These days, the commentariat is talking a lot about China and what China’s rising confidence means for the world—and for the democratic world in particular. In almost all these conversations, at some point someone will mention Francis Fukuyama and his 1992 book, The End of History. Published in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa and waves of democratization across Latin America, it was a triumphant cry of victory. Democracy had won. Democracy had answered, definitively, the ages-old question that had driven human history for millennia, namely: What ideas should govern society? That's the topic of this podcast conversation!
We're pretty sure that nobody’s got it all figured out. And if we can accept that the search for the best ideas to live by is unfinished, then maybe we should see the different models that govern China and America today, not only as a contest, but also as experiments—each of which generates important insights for the future. The China model demonstrates the power (and price) of unity; the liberal democratic model shows the power (and price) of diversity. The China model demonstrates the possibility of rapid, revolutionary change. The liberal democratic model shows that good policy is often slow policy. These are all good lessons.
Stepping back from both models, the most important lesson of the past twenty-five years is that we should keep up the search for good lessons, rather than engage in the conceit of claiming premature victory.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine from the recording.
Scott Chris, here we are in our maiden voyage of our podcast discussion of your maps. This is the weekly email newsletter you send out. I feel like metaphors are so definitive for how we think, right? It's not literally a map. You're not sending out something that looks like a cartographic. But it is a cartographic tool, right? You're trying to map out where things are going sociopolitically in light of technology and culture. So why did you choose the map metaphor for what you're doing?
Chris I mean, if I could draw better, maybe it would be a literal map. But drawing is not one of my skills, right? There are apps for that. Okay, well, maybe I will look into that then. If I can just sort of speak the words aloud and the AI turns it into a picture for me, that might be interesting. I think, you know, to some extent, the map metaphor is, you know, I've still got Age of Discovery on my brain, you know, kind of that first book, years I spent in In writing that and promoting it and all of that. And one of the most powerful stories that at least I found when I was sort of on stage or sitting with executives and talking about how do we make sense of the time we're in? How do we better make decisions and figure out what we need to change?
The most powerful story that I tell is the Christopher Columbus story. And what I find powerful about that, what I think people find powerful, is the unexpected twist in it. Columbus set sail in search of Asia, and he found America. That's what we remember him for. But we forget that he was looking for Asia. And when he found America, he was convinced that he had found Asia. And why was that? It's because Noah had three sons. And after the flood, they fathered the three races of humanity, Europe, Africa, and Asia. And I mean, that was the sort of the map of the world from the Bible. And that was the map that was in Columbus's head. And because he couldn't see past that map, Columbus wasn't able to grasp the significance of his own discovery. It took Amerigo Vespucci 10 years later to come and sort of tear up that mental map and say, OK, the reason that we can't make sense of this is that it isn't a place that was on that map. This is a mundus novus. This is a new world.
And as soon as that mental shift happened in the maps that Europeans had in their head and they got past their disappointment that this place wasn't Asia and could get excited about, oh, this is a whole new place that we know nothing about, then there was this sudden torrent of investment, of exploration that happened in what is now America.
Scott And so I think... And it opens up all sorts of other discoveries. I mean, there's also just that horizon breaking. There's all sorts of other discoveries in the period. Sometimes it's once one emotional or one map, one sort of map gets replaced with a more expansive one, you start to think expansively on an array of disciplines and realities, right?
Chris Yeah, and I think that, you know, when you sort of take this basic insight that we have mental maps as well, and they help us to see things, but they also delete the things that don't fit on the map. I think that it helps us to look at all sorts of things that are just, it helps us to think about living in a moment of rapid change. So much is happening in the world, so we would expect that our maps, which are meant to be like representations of the world, You know, become less and less valid the faster things change. And you actually see this kind of narrative being grasped, being groped at all over the place. I mean, take the biggest examples. You know, Amazon, you know, famously, Jeff Bezos, his sort of mantra is, every day at Amazon is day one. And the point there is, like, be careful about getting fixed in your habits, in your routines, in your way of thinking about this business. Because those, and this is now my word, like those maps then become an obstacle to rethinking the way things are.
Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things. All over the place, people are reaching for a kind of story that says we need to be agile, disruptive, all of this stuff. It's partly about saying let's avoid getting sort of crystallized in our thinking about things. For me, the language of maps is just simpler. And more intuitive way of expressing that same idea.
Scott I think about Jonathan Haidt's work on moral psychology. And he always says that morality, it binds and it blinds. Like something you need as a tribe, as human beings are evolving and you're trying to build communities, you need these sort of sense of values, you know, so it binds you together, but also blinds because it's sort of, and that's, I mean, I think what you're saying is something similar there, right? Like our maps bind us together. They allow us to have a shared Concept of reality and to go back and forth. But they also can be blinding when we all sort of agree on something. And sometimes those things are, this is like, right, like sort of Kuhn's, you know, the structure of scientific revolution, right? Like the paradigm shift things. And it's hard to shift paradigms, you know, because you have so much invested always in the old paradigm. It's just inevitable.
Chris That's right. That's right. And, you know, the only perfect map is the one that covers the whole surface of the planet, right? As soon as we make it smaller than that, we're making choices about what we simplify away. And, you know, I think exactly like Thomas Kuhn talking about the structure of scientific revolutions is really about, you know, the slow process of gathering more and more doubts about what we've chosen to simplify away. And do we need to sort of pick up Those pieces we've deleted and rearrange them into a new sort of valid understanding of what we're looking at. You know, it's kind of like, oh boy, now my mind is really roving. But think about the history of astronomy, right? Not to get back into history, but you know, people like Nicholas Copernicus, you know, with his whole It's a heliocentric model of the universe. It's the Sun, not the Earth. It's the center of the universe. And really what he was arguing was that the system of astronomy that we had that put the Earth at the center, and then Ptolemy had all these complicated celestial motions to explain how all the bodies got where they were at different times of the year, it worked.
But only if you ignored sort of the 5% of the time that it didn't really work, that the predictions about where all the bodies in the heavens were going to be weren't quite right. And really it was his frustration with the imperfection of the model. You know, those little bits of detail that we had chosen to delete that led him ultimately to overturn the whole model and say the only way To make the model more accurate is if we fundamentally rethink a couple of assumptions. And then it became a little more accurate. But there were still some little things that didn't quite fit. And then it took people like Galileo, it took people like Kepler to figure out that, oh, okay, we can't think about these things as circles. We have to think about them as ellipses. And then there were still a few little things that didn't fit.
And it took until we had Einstein to say, oh, we have to think about the gravitational forces between these bodies as they go through the heavens. And we'll figure all of that out. Now we think our map, we've continued to reduce the amount of information that we can't account for in our map. I don't know why I went on that tangent. No, that's interesting.
Scott It's interesting, right, because we're often slow to be irritated by the bits that don't fit. You kind of like rationalize, you just turn a blind eye to them. But then there's some people that are obsessed on the parts that don't fit, and they often become the revolutionaries. Well, on this podcast, what we're going to do is talk about each week. You do a little map every week about where we're going in the world, you know, through the lens of culture, technology, politics, socioeconomics. And this week is map 25, right? And map 25, it's been 25. It even says so. I know that because of my attention to cartographic detail. It says in the email, map number 25.
Chris So, you know, we can take this where you want it to go. I mean, why I felt compelled to sort of focus MAP25 on China is, you know, there's been this very simple story, a very simple narrative banging around. You know, I really think, you know, maybe since Trump was elected is when it really went into overdrive, that, you know, we're all messed up. But look at China. It is ordered. It is organized. It is, you know, resources and the national direction is aligned. And because of that alignment, it's achieving all sorts of economic progress, technological progress now. You know, the party has figured out Thank you very much. This deep doubt to the liberal democratic world, which is could we ever be as competent at governing ourselves? As they appear to be right now. And, you know, so in my narrative of maps, what I think is that we have
a very oversimplified, we have got like a dramatically oversimplified picture of China in our heads right now, almost like monochrome red, right? We're just wearing these rose colored glasses and all we see actually is what the party, the Communist Party wants us to see.
Scott You've lived in China for a number of years previously, and you did your PhD work on Chinese politics. This is going to be a really silly question, but I'm just going to ask it anyway. I think the average member of Western liberal society, I mean, people know that China, most people know anyway, that China is not a liberal democratic state, right? It wouldn't have the same sort of human rights kind of things or, you know, liberalism with a small l kind of, you know, certain inalienable rights of an individual, you know, these sorts of things. But how does that, but also it's... Getting pretty good at capitalist market economics at the same time. So how does that shape the average Chinese citizen? How different is life if you're an urban Chinese person that's not in one of the rural impoverished areas, but you're in a pretty developed area of China? How much freedom do you have on a daily basis relative to if you were in the UK or San Francisco or New York City or something?
Chris It's a really interesting question because in one sense, you could almost say there's not much difference in your daily life. I choose what I want to study. I have my job, my career. I earn my money. I buy my property. I go out with my friends. I make my life choices. I bear the consequences of those choices. You know, eventually I'm on welfare and at some point I die, right? And that story is probably... I'm surprised no one ever wrote a folk song like that.
Scott I made my choices and then I die.
Chris Yeah, so two things I can't do. I can't draw and I can't play an instrument. So that's why, again, if I could, I would express that in, you know, more eloquent musical form. Where things go in dramatically different directions is when somehow your life comes in conflict and your goals come in conflict with authority. In the US, in Canada, in the UK, we almost love it when we have a conflict with authority because we have a chance to sort of deploy our powers. I want due process, I'm going to sue you, I'm going to call your supervisor, I'm going to lodge a complaint, report, all this stuff. We've got so much resources to assert our indignation Our sense of injustice when the system doesn't take our interests, doesn't make them priority. In China, you have none of that. Everything that you have can be sacrificed on the altar of the priorities of the party state. And, you know, it begins at like at a constitutional level. If you look at the constitution of the country, there are all sorts of a very familiar sounding language there about a freedom to assemble and, you know, rights of...
It's all in there in the Constitution. But if you read it carefully, there's this kind of catch-all in the preamble that says, you know, none of this shall – I forget the exact language – but basically disturb the order of the party state. So they put kind of a catch up there and say, whatever we want, we can reinterpret this to decide that your actions, your behavior have gotten in the way, are disruptive, are contrary to the national interest. And that gives us the entire power of the state apparatus to do whatever we want with you. And that can be, you know, in high-minded ways when somebody like a famous artist like Ai Weiwei comes out and tries to create broad awareness of, you know, how many children were destroyed by shoddily constructed schoolhouses in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. And it also just comes down to people's personal lives.
This is our home, this is our village, and you're going to tear down the whole village to build a ski resort in time for the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. And my property is now worth a lot because it's going to be this ski resort, but I'm going to get inadequate compensation. I'm going to get relocated to somewhere else. Thank you very much.
Scott It's interesting. I referenced Jonathan Haidt's moral psychology stuff a couple minutes ago, but he says that basically moral taste bud receptors are care or compassion, right? He thinks these things are kind of semi-universal. Fairness. Right? In-group loyalty, kind of loyalty to the tribe, authority, respect for authority, and sanctity. These are kind of purity things, things that we think, you know, and sanctity is probably the most, the thing that feels most pre-modern to us. But he says that like, basically, liberals in a modern society, like in a society like the United States or the UK or Canada, Liberals tend to care about—everybody cares about compassion and fairness. They interpret it different ways, right? It says conservatives still have a place for—more of a place for loyalty, you know, authority and sanctity. And in some of his studies, he's like, well, basically, liberals will care more about suffering people in different—across the world than they will locally, whereas conservatives have this strong sense of care, but it tends to be very local. But it sounds like what you're saying is— The big taste bud in Chinese culture is authority and probably loyalty. Whereas I think a Western liberal is very suspicious of authority. You have all these constitutional things to try to kind of rein it in. Even if it doesn't work all that well, at least we have it as an ideal.
But that's just not an ideal, which, and then as we see, right, President, or President of the United States says here, President Xi, who's a very good friend. The greatest thing was when he was at Mar-a-Lago, and he was like, I mean, as I gave the order for Syria, I was eating, we were eating the best, most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you've ever seen. And President Xi was enjoying it very much. I'm like, I'm like, you have to give a Mar-a-Lago plug while you're talking about the bob-bobbing story. You have to say how Mar-a-Lago has the best job. President Xi knew it, too. But, you know, like, this sense in which President Xi has been named, you know, it basically could be president for life now. They took term limits out. But I read this article about that, and that was only one thing, right, in the context of lots of other changes, which were very efficiency-oriented, like changing the environmental regulations because they felt like their regulations were too toothless, and they're trying to actually get more efficient ecologically and structuring several of the sort of—adding some new ministries and agencies. It was like ministries and administrations or something. So it's interesting because a lot of the goals in these constitutional revisions would be things that people in any Western free market democracy would care about, right? And yet, it's through a more authoritarian lens. And like you're saying, we've seen this with Brexit and some of the rise of nationalism, kind of ugly kind of nationalism in Europe, in the United States.
All these things are making people cynical, right, about the Democratic Project. And people are like, well, China's, I mean, look how far they've come. That seems to be working. But, I mean, you're saying, right, it depends on the questions. I mean, you point out in your letter, it's like, look, you know, the party...
Chris In an average presidency, there are maybe like four or five good stories, right, that like the stand-up comedian can do their anecdote. You know, it's like George Bush, right, senior, not going to do it.
Scott Right, right, right, right.
Chris Like, you know, Danny Carvey made his whole career on like that one thing. Whereas for Donald Trump, you get four or five good things a week. I mean, no wonder that there is so much great comedy in political satire today because there's just endless new material, right? What are you going to do next?
Scott I mean, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, creates enough of that. I mean, Howard Stern, the idea was talking about, I need this woman. I would be president just to have this woman. So, hey, Howard Stern is the worst-looking president I've ever heard. No, he's not. He's the best-looking president we ever had. And if you ask that question again... You're out of the press room. He's like, I need a spokesperson like this.
Chris But, you know, and so this is actually a fantastic moment to get curious about other political systems, right? And not just China's because, you know, ultimately we learn so much, you know, by sort of stepping out of our own world view. We learn so much about what makes it ours. And I think you're right to kind of put a finger on authority as what you said, like kind of the, what was it like they've got a sweet tooth for it? And in the China worldview, that's exactly right. I would call it order. You know, one way to think about what China is as a kind of like historical project Is it really insane? Let's take the value of order and see what happens when that becomes the overriding priority, the overriding governing priority. And like some good stuff happens and then some real bad shit happens. And if we could, you know, and it's true that right now in sort of, you know, liberal democracy, there's a lot of disorder. So there's probably some interesting learning to do there. Well, you know, and if you're, if I'm a member, if we had like a member of the Communist Party here in this virtual room with us, you know, his first quibble would be, well, okay, wait a minute, we're a democracy too, by the way, check the constitution.
The only difference is that, you know, we had our election in 1949. It was called The Revolution. And since then, since the people chose us to be in power of this country, we've now been working on our mandate to deliver utopia. You guys sort of revisit that mandate every four or five years. We do it every hundred or so, but it's still a popular mandate that the people have given us to figure out, okay, so how do we do this shit? And we think that by our standards, by the way, we've done a pretty good job of it. Now, you know, the critique, because you say in the letter, I kind of like, because what worries me, and the other thing I was sort of responding to in this week's letter is, it is very popular, like in the Davos set right now, to compliment the leadership of Xi Jinping, of China, of the party, in contrast to everything that's happening here. Because it's very well run if, you know, for example, you're in business. But the other thing that's happening there is it's easy, actually, to run a society when you simplify away so many conflicting sources of value and conflict. When you just say, look, we're just going to focus for the next 10 years on top-line economic growth.
Any society can do that, right? The challenge is when it starts to conflict with environment, clean air, clean water, with people's rights not to be displaced. So you can put a factory here with people's property rights, with all sorts of things. And this is kind of the perverse consequence of this focus on order, which is like all sorts of things just isn't measured. And in the Chinese system, if it isn't measured, what gets measured gets done, and it gets done really well. And everything that doesn't get measured gets ignored at best and more likely gets sacrificed in order to get the thing that gets measured done. And so that, I think, is... That's the lesson, right, that China is demonstrating is sort of both the power and the price of running a government very, very efficiently, which is, you know, what liberal democracy was never really meant to be about, right? It's not about getting there fast. It's about getting there fairly. We're aiming at a far more complicated thing because we're always debating what is the thing we're aiming at.
Scott Yeah, right. And part of that is even also regularly having a conversation about what the aims are. And part of the reason maybe our system seems like it's had better days is it requires a sort of engaged citizenry and an educated citizenry to participate and make the system thrive. And if you have a sort of disengaged, uneducated citizenry, the system... It has a really deleterious effect on the system.
Chris This is something that I'm thinking about a lot right now, which is, is the problem that people are disengaged? Or is it something else? Because, you know, you look at, like, Trump, in Trump land, people are engaged, right? That was part of, that is part of his powers. He brings people off the benches, right? Like, now I want to be a part of this. I worry, and we talk about how politics today and social media and foreign interference and all this stuff is kind of breaking truth, right? And we live in sort of a post-truth political moment. But I'm actually worried that the real cancer spreading through liberal democracy is that we've got too much truth. And not enough doubt.
Scott Maybe we have engagement without education or without a certain kind of critical reflection. I mean, there's a kind of critical engagement and a kind of uncritical engagement.
Chris I completely agree. And I myself, I haven't figured that one out yet. It does come back to the China story where, you know, this is one of the big critiques among Chinese thinkers about sort of what we do in the liberal democratic world. We had this idea that the right of the individual to speak, to vote, but somehow we've taken it to this extreme where I have a right to be uninformed, and I have a right to my own truth. To a worldview that is obsessed with order, that values education very highly, The idea that you can have input, that you can have a voice, but not know anything, is really, really strange. It's really, really radical. And I guess the theory on our side of the table, sort of in our liberal democratic worldview, Okay, well, that's why it's not, you know, pure democracy, right? It's a liberal democracy. And the liberal side of it is we've got all these checks and balances. You know, there are a lot of things where it's not majority rule, but instead there are protections for minorities.
Scott Yeah, and the majority can say, you know, we want to outlaw rights for this group. And the Constitution says, no, there are certain things that can't be legislated.
Chris So, you know, and no one's more surprised about this than I am, but, you know... Donald Trump doesn't seem to remember his political science classes in first-year university, probably because he doesn't know.
Scott Or seventh grade civics.
Chris Do you guys still do civics? I mean, I think that's one of the problems, too. Who studies civics anymore? But right, I mean, for him, this is a democracy. And for him, you know, somewhere along the way, and he's maybe the clearest... This is a sort of manifestation of this is we've somehow gone from an idea of liberal democracy to an idea of tyranny of the majority. That's what he thinks that he has. Why is it that the Senate sometimes needs 60 votes? That makes no sense. It should be 51-49. That's because the idea that the majority shouldn't just run the table with whatever it wants to do. He doesn't get that. But the reason for it is that because we've decided to be so radical about who has a say, everyone gets a say, doesn't matter. There was no qualification other than age, right? And so I
guess to protect against the potential for bad ideas to rule, we have set some checks and balances, but then there, you know, really, I'm not so sure if it's democracy that's in crisis these days, or if it's sort of Liberalism.
Scott Yeah, I mean, and this is what's interesting, because there's so much, and I hope that all the listeners will read the newsletter, which we'll link to in the show notes, but one of the things that I think that I, that towards the conclusion you said, you talk about how chess, I like chess, I'm not great at it, but I do like it. There's this sort of basic theory of trade-off. Like, if I move here, you know, I move my coin here, I foreclosed on these possibilities and opened up these possibilities. So every move offers, you know, opens doors and closes them. And so you sort of think that rather than say which, you know, which is the winning system right now, because you sort of bring in the Fukuyama question, the end of history. Now, history's opened back up again. Liberal democracy is not the only viable system right now, although we might think it's the best system or the one we live in, but it has trade-offs. And so does China have some pretty big trade-offs. And so that you sort of encourage people to look at, to map-make In this sense, in terms of trade-offs, like list the trade-offs. What will you live with?
What possibilities do you want opened up? And what doors are you willing to close? So maybe some efficiency gets sacrificed for certain kinds of freedoms or vice versa, right? Is that kind of like your kind of takeaway in the letter?
Chris I think so. And, you know, so because the letter was focused on China, I mean, the point there We'll be right back. But from the stories people know, like the economic catastrophe, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, all the way through today, there are these giant social, environmental, often measured in human lives, trade-offs that are being made. Certainly, again, title of the map, China has not Thank you very much. And, you know, before we jump to that conclusion, we should also think about what is remarkable about that election in part is that it happened and it happened peacefully. Right. The whole idea is not that we're always going to pick the best leader, but that we're always going to have a peaceful transition of power. And, you know, if you think about the shift from Obama to Trump. That's about as radical a flipping of who's sort of running the show as people couldn't imagine it. And that's why nobody could imagine him winning. And yet in this country where, you know, sort of every third person has a gun, Not a single shot was fired over that transfer of power.
Even if the actual policy and philosophical shift isn't nearly what we've just had in the United States in the shift from Obama to Trump. So that is, in a way, democracy at work, and yet it is still a work in progress. And probably my last point on that would be, you know, we went through as a society this thing called the Cold War. And this Cold War competition between sort of democracy and communism, it really sort of narrowed down our creative thinking about our own system of government.
Scott It's bifurcated, right? Like the two things that are competing for viable world systems are this and this.
Chris Yeah, and we couldn't dare critique it because we had to defend it and demonstrate why it was better, right? And then we won the Cold War, right? So in a way that I think gave us a false sense of completion. We'd been trained to defend it, and then we had proved victorious, so it must be the best system. And while we should hold onto that, I think we need to recognize that it's time to just sort of reopen our thinking. About our own political system and to take, without being afraid of it, take inspiration from. Get curious about what is happening in China, what is happening in Africa, what is happening in Brazil. Because these are different, these are very different social experiments underway. And you know, we are trying to figure out the limits of what happens when you make freedom, kind of when your sweet tooth is freedom.
And whole other societies are looking at what happens when we put order first. Or where we put, you know, knowledge first or we put hierarchy first, right? These are valuable inspirations, points of inspirations, maybe for us to look at, well, what is the next step in the evolution of our political system going to be? And I think that's ultimately, you know, the question we need to be asking ourselves. You know, as we try to navigate so much about the political world today that seems unfamiliar.
Scott That is the raw material for many, many more maps to be written. Thanks for this maiden voyage, and we'll, you know, look forward to future episodes.
Chris It was lots of fun.