cdgr0820's video: Jeffrey Sachs: Highlights from Athens Democracy Forum 2022 10

Click on CC for accurate English subtitles. PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT: Societies have very deep-rooted political cultures and traditions that extend far back in history, for good and for bad, and these cultures are real... these different narratives have merit. The solution in a world of different narratives is to speak with each other more than we do. We in the United States—and I say we, but what I really mean is our political elites—do not speak with Chinese political elites except to point fingers or to yell at them, or to do other things. We certainly don’t even shake hands with Russian leaders or diplomats. But I’ve lived my whole career for 42 years of active duty listening to different narratives and seeing those perspectives from different sides and finding a lot of merit in the various positions and saying if you sat down to speak with each other, we would actually get somewhere... China looks today not completely different from the Han Dynasty. It’s a centralized administrative state with Confucian culture, with a tradition of excellence of the mandarins. When I speak with Chinese senior officials, which I do often, they are the best-informed professionals I know in the world. When I deal with them, they know their brief... When you are looking at Russia, Putin looks a lot like a czar. It’s not an accident. That is a culture of authority, and a cultural tradition. ... the United States, it is a semi-democratic, white-dominated, hierarchical, racist society that aims to preserve privilege by the elites. That’s how it was formed in 1787. It was a slave-owning genocidal country, killing Native Americans for a white culture, but amazingly it still looks that way, although we’re much more diverse now than we were... These are deep cultural distinctions, but we shouldn’t just simplify because we say democracy... What’s important is actually the details... We treat democracy as the good, but the most violent country in the world in the 19th century, by far, was perhaps the most democratic, or second most democratic. That was Britain. You can be democratic at home and ruthlessly imperial abroad. The most violent country in the world since 1950 has been the United States. - Jeff, stop now. Jeffrey. Jeffrey, I’m your moderator and it’s enough! The single biggest mistake of President Biden is to say the great struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of the environment and inequality.