The 4 Key Threats Facing The West | Niall Ferguson, Konstantin Kisin & Francis Foster

we seem to have lost a moral will here in the west there are many other indicators that we may be trending in the wrong direction would you agree with that or do you more optimistic about the future I think we've just allowed the educational system to move much further to the left than most people realize they don't pursue their own interests as a generation at all rationally and the new religions of the secular sphere turned out to be in some ways a good deal worse than the religions they displaced there are people who say that we are in the last days of Western Civilization there are people like R Dal who talk about how there are six stages of the collapse of Empire we're in five and a half or whatever as a historian what do you make of this um and everything that's been happening recently well I agree that it's not a particularly cheerful moment in world history but in my most recent book Doom the politics of catastrophe I try to argue that cyclical theories of History should be regarded with a great deal of skepticism because history isn't cyclical we would love it to be because of course that would make it so much easier to understand and indeed to predict and we would like it to be cyclical because we as individuals have a life cycle but history doesn't have a life cycle Empires civilizations great Powers they don't and and it's obvious when you actually look at them seriously rather than massaging the data to find a cycle uh if you look at historical long run historical data the characteristic feature is a lot of Randomness and that is because disasters upheavals are not normally distributed they're they're actually often either completely random like the incidents of major Wars or they are parallel driven pandemics earthquakes that kind of thing so I'm a big skeptic about cyclical theories of History Empires rise and fall yes sure but some Empires rise and fall really fast try Hitler's Empire which doesn't really get going until 36 and is done and Rubble by 45 that's N9 years whereas other Empires think of Rome you can measure in a millennium so I don't think it's plausible to say old western civilization has reached the fifth stage and Decline and fall or just around the corner it's fun and it sells books and there's always Market in the United States especially for the impending end of the Republic but it just doesn't seem to me that history is like that okay well interesting let me try from a different angle then because I think a lot of people might say look at where we are uh the West has accumulated huge debts uh the West Authority around the world is being challenged very robustly now to put it mildly um we seem to have lost a moral will uh here in the West there are many other indicators that we may be trending in the wrong direction would you agree with that or do you are you more optimistic about the future a lot of what you just said is true but you could also have said that in 1973 so 50 years ago didn't look great did it because the United States seemed to be losing the Cold War basically had bailed on South Vietnam which two years later was gone puff and uh it wasn't exactly going swimmingly in the Middle East uh in October 1973 uh the Soviet Union we know was going to decline and fall with great speed in the 1980s that wasn't obvious in 1973 the inflation problem of 73 was going to get a lot worse it's plausibly uh not going to be as bad this decade and I could go on uh in 1973 America was already in the early phases of the Watergate disaster which was would bring Richard Dixon to resignation to avoid impeachment if you had asked people 50 years ago how's it going there would been a lot who'd have agreed uh with the declinist who really thought the game was up there was a huge amount of division in the United States and not only in the United States I'm old enough to remember the 70s it wasn't a particularly good time in the United Kingdom either in fact the UK was the sort of poster child of stagflation at that time so what am I telling you I'm not convinced that there's some great cycle at work here it was pretty bad 50 years ago too and seven years later Ronald Reagan's elected nine years later Berlin Wall comes down and two years after that the Soviet Union is gone so the lesson I would like to draw from history is there's a lot of nonlinearity and you have to be I think making a more precise argument than you just did to get me properly worried so let me try so what is worrying today is not that we feel terribly divided or so polarized it's not particularly I think that uh there's uh a major economic problem actually the United States economy is shockingly strong under the circumstances I think the things that are concerning to me are number one China Russia Iran Iran North Korea are working with increasing uh cooperation and coordination in ways that are threatening to a number of democracies that the United States and its allies have been backing Ukraine is one Israel is another Taiwan is probably next and secondly China's really much bigger economically it has much greater resources uh technologically too than any previous rival that the United States and its allies faced Soviet Union economically was never more than about 42% of GDP relative to the US well China's are lot bigger than that certainly in the 80% range it's above 100% if you do a purchasing power parity calculation so that's the second point the third thing that is I think concerning is that the United States feels less able to cope with these geopolitical challenges than it was say 50 years ago I'll give you one specific example of that it cannot be right that with the economy more or less full employment there is a deficit of 7% of gross domestic product and that is going to lead very quickly into some nasty fiscal arithmetic in to be specific debt service costs are about to overtake defense spending and that trend line is really not pretty with interest rates rising and the deficits EX in excess of 5% of GDP as far as the eye can see so I think the fiscal situation of the US is a lot worse than it was in 1973 and that means that the US isn't actually able to cope with three military crises at once U lastly the mil milary industrial complex ain't what it was God I miss it I mean there was a time when the US really was the arsenal of democracy I made this point some time ago in a Bloomberg column it's quite a bit behind China which is now the Arsenal of autocracy with manufacturing value added roughly 2x that of the United States you don't have to go back very far for it to be the other way around back in I think around 2002 3 4 the US was a manufacturing power much greater than China so in the space of two decades there's been a real role reversal in the event of a hot war with China the US would run out of precision missiles in about 5 days more or less that's a much worse situation than anything 50 years ago so there are reasons to be worried but I you have to be quite precise about what you're worried about and that's what I'm worried about Neil let's broaden it this topic out a little bit how does civilizations actually fall well that's a good question I think most people imagine in a tobes way some kind of inner crisis of will of morale of self-belief they think of it as a perhaps a sort of aging process or maybe it's just entropy at work if one looks at the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in gibbons's telling it's really a very protracted process so protracted as to have been imp acceptable I think for most contemporaries but in more recent tellings uh Brian Ward Perkins for example actually the Roman Empire fell apart fell apart quite fast especially the Roman Empire in the west and I think it was perceptible That civilization had sort of come unstuck and I think we can understand similar processes if one looks for example in Chinese history the Ming fell apart in uh the mid 17th century in a way that was very suceptible with very meaningful impact on quality of life so we know what it's like when a civilization falls apart the infrastructure stops working Public Health gets much worse it can be caused by War it can be caused by plague it can be caused by uh other forces that are perhaps less discernable for example uh a civilization can fail fiscally it can fail because its monetary system doesn't work and it stops being able to uh deliver surpluses to to the the population so I think we understand a little bit how that process works and when you uh look at the work of someone like Peter Turin there is an attempt through his cliodynamics to to construct models of civilizational breakdown and and then look for a contemporary uh analogy and and in his most recent book Peter argues that the United States is in this kind of uh of a cycle uh he emphasizes the overproduction of Elites too many people with you know University degrees not enough for them to do uh he I thought quite brilliantly forecast a sort of peak in in organized violence in 2020 which I guess he got lucky with the pandemic and and George Floyd and the subsequent Mayhem but it kind of looks quite good as a prediction right now I guess when you look at all his variables however you could make a similar argument about China in fact one of the variables demographics looks worse for China another of the variables overproduction of educated people looks worse for China so in my review of his book which I like I mean I respect his work very much I said might be true uh but it might turn out to be true of China more a bit like Paul Kennedy's Book you you might remember the the rise and fall of the great Powers which came out in 1987 and said there is a kind of law of of decline where if you're spending too much on one thing and not enough on defense then your industrial capacity declines and all of that was supposed to apply to the United States but it turned out to be more true of the Soviet Union so we we can look for these signs of uh unraveling but I think we have to be quite careful not to be so sure that it's a US problem that we miss other worst problem s elsewhere I think the US also has a has a kind of interesting track record of worrying about its own decline I think it's a feature not a bug of the United States to worry about decline or to worry that the Republic's somehow going to enter a terminal crisis or that American power is going to Wayne Americans love worrying about that it's one of the things that sells books and gets op-eds printed and then it happens to the other guy and and Americans are like gee we won and then there's the kind of euphoric decade before it's time to start worrying about decline again Neil uh you talk about gen Z and their education uh I grew up in a crumbling Empire uh in the Soviet Union which also attempted to indoctrinate as children uh but I don't remember I remember my parents warning me you know you're going to go to school and you're going to be taught all this crazy stuff so get ready they're going to tell you about pavic Marosa and they're going to tell you about this and that and whatever and by the time I arrived at school I was rather inoculated and and many young people were and as comedians we know that uh I think ideas are like jokes and that in order for them to really land with the listener there has to be something about their experience that matches what they're being told and I wonder if you think that the economic circumstances facing young people the extraordinary price of housing for example the inability therefore to pair up and have families um the sense that many people now have that they're almost certainly not going to benefit from the the sort of liberal Democratic capitalistic promise which is that we will live better than our parents is that why these ideas are as persuasive as they are to young people today it's possible though I think one has to be a bit careful about about infering that that young people are are protesting uh in support of Hamas because they can't get onto the housing ladder in London I mean it's possible you've made my argument sound ridiculous which I think it's slightly unfair no I didn't I didn't mean to do that what I meant to say was that that the radicalism of the young extends along quite a broad front what's interesting is that it doesn't really focus terribly much on the economic issue that you mentioned if if young people really were concerned about uh the cost of housing in say the southeast of England uh then you'd have thought that they'd spend a lot of time researching housing policy and campaigning for reductions in the green belt and the construction and War housing but they do the exact opposite they oppose that because their radical support for environmental uh movements Extinction Rebellion Etc uh actually points them in the opposite direction and you'll find young people tying themselves to trees to stop further development in the green belt so I I don't think think if if these economic issues are are what's at work that that young people are are pursuing their own interests very competently no they're not but let me make the the connection that I was trying to make and perhaps you can address where the nihilism is therefore coming from because uh the argument I would make is if you don't have a bright future as you perceive it it is quite natural to retreat into some kind of cope as people now say on the internet yeah and the cope might be that we care about things that we can't control because we can't control the things that we care about I.E housing I mean I can tell you even for Our Generation the housing issue is massive and no amount of researching green bell policy is going to get someone my age on the housing ladder if they're not already at this point and we know obviously as you do and I do that becoming a parent for example massively changes how you see the world so do actually getting on a property ladder young people who to whom that's not available are quite likely to uh tend towards nihilism I would argue you disagree perhaps so where is the nihilism coming from if not from there well I think there is a a couple of points that are worth making first is if young people are suffering from the consequences of policies that have essentially rigged uh the property Market are the economy more broadly in favor of older Generations uh then they ought to be attractive to the more radical proposals uh not just to reform the housing uh situation but also to reform the welfare state because the the main problem that young people face is that the intergenerational uh balance is simply not being maintained the liabilities of welfare states in most Western countries are hugely skewed in favor of the elderly it's the young who will pick up the tab for the very generous forms of welfare that the baby boomer is essentially voted for themselves and so if were about economics you'd have thought that more young people would be as high wrongly predicted uh arguing for radical reform of entitlements I mean hak even says in the constitution of Liberty that the young will finally get so impatient with the elderly that they'll kind of her them into camps none of that has happened the young defer unwittingly I think but they defer to the logic of the welfare state young are overwhelming on the left they support uh labor of the conservatives Democrats over Republicans massively but that's bizarre because actually labor and the Democrats are the people most committed to preserving the welfare state with its current transfers from the relatively young to the elderly so I don't think young people understand their economic interests at all well now you may be right that faced with this uh problem they Retreat into nalism because they can't bring themselves to do what would be rational which would be to support uh the center for policy studies position on housing or you know the position of Republicans or older uh position of Republicans for entitlement reform they may justat into nihilism because embracing those conservative Solutions is just too odious to them there is another possibility though which is that they are as I was trying to argue drawn into a series of ideological positions through their education and these ideological positions lead to what used to be called on the left false consciousness they think the problem is uh Big Oil they think the problem is capitalism uh they think the problem is uh settle a colonialism because they get given these phrases from school and in University and and the net effect is that they don't pursue their own interests as a generation at all rationally and I made this I made this point in the great degeneration back in 2012 that if the young really understood their self-interest in the US they would all have been in favor of Paul Ryan's uh program of entitlement reform but almost no young people voted for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan Neil do you think part of the problem is as well is that these narratives that they're fed particularly when it comes to history are so incredibly powerful and they're so simplistic that they're far easier to ingest then actually what is a very unpleasant truth is as my dad always likes to tell me there's no black and white lad there's only a murky shade of gray well I do think you can see why you came out the way you did it's a good point my soul is from Wigan yeah I mean I think having grown up in in Glasgow I was receptive to that kind of argument when the entire city is gray uh it seems quite plausible and aren't that many moments in history when you can say unequivocally Good Guys bad guys I made this point in the war of the world that we end up winning World War II with Stalin doing a huge amount of the fighting and hardly need to tell you this but the Soviet Union is as brutal as totalitarian regime as Nazi Germany and so even that's a tainted victory that and that's one of the things that an older generation have long clung to as the one thing we did that was absolutely right except from the vantage point of people in Eastern Europe it was anything but that so I think it's partly that the stories are attractive the story of the imminent end of the world is one of the most attractive there is uh that that's been a part of of the great monotheistic religions people are drawn to disastrous outcomes it's why science fiction is a prop popular genre and so if you tell people that there is this imminent Extinction of end and the day after tomorrow over everything's just going to be on fire and every be dying from climate change very people are very receptive to that kind of argument and it it's it's quite hard to argue against it because it's it's approached in quasi religious spirit so if you offer any kind of criticism you're a denier and herotic and blasphemer so people are drawn into what is in fact a kind of secular religion of the impending end of days and we must prepare for it how should we prepare for it by fasting so we become vegans we should be celibates shouldn't have children and so you essentially have a kind of secular religion and this is something that fogline and others saw as a problem in the 20th century that in in the wake of the predominance of Christianity people didn't believe in nothing they believe in anything and and the new religions of of the secular sphere turned out to be in some ways a good deal worse than the religions they displaced well we're here again with the kind of strange religion of the impending end of the world and I think it's just it is much more appealing than it's complicated which is you know the least exciting combination of words and and the thing that historians are compulsively driven to say at the beginning of almost any answer they give to a question I I do think there is black and white though and here I'm going to come back at Wigan I think there is a very profound difference between a free society in which one can speak freely and write uh what one thinks and meet and form associations with whomever one likes and an unfree society in which those things are highly dangerous and indeed prohibited and may lead you into uh a jile even a labor camp that's a really big difference what is wrong with kids today now I do sound like the old uh fart that I've become is that they have no very clear idea of what an unfree Society is like hence queers for Palestine you know when radical we're doing a fundraiser by the way we're going to send them all over we got a t-shirt for you now it's um it's kind of bizarre and I've always said it was bizarre I mean I I remember saying to to my wife when we lived in Cambridge Massachusetts wouldn't it be funny if all the people who hate me and all the people who hate you simultaneously protested outside our house and the islamists found themselves right next to the you know the trans activist how would that go and we'd be able to sneak out the back as they fell on one another uh it's it's a curious thing that that that people don't understand what it's like to live under Hamas and they don't really understand what the Iranian Revolution aspires to do they don't understand what it was like to live in Stalin Soviet Union or in M China if they understood that then they might be more reluctant to do the kind of things that many students attempted to do these days like write letters of denunciation call for people to be fired for things that they've said it's amazing how totalitarian behaviors can creep into a free society and I think we've just failed to communicate unfreedom as a phenomenon to this generation and and maybe that's just uh our bad as a generation that we didn't get across to who the Generation Z kids what it was like and I I kind of used to toy with the idea of you know trips to North Korea cuz I don't think you ever feel quite the same about Freedom once you've been in an unfree unfree Society exactly and this is I think why we started trigonometry and been talking to so many people about it because we both know what that's like from our various experiences I was going to ask you as you were talking right at the about this because do you think this maybe is a cyclical element of History it seems that these ideas um mutated as they are are essentially what we had in the Soviet Union but along slightly different lines and it just takes a couple of generations for for us to forget and then we're back to square one and then the power of these ideas is they sound so good all things to all men equality blah blah blah blah blah blah is it just you know three generations and bam we're back to square one well I think the kind of Amnesia cycle of history that you know you you your your grandfather actually fought my grandfathers fought in the world wars uh and my father and my mother very clearly remembered being children in that time and I uh grew up in the 1960s and 1970s with the war as this sort of uh ubiquitous uh Collective memory which even constructed how we played in the playground and and after a certain point it just sort of wears off and you know I'll give you an example I don't think anybody watches black and white movies anymore whereas I did I can't get my children to watch them but if you don't watch black and white movies it's really quite hard to properly to connect with the second world war because so much of the great World War II movies are are black and white so that may be true I think the role of the historian the role as as I understand it is to counter that Amnesia by as vividly as possible conveying what the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath were like and I think those of us who do the job seriously I'm thinking here of Frank dua's work on China under ma or Orlando FES and before him Richard pipes on the Russian Revolution the people who do the job well can transcend the Amnesia of the fourth generation by saying yeah I know it's a long time ago and you don't even you never even met your great-grandfather who was fighting the Germans or fighting the Japanese but you need to know this I don't know quite why we failed so miserably when for a time it felt as if Hitler and Henry VII were what kids in British schools were taught somehow all that teaching about the Holocaust has failed if there are Generation Z students chancing from The River To The Sea Palestine will be free apparently oblivious to the fact that that implies a second Holocaust so you kind of find yourself asking where did all that Holocaust history get us we we clearly didn't get the message across about why Hitler was bad that that that somehow got lost in translation

Channel: Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

Views: 73,503

Keywords: ARC Forum, ARK, ARK FORUM, Jordan Petereson, ARC Conference, ARK Conference, London, Speakers, Speeches, Talks, ARCC, Conference, conference, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, Niall Ferguson, triggernometry, Konstantin Kisin, Francis Foster, trigger, trigonometry, the West, world history, Doom, politics, china politics, Roman empire fall, United States economics, decline of the West

Id: IUOKwITZq6U

Length: 27min 56sec (1676 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024