June 24, 2025 • 45 mins
We’re sharing a preview of a new audiobook, Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth, which celebrates the wit and wisdom of the legendary science fiction author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
Twenty-five years after his death, Adams’ books continue to be read by new generations and his creations along with his ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything being “42”, have seeped deep into public consciousness. Written and narrated by Arvind Ethan David, Adams’ former protégé, this one-of-a-kind audiobook includes reenactments of his work, rare archival material from the Adams Estate, and interviews with Adams’ personal friends like Stephen Fry and Ian Charles Stewart, and zoologists Lucy Cooke and Mark Carwardine. The preview you’re about to hear examines Adams’ view on politics, government, and power.
Get Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth now at Audible, Spotify, Pushkin, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Frushkin. Hello there, listeners. My name is R. Vindthan David.
I'm an author, a playwright, and a screenwriter whose work
has won Grammy Antonia wards. But more important than any
of that, I started my career working for Douglas Adams,
(00:36):
and I'm dropping into your feed today to share a
preview of my new audiobook about him, Douglas Adams The
Ends of the Earth, a celebration of his intellectual legacy.
Adams was more than a science fiction or comedy writer.
He was someone with deep insights into our world. He
foresaw the dangers of our current age, from social media
(01:00):
to chaotic politics, with hilarious clarity, and maybe he even
had some good ideas about how we might survive these
dangerous times. In this audiobook, you'll go on an immersive
journey through Adams's mind. We've never before heard recordings from
his personal archive, original readings of his work, and interviews
(01:22):
with those who knew and loved him best, from Stephen
Frye and David Bidel to leading astrophysicists, conservationists, and political scientists.
I do hope you enjoy this excerpt, and if you do,
you can find Douglas Adams The ends of the Earth
at pushkin dot fm, slash audiobooks on Audible, Spotify, or
(01:45):
wherever else good audiobooks are found. Thank you. Chapter five Politics,
People Are the Problem. The next three chapters of this
book discuss Douglas's views on politics, economics, and government. They
work as a triptych since the three subjects are interwoven
(02:09):
at more or less the atomic level. Given the times
of extreme polarization we live in, it might be helpful
to give the section a bit of a preface. So first,
let me say that I don't believe Douglas's politics conform
simply to a left or right divide. If you think
(02:29):
at the end of chapter five that he might have
been a sort of liberal centrist, then I'd urge you
to push into chapter six, which explores his views on
the economy. And if that chapter surprises you, then just
wait for chapter seven. The truth is that Douglas thought
about things far too deeply to be content with simply
(02:54):
signing up to one tribe or one political party. That's
just a way of accepting someone else's thinking, and accepting
other people's thinking. Was it should be clear by now,
not something Douglas Adams did.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Now, most people in my experience are content merely to remember.
But I can't remember if I don't understand, and I
would worry away at something and seemed to be dim,
you know, because I didn't get it. I needed more
logical support for something before I could accept it.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Douglas came at politics like he came at everything, from
first principles, from a need to understand. It is not
my intention to enlist or conscript Douglas to my or
to anyone's political agenda. Douglas was a radically original thinker,
(03:51):
someone who very much made up his own mind. And
I think we are at a time in world history
where radical, independent thinkers in politics are desperately needed. Here's
what Douglas said when asked who he would vote for
in the US presidential election of the year two thousand,
(04:12):
between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Well, first of all, it seems to be extraordinary that
out of two hundred and fifty million people it comes
down to those two.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
In fact, if you were to ask people who knew
him what Douglas's politics were, you get a pretty consistent answer.
He had some causes, particularly of course environmentalism and conservation,
but He never publicly associated himself with any political party,
being as skeptical of the excesses of capitalism under Margaret
(04:43):
Thatcher as he was about the union troubles of the
nineteen seventies under the left wing Labor government. His one
official quasi governmental role was that in March nineteen ninety five,
under a Conservative government, he was appointed to the Department
of National Heritages newly created Library and Information Commission. He
(05:08):
made a statement saying that I will.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
Be advocating for a strong IT policy and look forward
to a future when all our written.
Speaker 5 (05:16):
Records are digitally accessible. The IT move is afoot, and
not before time.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Six months later Douglas resigned his post and never came
near government work again. So resolutely apolitical, perhaps not during
every election. Over the last twenty years, a line from
the restaurant to the end of the universe has proliferated
(05:45):
across social media. It has become a meme. It is this.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
The major problem, one of the major problems, for there
are several One of the major problems with governing people
is that of whom you get to do it, or
rather of who manages to get people to let them
do it to them to summarize, it is a well
known fact that those people who most want to rule
people are ipso facto those least suited to do it.
(06:13):
To summarize the summary, anyone who is capable of getting
themselves made president should on no account be allowed to
do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary,
people are a problem.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
I met up with Brian Class, a professor of politics
at University College London. I asked him what he thought
about this Adam Zien meme, about the idea that anyone
who's capable of getting themselves made president should on no
account be allowed to do the job. Rather surprisingly, Professor
(06:47):
Class had thought a lot about it.
Speaker 6 (06:50):
It is a core of my research, a problem that
I call self selection bias, and that is where certain
kinds of people gravitate towards positions of leadership for all
of the wrong reasons. Right, So, what Adams has basically
summarized in a very short and punchy way is that
for many people in the world, power itself is not
(07:13):
a draw, right, it's a vehicle to enacting change. And
for those people, they're not obsessed with power, and therefore
they're not very good at getting it whereas the people
who are power hungry, which is usually used as a negative,
are precisely the people who are so obsessive that they're ruthless,
and they're very effective at obtaining power. And so what
(07:33):
Adams is basically saying, and I think this is true,
is that the people who are most drawn to power
like moths to a flame, by virtue of that obsession
and by virtue of the things that they have to
do in order to get to the highest offices in
the land, they disqualify themselves because they basically prove that
they're in it for the wrong reasons. And they also
(07:55):
have to behave in such ways during a campaign that
make it clear that they should not be trusted with
any sort of authority.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Here are some things about Professor Bryan Class. He is
an expert on democracy, authoritarianism, American politics, political violence, and
the nature of power. Most of all, he's an expert
on corruption. He's a professor at University College London and
(08:21):
a visiting fellow at Oxford University. He pops up as
a talking head on CNN and the BBC all the time,
and before he became an academic, he helped elect the governor
of Minnesota. He also happens to be a massive Douglas
Adams fan, but we'll get to that.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
I've gone around the world and interviewed a whole bunch
of leaders, former heads of state, and authoritarian regimes, all sorts,
and the sort of thesis of my last book, which
is called Corruptible, takes Adams's idea and uses it to
attack or sort of undermine the core idea that most
people have about politics, which is that power corrupts. And
(09:02):
the reason why the title of the book is called
Corruptible is because I'm arguing exactly the opposite, in line
with Adams, that the problem, the real problem, is that
corruptible people are drawn to power, and that it's not
that power itself is transforming others, although that does happen,
but rather the wrong sorts of people end up in
positions of leadership. And that's what that quote is all about.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Now in today's politics, with populism on the rise everywhere
and strong men presidents becoming the norm across the globe,
this view of leadership seems reasonable familiar, But Douglas was
writing in nineteen seventy eight. Have things always been thus? Well?
Speaker 6 (09:44):
I think this is an age old problem, right, So
this is something that the ancient Greeks and Romans and
Egyptians worried about. This is something that humans have grappled
with literally forever. So whenever you have hierarchy, which effectively
is something that emerged in some societies but not all
of them in the sort of vast stretch of civilization,
there's this big question of who do you put in charge?
(10:06):
If you have to put someone in charge, who should
that person be? And so humans have written about the
problems of power and abuse for literally millennia. So Adams
may have been responding to specific headlines or specific players
in British politics, et cetera. But I think he's actually
tapping into something much more universal here, something that has
(10:27):
befuddled humanity for as long as we've been on the planet.
And I think what he's also tapping into, which I
think is the fundamental insight of social science, and one
that is very simple but often overlooked by people who
are outside of the field, is that the way I
describe it, as I say, every single group of humans
that you have on the planet, in a club, in
(10:48):
a political party, whatever it is, they're a non random
subset of the population. They're not randomly selected like in
a lottery, and that means that certain traits are causing
people to sort themselves. Right, So what Adams I think
is doing is I think he's astutely saying that the
people who are sorting themselves towards politics are driven with
a thirst for power that is unusual among the rest
(11:10):
of the population. I suspect that he's actually dealing with
something that's far deeper and more universal, about a problem
that's played humanity pretty much for as long as we've
braced the planet.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Unsurprisingly, Douglas was aware of the ancient nature of this problem. Indeed,
he specifically wrote about a fictional ancient civilization which was
having some difficulty managing its political process. What follows comes
from the final Hitchhiker book, mostly Harmless. Remember, this is
(11:43):
the bleakest and most deeply cynical of all of Douglas's books,
so it's fair to say he wasn't feeling very optimistic
about the world when he wrote it. In the following scene,
Arthur and Ford witness an alien spaceship which crashes into London.
Out of the ship comes an immense silver robot one
(12:05):
hundred feet tall, which holds up its hand before proclaiming, I.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
Come and please technically to your lizard.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see.
Speaker 5 (12:18):
You mean it comes from a world of lizards.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
No, nothing so simple, nothing anything like so straightforward. On
its world, the people are people, the leaders are lizards.
The people hate the lizards, and the lizards rule the people.
Speaker 5 (12:38):
Odd, I thought you said it was a democracy.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
I did, it is.
Speaker 5 (12:42):
So why don't people get rid of the lizards?
Speaker 1 (12:45):
It honestly doesn't occur to them. They've all got the vote,
so they pretty much assumed that the government they voted
in more or less approximates to the government they want.
Speaker 5 (12:56):
You mean they actually vote for the lizards.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Oh yes, of course, But why because they didn't vote
for a lizard. The wrong lizard might get in? Got
any gin? What I said? Have you gone any gin? Oh?
Speaker 5 (13:15):
Look, tell me about the lizards.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Some people say the lizards are the best thing that
ever happened to them. They're completely wrong, of course, completely
and utterly wrong. But someone's got to say it. In
this allegory, the lizards are politicians, not any particular party
(13:41):
or stripe or type of politician, but rather the entire
self perpetuating, privileged cross party elite that has been governing
most Western democracies for decades, occasionally just changing who sits
in which seats. Here, Douglas is being astutely cynical about
(14:03):
the entire political processing system, left, right and center. The
system he is saying is broken, It's always been broken,
and it's set against us. But just being cynical doesn't
seem enough. More than that, it doesn't seem very like Douglas.
(14:26):
As we've observed in the sections of this book on
conservation and the Internet, Douglas was not content to simply
be a critic of what was broken. It was his
nature to try and fix problems to create something better,
whether that was a permanent refuge for mountain gorillas or
(14:48):
new models of community on the internet. So what would
Douglas have us do about it? If our democracy is broken?
Winston Churchill once famously said that democracy is the worst
form of government except for all those other forms that
have been tried from time to t But if even
(15:12):
the least worst form is so terrible, what is there
to do about it? Tear it down, give up on democracy,
and embrace plutocracy. Oligarchy, tune out. They didn't seem to
be anything in Douglas's writing that pointed towards a solution,
and at that point I was playing out of ideas.
(15:34):
So I asked Brian Klass, as a fellow fan and
as a political thinker, if he thought that Douglas was
just throwing his hands in the air and giving up.
Speaker 6 (15:45):
So you have, on the first part, this sort of
supply side, which is who decides to become a politician,
who ends up on the ballot, who volunteers to run
for office, and those are the power hungry people who
Adam suggests shouldn't be anywhere near power, right. And then
you have the demand side, which is why do we
keep on allowing people who are so manifestly unfit for
leadership to govern our societies? Because I think what he's
(16:09):
saying is that we are prone to being seduced by
powerful people who clearly should not be in charge, but
continually convince us to hand over power of our societies
over our societies to them. And those two ideas are
very complementary when you try to understand things like populism
the rise of demagogues, which are obviously extremely important as
(16:32):
we sit talking about this in twenty twenty four, but
they're you know, it's worth remembering populism and demagoguery are
something that, again the ancients also dealt with. How do
you reconcile democracy with the sort of passions of the
mob and the risk that somebody will convince people through
emotional ploys and so on, to allow them to govern it.
(16:53):
And I think Adams again, with this parable of the lizards,
he's not actually suggesting that this is what happens. He's
suggesting that the politicians that we allow to govern us
are like the lizards, who have no business being in power,
but we vote for one because the other one is worse.
And I think a lot of people see that in
modern democracies, where they're voting not for a politician but
(17:13):
against somebody else.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
I'm recording this in the chaotic first weeks and months
of the second Trump term, and as the US continues
to seesaw back and forth ever more violently between two
different visions of the country, as the population becomes more
and more divided, between two radically different tribes, each of
which seem not to just disagree with, but actively hate
(17:39):
each other, we seem trapped in a war of the lizards.
In this toxic environment, Douglas's challenge to us seems all
the more urgent. You can even say that it is
the great challenge of politics today to find an alternative
system that provides a fair and decent management of society
(18:04):
without involving any lizards at all. But how do we
do that if all the people who desire power shouldn't
have power, and if all the people who put them
in power shouldn't be trusted to choose. If we can
neither trust the supply of leaders nor the selection of leaders,
(18:26):
what solutions can politics give us? What is left?
Speaker 6 (18:31):
Yeah, so this is one of the key questions of
modern democracy in the age of populism. But I think
there's a few things I'd say about this. The first
is that obviously you want someone who desires power, but
you want someone who desires power for the sake of
enacting social change for the benefit of other people. So
for those people, the power is the means, not the end. Right.
(18:52):
So you want people who want to rule like that
is obviously true, but you also want them to be
clear eyed about the fact that it's a means not
an end. And the point that I always make to
people when I'm trying to convince them to get involved
in politics or to do their bit to try to
make their own society a little better is to say, look,
the power hower hungry people will show up one hundred
(19:12):
percent of the time because the power is enough of
a draw that, even in a destructive and dysfunctional political
system like the United States is currently power hungry zelots
are going to run for office, right, So the question
that becomes do we balance them out? And the way
you balance them out is that the people who care
about the service and view power as a means rather
than an end. Now, if enough of those people in
(19:33):
the second category run for office, then will be okay.
But the problem is that you end up creating a
self fulfilling prophecy when politics becomes so bad and so
toxic that the costs of it are so enormous. And
this is where what I think Adams is hinting at.
Here is something that I've seen in my own family life,
which is my mom inspired me to get interested in
politics because she ran for school board at the local
(19:55):
level when I was a kid. And you know, more recently,
I've asked her like, would you run today? And she
says no way, right, because like the death threats, you
get the crazy conspiracy theories, the zelots, all this type
of stuff, the risk of violence and so, and that's
a sort of parable for the good, decent public servant
bowing out. And I think what Adams is also hinting
(20:16):
at is that the ugliness of the arena in many
political spheres is such that the moral compromises you have
to make in order to get elected those are the
ones that he's I think referring to beyond the self
selection bias that I talked about before. So you know,
I worked in a political campaign before I became an academic,
And yeah, I mean you have to make trade offs.
(20:37):
You sort of like the candidate I worked for who
went on to become the governor of Minnesota. You know,
he said to me, Look, we don't want to make
promises we can't keep because we have to govern if
we win. But also if we don't win, none of
this matters, right because we don't could actually do anything.
So at some point, the whole purpose of your job
as a campaigner is to win. And when you are
(20:58):
faced with the choice between not winning and doing something
that is potentially not what you want to do, but
you might have to do. Many politicians make the hard
nosed but often im moral choice, and so you know,
I think that's where Adams is mixing these two ideas
together to very very succinctly describe both self selection bias
(21:21):
and the moral degradation that often comes. It's sometimes called
in philosophy the dirty hands problem, which is that in
order to get to power, you've got to get your
hands dirty. What should we do about that fact when
we need people to sometimes get their hands dirty because
that's the only way to solve problems, right, So it
is the perennial problem of democracy where you have to
(21:41):
solicit votes. I'm not so cynical as to say that
anyone who ends up in power is obviously unfit for office,
but I think he's summarizing something that is extremely apt,
and to me, is the biggest problem of democracy in
the twenty first century, which is, how do you convince
the right people to seek office when the system itself
(22:02):
is so fundamentally broken and toxic that that prospect is
just abhorrent and off putting to most people.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
At this point, I just sort of wanted to kill
myself and all the lizards. I wondered, though surely Douglas
wouldn't have just identified the problem. Surely somewhere he would
have suggested a solution. How do we find people whose
desire is to use power to serve, to deliver meaningful
(22:32):
and positive change for others, and not just to advance themselves.
That's when I remembered about the ruler of the universe
and his cat. In the second Hitchhiker novel, The Restaurant
at the End of the Universe, Zeyphod and Trillion succeed
(22:52):
in tracking down the true ruler of the universe. He
is revealed to be not a president or a dictator,
not an official of any kind, not somebody who wants power,
but rather an old man who has been recruit to
do a difficult job and who lives in a simple
(23:13):
shack on a deserted planet. Here there's a dramatization of
that moment, with the ruler played by Samuel Barnett, Trillion
by Alison Cabanas, and me taking the role of Zafa
in there.
Speaker 7 (23:29):
Yes, sam shack, Yes, but it's in the middle of nowhere.
You must have come to the wrong place. You can't
rule the universe from a shack. Hello, I do you
rule the universe?
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Well?
Speaker 4 (23:47):
I tried not to.
Speaker 5 (23:48):
Are you wet?
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Wet? Doesn't it look as if we are wet?
Speaker 4 (23:53):
That's how it looks to me. But how you feel
about it might be an altogether different. Better. If you
feel warmth makes you dry, you'd better come in. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Listen, We've come to ask you some questions. All right,
you can sing to my cat if you like.
Speaker 5 (24:09):
You like that, you better ask him.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Does he talk?
Speaker 4 (24:12):
I have no memory of him talking, but I am
very unreliable.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Now you do rule the universe? Do you?
Speaker 5 (24:20):
How can I tell.
Speaker 7 (24:22):
How long have you been doing this?
Speaker 5 (24:24):
Ah?
Speaker 4 (24:24):
This is a question about the past, isn't it?
Speaker 7 (24:27):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (24:28):
How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction
designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical
sensations and my state of mind?
Speaker 7 (24:36):
Do you answer all questions like this?
Speaker 4 (24:39):
I say what it occurs for me to say when
I think, I hear people say things more I cannot say.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Good on you, great ruler. You tell it like it is.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
Listen to me.
Speaker 7 (24:50):
People come to you, do they in ships?
Speaker 4 (24:52):
I think so?
Speaker 7 (24:53):
And they ask you to take decisions for them about
people's lives, about worlds, about economies, about wars, and everything
going on out there in the universe.
Speaker 5 (25:02):
Out where, out there. How can you tell there's anything
out there? The door's closed.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
You know there's a whole universe out there, man, and.
Speaker 7 (25:10):
You cannot dodd your responsibilities by saying they don't exist.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
You both seem very sure of your facts. I couldn't
trust the thinking of people who take the universe if
there is one, for granted.
Speaker 7 (25:23):
Don't you understand that what you decide in this shack
of yours affects the lives and fates of millions of people.
Speaker 4 (25:31):
I don't know. I've never meature all these people you
speak of, and neither I suspect have you?
Speaker 5 (25:37):
They only exist in words we hear. It is folly
to say you know.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
What is happening to other people. Only they know if
they exist. They have their own universes, of their own
eyes and ears.
Speaker 7 (25:50):
Uh huh, I think I'm just popping outside for a moment.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Wow, I'll come with you. This particular rule of the
universe is clearly not motivated by power. Indeed, he seems
to be motivated by nothing other than the pursuit of truth.
(26:16):
But surely going and plucking logically minded strangers out of
their communities and sequestering them in private on distant planets,
whilst handing them huge responsibility. Surely that isn't a sensible
or remotely practical approach to governance. I asked Professor Klass
what he thought.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
There's a sort of aspect to this which, in addition
to the naivety that is required to make good decisions,
where you sort of don't take ideology for granted. I
think that's part of what he's critiquing, right, is that
this individual really clearly is not a zealot. They're not
an ideological thinker. There's someone who thinks about the fundamentals
of truth and so on, you know, queries the logic
(26:57):
of various premises, rather than accepting them instantly.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
So the ruler of the universe represents a non partisan,
clear thinker. I can see how we could use more
those in our politics, more of him, and less power
hungry lizards or less vainglorious ze Ford Biebel boxes. But
how would we get these good people to join politics,
(27:22):
particularly the grinding, difficult, toxic, polarized politics off the modern age.
Speaker 6 (27:29):
What's really bizarre about the way modern politics works is
that we basically wait for people to volunteer rather than
trying to select them. And what I mean by that
is political parties spend small amount of money on recruitment.
They basically say, Okay, we have an open seat. Who's
going to run for office? And this is precisely what
(27:49):
Adams is talking about, right. What happens in that system
is that all of the power hungry people come out
of the woodwork. Now, there's a lot of people in
our societies who have proven that they are service driven leaders,
and our political parties should be spending a lot of
money identifying those people and convincing them to run, and
they don't. They basically just wait for the people to
throw their hat in the ring, and then they sort
(28:11):
of say, who's the best candidate among this group.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
The fact that political candidates and modern democracies self select
and volunteer themselves seem so self evident to me that
I struggled to imagine any alternative. Professor Klass thankfully had
no such struggle.
Speaker 6 (28:31):
Yeah, I mean it's really straightforward. I think it's something
where you would have a let's say a congressional seat
opens up. The first thing you would do as a
political party is you would develop a committee that's trying
to identify possible candidates. You would then ask for nominations
from the public of people who they thought were those
are the proven track record of really pro social public
(28:53):
leadership in whatever field it was. And then the conversations
would begin with those people to try to recruit them,
and with the mentoring that can come with a political
party apparatus of how to raise money, the guarantee that
if they were to run, that the party would support
them with campaign funds and so on. What I'm jesting
is that there is a way in which a more
rational political party would identify people through a nominations process,
(29:17):
with a committee that then vetted a short list, then
tried to persuade them using sort of big wigs. I mean,
you can imagine Barack Obama getting dispatched to this congressional
seat to say, please, we need you. You know, would
you run person who has cured cancer, you know, whatever,
this sort of aspect, and if you do that, along
with the sort of financial apparatus that can support these
(29:37):
people to ensure they don't have to raise money every
day of the week, you can start to get people
who are willing to go into politics for the right reasons.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
In other words, we would select a bunch of selfless, thoughtful,
impartial experts. We would shield them from the dirty side
of politics, and you sequested them somewhere, perhaps in a
remote hut with a friendly cat, and we encourage them
to think deeply about the decisions that need to be taken. Lovely,
(30:08):
though this idea sounds, a world ruled by a collection
of kindly disinterested eccentrics didn't strike me as particularly scalable
or realistic, so I pushed Brian class for other potential
solutions to the problem of the lizards.
Speaker 6 (30:26):
Yeah. You know, it's interesting because Adams hasn't, as far
as I know, written about a concept called sortian, but
I think he would be interested in it, and it's
something where I think it should be used more often,
especially at the local level. Sortician is basically random selection
of people to make decisions the way that the ancient
Athenians did this using this device called the claritarion, where
they basically randomly put in They put in all the
(30:49):
sort of tokens for every citizen, and they randomly selected
a row, and those people were selected to join the
citizen Assembly, as it were, to make decisions. And one
of the things that I've advocated for is using that
sort of selection process as oversight for leaders. So, you know,
in the UK, for example, you had a system during
the pandemic where a bunch of people in our office
(31:10):
allocated effectively kickbacks. But you know, government contracts to their
friends for really poor quality ppe, you know, during the pandemic,
and all these billions of pounds were dispersed. Now, if
you had an oversight body of randomly selected British citizens
to vet some of these choices and to sort of
give them the thumbs up or the thumbs down, I
(31:30):
can't imagine that somebody would ever say, yes, well let's
give it to the Tory, you know, member of the
government's you know friend, that's the right thing to do,
right You wuld just obviously be wrong if you had
a second opinion that came from a random selection process.
Increasingly this is being used in local decision making for
less polarizing issues, and so, you know, I don't think
(31:53):
that politicians should be replaced, but I think that there
are clever ways of using random selection, which takes away
exactly the problem that Adams is highlighting here, which is
the self selection and the sort of mechanisms of campaigning
and democracy. You know, jurys are select did randomly and
we turn over some really consequential decisions to them. So
(32:13):
for certain decision making, certain forms of decision making, it
might be part of the mix that can help.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
What Professor class is describing as sortician has a more
everyday name, citizen assemblies. These assemblies are both an ancient
form of democracy, dating as he says, back to the Greeks,
but also one of the fastest growing mechanisms in our
modern democracies. Citizen assemblies are where randomly selected but representative
(32:45):
group of citizens are brought together to deliberate and make
decisions on major issues. They have been responsible for, amongst
other things, passing abortion protections in Ireland, electoral reform in Canada,
and climate change legislation in both France and the United Kingdom.
What underlies the authority and effectiveness of citizen assemblies is
(33:10):
that the decisions are not made top down by an
authority who thinks they know what's best for the population,
but from the bottom up by the people actually living
in the community, or, as the ruler of the universe puts.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
It, it is folly to say you know what is
happening to other people. Only they know if they exist,
they have their own universes, of their own eyes and ears.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
One of the most interesting things about citizens assemblies is
how they can be supercharged by technology. With the advent
of the Internet and collaborative software tools, citizen assemblies can
have not just dozens or hundreds of participants, but hundreds
of thousands, and can take place virtually and in real time.
(34:02):
The country pushing this further than anywhere else is Taiwan,
where the v Taiwan Process has revel duianized decision making.
The person who spearheaded this breakthrough is Audrey Tang, who
served as Taiwan's first Digital Minister, in fact the first
digital minister of anywhere in the world, and is currently
(34:23):
Taiwan's cyber Ambassador at Large. Audrey came to her unusual
roles in unusual ways, not by winning an election, but
by being part of a mass demonstration occupying Parliament. Here
she is being interviewed on the Rest is Politics leading
podcast by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell.
Speaker 8 (34:47):
The people who occupy the parliament opened up the conversation
in a non violent way with half a million people
on the street, and so people could every day see
the rough consensus that was reached among the occupiers. So
in many senses it was not a protest inasmuch as
a demonstration that shows the Speaker of the Parliament that
(35:07):
people do actually collease in through something like a rough
consensus after three weeks as now violent occupy and speaker
once simply said, at the end of occupy, yes, that
is the direction where we're going. And so the trade
deal was canceled and people embraced this idea of crowdsourcing.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
At the end of that year, we should pause to
rarely understand what is happening here. A group of anti
government protesters stormed the parliament. So far, this is a familiar,
if depressing story of twenty first century democracy gone wrong.
But in this case, rather than violently breaking down doors
(35:44):
and clashing with police, the protesters sit down and open
up their laptops and convene a half million of their
fellow citizens into deliberative groups. Over the course of a
few weeks, they thrash out an alternative setup proposals to
the trade deal they were opposed to, and at the
(36:06):
end of the time, the protester's version is adopted into law.
The story gets even weirder. At the next election, Audrey
and her fellow protesters find themselves elected into government and
working as a team pivot Taiwan's democratic processes into full
(36:29):
alignment with an open source, transparent, Internet enabled vision of government,
one that incidentally coped with the COVID pandemic better than
any other nation on Earth. Further, Taiwanese politics has gone
from being as polarized and polarizing as anywhere else on
(36:50):
Earth to being a largely consensus, data and solution driven politics,
with a substantive proportion of the cabinet ministers and the
country's Prime Minister and president all being independent, i e.
Not Aligned with any political party. Somehow, starting with the
(37:12):
ancient Greek idea of sortician and supercharging it with the
power of the Internet, Audrey Tang and the people of
the Sunflower Revolution managed to recruit themselves as a group
of non politicians to run a government in an open source,
first principles consensus driven kind of way. This harnessing of
(37:35):
the power of the Internet to bring together the opinions
of the crowd felt somewhat familiar. It felt like a
very Adamsian concept, the idea that we could use computers
to change the way we think about decision making, from
top down to bottom up, from authoritarian to emergent. It's
(37:59):
vintage Douglas, vintage, as it turns out, of the year
two thousand.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
So what should we model in our computers. One thing
it'd be good to get some kind of handle on
is the world.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
So let's model that.
Speaker 5 (38:17):
It's a big job.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
But then there are a lot of us, and there
are a lot of computers, many more than Thomas Watson
ever imagined. You may remember that it was he who,
as the head of IBM, commissioned a study to find
out how many computers the world would actually need. The
answer came back six, and Watson was determined that IBM
(38:43):
would build them all. That was back in the old
top down, big brother view of the world. What we
failed to foresee was that the world would not be
dominated by one or a few giant computers sitting at
the top of the hierarchy, but rather it would be
informed by millions and millions of tiny little brothers and
(39:03):
sisters and cousins, all down at the bottom of the
hierarchy where the information is. As a result, we might
gradually not even lead a hierarchy.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
In a different talk to a group of students a
little later the same year, Douglas applied this idea specifically
to the question of politics.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
Anything that involves the government, like getting driving license, social
security cardog happens at geological speeds, And after a while,
I think people are going to start taking note of
this and saying, sorry, exactly what function is that you're performing.
I know that it costs us billions of dollars, and
(39:46):
I know that it infests our television screens while we
hear you discussing absolutely nothing with each other, and that
this is meant to be terribly important. But I'm beginning
to wonder if it is actually that important when we
can actually micro manage our own lives much much more effectively.
I mean, any political economists will tell you you actually
have more effect as a member of a sort of
(40:11):
economic political culture every time you walk down a supermarket
island and say, well, I'm going to buy this and
I'm not going to buy that, and all I think
I'll have two of those then you do when you
put a tick in a box every four years. That's
why everybody is so desperately keen to get that information.
They used to stand around with white coats and clipboards,
and now they've got electronic point of sale when they're
bringing that stuff up at the cash register. That's democracy
(40:34):
and action, but we don't think of it in those
terms yet, because it's funny how many people will bows
one political cause and actually act differently when it comes
to actual financial decisions. And one of the reasons why
we tend to sort of think, we claim to think
one way politically and then do something different is because
you're never even really aware of the consequences in any
(40:56):
political decision you make, because it'll be years before it
has any consequence. And it's rather like living in a
room which has got a thermostat in it, which is,
as we know as a negative feedback circuit. The thermostat is
set to react six months later. You know, you would
(41:17):
really get no good sense of the consequences of anything.
And I think we live in a sort of political
culture where we never get the consequence, the actual consequences
of what we decide. And I have a feeling that
if we shorten the feedback it's shortened them, and shorten them,
shorten them, make them more and more local, and more
more and more sort of intimate to yourself. Then gradually
(41:39):
we'll have the equivalent of a sort of fly by
wire aircraft, that it's a run by each of us
as our own tiny little sort of negative feedback loops.
The way that society works, the way that culture works,
the way that politics and economy works, is much more
reflective of actually what people are doing and thinking in
the decisions they're making day by day. People think that
electronic democracy will mean instead of going out to a
(42:01):
voting booth and putting across, you'll be doing it on
your computer screen. That's much much more to do with
daily micromanagement of stuff. Until now we've not been able
to do, and we rely on vast hierarchies of controled
when able to do for us.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
At this point we shouldn't really be surprised anymore. So
there he is, twenty years before the Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan,
effectively predicting it. I wrote to Audrey Tang asking her if,
by any chance she was a Douglas Adams fan here's
her email back to me. I've always held a very
(42:39):
special place in my heart for the work of Douglas,
and to see his ideas explored with such care is
really wonderful. I'll continue being an avid admirer of Douglas's genius. Now,
I'm not saying that Audrey Tang came up with a
(43:00):
radical and radically better new way to do democracy because
she is a Douglas Adams fan. I'm not saying she
got the idea of how to reinvent her country from
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But well, I'm not
not saying that either. So three guesses as to which
(43:25):
major democracy citizen assemblies aren't getting any traction in. You
don't need three guesses the United States of America, because
citizen assemblies are dependent on being able to find a
group of randomly selected people who are willing to work
together in good faith and to set aside partisan and
(43:45):
ideological positions. And for the last few decades at least,
American politics is all about partisan divisions and ideological positions.
I have quoted in this chapter two of Douglas's most
famous and viral lines about politics. There is a third
(44:06):
in the same category written specifically about the figure of
the president.
Speaker 4 (44:13):
The president in particular is very much a figurehead. He
wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by
the government, but the qualities he is required to display
are not those of leadership but those of finally judged outrage.
For this reason, the president is always a controversial choice,
always uninfuriating, but fascinating character. His job is not to
(44:36):
wield power, but to draw attention away from it. On
those criteria, Zefod Biebelbrocks is one of the most successful
presidents the Galaxy has ever had. He has already spent
two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Now I want to make very clear that I'm not
claiming that Douglas predicted Donald Trump. It is almost too
easy to compare President Trump to President Biebelbrox. Where I
think the quotation does lead to an interesting conversation is
if we ask if the real power isn't in the
(45:13):
presidency but hidden behind it, what exactly is that hidden power,
that invisible hand of which Douglas is speaking
Frushkin. Hello there, listeners. My name is R. Vindthan David.
I'm an author, a playwright, and a screenwriter whose work
has won Grammy Antonia wards. But more important than any
of that, I started my career working for Douglas Adams,
(00:36):
and I'm dropping into your feed today to share a
preview of my new audiobook about him, Douglas Adams The
Ends of the Earth, a celebration of his intellectual legacy.
Adams was more than a science fiction or comedy writer.
He was someone with deep insights into our world. He
foresaw the dangers of our current age, from social media
(01:00):
to chaotic politics, with hilarious clarity, and maybe he even
had some good ideas about how we might survive these
dangerous times. In this audiobook, you'll go on an immersive
journey through Adams's mind. We've never before heard recordings from
his personal archive, original readings of his work, and interviews
(01:22):
with those who knew and loved him best, from Stephen
Frye and David Bidel to leading astrophysicists, conservationists, and political scientists.
I do hope you enjoy this excerpt, and if you do,
you can find Douglas Adams The ends of the Earth
at pushkin dot fm, slash audiobooks on Audible, Spotify, or
(01:45):
wherever else good audiobooks are found. Thank you. Chapter five Politics,
People Are the Problem. The next three chapters of this
book discuss Douglas's views on politics, economics, and government. They
work as a triptych since the three subjects are interwoven
(02:09):
at more or less the atomic level. Given the times
of extreme polarization we live in, it might be helpful
to give the section a bit of a preface. So first,
let me say that I don't believe Douglas's politics conform
simply to a left or right divide. If you think
(02:29):
at the end of chapter five that he might have
been a sort of liberal centrist, then I'd urge you
to push into chapter six, which explores his views on
the economy. And if that chapter surprises you, then just
wait for chapter seven. The truth is that Douglas thought
about things far too deeply to be content with simply
(02:54):
signing up to one tribe or one political party. That's
just a way of accepting someone else's thinking, and accepting
other people's thinking. Was it should be clear by now,
not something Douglas Adams did.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Now, most people in my experience are content merely to remember.
But I can't remember if I don't understand, and I
would worry away at something and seemed to be dim,
you know, because I didn't get it. I needed more
logical support for something before I could accept it.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Douglas came at politics like he came at everything, from
first principles, from a need to understand. It is not
my intention to enlist or conscript Douglas to my or
to anyone's political agenda. Douglas was a radically original thinker,
(03:51):
someone who very much made up his own mind. And
I think we are at a time in world history
where radical, independent thinkers in politics are desperately needed. Here's
what Douglas said when asked who he would vote for
in the US presidential election of the year two thousand,
(04:12):
between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Well, first of all, it seems to be extraordinary that
out of two hundred and fifty million people it comes
down to those two.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
In fact, if you were to ask people who knew
him what Douglas's politics were, you get a pretty consistent answer.
He had some causes, particularly of course environmentalism and conservation,
but He never publicly associated himself with any political party,
being as skeptical of the excesses of capitalism under Margaret
(04:43):
Thatcher as he was about the union troubles of the
nineteen seventies under the left wing Labor government. His one
official quasi governmental role was that in March nineteen ninety five,
under a Conservative government, he was appointed to the Department
of National Heritages newly created Library and Information Commission. He
(05:08):
made a statement saying that I will.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
Be advocating for a strong IT policy and look forward
to a future when all our written.
Speaker 5 (05:16):
Records are digitally accessible. The IT move is afoot, and
not before time.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Six months later Douglas resigned his post and never came
near government work again. So resolutely apolitical, perhaps not during
every election. Over the last twenty years, a line from
the restaurant to the end of the universe has proliferated
(05:45):
across social media. It has become a meme. It is this.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
The major problem, one of the major problems, for there
are several One of the major problems with governing people
is that of whom you get to do it, or
rather of who manages to get people to let them
do it to them to summarize, it is a well
known fact that those people who most want to rule
people are ipso facto those least suited to do it.
(06:13):
To summarize the summary, anyone who is capable of getting
themselves made president should on no account be allowed to
do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary,
people are a problem.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
I met up with Brian Class, a professor of politics
at University College London. I asked him what he thought
about this Adam Zien meme, about the idea that anyone
who's capable of getting themselves made president should on no
account be allowed to do the job. Rather surprisingly, Professor
(06:47):
Class had thought a lot about it.
Speaker 6 (06:50):
It is a core of my research, a problem that
I call self selection bias, and that is where certain
kinds of people gravitate towards positions of leadership for all
of the wrong reasons. Right, So, what Adams has basically
summarized in a very short and punchy way is that
for many people in the world, power itself is not
(07:13):
a draw, right, it's a vehicle to enacting change. And
for those people, they're not obsessed with power, and therefore
they're not very good at getting it whereas the people
who are power hungry, which is usually used as a negative,
are precisely the people who are so obsessive that they're ruthless,
and they're very effective at obtaining power. And so what
(07:33):
Adams is basically saying, and I think this is true,
is that the people who are most drawn to power
like moths to a flame, by virtue of that obsession
and by virtue of the things that they have to
do in order to get to the highest offices in
the land, they disqualify themselves because they basically prove that
they're in it for the wrong reasons. And they also
(07:55):
have to behave in such ways during a campaign that
make it clear that they should not be trusted with
any sort of authority.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Here are some things about Professor Bryan Class. He is
an expert on democracy, authoritarianism, American politics, political violence, and
the nature of power. Most of all, he's an expert
on corruption. He's a professor at University College London and
(08:21):
a visiting fellow at Oxford University. He pops up as
a talking head on CNN and the BBC all the time,
and before he became an academic, he helped elect the governor
of Minnesota. He also happens to be a massive Douglas
Adams fan, but we'll get to that.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
I've gone around the world and interviewed a whole bunch
of leaders, former heads of state, and authoritarian regimes, all sorts,
and the sort of thesis of my last book, which
is called Corruptible, takes Adams's idea and uses it to
attack or sort of undermine the core idea that most
people have about politics, which is that power corrupts. And
(09:02):
the reason why the title of the book is called
Corruptible is because I'm arguing exactly the opposite, in line
with Adams, that the problem, the real problem, is that
corruptible people are drawn to power, and that it's not
that power itself is transforming others, although that does happen,
but rather the wrong sorts of people end up in
positions of leadership. And that's what that quote is all about.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Now in today's politics, with populism on the rise everywhere
and strong men presidents becoming the norm across the globe,
this view of leadership seems reasonable familiar, But Douglas was
writing in nineteen seventy eight. Have things always been thus? Well?
Speaker 6 (09:44):
I think this is an age old problem, right, So
this is something that the ancient Greeks and Romans and
Egyptians worried about. This is something that humans have grappled
with literally forever. So whenever you have hierarchy, which effectively
is something that emerged in some societies but not all
of them in the sort of vast stretch of civilization,
there's this big question of who do you put in charge?
(10:06):
If you have to put someone in charge, who should
that person be? And so humans have written about the
problems of power and abuse for literally millennia. So Adams
may have been responding to specific headlines or specific players
in British politics, et cetera. But I think he's actually
tapping into something much more universal here, something that has
(10:27):
befuddled humanity for as long as we've been on the planet.
And I think what he's also tapping into, which I
think is the fundamental insight of social science, and one
that is very simple but often overlooked by people who
are outside of the field, is that the way I
describe it, as I say, every single group of humans
that you have on the planet, in a club, in
(10:48):
a political party, whatever it is, they're a non random
subset of the population. They're not randomly selected like in
a lottery, and that means that certain traits are causing
people to sort themselves. Right, So what Adams I think
is doing is I think he's astutely saying that the
people who are sorting themselves towards politics are driven with
a thirst for power that is unusual among the rest
(11:10):
of the population. I suspect that he's actually dealing with
something that's far deeper and more universal, about a problem
that's played humanity pretty much for as long as we've
braced the planet.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Unsurprisingly, Douglas was aware of the ancient nature of this problem. Indeed,
he specifically wrote about a fictional ancient civilization which was
having some difficulty managing its political process. What follows comes
from the final Hitchhiker book, mostly Harmless. Remember, this is
(11:43):
the bleakest and most deeply cynical of all of Douglas's books,
so it's fair to say he wasn't feeling very optimistic
about the world when he wrote it. In the following scene,
Arthur and Ford witness an alien spaceship which crashes into London.
Out of the ship comes an immense silver robot one
(12:05):
hundred feet tall, which holds up its hand before proclaiming, I.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
Come and please technically to your lizard.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see.
Speaker 5 (12:18):
You mean it comes from a world of lizards.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
No, nothing so simple, nothing anything like so straightforward. On
its world, the people are people, the leaders are lizards.
The people hate the lizards, and the lizards rule the people.
Speaker 5 (12:38):
Odd, I thought you said it was a democracy.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
I did, it is.
Speaker 5 (12:42):
So why don't people get rid of the lizards?
Speaker 1 (12:45):
It honestly doesn't occur to them. They've all got the vote,
so they pretty much assumed that the government they voted
in more or less approximates to the government they want.
Speaker 5 (12:56):
You mean they actually vote for the lizards.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Oh yes, of course, But why because they didn't vote
for a lizard. The wrong lizard might get in? Got
any gin? What I said? Have you gone any gin? Oh?
Speaker 5 (13:15):
Look, tell me about the lizards.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Some people say the lizards are the best thing that
ever happened to them. They're completely wrong, of course, completely
and utterly wrong. But someone's got to say it. In
this allegory, the lizards are politicians, not any particular party
(13:41):
or stripe or type of politician, but rather the entire
self perpetuating, privileged cross party elite that has been governing
most Western democracies for decades, occasionally just changing who sits
in which seats. Here, Douglas is being astutely cynical about
(14:03):
the entire political processing system, left, right and center. The
system he is saying is broken, It's always been broken,
and it's set against us. But just being cynical doesn't
seem enough. More than that, it doesn't seem very like Douglas.
(14:26):
As we've observed in the sections of this book on
conservation and the Internet, Douglas was not content to simply
be a critic of what was broken. It was his
nature to try and fix problems to create something better,
whether that was a permanent refuge for mountain gorillas or
(14:48):
new models of community on the internet. So what would
Douglas have us do about it? If our democracy is broken?
Winston Churchill once famously said that democracy is the worst
form of government except for all those other forms that
have been tried from time to t But if even
(15:12):
the least worst form is so terrible, what is there
to do about it? Tear it down, give up on democracy,
and embrace plutocracy. Oligarchy, tune out. They didn't seem to
be anything in Douglas's writing that pointed towards a solution,
and at that point I was playing out of ideas.
(15:34):
So I asked Brian Klass, as a fellow fan and
as a political thinker, if he thought that Douglas was
just throwing his hands in the air and giving up.
Speaker 6 (15:45):
So you have, on the first part, this sort of
supply side, which is who decides to become a politician,
who ends up on the ballot, who volunteers to run
for office, and those are the power hungry people who
Adam suggests shouldn't be anywhere near power, right. And then
you have the demand side, which is why do we
keep on allowing people who are so manifestly unfit for
leadership to govern our societies? Because I think what he's
(16:09):
saying is that we are prone to being seduced by
powerful people who clearly should not be in charge, but
continually convince us to hand over power of our societies
over our societies to them. And those two ideas are
very complementary when you try to understand things like populism
the rise of demagogues, which are obviously extremely important as
(16:32):
we sit talking about this in twenty twenty four, but
they're you know, it's worth remembering populism and demagoguery are
something that, again the ancients also dealt with. How do
you reconcile democracy with the sort of passions of the
mob and the risk that somebody will convince people through
emotional ploys and so on, to allow them to govern it.
(16:53):
And I think Adams again, with this parable of the lizards,
he's not actually suggesting that this is what happens. He's
suggesting that the politicians that we allow to govern us
are like the lizards, who have no business being in power,
but we vote for one because the other one is worse.
And I think a lot of people see that in
modern democracies, where they're voting not for a politician but
(17:13):
against somebody else.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
I'm recording this in the chaotic first weeks and months
of the second Trump term, and as the US continues
to seesaw back and forth ever more violently between two
different visions of the country, as the population becomes more
and more divided, between two radically different tribes, each of
which seem not to just disagree with, but actively hate
(17:39):
each other, we seem trapped in a war of the lizards.
In this toxic environment, Douglas's challenge to us seems all
the more urgent. You can even say that it is
the great challenge of politics today to find an alternative
system that provides a fair and decent management of society
(18:04):
without involving any lizards at all. But how do we
do that if all the people who desire power shouldn't
have power, and if all the people who put them
in power shouldn't be trusted to choose. If we can
neither trust the supply of leaders nor the selection of leaders,
(18:26):
what solutions can politics give us? What is left?
Speaker 6 (18:31):
Yeah, so this is one of the key questions of
modern democracy in the age of populism. But I think
there's a few things I'd say about this. The first
is that obviously you want someone who desires power, but
you want someone who desires power for the sake of
enacting social change for the benefit of other people. So
for those people, the power is the means, not the end. Right.
(18:52):
So you want people who want to rule like that
is obviously true, but you also want them to be
clear eyed about the fact that it's a means not
an end. And the point that I always make to
people when I'm trying to convince them to get involved
in politics or to do their bit to try to
make their own society a little better is to say, look,
the power hower hungry people will show up one hundred
(19:12):
percent of the time because the power is enough of
a draw that, even in a destructive and dysfunctional political
system like the United States is currently power hungry zelots
are going to run for office, right, So the question
that becomes do we balance them out? And the way
you balance them out is that the people who care
about the service and view power as a means rather
than an end. Now, if enough of those people in
(19:33):
the second category run for office, then will be okay.
But the problem is that you end up creating a
self fulfilling prophecy when politics becomes so bad and so
toxic that the costs of it are so enormous. And
this is where what I think Adams is hinting at.
Here is something that I've seen in my own family life,
which is my mom inspired me to get interested in
politics because she ran for school board at the local
(19:55):
level when I was a kid. And you know, more recently,
I've asked her like, would you run today? And she
says no way, right, because like the death threats, you
get the crazy conspiracy theories, the zelots, all this type
of stuff, the risk of violence and so, and that's
a sort of parable for the good, decent public servant
bowing out. And I think what Adams is also hinting
(20:16):
at is that the ugliness of the arena in many
political spheres is such that the moral compromises you have
to make in order to get elected those are the
ones that he's I think referring to beyond the self
selection bias that I talked about before. So you know,
I worked in a political campaign before I became an academic,
And yeah, I mean you have to make trade offs.
(20:37):
You sort of like the candidate I worked for who
went on to become the governor of Minnesota. You know,
he said to me, Look, we don't want to make
promises we can't keep because we have to govern if
we win. But also if we don't win, none of
this matters, right because we don't could actually do anything.
So at some point, the whole purpose of your job
as a campaigner is to win. And when you are
(20:58):
faced with the choice between not winning and doing something
that is potentially not what you want to do, but
you might have to do. Many politicians make the hard
nosed but often im moral choice, and so you know,
I think that's where Adams is mixing these two ideas
together to very very succinctly describe both self selection bias
(21:21):
and the moral degradation that often comes. It's sometimes called
in philosophy the dirty hands problem, which is that in
order to get to power, you've got to get your
hands dirty. What should we do about that fact when
we need people to sometimes get their hands dirty because
that's the only way to solve problems, right, So it
is the perennial problem of democracy where you have to
(21:41):
solicit votes. I'm not so cynical as to say that
anyone who ends up in power is obviously unfit for office,
but I think he's summarizing something that is extremely apt,
and to me, is the biggest problem of democracy in
the twenty first century, which is, how do you convince
the right people to seek office when the system itself
(22:02):
is so fundamentally broken and toxic that that prospect is
just abhorrent and off putting to most people.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
At this point, I just sort of wanted to kill
myself and all the lizards. I wondered, though surely Douglas
wouldn't have just identified the problem. Surely somewhere he would
have suggested a solution. How do we find people whose
desire is to use power to serve, to deliver meaningful
(22:32):
and positive change for others, and not just to advance themselves.
That's when I remembered about the ruler of the universe
and his cat. In the second Hitchhiker novel, The Restaurant
at the End of the Universe, Zeyphod and Trillion succeed
(22:52):
in tracking down the true ruler of the universe. He
is revealed to be not a president or a dictator,
not an official of any kind, not somebody who wants power,
but rather an old man who has been recruit to
do a difficult job and who lives in a simple
(23:13):
shack on a deserted planet. Here there's a dramatization of
that moment, with the ruler played by Samuel Barnett, Trillion
by Alison Cabanas, and me taking the role of Zafa
in there.
Speaker 7 (23:29):
Yes, sam shack, Yes, but it's in the middle of nowhere.
You must have come to the wrong place. You can't
rule the universe from a shack. Hello, I do you
rule the universe?
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Well?
Speaker 4 (23:47):
I tried not to.
Speaker 5 (23:48):
Are you wet?
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Wet? Doesn't it look as if we are wet?
Speaker 4 (23:53):
That's how it looks to me. But how you feel
about it might be an altogether different. Better. If you
feel warmth makes you dry, you'd better come in. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Listen, We've come to ask you some questions. All right,
you can sing to my cat if you like.
Speaker 5 (24:09):
You like that, you better ask him.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Does he talk?
Speaker 4 (24:12):
I have no memory of him talking, but I am
very unreliable.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Now you do rule the universe? Do you?
Speaker 5 (24:20):
How can I tell.
Speaker 7 (24:22):
How long have you been doing this?
Speaker 5 (24:24):
Ah?
Speaker 4 (24:24):
This is a question about the past, isn't it?
Speaker 7 (24:27):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (24:28):
How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction
designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical
sensations and my state of mind?
Speaker 7 (24:36):
Do you answer all questions like this?
Speaker 4 (24:39):
I say what it occurs for me to say when
I think, I hear people say things more I cannot say.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Good on you, great ruler. You tell it like it is.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
Listen to me.
Speaker 7 (24:50):
People come to you, do they in ships?
Speaker 4 (24:52):
I think so?
Speaker 7 (24:53):
And they ask you to take decisions for them about
people's lives, about worlds, about economies, about wars, and everything
going on out there in the universe.
Speaker 5 (25:02):
Out where, out there. How can you tell there's anything
out there? The door's closed.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
You know there's a whole universe out there, man, and.
Speaker 7 (25:10):
You cannot dodd your responsibilities by saying they don't exist.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
You both seem very sure of your facts. I couldn't
trust the thinking of people who take the universe if
there is one, for granted.
Speaker 7 (25:23):
Don't you understand that what you decide in this shack
of yours affects the lives and fates of millions of people.
Speaker 4 (25:31):
I don't know. I've never meature all these people you
speak of, and neither I suspect have you?
Speaker 5 (25:37):
They only exist in words we hear. It is folly
to say you know.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
What is happening to other people. Only they know if
they exist. They have their own universes, of their own
eyes and ears.
Speaker 7 (25:50):
Uh huh, I think I'm just popping outside for a moment.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Wow, I'll come with you. This particular rule of the
universe is clearly not motivated by power. Indeed, he seems
to be motivated by nothing other than the pursuit of truth.
(26:16):
But surely going and plucking logically minded strangers out of
their communities and sequestering them in private on distant planets,
whilst handing them huge responsibility. Surely that isn't a sensible
or remotely practical approach to governance. I asked Professor Klass
what he thought.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
There's a sort of aspect to this which, in addition
to the naivety that is required to make good decisions,
where you sort of don't take ideology for granted. I
think that's part of what he's critiquing, right, is that
this individual really clearly is not a zealot. They're not
an ideological thinker. There's someone who thinks about the fundamentals
of truth and so on, you know, queries the logic
(26:57):
of various premises, rather than accepting them instantly.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
So the ruler of the universe represents a non partisan,
clear thinker. I can see how we could use more
those in our politics, more of him, and less power
hungry lizards or less vainglorious ze Ford Biebel boxes. But
how would we get these good people to join politics,
(27:22):
particularly the grinding, difficult, toxic, polarized politics off the modern age.
Speaker 6 (27:29):
What's really bizarre about the way modern politics works is
that we basically wait for people to volunteer rather than
trying to select them. And what I mean by that
is political parties spend small amount of money on recruitment.
They basically say, Okay, we have an open seat. Who's
going to run for office? And this is precisely what
(27:49):
Adams is talking about, right. What happens in that system
is that all of the power hungry people come out
of the woodwork. Now, there's a lot of people in
our societies who have proven that they are service driven leaders,
and our political parties should be spending a lot of
money identifying those people and convincing them to run, and
they don't. They basically just wait for the people to
throw their hat in the ring, and then they sort
(28:11):
of say, who's the best candidate among this group.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
The fact that political candidates and modern democracies self select
and volunteer themselves seem so self evident to me that
I struggled to imagine any alternative. Professor Klass thankfully had
no such struggle.
Speaker 6 (28:31):
Yeah, I mean it's really straightforward. I think it's something
where you would have a let's say a congressional seat
opens up. The first thing you would do as a
political party is you would develop a committee that's trying
to identify possible candidates. You would then ask for nominations
from the public of people who they thought were those
are the proven track record of really pro social public
(28:53):
leadership in whatever field it was. And then the conversations
would begin with those people to try to recruit them,
and with the mentoring that can come with a political
party apparatus of how to raise money, the guarantee that
if they were to run, that the party would support
them with campaign funds and so on. What I'm jesting
is that there is a way in which a more
rational political party would identify people through a nominations process,
(29:17):
with a committee that then vetted a short list, then
tried to persuade them using sort of big wigs. I mean,
you can imagine Barack Obama getting dispatched to this congressional
seat to say, please, we need you. You know, would
you run person who has cured cancer, you know, whatever,
this sort of aspect, and if you do that, along
with the sort of financial apparatus that can support these
(29:37):
people to ensure they don't have to raise money every
day of the week, you can start to get people
who are willing to go into politics for the right reasons.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
In other words, we would select a bunch of selfless, thoughtful,
impartial experts. We would shield them from the dirty side
of politics, and you sequested them somewhere, perhaps in a
remote hut with a friendly cat, and we encourage them
to think deeply about the decisions that need to be taken. Lovely,
(30:08):
though this idea sounds, a world ruled by a collection
of kindly disinterested eccentrics didn't strike me as particularly scalable
or realistic, so I pushed Brian class for other potential
solutions to the problem of the lizards.
Speaker 6 (30:26):
Yeah. You know, it's interesting because Adams hasn't, as far
as I know, written about a concept called sortian, but
I think he would be interested in it, and it's
something where I think it should be used more often,
especially at the local level. Sortician is basically random selection
of people to make decisions the way that the ancient
Athenians did this using this device called the claritarion, where
they basically randomly put in They put in all the
(30:49):
sort of tokens for every citizen, and they randomly selected
a row, and those people were selected to join the
citizen Assembly, as it were, to make decisions. And one
of the things that I've advocated for is using that
sort of selection process as oversight for leaders. So, you know,
in the UK, for example, you had a system during
the pandemic where a bunch of people in our office
(31:10):
allocated effectively kickbacks. But you know, government contracts to their
friends for really poor quality ppe, you know, during the pandemic,
and all these billions of pounds were dispersed. Now, if
you had an oversight body of randomly selected British citizens
to vet some of these choices and to sort of
give them the thumbs up or the thumbs down, I
(31:30):
can't imagine that somebody would ever say, yes, well let's
give it to the Tory, you know, member of the
government's you know friend, that's the right thing to do,
right You wuld just obviously be wrong if you had
a second opinion that came from a random selection process.
Increasingly this is being used in local decision making for
less polarizing issues, and so, you know, I don't think
(31:53):
that politicians should be replaced, but I think that there
are clever ways of using random selection, which takes away
exactly the problem that Adams is highlighting here, which is
the self selection and the sort of mechanisms of campaigning
and democracy. You know, jurys are select did randomly and
we turn over some really consequential decisions to them. So
(32:13):
for certain decision making, certain forms of decision making, it
might be part of the mix that can help.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
What Professor class is describing as sortician has a more
everyday name, citizen assemblies. These assemblies are both an ancient
form of democracy, dating as he says, back to the Greeks,
but also one of the fastest growing mechanisms in our
modern democracies. Citizen assemblies are where randomly selected but representative
(32:45):
group of citizens are brought together to deliberate and make
decisions on major issues. They have been responsible for, amongst
other things, passing abortion protections in Ireland, electoral reform in Canada,
and climate change legislation in both France and the United Kingdom.
What underlies the authority and effectiveness of citizen assemblies is
(33:10):
that the decisions are not made top down by an
authority who thinks they know what's best for the population,
but from the bottom up by the people actually living
in the community, or, as the ruler of the universe puts.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
It, it is folly to say you know what is
happening to other people. Only they know if they exist,
they have their own universes, of their own eyes and ears.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
One of the most interesting things about citizens assemblies is
how they can be supercharged by technology. With the advent
of the Internet and collaborative software tools, citizen assemblies can
have not just dozens or hundreds of participants, but hundreds
of thousands, and can take place virtually and in real time.
(34:02):
The country pushing this further than anywhere else is Taiwan,
where the v Taiwan Process has revel duianized decision making.
The person who spearheaded this breakthrough is Audrey Tang, who
served as Taiwan's first Digital Minister, in fact the first
digital minister of anywhere in the world, and is currently
(34:23):
Taiwan's cyber Ambassador at Large. Audrey came to her unusual
roles in unusual ways, not by winning an election, but
by being part of a mass demonstration occupying Parliament. Here
she is being interviewed on the Rest is Politics leading
podcast by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell.
Speaker 8 (34:47):
The people who occupy the parliament opened up the conversation
in a non violent way with half a million people
on the street, and so people could every day see
the rough consensus that was reached among the occupiers. So
in many senses it was not a protest inasmuch as
a demonstration that shows the Speaker of the Parliament that
(35:07):
people do actually collease in through something like a rough
consensus after three weeks as now violent occupy and speaker
once simply said, at the end of occupy, yes, that
is the direction where we're going. And so the trade
deal was canceled and people embraced this idea of crowdsourcing.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
At the end of that year, we should pause to
rarely understand what is happening here. A group of anti
government protesters stormed the parliament. So far, this is a familiar,
if depressing story of twenty first century democracy gone wrong.
But in this case, rather than violently breaking down doors
(35:44):
and clashing with police, the protesters sit down and open
up their laptops and convene a half million of their
fellow citizens into deliberative groups. Over the course of a
few weeks, they thrash out an alternative setup proposals to
the trade deal they were opposed to, and at the
(36:06):
end of the time, the protester's version is adopted into law.
The story gets even weirder. At the next election, Audrey
and her fellow protesters find themselves elected into government and
working as a team pivot Taiwan's democratic processes into full
(36:29):
alignment with an open source, transparent, Internet enabled vision of government,
one that incidentally coped with the COVID pandemic better than
any other nation on Earth. Further, Taiwanese politics has gone
from being as polarized and polarizing as anywhere else on
(36:50):
Earth to being a largely consensus, data and solution driven politics,
with a substantive proportion of the cabinet ministers and the
country's Prime Minister and president all being independent, i e.
Not Aligned with any political party. Somehow, starting with the
(37:12):
ancient Greek idea of sortician and supercharging it with the
power of the Internet, Audrey Tang and the people of
the Sunflower Revolution managed to recruit themselves as a group
of non politicians to run a government in an open source,
first principles consensus driven kind of way. This harnessing of
(37:35):
the power of the Internet to bring together the opinions
of the crowd felt somewhat familiar. It felt like a
very Adamsian concept, the idea that we could use computers
to change the way we think about decision making, from
top down to bottom up, from authoritarian to emergent. It's
(37:59):
vintage Douglas, vintage, as it turns out, of the year
two thousand.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
So what should we model in our computers. One thing
it'd be good to get some kind of handle on
is the world.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
So let's model that.
Speaker 5 (38:17):
It's a big job.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
But then there are a lot of us, and there
are a lot of computers, many more than Thomas Watson
ever imagined. You may remember that it was he who,
as the head of IBM, commissioned a study to find
out how many computers the world would actually need. The
answer came back six, and Watson was determined that IBM
(38:43):
would build them all. That was back in the old
top down, big brother view of the world. What we
failed to foresee was that the world would not be
dominated by one or a few giant computers sitting at
the top of the hierarchy, but rather it would be
informed by millions and millions of tiny little brothers and
(39:03):
sisters and cousins, all down at the bottom of the
hierarchy where the information is. As a result, we might
gradually not even lead a hierarchy.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
In a different talk to a group of students a
little later the same year, Douglas applied this idea specifically
to the question of politics.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
Anything that involves the government, like getting driving license, social
security cardog happens at geological speeds, And after a while,
I think people are going to start taking note of
this and saying, sorry, exactly what function is that you're performing.
I know that it costs us billions of dollars, and
(39:46):
I know that it infests our television screens while we
hear you discussing absolutely nothing with each other, and that
this is meant to be terribly important. But I'm beginning
to wonder if it is actually that important when we
can actually micro manage our own lives much much more effectively.
I mean, any political economists will tell you you actually
have more effect as a member of a sort of
(40:11):
economic political culture every time you walk down a supermarket
island and say, well, I'm going to buy this and
I'm not going to buy that, and all I think
I'll have two of those then you do when you
put a tick in a box every four years. That's
why everybody is so desperately keen to get that information.
They used to stand around with white coats and clipboards,
and now they've got electronic point of sale when they're
bringing that stuff up at the cash register. That's democracy
(40:34):
and action, but we don't think of it in those
terms yet, because it's funny how many people will bows
one political cause and actually act differently when it comes
to actual financial decisions. And one of the reasons why
we tend to sort of think, we claim to think
one way politically and then do something different is because
you're never even really aware of the consequences in any
(40:56):
political decision you make, because it'll be years before it
has any consequence. And it's rather like living in a
room which has got a thermostat in it, which is,
as we know as a negative feedback circuit. The thermostat is
set to react six months later. You know, you would
(41:17):
really get no good sense of the consequences of anything.
And I think we live in a sort of political
culture where we never get the consequence, the actual consequences
of what we decide. And I have a feeling that
if we shorten the feedback it's shortened them, and shorten them,
shorten them, make them more and more local, and more
more and more sort of intimate to yourself. Then gradually
(41:39):
we'll have the equivalent of a sort of fly by
wire aircraft, that it's a run by each of us
as our own tiny little sort of negative feedback loops.
The way that society works, the way that culture works,
the way that politics and economy works, is much more
reflective of actually what people are doing and thinking in
the decisions they're making day by day. People think that
electronic democracy will mean instead of going out to a
(42:01):
voting booth and putting across, you'll be doing it on
your computer screen. That's much much more to do with
daily micromanagement of stuff. Until now we've not been able
to do, and we rely on vast hierarchies of controled
when able to do for us.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
At this point we shouldn't really be surprised anymore. So
there he is, twenty years before the Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan,
effectively predicting it. I wrote to Audrey Tang asking her if,
by any chance she was a Douglas Adams fan here's
her email back to me. I've always held a very
(42:39):
special place in my heart for the work of Douglas,
and to see his ideas explored with such care is
really wonderful. I'll continue being an avid admirer of Douglas's genius. Now,
I'm not saying that Audrey Tang came up with a
(43:00):
radical and radically better new way to do democracy because
she is a Douglas Adams fan. I'm not saying she
got the idea of how to reinvent her country from
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But well, I'm not
not saying that either. So three guesses as to which
(43:25):
major democracy citizen assemblies aren't getting any traction in. You
don't need three guesses the United States of America, because
citizen assemblies are dependent on being able to find a
group of randomly selected people who are willing to work
together in good faith and to set aside partisan and
(43:45):
ideological positions. And for the last few decades at least,
American politics is all about partisan divisions and ideological positions.
I have quoted in this chapter two of Douglas's most
famous and viral lines about politics. There is a third
(44:06):
in the same category written specifically about the figure of
the president.
Speaker 4 (44:13):
The president in particular is very much a figurehead. He
wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by
the government, but the qualities he is required to display
are not those of leadership but those of finally judged outrage.
For this reason, the president is always a controversial choice,
always uninfuriating, but fascinating character. His job is not to
(44:36):
wield power, but to draw attention away from it. On
those criteria, Zefod Biebelbrocks is one of the most successful
presidents the Galaxy has ever had. He has already spent
two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Now I want to make very clear that I'm not
claiming that Douglas predicted Donald Trump. It is almost too
easy to compare President Trump to President Biebelbrox. Where I
think the quotation does lead to an interesting conversation is
if we ask if the real power isn't in the
(45:13):
presidency but hidden behind it, what exactly is that hidden power,
that invisible hand of which Douglas is speaking
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