most interesting things about citizens assemblies is
Speaker 1: how they can be supercharged by technology. With the advent
Speaker 1: of the Internet and collaborative software tools, citizen assemblies can
Speaker 1: have not just dozens or hundreds of participants, but hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands, and can take place virtually and in real time.
Speaker 1: The country pushing this further than anywhere else is Taiwan,
Speaker 1: where the v Taiwan Process has revel duianized decision making.
Speaker 1: The person who spearheaded this breakthrough is Audrey Tang, who
Speaker 1: served as Taiwan's first Digital Minister, in fact the first
Speaker 1: digital minister of anywhere in the world, and is currently
Speaker 1: Taiwan's cyber Ambassador at Large. Audrey came to her unusual
Speaker 1: roles in unusual ways, not by winning an election, but
Speaker 1: by being part of a mass demonstration occupying Parliament. Here
Speaker 1: she is being interviewed on the Rest is Politics leading
Speaker 1: podcast by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell.
Speaker 8: The people who occupy the parliament opened up the conversation
Speaker 8: in a non violent way with half a million people
Speaker 8: on the street, and so people could every day see
Speaker 8: the rough consensus that was reached among the occupiers. So
Speaker 8: in many senses it was not a protest inasmuch as
Speaker 8: a demonstration that shows the Speaker of the Parliament that
Speaker 8: people do actually collease in through something like a rough
Speaker 8: consensus after three weeks as now violent occupy and speaker
Speaker 8: once simply said, at the end of occupy, yes, that
Speaker 8: is the direction where we're going. And so the trade
Speaker 8: deal was canceled and people embraced this idea of crowdsourcing.
Speaker 1: At the end of that year, we should pause to
Speaker 1: rarely understand what is happening here. A group of anti
Speaker 1: government protesters stormed the parliament. So far, this is a familiar,
Speaker 1: if depressing story of twenty first century democracy gone wrong.
Speaker 1: But in this case, rather than violently breaking down doors
Speaker 1: and clashing with police, the protesters sit down and open
Speaker 1: up their laptops and convene a half million of their
Speaker 1: fellow citizens into deliberative groups. Over the course of a
Speaker 1: few weeks, they thrash out an alternative setup proposals to
Speaker 1: the trade deal they were opposed to, and at the
Speaker 1: end of the time, the protester's version is adopted into law.
Speaker 1: The story gets even weirder. At the next election, Audrey
Speaker 1: and her fellow protesters find themselves elected into government and
Speaker 1: working as a team pivot Taiwan's democratic processes into full
Speaker 1: alignment with an open source, transparent, Internet enabled vision of government,
Speaker 1: one that incidentally coped with the COVID pandemic better than
Speaker 1: any other nation on Earth. Further, Taiwanese politics has gone
Speaker 1: from being as polarized and polarizing as anywhere else on
Speaker 1: Earth to being a largely consensus, data and solution driven politics,
Speaker 1: with a substantive proportion of the cabinet ministers and the
Speaker 1: country's Prime Minister and president all being independent, i e.
Speaker 1: Not Aligned with any political party. Somehow, starting with the
Speaker 1: ancient Greek idea of sortician and supercharging it with the
Speaker 1: power of the Internet, Audrey Tang and the people of
Speaker 1: the Sunflower Revolution managed to recruit themselves as a group
Speaker 1: of non politicians to run a government in an open source,
Speaker 1: first principles consensus driven kind of way. This harnessing of
Speaker 1: the power of the Internet to bring together the opinions
Speaker 1: of the crowd felt somewhat familiar. It felt like a
Speaker 1: very Adamsian concept, the idea that we could use computers
Speaker 1: to change the way we think about decision making, from
Speaker 1: top down to bottom up, from authoritarian to emergent. It's
Speaker 1: vintage Douglas, vintage, as it turns out, of the year
Speaker 1: two thousand.
Speaker 3: So what should we model in our computers. One thing
Speaker 3: it'd be good to get some kind of handle on
Speaker 3: is the world.
Speaker 1: So let's model that.
Speaker 5: It's a big job.
Speaker 3: But then there are a lot of us, and there
Speaker 3: are a lot of computers, many more than Thomas Watson
Speaker 3: ever imagined. You may remember that it was he who,
Speaker 3: as the head of IBM, commissioned a study to find
Speaker 3: out how many computers the world would actually need. The
Speaker 3: answer came back six, and Watson was determined that IBM
Speaker 3: would build them all. That was back in the old
Speaker 3: top down, big brother view of the world. What we
Speaker 3: failed to foresee was that the world would not be
Speaker 3: dominated by one or a few giant computers sitting at
Speaker 3: the top of the hierarchy, but rather it would be
Speaker 3: informed by millions and millions of tiny little brothers and
Speaker 3: sisters and cousins, all down at the bottom of the
Speaker 3: hierarchy where the information is. As a result, we might
Speaker 3: gradually not even lead a hierarchy.
Speaker 1: In a different talk to a group of students a
Speaker 1: little later the same year, Douglas applied this idea specifically
Speaker 1: to the question of politics.
Speaker 3: Anything that involves the government, like getting driving license, social
Speaker 3: security cardog happens at geological speeds, And after a while,
Speaker 3: I think people are going to start taking note of
Speaker 3: this and saying, sorry, exactly what function is that you're performing.
Speaker 3: I know that it costs us billions of dollars, and
Speaker 3: I know that it infests our television screens while we
Speaker 3: hear you discussing absolutely nothing with each other, and that
Speaker 3: this is meant to be terribly important. But I'm beginning
Speaker 3: to wonder if it is actually that important when we
Speaker 3: can actually micro manage our own lives much much more effectively.
Speaker 3: I mean, any political economists will tell you you actually
Speaker 3: have more effect as a member of a sort of
Speaker 3: economic political culture every time you walk down a supermarket
Speaker 3: island and say, well, I'm going to buy this and
Speaker 3: I'm not going to buy that, and all I think
Speaker 3: I'll have two of those then you do when you
Speaker 3: put a tick in a box every four years. That's
Speaker 3: why everybody is so desperately keen to get that information.
Speaker 3: They used to stand around with white coats and clipboards,
Speaker 3: and now they've got electronic point of sale when they're
Speaker 3: bringing that stuff up at the cash register. That's democracy
Speaker 3: and action, but we don't think of it in those
Speaker 3: terms yet, because it's funny how many people will bows
Speaker 3: one political cause and actually act differently when it comes
Speaker 3: to actual financial decisions. And one of the reasons why
Speaker 3: we tend to sort of think, we claim to think
Speaker 3: one way politically and then do something different is because
Speaker 3: you're never even really aware of the consequences in any
Speaker 3: political decision you make, because it'll be years before it
Speaker 3: has any consequence. And it's rather like living in a
Speaker 3: room which has got a thermostat in it, which is,
Speaker 3: as we know as a negative feedback circuit. The thermostat is
Speaker 3: set to react six months later. You know, you would
Speaker 3: really get no good sense of the consequences of anything.
Speaker 3: And I think we live in a sort of political
Speaker 3: culture where we never get the consequence, the actual consequences
Speaker 3: of what we decide. And I have a feeling that
Speaker 3: if we shorten the feedback it's shortened them, and shorten them,
Speaker 3: shorten them, make them more and more local, and more
Speaker 3: more and more sort of intimate to yourself. Then gradually
Speaker 3: we'll have the equivalent of a sort of fly by
Speaker 3: wire aircraft, that it's a run by each of us
Speaker 3: as our own tiny little sort of negative feedback loops.
Speaker 3: The way that society works, the way that culture works,
Speaker 3: the way that politics and economy works, is much more
Speaker 3: reflective of actually what people are doing and thinking in
Speaker 3: the decisions they're making day by day. People think that
Speaker 3: electronic democracy will mean instead of going out to a
Speaker 3: voting booth and putting across, you'll be doing it on
Speaker 3: your computer screen. That's much much more to do with
Speaker 3: daily micromanagement of stuff. Until now we've not been able
Speaker 3: to do, and we rely on vast hierarchies of controled
Speaker 3: when able to do for us.
Speaker 1: At this point we shouldn't really be surprised anymore. So
Speaker 1: there he is, twenty years before the Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan,
Speaker 1: effectively predicting it. I wrote to Audrey Tang asking her if,
Speaker 1: by any chance she was a Douglas Adams fan here's
Speaker 1: her email back to me. I've always held a very
Speaker 1: special place in my heart for the work of Douglas,
Speaker 1: and to see his ideas explored with such care is
Speaker 1: really wonderful. I'll continue being an avid admirer of Douglas's genius. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that Audrey Tang came up with a
Speaker 1: radical and radically better new way to do democracy because
Speaker 1: she is a Douglas Adams fan. I'm not saying she
Speaker 1: got the idea of how to reinvent her country from
Speaker 1: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But well, I'm not
Speaker 1: not saying that either. So three guesses as to which
Speaker 1: major democracy citizen assemblies aren't getting any traction in. You
Speaker 1: don't need three guesses the United States of America, because
Speaker 1: citizen assemblies are dependent on being able to find a
Speaker 1: group of randomly selected people who are willing to work
Speaker 1: together in good faith and to set aside partisan and
Speaker 1: ideological positions. And for the last few decades at least,
Speaker 1: American politics is all about partisan divisions and ideological positions.
Speaker 1: I have quoted in this chapter two of Douglas's most
Speaker 1: famous and viral lines about politics. There is a third
Speaker 1: in the same category written specifically about the figure of
Speaker 1: the president.
Speaker 4: The president in particular is very much a figurehead. He
Speaker 4: wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by
Speaker 4: the government, but the qualities he is required to display
Speaker 4: are not those of leadership but those of finally judged outrage.
Speaker 4: For this reason, the president is always a controversial choice,
Speaker 4: always uninfuriating, but fascinating character. His job is not to
Speaker 4: wield power, but to draw attention away from it. On
Speaker 4: those criteria, Zefod Biebelbrocks is one of the most successful
Speaker 4: presidents the Galaxy has ever had. He has already spent
Speaker 4: two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.
Speaker 1: Now I want to make very clear that I'm not
Speaker 1: claiming that Douglas predicted Donald Trump. It is almost too
Speaker 1: easy to compare President Trump to President Biebelbrox. Where I
Speaker 1: think the quotation does lead to an interesting conversation is
Speaker 1: if we ask if the real power isn't in the
Speaker 1: presidency but hidden behind it, what exactly is that hidden power,
Speaker 1: that invisible hand of which Douglas is speaking