ON TYRANNY: Is our Democratic Republic on the Brink of Authoritarianism?

[Music] good morning welcome to the los angeles world affairs council and town hall i'm kim mcclary president and ceo and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to today's program please stay tuned to the end of today's program for a brief summary on our all of our upcoming programs and please consider becoming a member of the world affairs council town hall you can check out all the great benefits on our website at law act for those of you who would like to submit questions today to today's program there's a control panel on the right hand side of your screen where you can type in your questions jessica giganzik our vice president of events will be managing your questions during the q and a days program which would start in about 30 to 35 minutes it is now my great pleasure to welcome you to today's program on tyranny is our democratic republic on the brink of authoritarianism with professor timothy snyder who's a professor of history at yale university nora krug author illustrator associate professor at parsons school of design and our moderator daryl holter ceo of felix chevrolet and co-owner of chevalier's bookstore and a los angeles world affairs town hall board member the new graphic edition of on tyranny will be released this week it's available at chevalier's bookstore the oldest bookstore in l.a and a link will be provided to you on the chat with that daryl we're so thrilled with you moderating today's program nora professor snyder we have a terrific audience signed up for you today thank you all for your time and let me turn it over to you darryl well thanks so much kim and thanks to all the uh the the members of the group for this uh uh and and tim and nora you know getting together with you today is a real treat now this is a very timely and very exciting book and it was an exciting book when i first read it when it was in the little manifesto form uh in in 2017 so i was so excited about it that i kept buying more copies and giving it to people to read i found that other people were doing the same thing it was it's like a manifesto for our for our time uh and uh of course when i read it again in the in the new form with the the beautiful graphics and wonderful graphics that that have been added to it illustrations by nora i i could really see that it was really an eye-opener and i'd really like to start by asking this question about kind of where it came from i mean tim was it that you were you were you were sitting around and you you came up with a idea of using art uh where were you and did you searched out nora or nora was it you had read this and thought that it would be interesting to attach these these illustrations to it to give it to give it more meaning or perhaps the two of you were meeting having a glass of wine and talking about the decline of our democracy and and were thrust into this this great uh very compelling collaboration of politics and art uh no there's a correct answer to that and it's uh it's it's it's it's it's it's number it's number one but i mean here's how i would think about it daryl i i would say that it has to do in some sense with with nora trying to fig to figure out her life and its relationship to german history because we have we have a point of intersection but it's not so much about us as people it's more about us in what we're trying to do with our work so so noir wrote a wonderful beautiful book called um called hymot or or homeland which is her and her investigation of of her little part of germany and her family's part in its its history and so that's her life coming to a certain point a certain kind of artistic expression and i read that book and when i read that book i said this is the person you should illustrate on tyranny i didn't have any other list of candidates i the idea that it could be illustrated was in my mind but i didn't have the person but once i read the book i thought okay now i have the person and so i was intersecting with nora at a certain point in her life at a certain point in what she had written about and what she had written about uh was historical it was about germany but and it exposed history in a way which i found very sympathetic but it was also important to me that her sensibility was very different from my own and i thought and if i was there was going to be an illustrated edition of on tyranny i didn't want to just be like on tyranny with pictures i wanted it to be something new and different and interesting which it now is thanks to her yes i think so nora how about you this uh tim's described a little bit about your process but and we will ask more about it and more examples but in terms of the initial um collaboration yes i mean i was very excited obviously when timothy first introduced the idea and um as he just said it was a um you know i felt a kinship obviously because we're so focused on the subject you know similar subject matters and in that way it felt like a natural continuation for me uh from the previous project i had been working on and um i also was very very grateful and continue to be very grateful to timothy for his openness because he as he just mentioned um it it became sort of a dialogue uh you know for me as well he was very encouraging for me to come up with my own ideas while of course keeping his text at the center of the process but um encouraging me to re reinterpret it in my own way yeah and i think you've you've really succeeded and it it you know it's a great work in that in that respect of bringing this kind of connection between politics and art in a really creative and interesting interesting way you know you know tim when i when i first read on tyranny and uh four years ago when i first met you and we were able to chat a little bit when you were in los angeles um and after reading it again after four years i i was struck by this kind of brutal fact uh you know i spent as you know my earlier academic career studying a european history in the 20th century and a lot of things a lot of the lessons that you talked about i was somewhat familiar with them when i when i first read the book what was interesting is rereading the book in 2021 how i felt i no longer really needed to draw from those lessons from european history in the 20th century because i had five years of history in america to draw some of this to underscore some of the same uh a kind of of lessons and i think that's that was really an important thing that all the viewers might think about who have already read your book to take another look at it in light of uh what we've really seen tim you know you opened up with this sentence history doesn't repeat but it does instruct what more have we learned over the last five years well i mean thanks thanks for that thanks for that question so when i was writing on tyranny i was following the principle that i thought should apply to everybody which is that we're in an emergency we're in a crisis and everybody needs to bring what they have so if you're a lawyer you've got a certain set of tools you know if you're a historian you're another set of tools an artist another set of tools i was bringing what i had as a european historian i wrote that book very very quickly and it had to be on the basis of things that i thought i understood and thought i understood clearly enough to to re-encapsulate for americans very quickly you know on deadline basically in a few days which is which is what i did and the logic was let's take a situation which is confusing and chaotic and let's apply to it situations from other places and times that we recognize is important so we recognize that stalinism is important we recognize that nazism is important we recognize those references so let's take the wisdom from people who live through things like that and see if any of that wisdom helps us to clarify what's going on in america that was my idea i was never trying to say that we were separate from all of this i was trying to say here are some guide posts and maybe these guideposts can lead us back and my hope was daryl and i think this has happened in the course the past five years is that then what happened after 2016 would be more intelligible because we would have terms for it we'd have concepts for it we wouldn't keep getting surprised because if you're surprised over and over again in a negative way you start to feel helpless right so i do want people to be surprised i want people to feel like others have dealt with things like this here is some advice we can we can not only react we can we can get out ahead a little bit right we can realize that we are in history and so what i like about your question is like the recognition that we are in history because part of our problem in the 90s and the first decade of the 20th century 21st century was this idea the history is over like all the bad stuff is going to go away all the good stuff is going to come we don't have to think about values we don't have to remember the details of the past because there's only one possible outcome and the truth is like if you forget about history it's going to come back for you right which is what has happened right every like all the lessons in my book but not just in my book all the lessons of like the classics about tyranny they are just all back right now right in front of us like right in our windshield they're right there right in front of us um because we have chosen to ignore history right so i i appreciate what you're saying and i mean what one can take off the things that have happened in the last five years like there's been attempted coup d'etat by a sitting president you know all kinds of things which would have seemed unthinkable if you're only thinking about a narrow optimistic a historical version of the us but once we let history back in everything becomes thinkable again we were less surprised we're more ready to act and that was that was the idea of the book yes and american exceptionalism you know depending on ideas of checks and balances and i don't really see them in place anymore one of the really interesting things that you said it when you responded to this question i just want to follow up with you you said everyone has something to bring to the problem so everyone has some thing to contribute uh when and that's kind of what we want to do with this with this book is that everybody whether you're an attorney whether you're this whether you're that we all have something that we can do and i think that's a positive aspect which you talk about in when you get to some of the later lessons as well i think that's really important tim thank you for that um nora uh your art really illuminates many of these important lessons that tim offers uh and you know i wonder how do you actually do that i mean how do you decide which image to use to express the key points that tim tries to convey now some of these points that tim tries to convey aren't necessarily simplistic points he makes them see he breaks them down so we can understand them but they are a little bit complicated uh and sometimes they need to be we need to re-understand under we need to understand them again uh and here's here's here's one example and why don't you talk a little bit about thomas jefferson's quote which tim talks about and your images around it and maybe you can pick up some of the other concepts that tim talks about and show us the images that you use to express those those concepts yes for me of course the text is always at the center of the process of the work process but it's important to me as an illustrator that i don't um translate the text one-to-one into images because i think that would just make it flat so my goal was to create a second layer an additional layer that hopefully would be a poetic layer that would provide a different kind of emotional access to the the things that tim p writes about um and what was also important to me which is as you can see in this example um part of the entire book um is the combination of my own illustrations such as the the guy looking through the magnifying glass and into the mirror and then found objects and images and also images from archives that somehow relay relate to the text from different periods of time and also different cultural contexts so by combining these different materials i wanted to underline that tyranny is timeless and universal and also what timothy just mentioned which is that we don't exist in a historic vacuum we are made up of the past and we have to recognize that the past is always present and i think illustration has an important role to play in that because it can show us in a very visceral and direct way that um things have happened in the past and that we need to remember them and learn from them and so for for instance for this for this quote about eternal vigilance vigilance being the price of liberty i chose an old photograph um that was taken in louisiana and it shows two escaped former slaves and um i i chose to use this as an example and i i hand colored this historic photograph in order to bring it into the present so that we see a clear connection between the history of slavery and present-day racism so that was you know just one idea on on this spread um i don't know if we should look at some others um well let me let me comment a little bit on that and then we can look at a couple more what what nora said i thought was really uh important that she is adding a second layer a poetic layer uh to to provide an emotional aspect uh to the to these writings and when you look at this quote from thomas jefferson and what he's talking about you know he's he's talking not just about an external enemy he's talking about an internal uh an internal problem and even this whole this whole issue of terrorism the way it's been just defined in our country for all these years has been defined as the only kind of terrorism was external terrorism there was no such thing as internal there was no such really with the with the uh exception of a few groups you know no one was really looking at what internal terrorists domestic terrorists were really doing and we saw it in january january 6th yeah exactly i mean even today when we use the term terrorism we often think of foreign terrorism or something that we can't quite understand that's not home grown necessarily and that's how i try to depict it by showing the man in the second image looking into the mirror and looking at himself with his face and taking on an aggressive look i mean i think another way to to look at this uh tim menorah is that you know the first time i read on tyranny in 2017 i was really jarred by the whole language that was being used in it and and and the fact that it was not a big long detailed piece but it was it was it was small it was it was a manifesto it was a manifesto a manifesto is something that you can carry in your pocket and give to people and read relatively quickly i think that's the way i would define a manifesto and it this crystallized some of my fears it underscored concerns i had it kind of deep deepened my my pessimism but it also made me want to share tim's writings with others and and i found nora your images are disturbing many of them as well i mean you've got an example of it right in front of us uh how how these images can really jar our consciousness and force us to think more deeply about what we're really doing and about what we're going to do and what we should be doing and and nora that's done by design how did you do that where do you where do you find these images how do you put all this together as an artist uh well i mean it's it's both an intuitive and a controlled process i think it always has to be a combination of both so i look at you know i read timothy's text i basically illustrated it chronologically from the first chapter to the last because i wanted to to move through the book with a reader and i wanted to understand how they would look at the images and progression and so i read each chapter one after another again after i'd read the whole book before um and thought about ideas visual ideas um and again you know thought about places to look for found materials that could underline the historic i mean i i resorted to or not resorted the wrong word i used historic photographs when i one when i thought it was more important to convey a specific moment in history rather than redrawing it because i think those images can also be really jarring when you see the exact moment in time when something happened that we shouldn't forget i feel like we owe it to the people depicted in these photographs to look and to witness that moment that they were suffering through that's why i chose to include historic photographs so with every chapter i thought about you know is there something in there that deserves to be illustrated through a historic photograph or what's better you know what's better in the form of an illustration where you can convey something on a more poetic and less factual level nora why don't you show us some more examples of of these lessons as you've illustrated them in your art and and talk a little bit about what those lessons were and the the art art that you've used to convey that the meaning of those uh of those lessons so this this spread is from the chapter believe in truth and it talks about i mean i don't really i feel a little you know nervous trying to summarize what timothy was thinking so i'm just going to say it in a few word words it's obviously about the importance of believing believing in truth uh about um doubting things that are just being said online about uh it's as much as it is about truth truth it's also about lies it talks about donald trump's um daily regimen of lying i think on average he uh he lied 27 times a day he said to correct that i mean it got more it's got to be more than that by the end yeah okay um so i um on the left page i used this found um postcard they were referred to tall tale postcards they were from 1910 1920 and there were postcards that were used um that were sold commercially and that showed some form of exaggeration and i wanted to convey this idea that we've always enjoyed you know witnessing lies or witnessing exaggeration and boastful behavior and that that's something that we should think about more critically that you know it's not it's not a joke to listen to somebody lying to us we have to recognize this as something dangerous um maybe we can go to the next image um and this this uh particular paragraph um talked about um conspiracy theories and our tendency to believe uh in fictional counter worlds uh and also the idea that um if we describe a person or political figure such as hillary clinton in this case in a in a negative light that if we repeat this over and over again if we repeat this lie or hear it repeat it over and over again in our heads this person transformed so i tried to capture this idea of a transformation from a normal human being into a monster through this fashion of six images yes and that was that was really powerful and tim talked about this in a two but we we saw it too i mean we saw with with trump on tv we talked about you know uh lock her up lock her up uh you know we saw it you know time and time again at these events and these rallies and you can see the way that this this character on the on the right hand page here the way this character as she begins to incorporate these lies as truth uh how she begins to evolve and change into something totally different than what she was and when when you look at the polling right now that people believe that the the election was was rigged or was unfair they believed that trump won i mean it's astounding uh and i mean it totally validates this idea of uh this shamanistic incantation incantations that that tim talked about norah why don't you give us another uh example um i believe this is also from the same chapter and it talks about uh propaganda on the right hand side and um uh what was important to me in general for the for the book was that i in that i show the traces of how the images were made in the book um that i i used a lot of collage style images i on some threads i actually tore the paper i wanted the reader to become process a part of the process of destruction and reconstruction to me the whole idea of illustrating this book was not only the idea of creating something but also tearing something down of allowing the reader to question um you know fixed notions that we have of terms such as history or tyranny or uh also the images that we associate with war and history are are very set to a certain degree so i saw part of my role in deconstructing these notions and tearing them down and then reconstructing them and i wanted to do that in a very visceral way showing the traces of of my process so that the reader almost could feel that they were also involved in this process um it was also you know meant as a as a call for action as a way of saying well you are you know we are all part of this uh deconstruction of democracy if we're not paying attention to what's what's happening and what we're doing and to the decisions that we make every day in our private lives that have consequences for the lives of others and so on the left-hand side um the last paragraph is actually printed uh um upside down on purpose so that the reader is forced to turn around the book and when they do the face transforms from you know a more harmless looking university professor into a um a nazi figure basically and so by turning the book around the reader again is part of this process of of change of negative change and deconstruction and um so it was important for me to integrate this physicality into the book as an object yeah what an interesting way to do it nora and what a great example of how art can contribute to a political understanding or deepen our political understanding you know tim in writing what he wrote made made the point but but now you can turn the the book upside down and really see it in a in an illustrated in a graphic way it's quite powerful do you want to show us one more before we move on to the quest did they have another one norah yeah maybe this one um another thing that was important to me was this idea of witnessing which uh you know timothy i think timothy's book is a call also to witness you know to look back at the past but also to witness what's happening at the moment to recognize patterns uh and to to stop them uh as as you know as early as possible and so this i i try to convey this idea of witnessing by uh facing by showing figures that face the reader um and i've done that throughout the book i've done that with the photograph we just looked at of the escaped former slaves as well and to me this is a way of saying uh you know look at me um you know what do something or it's it's underlying this this idea that of the book being a call for action and so on the left-hand side there is historic photograph of two uh german men in uniform or um austrian men in uniform who um applied a sign to jewish crop windows um during you know the time of the nazi regime basically discouraging people from buying uh products at jewish shops and this man is looking straight at the reader as if he's asking us you know would you would you join me in doing this would you join me in boycotting these people's shops and the woman on the right is a jewish woman because the text on that page talks about a jewish life disappearing in austria at the time and the woman also looks at the reader as if to ask you know will you will you help me from you know not disappearing and so you're confronted with these two perspectives and you have to [Music] you have to commit to hopefully the one on the right yeah i think it's really powerful and you know one of the ones that maybe not being on that's on the screen but one of the lessons in and number nine about be kind to our language is something i just wanted to bring up uh uh when when when tim wrote it and i i don't think it's in the illustrations that we can show but it's avoid pronouncing phrases that everyone else does think your own way of speaking even if only convey the thing you think everyone is saying make an effort to separate yourself from the internet and read books now that's the one for all the books the booksellers and the people that need to read books and i had to put that one in um i wanted to ask both of you a question about the marketing of of this this new volume it's this exciting new volume you know tim's pocket-sized manifesto as i mentioned was was really convenient for all of us to carry around and take yours is yours is larger uh and we can't put it maybe into our pocket but do you think that this allows the tim's message uh other lessons to reach a broader demographic audience do you want to answer that i mean so let's hope so i mean so look when i wrote on tyranny it was meant as you say to be accessible also in the physical sense right i mean it was the the the it was produced very quickly and very simply and the price especially at the beginning was very very low and that was deliberate because there was an idea i mean use the word marketing but there are forces other than that at play here you know from me and not only from me i mean people who are not just me and nora who are involved in this book are thinking about it in terms of you know it's it's transformative purpose and not just you know in terms of the in terms of the cash nexus but it was meant to be as you say something you can carry around and over and over again i get the confessions from people who say i carry a copy in my purse or i carry two copies in my purse so i can give one out and that's wonderful you know that's wonderful but this as you say is something different i mean this for one thing takes longer to read it's it's it's not as though the illustrations you know mean that you can skip through it or make it an easier book the illustrations add not just one layer i mean nor spoke of that in a layer but the illustrations add several layers and they mean that some of the words come through in a way which may take some some time to think about right so that like the very first illustration that you showed um i don't know claire if you have like the the ability to make that pop back up again but the very first one with the formerly enslaved people and the quotation that runs from one page to the other page that's one of the rare references i make in the book to american history and then what nora has done with that is that she'd made it she's made it much more important in the in the graphic edition than it was in the illustrated one because if you're an american reading that and you follow this little trail you realize oh these words are pronounced maybe jefferson said them who knows but they were pronounced for sure by this abolitionist wendell phillips right and so then you follow that little orange dot and then you're if you're you're looking at this picture of these enslaved people and you're thinking you know aha as you as you said before daryl um the problem of eternal vigilance isn't the problem of looking outwards it's the problem of looking inwards and that's a lesson i mean that's a little poi for me that was an aside originally right but now it's not in the side anymore i mean i would venture to say that with you know with with the orange trail and with the photograph a thoughtful american is going to pause on that point longer than he or she would have would have in the in the initial edition so we're going after something else it is meant to be more accessible i certainly was thinking about younger readers but accessible doesn't necessarily mean easier right accessible can also mean that the book gets access to your mind in different ways across different channels and i think the bro it certainly does that when i when i when i read it i mean i wrote the book right but when i when i read it i don't feel like oh this is something which is familiar to me i feel like my own words are now coming coming at me um from all these different angles and feels differently like the internal my internal reaction to it is very very different so yeah it's meant to be more accessible yeah it's meant to get to young people but also there's this exciting part of you know two different sensibilities about presentation coming together and creating something that neither of us could have created and i hope a lot of people will like that you know i hope that will work right but part of it is also the adventure of it right which is not a word that marketing people like like you don't talk to marketing people about adventures you're having but this is an adventure right like my writing the book was an adventure nor illustrating it was also an adventure from her point of view and now we have this thing together which is unpredictable and i think very beautiful and i hope it's going to reach lots of people but honestly like if i thought too hard about reaching lots of people i would never have been able to do what i did in the first place i think the same is kind of true of this as well i think it will but i think partly it will because it's unexpected and unusual and not exactly what people think it's going to be when they open it up right and just to follow up a little bit on both of your comments with respect to art and politics and and this this emotional aspect that one can derive by studying these images which it's kind of hard to do just just in the in the printed word but that particular thing when you talk about looking inwards you're also talking about not just looking at domestic terrorism but actually what individuals think about themselves i mean how how are individual people fragmented as we are out there you know we're busy with this that that and the other thing but what are we going to do about this problem and what actually are we going to do we we have to think about this is our problem this isn't somebody else's problem this is our problem what are we going to do about it and i think some of the some of the artistic images allow us to or force us and perhaps compel us to think about these things more more clearly than we would uh maybe the first time around that's kind of the way i look at it at least and um can i say something about that because i mean i think that's nice i mean in in on tyranny i'm citing the words of people who live through nazism or stalinism or late communism i'm studying the words and it's important that they're people because they're people who had experiences but you think of people differently when they're when they're pictured so nora doesn't illustrate most of the people that i write about but some of them she does and one of them for me very tellingly um is is a woman called teresa who was um who who was you know what we would call a rescuer during the holocaust and when i cite her words and her actions i'm doing one thing but nora at that point in the book does something that she doesn't do that often which is she stops and she actually tells a story like frame by frame chronologically frame by frame by frame by frame and when we watch this young woman teresa do what she does frame by frame illustration by illustration that is different than just knowing that she did it right like my my lesson for the lesson that she is she's in is stand out and the point about her is that when other people drifted away from their former friends she stayed close to her friends she behaved as she herself said normally in the sense that she didn't change when everybody else changed saying that is one thing but watching it is another thing and for me there's an illustrator like right in the middle of it she's going to the ghetto and she's bringing food and in nora's illustration she's carrying a basket and for me like that basket was the whole thing like just from like the basket makes it real if you're going to help someone you have to plan ahead you have to plan ahead think about what you're carrying you're carrying something it's a basket like that basket made the whole story much realer for me um and and so that's just a little tiny example of how illustrations work to make people not just sources of words but to make to so you can follow what they did with their bodies and the risks that they took and like the plans they had to make you know not everything is just about impulses and feelings but it's about trying to remain yourself and then doing things that are consistent with remaining yourself and that involves some planning and some details right and so that's that's an example where norah's illustrations really told for me yeah that's really a powerful example and this in fact is the image if you can see it there she is with the basket and uh you know it brings it all back to us you know this isn't somebody else's problem we need to try to figure it out you know i've got more questions i'm really going to withhold them for right now i think we could go on for a long time but i know there are a lot of people that are watching this event and i know they i'm sure there are a lot of questions so i'm going to turn it back over to something daryl though about that image did you know oh please yes sorry just just uh as a conclusion yeah i uh i think it's all it's all about empathy i think that when we see images we are able to empathize and little uh you know objects like a basket can make us feel what it what it was like um and i think that's also the role of an illustrator i think is to empathize and to convey that empathy to the to the viewer to the reader and um that was that was an important uh goal for me in the book and thank you for adding that addition to it nora because again this this whole discussion has been very very interesting and enlightening to me this this very intense collaboration of politics and art and how it can be put together in creative new ways i'll turn it back over to to jessica to handle questions i'm sure there are a lot of them thanks sir yes we have a lot of questions thank you so much daryl before we launch into the q a session i would just like to thank our viewers and our audience and our members for your continued support of the world affairs council and town hall as you know we are not able to do in-person programs right now so we do really need your support to continue events like this either by becoming a member or making a donation you can visit our website at lawacth.org and become a member or donate there thank you so much all right uh professor snyder it's great to have you back at the council and nora thank you so much for joining us today and for those incredible graphics that you have shared our first question nora has beautifully characterized the past history of fascism what does she see happening to societies in the future oh god i think that's really um more a question for timothy um sorry can you repeat the question please sure so they really liked your images uh how you characterized fascism in the book and they're wondering what you see in from for society's five years in the future yeah i mean it's it's an important question it's one that we all have to ask ourselves because obviously we have to plan for it now we have to uh you know engage now to prevent what happened from happening again including in the united states i find it very difficult to predict because i'm not you know historian but i i see a variety of good and bad scenarios happening and i i think yeah i don't know if timothy wants to enlighten us i just want to well i just want to say that like the question itself reveals the success of norah's illustrations because suddenly we're thinking of events in the past as being part of our present like they've suddenly become real to us like what hurt one of the things that illustrations do not just in this book but they put the past into the present tense so that you're suddenly identifying with you know having some kind of relationship with the people that you're reading about and once the past is in the present tense then naturally you start thinking about the future and it's nice that nora says that like historians can predict the future you know i try to make very few predictions because i've got kind of a winning streak going um but but the main thing that i would say here is about art like daryl was going to ask a question he didn't get to it because noah and i were so you know we talked a lot but he was going to ask a question about what lesson i would have added and i i do have a lesson about um being kind to the language and i have a lesson about taking care of the face of the world which sort of which are both in their different ways about art but without saying what the future is going to be what i would say is that we need art so that we can imagine the future for better or for worse because without sources of creativity it's very hard to be creative and if we can't think about the future as containing like both really negative and really positive possibilities then we tend to get stuck we tend to spin our wheels in the present and as we spin our wheels in the present people who are smarter than us or who have more resources than us are are going to lock us into something which is bad so that for me is like that's one of the reasons why i'm so happy about this collaboration is that i i sincerely believe we're not going to make it into a better future without art okay and i'm just saying some one one thing just to follow up on this is this what tim's talks about putting the past into the present tense is a powerful idea and an important one professor snyder how do you see technology and social media companies in particular uh contributing to the tyranny in our world for example censorship without recourse having bank account shutdown to eliminate access to commerce internet providers deleting websites so i guess let me start even bigger on that one there's a basic problem of centralization so i mean before we even get to like who gets to have access to what um which is not personally my primary concern i i would just i would point to the problem of centralization that whatever you think about facebook's decision here or twitter's decision there there's no way that these entities should have this much power that just simply should not have happened this kind of monopoly relationship should not have been allowed to arise the more so since the united states has laws on the books the german act and the anti-trust act which would which should if you just read them they should prohibit exactly the kind of situation which has arisen but from from my point of view i have to say i'm much less concerned about like this billionaire being shut down or that billionaire being shut down because those billionaires are going to find other ways i don't really care honestly that does not rise very high on the list of like the things i'm worried about with it what i worry more about is the general way that these companies shape the way humans relate because the the net effect is we spend less time communicating with each other in person we spend more time interacting without seeing each other which makes us treat us work to treat one another worse the net effect is that we are constantly being fed stuff following behavioristic algorithms which draws us towards our worst selves which makes us more which bestializes us basically for lack of a better word so that um so that we and so our politics become more polarized because we're being taught constantly that everything is about what makes us feel good or what makes us afraid and life kind of gets you know that's their profit model they keep our eyes on the screen that way and that's terrible for politics and it makes democracy almost impossible because democracy has to be about you know floating floating agreements about different sets of policy issues it has to be about citizens recognizing common interests with some citizens sometimes and other citizens other times it can't be about us and them us and them is authoritarianism us is tyranny and social media drives us towards towards us and this is a good follow-up question to that how have people being locked in their homes during covid limited our diversity of thought and made us too reliant on media rather than lived experience and interaction feedback from those around us um yeah i mean that uh the the i mean if there's anything good that we can draw from this we can we realize that being at home all the time staring at a screen the whole time is not good right we had we had i remember the beginning of all this i was i was hanging out with some people from silicon valley who were like not to be too mean but they were kind of excited about the pandemic because they thought like this is going to prove how like digital education is terrific and in the future all we're going to want to do is and let's face it like that didn't work like nobody learned anything no i mean as a first approximation nobody learned anything kids lost a year or more of their education and in addition to what we didn't learn we got worse at dealing with one another at human beings so like that's a i mean that's a lesson that i think we should remember because the propaganda about how great all this stuff is is gonna come back before before we know it and yeah i mean when i you know when i think of so i was in the hospital during the beginning of the pandemic and when i came out the first thing i did i mean the first actual physical thing i did was i put on a suit and i put on a mask and i went to a black lives matter protest and like i was sure i was doing the right thing but it was also just great to be with a bunch of strangers and have strangers and people that i kind of knew or didn't you know and and to be out being myself and expressing myself in the three-dimensional world and like just the taste of that was i mean the the the occasion was a very sad one but the taste with other people was nevertheless very sweet like i knew that i i'm not a particularly extroverted person but i knew that i needed that and i think we all miss that and like the saddest thing is for the hardest thing like i think of this as a parent as an educator now like it's very hard to get young people to become comfortable with that and we just we've just had a couple of years which are going to make it all the harder you know if i can just comment a little bit on that question you know we those of us who are old enough to remember the vietnam war remember when we would watch tv and there were like you know three basically three channels and all those channels were their news was governed by a fairness doctrine policy and that was that you weren't you know you weren't supposed to just tell things that were total lies you weren't supposed to so therefore you would have different opinions for example about the vietnam war walter cronkite etc but you also had an element of fairness now that was what deregulation uh that was taken away for all the cable news networks they don't have to do that i mean this is another element it actually could be it was a policy decision it could be altered through policy this next question what types of what types of modern tyrannical behavior do you see on the right and the left in business in academia um is that is that for me i guess i mean so so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna take aim at the false parallel there like so the idea that like academia is out there in the forefront of tyranny you know i'm not i'm not gonna go with that also in in business i mean business is a big category for me the main problem in the us is not business i mean i i like markets i like businesses i like small businesses i like medium-sized businesses the main tyrannical factor in commercial life is monopoly i mean and and the main the main political one of the main political problems in u.s life is that the more money you have the more influence you have and that means that a few companies have way just way more influence and they ought to have it means one way that we're not really a democracy is that there are a few institutions with with you know basically unlimited funds to spend on on on on on influence and that just shouldn't be like that right and that's not a matter of the right or the left it's like a structural issue you know from plato like plenty of people who are not bleeding heart liberals from plato all the way to friedrich hayek all knew that terrific inequalities of wealth or what we call monopoly is going to be a problem for democracy so i'm not going to call that the right i'm just going to say that's a structural problem with the us as far as campuses i mean like i guess like i live with students all the time like this is what i do you know i would venture to say that i have more experience with students at elite universities than anybody who comments on them because it's my line of work right like if i were a butcher i would feel the same way about that right i would feel i would find it weird that suddenly everybody in the public sphere is talking about what it's like to be a butcher i find it weird that everybody in the public sphere is suddenly talking about what it's like to be a professor like i have a pretty good idea of what it's like and the basic truth about it is that the four years that students get to spend in universities are the freest years of their life in america more or less free of their parents and they're more or less free of their jobs which are going to prevent them from saying things that they don't that they might want to say that's the basic truth i mean university people are more free than they're going to be elsewhere students say crazy things sometimes right they do but isn't the important thing that there's some place where they can do that where they can experiment whether or not instantly where the whip is not instantly cracked by their parents or by public opinion or by the internet or by some peer group or by their boss the campus is the one place where the whip in america where the whip is not instantly cracked and then the campus is the one place where kids are going to learn unpredictable things from people they've never heard of right so i agree like there are some there's some wackiness at yale you know there's some wackiness at other campus campuses sometimes students are wrong of course you know like other people are but if you want to get rid of amer freedom in america what you should do is organize a campaign against the campuses and and like spout nonsense about theirs and free speech on campus for me that's totally orwellian um there is more free speech on campus than there is in any other part of american life which i'm happy to demonstrate right i mean here i am i've written these books which are incredibly critical about pretty much everything in american political life i can say whatever i want to say and no one's going to fire me tell me that that's tell me how true that is in other parts of american life tell me how the people on fox news can criticize the murdoch family or whatever they can right so if you want to get rid of free speech in america target the campuses and if you want to do it in orwellian way talk about how there's no free speech on campus and that's what's going on i mean there's a campaign against the place the one place where there really is free speech there's a campaign against us so let's let's think about what that means yeah i think one of the most important uh parts of education in general is to to learn uh you know to criticize or to uh you know to learn critical thinking and also to be able to redefine and rethink who we should be or could be as a society i mean the idea that we we can redefine that we can reinvent that and i agree that i think those are one of the few places where that's possible at all in our society um professor snyder you mentioned earlier the sherman act and anti-trust laws what other aspects of our current government should we be trying to fight for more to prevent tyranny individual rights state strikes aspects of the constitution well i think as i mean again returning this question of like what the future should be like and what art can do we as citizens in the united states need to have a much more expansive idea of what freedom is because one of the things which is happening to us slightly under the radar is that the value of freedom has been subordinated to a very legalistic understanding of the constitution so our rights are being whittled away especially our right to vote our right to have representatives are being whittled away by people who find like this turned a phrase in this law this turn of race in this law and who are writing laws um to restrict the franchise and to make americans less free and that is the normal scenario in the 21st century that's what happened in hungary it's what happened in in russia like you don't have to break any laws we did have an attempted coup in this country but you don't you know and maybe there'll be another one but you don't have to have that you can just write the laws in such a way that they're uninformed by values and so americans have to have a much bigger more expansive notion of freedom than we have i think what's one of our problems is we use the word a lot but we're not really sure what we mean by it right and one basic thing that we should mean by it is it for example is that everybody should have the right to vote no so i'm just i realized the question was about government but i mean the point of the whole point of view of the book is that you're kind of going to get the government that you deserve and if you don't have the concepts like the courageous concepts the ideas of the future then the government that you get is going to be a tyrannical one but like if i were going to name one thing that you know very specifically the biden administration should do i think the biden administration should be worried about factuality i think that we you know we need to have some kind of manhattan project okay that's not the best technology but we have to have some kind of like space launch you know apollo type program to restore local news to restore local factuality because american debates let's face it american debates right now are kind of crazy right why like why when i go to ohio do i have to listen to talk radio about what happens in like ivy league universities who cares what matters you know when i'm when i'm going back to ohio which is where i'm from the local news should be about stuff in ohio it should be about like the water pollution or the school board it should be about the stuff that's happening in your life and most most of america is now a news desert like most of america has no local reporting most americans have no way of finding out whether their local politicians are corrupt they have no way of finding out who's making donations to who you know they have no way of finding out about pollution not there's nothing right and when we don't have that not only is our own life going to be worse because the local life actually happens locally it means that we're going to become we're going to care about national stuff which maybe isn't that important or international stuff or will be drawn to conspiracies or fictions or whatever it might be that's what's happened you know that goes back to the question about social media and monopoly social media and its monopoly have crowded out the way that for the previous hundred years americans found out what was going on in their lives so if i were the biden administration like that's the moonshot that i would be aiming for is giving americans you know not about it's not about politics it's about stuff which is pre-political giving americans basic knowledge about what's happening in their own lives let them have that knowledge and then let them think about more abstract kinds of politics thank you um do you see the vactine vaccine mandates as an example of tyranny as some people do do you think it could slip into that based on what we've seen with police responding aggressively to some people choosing to not wear masks or be vaccinated so i feel like this is a series of american questions directed to me which is slightly unfair to to nora i mean so let's talk about what freedom actually is then because like is freedom my ability to punch you in the face i mean generally the view is that it's not right so do i have the freedom let me let's say i have a terrible infectious disease uh do i have the freedom to breathe that into your lungs i would say by the same principle i probably don't right i think one of our problems in the u.s is that we get to thinking that freedom is just about what i feel like you know and then like if i can't do what i feel like i'm frustrated and that's tyranny but if that's our only notion of freedom we end up getting like we end up with a really narrow area of stuff we care about and we stop caring about things which are which are much more important to freedom like can i be healthy can my children get a good education like all these things that have to do with the future get somehow just get removed and i'm obsessing about whether i have to wear a mask or not um and and honestly like i'm perplexed by the whole mask thing because there's like the world is so full of things that involve freedom and this is just trivial it just doesn't really matter whether you i mean whether or not or not right i mean the people who say you shouldn't wear masks like i'm sure they think women should wear bras you know like these are just like these are not issues which seem to me to be very high in like the list of what really freedom is about with vaccines you get to the issue people want to talk about responsibility we don't have to get to responsibility the question is whether i have the freedom to get you sick and i think the answer is not and there's also a question of like are we a freer country if people are healthy i think the answer is yes right i mean jefferson said there was a right to life jefferson said there was a right to liberty what is the thing which is between life and liberty health and what did jefferson say about health he said it was the most important thing in the world after ethics given what we know about health now i think one way we can become freer as a people is by trying to be healthy for for one another right so that's that's where i come down on this this issue i don't i don't i i think that like sometimes being if you're going to be free you have to recognize that other people are other people should also be free it's not just like my ability to get you in the face it's also your ability not to be hit in the face it's and if we think take that principle of two people and we take it further then it's a very small step to thinking yeah we would all be freer if we would act in such a way that we all respect one another not only is the outcome that we're all freer but also that respect is a respect for the other person's freedom and if the other person's not free then freedom doesn't mean anything i think that's exactly right i mean freedom demands responsibility in a democratic society and that's the way that we should look at freedom not at this very narrow narrow narrow down uh individual where the individual wants to believe what they want to believe even if it's not true then that's freedom and that's i think one of the problems that we're up against thank you um for nora nora is there civics education in german schools or has it been abandoned as it has here um we don't have a i mean i can only talk to when i was a student because i haven't lived in germany for almost 20 years um but that there wasn't a civics class per se we had one class called ethics but that was really just an alternative if you didn't take christian uh catholic or protestant education class you were kind of stuck with what was called ethics and unfortunately i chose catholic class at the time um so some of these valuable conversations i think took place in this non-religious class but of course we had a very strong history class i mean we learned an immense amount about the second world war and the holocaust which i think informed most of my fellow german west germans at least uh minds and and sense of democracy and agency personal agency which is still i think very much at the forefront of a lot of germans minds today yeah i know we're almost at the end of the hour but i had two different people asked the same question which is will there be a film version of on tyranny um there there have been there have been discussions about it um it's it it it could it could happen there it's it's not you're not the first two people who've had this idea let me put it but like a bunch of people in la so you probably know more than me about this well i'll see what i can make happen yeah well see what you can do jessica you tip on that that sounds good well when it does become a film i would be happy to have you back professor snyder and and we can do a screening and another q a afterwards so thank you so much for this uh enlightening discussion and daryl i'm gonna turn this back over to you thank you so much well thanks so much tim and nora and and thanks to to to the world affairs council and town hall for sponsoring it i mean i i really i really found it to to be a useful discussion um i i really would hope that that this edition of the book will be a kind of a launch pad for for really more political activism to try to defend our uh democracy and to uh protect it for our children and our grandchildren i just spent yesterday with my grandchild who's one year old and i just kept coming back to this kind of feeling about what are we doing with our country so thanks so much tim thanks so much noah thank you so much for having me and us yeah thanks to the world affairs council for for inviting us and thanks to all of you who asked questions i really really appreciate the exchange professor snyder nora crook and our wonderful moderator darrell holder this was such a sobering and moving program i i can't wait to order the book it's available this week so please i encourage everybody to read it and i hope you'll come back all of you because this is such an important ongoing discussion thank you so very much for our viewers i wanted to share some upcoming programs tomorrow politics in the time of coronavirus on october 7th a conversation with edison international president and ceo pedro pizarro on california's pivotal climate change movement on october 12th again politics in the time of coronavirus stands on at a new time 5 pm on the 13th risk a user's guide with general stanley mcchrystal and on the 15th a conversation with dr fiona hill moderated by doyle mcmanus from the los angeles times the 21st we have social media the dark side a conversation with roger mcnamee so please go to our website at lawacth.org register today become a member make a donation we can't do this without you please stay safe stay informed and we hope to see you tomorrow take care everyone [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Los Angeles World Affairs Council & Town Hall

Views: 11,011

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Id: X_h0z5tCOYE

Length: 61min 25sec (3685 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021