Secret History #8: Death by Bureaucracy — Transcript

Explores the 2015 Yale debate on safe space vs free space, highlighting generational shifts and cultural conflicts in university settings.

Key Takeaways

Universities face growing tension between safe space and free space philosophies.
Generational shifts influence student expectations about respect and intellectual challenge.
Parental protection, consumerism, and ideological factors contribute to campus conflicts.
Respectful discourse is challenged by confrontational student behavior toward faculty.
Balancing emotional safety and academic freedom remains a critical issue in higher education.

Summary

In October 2015, Yale's Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an email advising students to avoid potentially offensive Halloween costumes.
Erica Kustakis, dean of Silliman College, opposed the email, advocating for free space where students can experiment and learn from mistakes.
The debate centered on safe space (protecting feelings) versus free space (encouraging intellectual growth through challenge).
Students largely supported safe spaces, marking a generational shift from previous norms emphasizing free expression.
Kustakis and her husband faced student backlash, including accusations of racism and disrespectful confrontations.
The video highlights the tension between student demands for comfort and the traditional university role of fostering debate and growth.
Three explanations for this cultural shift are proposed: overprotective parenting, consumerist mentality treating students as customers, and ideological influences in academia.
The conflict illustrates broader societal and generational divides on free speech, respect, and educational purpose.
The video does not take a definitive side but emphasizes the complexity and legitimacy of both perspectives.
It reflects on how university culture has evolved and the challenges this poses for educators and students alike.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Okay, so welcome back from the break. Today, I want to talk about an incident that happened in October 2015 at Yale University. What happened was this: Halloween is coming up, and at Halloween, people like to dress up silly, get drunk, and have a good time.

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A university department called the Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an email to students saying, "It's Halloween, you guys want to have fun, that's fine, but please be sensitive about the feelings of other people." So, for example, do not dress up like a panda because we have Chinese students, and

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they might be offended if you dress up like a panda. Okay, so this email went out to all the students at Yale, and one teacher who works at a residential college called Silliman, okay. So Yale, the university, is divided

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into dormitories called residential colleges, and she is a dean, with her husband, of this college called Silliman. To her students, she writes an email and says that she didn't agree with the university email. She says that a

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university is a place for you to explore, experiment, and make mistakes. So yes, be sensitive about the feelings of others, but we trust you to make mistakes and to recover from them. Okay.

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So, the debate was essentially over safe space versus free space. The university said that safe space is important. We must respect the feelings of others.

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But the dean of Silliman, her name is Erica Kustakis, she believes in the idea of free space.

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So a university is a place for debate, for questioning, for experimentation. And yes, feelings will be hurt. That's part of the growing up process, the intellectual process. So let me ask you a question. Do you guys agree with

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number one, who argues for safe space, or number two, Erica Kustakis, who argues for free space? What do you think? Can—sorry, can you speak into the mic, please? Why do you—yeah. Why do you believe number two is correct?

Speaker A

Oh, because I think that university is a place where you can explore yourself, you know, jump out of your comfort zone, and try things that you have never experienced before. Okay. Who disagrees? Who believes it's more important to respect the feelings of others? And like, if the college prohibits

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these kinds of dressings that may be offensive to other students, it's just on the campus. If you walk out in society, there will still be people who want to dress maybe like a panda or something. So, um, I think it's

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I think it's necessary to, like, to, um, to—well, uh, yeah. Okay. All right. Any other opinions? Any other opinions? Okay. So, you say we start the rules, right? I think it depends on who decides. It feels like for myself, I think free space will be more important.

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I need to explore what I want, but for being as a leader, being as a head of the college, I think safe space will be more important for them because they need to take control.

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Okay. Right. But the problem is this is a conflict, right? If the teachers care about safe space, you cannot have free space. Mhm. Right. So the question then is, what do you think in principle is more important, free space or safe space? Safe space. Okay.

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Okay. All right. Okay. So yeah. So most students believe safe space is more important, and this marks a generational shift because when I was growing up, there was no debate. It was just assumed that free space is more important

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because if you're not allowed to make mistakes, if you're not allowed to explore, if you're not allowed to argue with other people, if your feelings don't get hurt, you will never grow as a person. Okay? So, this marks a

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generational divide or generational gap. Okay. So, um, we're going to look at what happened because of this debate. So, the students who read the email were offended that Erica Kustakis was arguing for free space because they believed that by

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doing this, you're going to hurt our feelings. All right? And so, let's look at what happened. And remember, this is Yale University.

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So what's happening is that when Chris Kustakis, the husband of Erica Kustakis, went to a meeting, he was surrounded by students and they were confronting him. Okay, there's like 100 students accusing him of racism, telling him that he is being racist. You were being offensive. You admitted that you hurt us. Why can't you say sorry?

Speaker A

Hurt you? I'm sorry. One at a time, please, one at a time. It's very easy for any trivial word of mine to be misinterpreted. So, one at a time. I'm happy to speak to you as much as you want. I can't speak as much because I have other students that need

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time as well. So, unfortunately, a little bit. Okay. So, look, I'm not saying which side is correct. Okay? Both sides have legitimate points. Both sides have problems. But you will notice that he, the professor, he's much older than the students.

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And the students are treating him—you can see their faces, right?—they're treating him with some contempt, and that's not appropriate. And when I was growing up, we didn't do this. If you didn't like a professor, you thought, well, he's an—And but

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you know what? Most professors are because they're professors. Okay? You did not go and like stalk the guy and complain to him.

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That's kind of disrespectful. All right. So the question then is, why is this happening? So I want to show you another video.

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And this video is kind of crazy. Introvertly learn. Okay, this video you understand that as your decision of matter, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman. You have not done that. By sending out

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that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that? No, I don't agree with that. Then why did you accept the position? Because I have Bob hired you. Okay, so this is not appropriate. Okay, again, both sides have legitimate points,

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but this is not appropriate, right? Because what she's saying to him is you work for us. Your job is to make us feel at home. And his response is that my job is to help you learn. My job is to help you grow. And that means openness. That

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means debate. That means pain. And her response is, "I don't want that crap. I want to feel good. I want to feel at home. I don't want to be challenged." And if you think about it, that defeats the entire point of university.

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So again, I'm not saying who's right. Um, I'm not saying who's wrong, but clearly there's a problem here. And when I went to Yale a long time ago, we didn't have any of this. In fact, this sort of incident where a student would curse a

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professor, it was unimaginable to us. Okay. So the question then is, why is this happening? And there are three explanations for why this is happening. The first explanation is parenting.

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These kids grew up in very privileged households, and their parents are very protective of them, and their parents treat them like friends, and so these kids are spoiled.

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Okay, that's the first explanation. The second explanation is the idea of a consumerist mentality.

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So in a university, the idea is that the students are consumers, the customers, and the customers are always right. What the customers want, you have to give them. So if the customers want a safe space, they want to come and enjoy their

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time at university, and they don't really challenge that the professors have to meet their demands; otherwise, he should not have this job. Okay. And this is a mentality that we call neoliberalism or consumerism. Okay? That's the second explanation.

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Okay. The third explanation is ideological. So the idea is that at universities, universities are overrun by left-wing professors who teach students that society is racist against minorities who happen to be, you know, black and female, and they must overturn the white racist supremacist structure, and you do

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that by telling white professors who are privileged that they are racist. Okay, so these are three standard explanations for why this is happening because this sort of stuff is happening quite a lot in America. What I want to argue

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that there's actually another explanation which I think is much more compelling. And the explanation is that universities have become bureaucracies.

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Before universities existed to teach you how to think, to help professors do cutting edge research that helps a society improve or innovate. But today universities including Yale, Harvard, all the universities have become bureaucracies that exist in order to promote the interests of the administrators who want

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to sit in their office, get really nice uh get get a really big salary and feel good about themselves. Okay, that's the argument I will make to you today. And what I will show you is that this is not just true for universities. It's true

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for every major organization in America and in the western world and arguably all around the world. Okay, that's the argument I will make to you today. Any questions before I begin?

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All right. Okay. So today's lecture is death by bureaucracy. how the idea of bureaucracy, the bureaucratic mindset is taking over the world. All right, so let's talk about another incident at Yale. Okay, this is Yale Law School and

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a student named Trevor Colbert. He sends an email. He has a party. He sends an email to all the students at Yale Law School. And there there are actually not that many students at Y Law School. There's maybe 300, okay? But all the

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students get it. and he says that he's going to organize a party and it's it's a trap house party. And you know, it's it's a bit of a joke because trap house means actually a drug house, a place where drug dealers sell uh drugs. But

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black students, African-American students, read the email and they're offended and they're like, "Are you making fun of black students?" So, they write a letter of complaint to the deans of Yale Law School. And there are two deans who investigate. Okay, their names are Eldic and Koskov. Okay, and they

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said and what Trevor Cobert does is he actually records the meeting. Okay, secretly 20 for 20 minutes they talk. And basically Colbert does not believe he did anything wrong. He sent an email and he said it it was a funny email. He thought it was

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funny. Okay. But the deans tell him, "You think it's funny, but other students found it offensive. So, you need to apologize. And Cobbert's like, "Okay, well, I'll tell you what. If these students thought that what I wrote was offensive, then I

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will talk to them. We will talk together about why they found my email offensive and we will settle this amongst ourselves." And the dean's like, "No, no, no. We want to we want to help you guys out. We want to protect you guys.

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We're afraid that you guys meet, you guys will fight even more. And Trevor Corbert's like, "Well, I want to hear what they think. I don't want to hear this from you. I want to hear what they think." Okay. And and then what happens

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is that the deans start to threaten Trevor Colbert. They basically tell him, "These things amplify over time, so you must apologize right away for your sake." Okay? and they tell him, "Listen, if you do not apologize, then this might

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affect your career. This might affect your social circle." Okay? So, they're threatening him. And what they say is, "We're doing this for your sake." Okay? Eric says he worries about the email affecting students reputation, not just here, but when you leave. You know, the

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legal community is a small one. And he says, "You know what? I will write the email for you. I will craft the apology for you." And cost warns that escalation is a possibility if the student doesn't apologize. Okay, so this is coercion.

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And again, the student, it's not clear what the student did wrong. Some students found it offensive, but it's not clear what rules or what laws, what regulations Trevor Covert broke. Okay, it's not clear. So why is this happening? Okay, my argument to you is that it's happening because

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these guys cost and elic they need things to do because being a dean of a university, it's not a real job, right? They're professors who teach, there are researchers who do research, but deans actually don't do anything. So when you have a bureaucracy,

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bureaucrats go make problems for everyone in order to create solutions for everyone. Okay? So another way of saying this is 20 years ago, 30 years ago when I was a student at Yale, if you had a problem, you had to go talk to a professor

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because there was no one else to talk to. Nowadays, you can talk to like 20 or 30 different deans, dean of student affairs, dean of student faculty relation, who knows? Okay, but there are like all these offices they can go to

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and quite honestly the same at the school as well, right? If you don't like me as a teacher, there's like four or five different people you complain you can complain to and quite honestly a lot of you do complain. Okay, so I know

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about this and and what this is happening is these university have become bureaucracies. Now the question then is why the bureaucracies and the answer is in the beginning as a university you have to build up your reputation right so you

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work hard uh you focus on teaching you focus on research so it's a struggle to become a global brand once you become that global brand there's nothing else to do there's no more ideology there's more struggle so what happens is the

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people in charge start engaging in rent seeking behavior they take advantage of the position in order to make their life easier and then they pass on this privilege to their friends and then to their children and this creates a

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bureaucracy and the university starts to exist in order to empower these people at the expense of students and professors. Okay. All right. So to show you how ridiculous this has become, here's an example. This is from CNN, okay? And this is the year 2020. A

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University of South California professor is under fire for using a Chinese expression students alleg sounds like an English slur. Okay? So, there's a Chinese word that sounds like an racial slur, an insult in English.

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These two words actually do not sound the same. Okay? You know what the word is, right?

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Okay. They It's not the same as the English word, but it sounds a bit similar. So, what happened was some black students, African-American students who are not in his class, okay? Wrote a letter of complaint. And honestly, if you read it, it sounds like a joke. It sounds like a prank, right?

Speaker A

So, let's read it together. Let's let's Okay, so this is professor Greg Patton, and he's just teaching communication Chinese. He's just teaching Chinese to his students on how to communicate in China when you do business. Okay? and he

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and he says, "Look, nga, it's just a feeler. It doesn't really mean anything." And he says it a few times, but there's no there's no bad intention what he's saying, right? I mean, he's he's just pointing out a fact. So, what these

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students write is this phrase clearly and precisely before instruction is always identified as a phonetic hunter and a racial derogatory term and should be carefully used especially in the context of speaking Chinese within the social context of the United States. Okay, so this is a ridiculous idea and honestly

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it sounds like a joke. Okay, it just sounds like these students are playing a joke and and the prof and the administration just ignore this, right? Guess what happens?

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The dean, okay, the head of the business school announced that a different professor would take over teaching Patton's class. He fired Patton. And then he said, "Professor Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain

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and upset among students. And for that, I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt, and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better." Okay, he's being

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It's a joke. It's a prank. And and he's taking it very seriously. Why? Because he's trying to protect his job. He's trying to look good. He's trying to explain why I'm the leader because I protect everyone. Okay. So then again, what is why is this

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happening? Well, again, the idea of bureaucracy. So this is a University of California, San Diego. This is student enrollment. Okay, so you can see a slight increase in student enrollment. But look at this. Senior management, deans, administrators, managers. Boom. Okay. Boom. This is called rent seeeking behavior.

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This is people in power take advantage of their power to give jobs to their friends who do nothing every day. And because of that, they're always looking to cause problems for everyone else, especially professors who do real work.

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Okay. So, let's just look at universities. As you can see, um the blue is teaching. So, what's really interesting is that the investment in teaching has gone down. Okay? So, the investment in teaching has gone down the blue. Okay?

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But look at this. The red is administration. So over the past from 1980 to today, over the past 40 years, universe have put less money into both um administration as well as maintenance, but have put more money into

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administration, into bureaucracy. Okay, this is where your money is going, guys. All right, so this is Illinois. You see a massive surge in managers at but the same time student enrollment is going down. It went down 3%.

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All right. So this is a paper written about the Swedish education system. The higher education system system. Okay. It's it's no different anywhere else.

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All right. So let's so the argument is that bureaucracy is ballooning in Swedish higher education. So let's look at some interesting statistics. All right. So what's happening is that this chart tells you that teachers are teaching more and more students. Okay? Teachers are teaching more and more

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students but administrators are managing less and less students. And the reason why is teachers are fewer and fewer but managers are more and more. That makes no sense. Okay. Um, so you can see that teachers and researchers it's pretty flat. Okay. It

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hasn't really expand that much but secretaries people who do real work it's going down but managers are going up. Okay. So if the university is facing problems the first thing you should cut are the people who do no work. Right?

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But it's the opposite. People who do no work the managers keep their jobs and in fact they pay themselves more. the professors and the maintenance and the secretaries lose their jobs to cut costs. Okay. Um this is how much they're paid. As you

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can see over the same time period, secretaries are getting paid less and less. Teachers are getting paid less and less. But look at this. Managers are getting paid more and more. Uh these are the different departments, okay, of a university. So, as you can see, okay, the the the jobs, the

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departments that do real work, IT, uh, HR, they're going down, but management is going up, right? So, the people who do absolutely no work, their jobs keep on going up and up, and they get paid more and more. And as I said, the problem of bureaucracy is not only do managers do

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nothing every day, but they expect others to do more work. Okay. So, professors researchers teachers they're doing more work because the managers are giving them more paperwork to do, okay, like evaluations and all that. So, professors spend all now

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almost 20% of their workday on paperwork given to them by managers. And this paperwork is not necessary. It's just given to them to justify the jobs of the managers. Okay. This is America. We go back to America.

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And as you can see, um, this is a university called Galidat debt. And as you can see over a 20-year period, there's a blue are the salaries of professors, and it's pretty stable. Okay, you went from 72 to 86. Not a huge

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increase, but look for managers. Okay, the president, it doubled from 141 to 28 280. it doubled. Right now, the salaries are over three times as much as faculty.

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Um, this is Connecticut. At Yale, the president makes $2 million a year. At Wesland, he makes $3 million a year. Okay. Um, this is a private university called Stratford University. And they went bankrupt. Right now more and more

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universities are going bankrupt because obviously you have too many managers and all they do is um get huge paychecks for doing nothing. Eventually you're going to go bankrupt, right? So yeah.

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Okay. Sorry to interrupt, but the school the school board is not stupid. So I mean this is a fact. And so why why don't they just change anything?

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That's a great question. Okay. The reason why is they're all friends. the school board, the president, the vice president, they're all friends.

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And that's why they can do this because they control all the power. They're all friends. And it's in their best interest to steal together, right? Because if you steal by yourself, then you might get caught. But if you steal together,

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then you're untouchable. Okay? So this is exactly what happens at Stratford University. The university goes bankrupt. And because the president and the vice president are stealing from the university, stealing because they are um not only collecting huge paychecks, but they're also expensing everything to the

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university. So for example, they buy a car or they have a gym membership, they charge the university. And if the university can't pay for it, what they do is they lend money to the university. Okay? All right. So Schultz is a president. He

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lists himself and his wife as the biggest creditors claiming that the university owes the couple 2.5 million for eight promisory notes. Okay. So, the university could not pay uh their cars or their house mortgages. And it's like and the sourc [Music]

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went bankrupt like okay now you have to pay me back. All right. So, so again how were they able to do this? Because the filings also shed light on payments to university insiders in its final year of operation. The college paid out of over

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30,000 in segments to seven trustees. So the people at the top were getting paid off even as university was going bankrupt. Though the filing doesn't differentiate which expenses were Richards and which were Maryann's, the filings for 2020 alone showed over 18,000 in lease and insurance payments for the shorts cars.

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Okay, so they had cars and they were making university pay for these cars over 4.7 million in loan payments and collateral return to Eagle Bank on behalf of Schultz. Okay, so they also making the university pay for their

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houses as well. And then you're like, how could they do this? Well, the answer is because in America, the rich always wins in the court system. So whoever is able to hire the best lawyers always wins out and they have a lot of money. The university is

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bankrupt. They don't have a lot of money so they will win out. Okay. So I point this out because this is going to what this is what's going to happen to many universities over the next 5 10 years in America because you have a system where

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you have the managers at the top. They all best friends. They're all stealing from the university together and eventually the university will bankrupt.

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So that's America. Okay. But it's not again it's not just universities. This is every bureaucracy. is every organization is happening like this. So you look at Canada in Canada you can see a rise of 9% in the population but look

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at the government okay it's went up by 26%. Um in America you can see a sharp decline in manufacturing jobs starting in about the 1980s because these jobs are being offshored to China but at the same time you see this steady increase in government jobs. Okay. So people in

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America are doing less real work and more and more people are becoming bureaucrats. Okay.

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So as you can see the growth in the government is usually in management. Okay. People will real work no it's pretty flat but look at the managers look at the administrators.

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Okay they're going way up and it's a pretty steady increase. All right. So how do we know the government doesn't really do anything?

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Okay, so there's a study that shows us that um it's looking at rules. Okay, so rules help society be more efficient. So as you can see um the number of rules have gone down actually number of significant rules, rules that actually

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impact you day-to-day have gone way down. But this is interesting, the paperwork has gone up.

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Okay. So, this tells us the managers, the administrators in the federal government of of the United States, they don't do anything but produce paperwork that's meaningless. Has actually no impact on the lives of ordinary people. Okay.

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Okay. Let's look at the milit military. So, everyone believes that America has the world's greatest military because it spends the most on the military and has all these high-tech weapons, right? The problem is a bureaucracy in the military

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right now. So you see what's happening is an increase in management because the ratio of manager officer to soldier is going down. Okay? So you have more officers and less soldiers. That's a problem. You're fighting a war.

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All right? So um in the Civil War, and this is the 1860s, you had one officer for every 14 soldiers. Now it's one to four. Okay. The biggest problem is the increase in generals. Okay. So you can see three and four star generals have increased the most. In World War II

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um America had about 12 million soldiers. They had seven generals who are fourstar. Today America has about 1.2 million soldiers. They have 40 fourstar generals. And this is a huge problem. Why? Because if you're a fourstar general, you have a

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lot of privileges beyond your salary. So, uh, this is from Raymond Dubas who works in the Pentagon and he writes about the perks of a fourst star general. A fourstar has an airplane. A three star often doesn't. Can a three

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star get an airplane when he needs it? Not always. Okay. So, a four-star general always has his own personal airplane. What is his personal airplane?

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It's called a G5. This is what a G5 is, guys. This is what a G5 is. This is his own personal plane. It's always there for him. If he if he doesn't want to fly, it's waiting on the Tarmac for him. Okay, you can see how luxurious it is.

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This cost 50 to $60 million per plane. Every four-star general has this plane. At the same time, guys, what's happened to soldiers? The soldiers don't have enough to eat. There's 1.2 million veterans on food stamps. Okay, that's 8% of all veterans in America. The people who actually fight, the

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people actually make sacrifices for their country don't have enough to eat while the generals fly around in like these really nice planes. That's a state of the American military.

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All right. So it's not just the military. It's every single US government department. Okay. All the administrator you see massive increase in administration. All right. So people who do real work, okay, is in the red. People who do actually no work is in the blue. Okay.

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So people who do science, math, engineering, 621. People who do administration 1782. So in every federal bureaucracy you have bloat. You have managers who do nothing and you don't have very few people people who do the actual real work. It's it's it's true for every single federal organization in in America.

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So this just shows you how the ratio of managers and supervisors to other employees.

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What's really funny about bureaucracy is evaluation is very important. Who does the evaluation? Managers do the evaluation. So at the end of the year they do do they do performance review and what happens is they tell they evaluate themselves and their friends like you did a great job. They then look

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at other people who do the real work and says you guys could do better. Okay. So outstanding is the highest uh performance review for the government. Right. 62 64% got outstanding. Okay. Managers who do nothing every day. 47% got outstanding for every other job. All

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right. So it's a rigged game. Same same thing with hospitals. The the brown is the growth in doctors. You can see it's pretty steady. But look at the administrators. Okay. The yellow are the administrators.

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It It's blowing up. Okay. And so it c it forces health care costs to go up. The reason why healthcare is so unaffordable in United States is not because it has the best healthcare in the world. It doesn't. It's so it's expensive because

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it's got so many administrators who do nothing every day. All right. So what do what do these managers do? Well, the managers always think of new ways to screw everyone else. Okay. So these are health insurance companies and this is

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their denial rates. Okay? So you work hard for 40 years, you pay your health insurance, okay? And then maybe you get cancer and then you go to the doctor.

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The doctor charges you like a million dollars and you're like you don't have a million dollars but you have insurance. So you go to insurance company. It's like hey I paid 40 years of insurance fees. Can you help me out? I mean, and

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look, the insurance company, Unite Healthcare, about a third, 32% of all claims are denied.

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And they do this as practice because if you fight them, they'll say, "Okay, you know what? We'll we'll we'll we'll agree to pay you back." Okay? But if you don't fight them, then they're like, "Great." Okay? So, it's extremely unethical. And

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so that's what what managers do every day. Think of new ways to screw over their patients and doctors.

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All right. So why is this happening? All right. Why is America like this? Why is the west like this? Why why is the entire world like this? So this is France Kafka and he was writing before World War I. This is his most famous

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book called The Trial. Okay. I'm not sure if you guys have read this book or heard of heard of this book. Okay, it's very good. And the novel, it's a very interesting novel because the main character, Joseph K, he works at a bank.

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He's a blank bank clerk and he has never gotten any into trouble his entire life.

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Okay? He's very obedient. He's very nice. He just sticks to himself. And then one day, the police come and arrest him. The police don't tell him why.

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And Joseph K tries to figure out why, but he he does not know what he did wrong. He does not know why he's being arrested. And then he's put on trial.

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And the judge doesn't tell him what he did wrong. Okay? And just in case trying to figure out why this happened to me, okay? And this and and and this is his answer.

Speaker A

Its purpose is to arrest innocent people and wage pointless pro pointless prosecutions against them, which as in my case, lead to no result. How are we to avoid those in office becoming deeply corrupt when everything is devoid of

Speaker A

meaning? Okay, because society has become a bureaucracy and bureaucrats need things to do. So they go, the police go and arrest innocent people and then send them to trial. Okay? Now, what he doesn't say is the police could arrest criminals,

Speaker A

right? But the police don't want to do that because the criminals might fight back or the criminals might uh be mean. Okay? They rather arrest an innocent person because they know the person will be compliant. Okay? That's the logic of bureaucrats.

Speaker A

How do I justify my existence by doing as little work as possible? Okay, so this sounds strange, but let me tell you a story. This is a true story.

Speaker A

I'm in Toronto with my two boys and I let them run around the park. Okay? And we've been doing this for two months, so I trust them. One of my boys, he's four years old. He runs too far and I lose track of him. Okay? A stranger finds him

Speaker A

and starts talking to him, but my boy doesn't speak any English. So people now surround my boy like where where's where where your parents and he is scared because he doesn't speak any English. So he faints. Okay, that that's what he

Speaker A

does. He faints to protect himself. So they call the police. They call the par the paramedics. They come and they make sure he's all right. Okay, now I find him. Okay, and now the police interview me. They interrogate me and I explain to

Speaker A

him what happened. And at this point, they just let us go home, right? But they insist on taking us to the hospital. I'm like, if we go to a hospital, we could be stuck there for like 12 hours. We could be we could be

Speaker A

in line. And like the paramedics, the MAT has already told us there's something wrong with him. Okay? It's not heat stroke. He just fainted, but he's fine. His vital signs are fine, but the police kept on insisting. Meanwhile,

Speaker A

there's a fight going on at the park. Okay? And I'm thinking to myself, why are you guys bothering me and not going to arrest those guys who are fighting somewhere else? And the answer is because it's easier to deal with me than

Speaker A

to go arrest those guys. Okay? That's how bureaucrats think. They're always thinking of ways to justify the existence but not do real work. Okay? And that's the message of the trial. Eventually, society becomes so bureaucratic that the bureaucrats only think about how to make problems for ordinary

Speaker A

citizens because life becomes easier for them. Okay, does that make sense? All right, let's move on to the origins of totitarianism by Hannah Rant. Henry Rant is a 20th century's one of the 20th century's most uh powerful intellectuals

Speaker A

and she's writing about how Nazism came to dominate Germany. Now communism came to dominate Soviet Russia and how these two regimes led to the deaths of tens of millions of people. How they started World War II, how they create the

Speaker A

Holocaust, how they create the famine. Okay. And in her book she she says that these two regimes are religious cults. They're evil cults and they have three defining characteristics. Okay. The first is that they're removed from reality. They don't care about reality. They have a religion. They have

Speaker A

a faith. They have a mindset and they want to impose their faith on reality.

Speaker A

Okay? They don't care about reality. They're removed from reality. That's the first thing. Okay? Second thing is that when you're removed from reality, your only logic is movement expansion. Okay? You only know if you're right if you're growing. Okay? So if the Nazis, their faith, their religion would lead

Speaker A

to the destruction of Germany, but their membership was increasing. So they were right. They were winning these wars against European countries. Therefore, they're right. Okay? They cannot use logic to explain their actions. So they use movement to expl to justify their actions. Okay, that's number two. One

Speaker A

and two means number three, which is the Nazis and the Soviets hated reality. They defied reality. They fought against reality. So even though the Nazis were losing the war, even though it's clear they cannot defeat the Soviet Russia,

Speaker A

they doubled down because in their religion movement is what matters. Defining reality is what matters. And that's what led to the destruction of Germany.

Speaker A

Okay. All right. So, and she explains that tot regimes have these three characteristics. They're removed from reality. All they care about is expansionism. and they want to defy reality as their true test of faith.

Speaker A

What she does not say in the book is that these three can can apply to all bureaucracies.

Speaker A

All governments meaning that over time all governments all bureaucracies will tend towards totalitarianism because they have that's the only way they can justify their existence.

Speaker A

Okay, does that make sense? All right, so let's talk let's talk about this concretely. Okay, what do I mean by this? So this is a book by James Scott.

Speaker A

It's an excellent book by the way uh called Seeing like a state. And he's trying to explain to us how brock bureaucracies work, how governments function. And for him, governments actually create more problems than they solve. Why?

Speaker A

Well, he lists four reasons. The first is that he all they care about is the administrative ordering of nature and society. So, so another way of saying this is a bureaucracy is a machine. It's a hierarchy. It's static. It's

Speaker A

mechanical. But society is like a forest. It's diverse. It's an ecosystem. It's organic. For a state to exist, it must turn the forest into a machine like itself. So it destroys diversity. It destroys spontane spontaneity. It destroys imagination.

Speaker A

Okay. All right. So let let's use an example of this. All right. So my question to you is like who are you? Can can you can you tell us who who are you?

Speaker A

Like like who are you as a person? Tell us who you are as a person. Like my Yeah. Yeah. just just use one or two minutes to to to introduce yourself. Who are you as a person?

Speaker A

Hi, my name is Banker and I I grew up in Beijing. Uh, and I came to Moonshot this this school in 2024 last year. And uh, okay, wrong wrong. Okay, that's that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is you're a teenage boy. Oh,

Speaker A

okay. That's the correct answer. All right. You believe that you are an individual with individual aspirations, ambitions, with a past, with a history.

Speaker A

The state doesn't care. The state needs to classify you in a way that can that I can use you. Okay? You're a teenage boy, which means like two years time, you can be employed in a factory or I can send you to war. Okay? That's all I care

Speaker A

about. Okay? I don't care about your name. I don't care about who you are. I don't care who your parents are. I don't care about your past. I don't care what you like. All I care about is the fact that you are a teenage boy. and

Speaker A

therefore I can I can exploit you for labor. Okay, that's how states think. Okay, so the batization of society. Second is the idea of high marers ideology. So because the state is a monopoly, democracy is a monopoly. It

Speaker A

becomes arrogant. It has hubris. It's overconfident and it it wants to impose its ideology on everyone else. It believes that through its own planning it can achieve paradise. Okay. Um so it becomes authoritarian meaning it refuses to listen to criticism to feedback to questions. It does it is not open to

Speaker A

debate. It in it imposes its will on people. Okay. Which creates a weak civil society. And if if as an organization you're not getting feedback, you're not allowing for openness, then you will wither and die. Okay? And that's why states, governments

Speaker A

will always fail in the end. Okay. So he uses two examples. The first example is what happened in the late uh 19th century Germany. So in Germany there's there's lots of forests and the state is thinking of ways how can we how can we best monetize the

Speaker A

resource of the forest? Well, there are certain trees that you can cut down for lumber, right? The problem is that in a forest, most space is occupied by useless shrubs or greenery or trees. Okay? So, their idea is, you know what, here's a

Speaker A

simple solution. We'll burn on the forest and just plant trees that we can harvest for lumber, right? Brilliant. That's a brilliant use of space. It's more efficient. The problem though is that when you do that, the trees are now are susceptible to disease,

Speaker A

to weather changes. A forest is resilient because it's diverse. Okay, so that's what this what Scott says. Monocultures are as a rule more fragile and hence more vulnerable to the stress of disease and weather than poly cultures are. Any unmanaged forest may

Speaker A

experience stress from storms, disease, drought, fragile soil or severe cold. A diverse complex forest however with its many species of trees. Its full complement of birds, insects and mammals is far more resilient, far more able to withstand recover from such injuries than pure stance. So nature has diversity because it allows for

Speaker A

resilience. Okay? Some part of the forest can die, but the rest of the forest will recover from anything, whether it's disease or drought or weather. Okay? And we humans are the same way. If you let humans do whatever they want, we are resilient. So

Speaker A

some communities might die off, but other communities will adapt. The problem with a state with a government is that it refuses it sees diversity as an enemy. Okay? So if there's a natural disaster, it's very likely that a lot more people die off than otherwise. Okay.

Speaker A

Another example is force communism in Tanzania. Okay. Okay, so it's a top- down system and their idea is okay, these farmers have their little small farms and they grow their crops, but that's not efficient. What if we just got all the

Speaker A

farmers together and had coffee and they all, you know, had coffee uh or wheat or whatever and then we can sell this to other countries. Okay? And of course you can imagine that this will lead to starvation because it's the same

Speaker A

principle as the forest. If there's a weather crisis or if there's a disease then all your crops die off and then your people die off. Okay. What these planners carried in their mind's eye was certain aesthetic what one might call a visual codification of

Speaker A

modern rural production and communicate community life. Okay. So the problem with bureaucrats is they have no imagination. Everything to them has to be mapped out. They like things that can be mapped out that can that can be a

Speaker A

blueprint. Okay? They like to brag about these things because because that's how they see the world.

Speaker A

But real world nature requires diversity. It requires organic. Okay. All right. So he gives examples of how the state transforms society. So before what would happen is that people would just come together and they will organize their communities according to their needs. Okay, it's a bottomup

Speaker A

process. But the state wants to create permanent cities where people are just in one place all the time, right? That's why you have cities. Um before what's natural is just for people to live on small farms and share stuff with other

Speaker A

people to trade with with each other. The problem with this is the state cannot tax you. So what the state does is it brings you to cities, makes you work in a factory so it can tax you. Okay? The point of giving you a wage is

Speaker A

so it can tax you to exploit you. um property um before it was very common for people to share property together. Okay, now there's it's all owned and controlled by the state. Uh resources are the same thing. Before people just use resource

Speaker A

according to needs but now the state wants to centralize these resources. Okay, so it can tax and exploit people properly. Okay, so that's what a state proxy does. So what are the consequences of the over bureaucratization of society? Well, what's happening in America is that while consumer goods

Speaker A

like cars, clothing, and cell phones are going down, what's going up are hospital services, schooling, okay, housing. Why? Because these are monopolies controlled by bureaucrats, right? So what's happening is with the over bureaucratization of society, it's almost impossible for middle class people, or people to have a good life. Now okay

Speaker A

here's another really interesting chart. The black shows you the growth in the stock market. Okay, and you think you think, wow, this is a good thing. Okay.

Speaker A

The problem is first of all only 10% of people in United States control most of the stocks over 90% of the stocks. The other issue is this. The other issue is if you look at prices, yeah, it's gone up. But if you just turn, but if you look at stocks

Speaker A

as a units of gold, if you use gold to buy stocks, guess what? The price of stocks have gone down. That's a blue. Okay? If you use money to buy stocks, it goes up. But if you use gold to buy stocks, it goes down. What this is

Speaker A

telling us, okay, very simple, is we are living in a lie. All this wealth generation, it's all a lie. It's not real. We just think it's real. We We're living in a fairy land created by bureaucrats to fool us to believe that

Speaker A

we are prosperous. Okay? Does that make sense? The amount of gold that you can buy with stocks has gone down. Okay. And so the blue is the gold, the black is money. The money isn't is worthless. Okay. All right. Another problem that

Speaker A

bureaucratizing has created is people don't want to work anymore. So in America, this is called quite quitting. In China, it's called tonging or banan.

Speaker A

Okay? Lying flat, let it rot. People don't want to work anymore. Why? Because it's pointless to work in a bureaucracy, right? Leaders don't care. The organiz doesn't need you.

Speaker A

You are alienated. You are told what to do and you cannot negotiate. You cannot rise from the bureaucracy. You're you're being asked to work too too much.

Speaker A

You feel as though you're just a machine. Okay? And so you're and so the way you rebel is lying flat or quite quitting. Okay. So your overure of society means that people now have become more lazy, more complacent, more more indifferent.

Speaker A

And what this also means is that democracy is declining because people's voice people people's power is declining. Okay. So you can see that people feel as though democracy is in the decline. In fact, experts um estimate that democracy, the capacity for people to participate in politics,

Speaker A

the capacity for people to influence politics has declined rapidly these past 10 years. Okay? So we are living in a world that is becoming more and more bureaucratic and it's killing us. Okay. All right. Questions.

Speaker A

So, as you say, we now live in a very corrupt world. So, we live in a bureaucratic world.

Speaker A

Yeah. Bureaucratic world. So what so I I I can't really see the future of no matter it's the mankind or like are there any good side of the current world?

Speaker A

Okay, what what are what are the good things about the current world? Well, the good um side is that because things have become so corrupt, people now are forced to think for themselves, right? Before you could just trust your teacher, you just trust your

Speaker A

parent. You just trust author authority figures. But now you see them for the bureaucrats that they are. And so now you're forced to think forced to think for yourself. And so you're now forced to educate yourself. You're now forced

Speaker A

to explore different opinions. So people's minds are opening. And that I think is a very good thing in today's world. Okay, any more questions?

Speaker A

So, will it help if we cancel uh most of the managers and just like keep one one or two of them like Yeah. Okay. So, that's a really good question. Okay. If this is a problem, why not just get rid of the managers? And the answer is they have all the power.

Speaker A

Okay. they would much rather send you to war and kill you off than to tend to lose their jobs. Okay, so going back going back example of Straford University that's that their mentality is how do I maintain my privilege? They don't care

Speaker A

about society. All they care about is maintaining their privilege, right? So they are bankrupt society and then when society becomes bankrupt they expect society to still continue to pay them off. Okay. So these are parasites and there's nothing we can do about it. Yeah. Um as we just said are there less

Speaker A

teacher and less professor or like le like like most of people would choose to quite quitting then who are they going to control if there's less people to work for them you know okay that's a really good question they don't think like that they don't

Speaker A

think about how efficient is my organization They don't think about like am I going to have a job in the next 5 years. All they care about is maintaining the position right here and now. Okay. The way they do that is they

Speaker A

hire their friends or people like them into other manage management positions. So they become like a cabal or or a network onto themselves. And for them they they become parasites. And what parasites want to do is they want to

Speaker A

feed off the host. The host dies, what's going to happen? They will switch to another host, right? Why? Because they're all part of larger networks as well. So that's how they think. They're thinking, well, you know, as long as society survives, I

Speaker A

will continue have a job. Okay? So maybe this university goes bankrupt, but there's another university I can go to and exploit. And and you know what? It works.

Speaker A

Okay. Because people at the top protect each other, right? Okay. Does that make sense? They don't care about this hole, this hole. They don't care about this organization. They don't care. They don't care if it goes bankrupt because they can always move on

Speaker A

to another organization to bankrupt. Okay? What matters is to maintain their patronage, the political networks, so they all help each other. Okay?

Speaker A

Does that make sense? Okay. Great. Any more questions? Um is there any possible to uh stop or even reverse this u cooperating system? Yeah. Um I keep on explaining this this this. Okay. They are the ones in power and so what has to happen is society has

Speaker A

to collapse before society can regenerate before society can rejuvenate. Okay. But before society can collapse they have a lot of tricks up their sleeves. Okay. So, for example, they can create civil wars where the left and the right fight each other and they're left alone. Or they can use AI

Speaker A

to control you, right? AI is God, guys. Listen to God. Okay? Or they can fake an alien invasion.

Speaker A

Okay? Or they can send you to war. They can start these pointless wars. Okay?

Speaker A

But whatever it takes in order to maintain their privilege and their power, that's a mentality. And that's how they got to where they are. Okay?

Speaker A

Okay. And that's how the elite think. Any more questions guys? Okay Mr. J. My question is um so I'm a 12th grader. So if you are in my shoe like if you are in a 12th grader in nowadays what would you do like are you

Speaker A

still going to pursue for a further education a higher education or will you going to like just drop out? Yeah. Okay. That is a great question.

Speaker A

So, you are you guys are about to go to university. And as I told you in this class, university is a complete ripoff. Okay? All you're doing is you're paying for the nice salaries and perks of these administrators at university. You're not

Speaker A

really paying for the professors. All right? You're paying for the administrators to have their nice lives. And so, what I would do is maybe not go to university. What I would do is focus on education, on learning, by reading a

Speaker A

lot of books, by um asking a lot of questions and doing my own research, by learning real skills. Okay? So, in a site like this where the game is rigged, going to university means that you'll just lose. Okay? Maybe before like 20 30

Speaker A

years ago it was good to go it was good to go to university because you might become a manager but now all those slots have been taking taken up by the elite and the children. Okay, there's no space for you. So the only thing you can do in

Speaker A

this context is to really start educating yourself in real knowledge. All right, reading books, um meeting lots of different people, exploring the world. Okay. Like really develop real knowledge.

Speaker A

Okay. That's that's the best solution, right? Any more questions? Does it matter to the major?

Speaker A

Does it matter to the major? No, it does not matter the major. It's all a scam. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker A

It's all a scam. Even for liberal arts, uh, it's all a scam. Okay. Doesn't matter what university you go to, liberal arts, Ivy League, state, it's all a scam. Doesn't matter what your major is, economics, psychology, humanities, computer science, it's all a scam. Okay? The system exists so that the managers,

Speaker A

administrators can continue to feed off the system. All right? Okay, guys. So, uh we'll continue this next week. Okay? All right. But thank you for the questions.

Topics:Yale Universitysafe spacefree spaceuniversity debatestudent protestsacademic freedomgenerational shiftcampus cultureintellectual growthhigher education conflict

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the main conflict in the Yale Halloween incident?

The conflict was between the university's call for safe spaces to avoid offending students and a dean's advocacy for free space, encouraging intellectual risk-taking and debate.

How did students react to Erica Kustakis' stance on free space?

Many students were offended, accusing her and her husband of racism and disrespect, leading to confrontations and demands for apologies.

What are the three explanations given for the rise of safe space demands on campuses?

The three explanations are overprotective parenting, a consumerist mentality treating students as customers, and ideological influences promoting social justice activism.

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