Note: I was just on Conversations with Tyler, where we discussed Conrad’s Nostromo, among other topics. Unlike most recent podcasts, where I’ve talked about my new book, Tyler suggested we do something else, and read a novel that spoke to many of the topics covered in it. Nostromo was an inspired choice, and the result was a broad discussion that covered state capacity, why Latin America is so violent, the American right, the role of intellectuals, and more. Self-recommending.
I recently read Francis Fukuyama’s new book, In the Realm of the Last Man: An Intellectual Memoir. I recorded a podcast with him for CSPI, which you can listen to or watch here. Below, I present a cleaned-up transcript.
I probe a few of our disagreements, namely on the topics of life extension, anti-aging, and genetic engineering. I think Fukuyama brings up legitimate concerns, but the upsides of going all in on these technologies are so high that surely we can find ways to deal with them short of accepting disease and death!
Despite our differences, I believe that Fukuyama is probably the most important intellectual of the last half century. The End of History has structured practically all of the debates we’re currently having about democracy, global order, the rise of populism, Trumpism, and the loss of meaning under modernism. The book was remarkable in calling both the triumph of liberal democracy and the kinds of issues we would be facing once people got bored as a result of too much safety and prosperity, and not having a great cause to fight for. The question of how to reconcile the plain fact that liberal democracy works with its limited ability to speak to what is idealistic in human nature remains with us. I’m more confident that the main proposed solutions are bad than I am in any answer I’ve been able to provide myself.
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After we finished our conversation, I remembered that I wanted to ask Fukuyama about his meetings with Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2006 and 2007, which he described in his memoir as follows.
The tent was actually quite spacious and air-conditioned, with several large flat-panel TVs carrying CNN and some Arab news channels. I was a bit out of sorts because British Airways had managed to lose my luggage on the way to Tripoli and I’d had to buy new clothes for myself. Qaddafi in his Bedouin gear greeted me in passable English. He said that he would much rather meet with an intellectual like me than with Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak or any other political leader: “You wrote an important book, and I have written an important book,” meaning his Green Book that was required reading of everyone in Libya. He wanted to exchange notes.
Thus began several hours of one-on-one discussions (if that’s what you can call them) with the Libyan dictator that extended into a second visit in early 2007. Qaddafi was a reasonably bright but extremely poorly educated military officer who had staged a coup and become dictator of his country at the age of twenty-seven. He never had any form of higher education and his head was filled with endless conspiracy theories and crazy ideas. His Green Book propounded a theory of direct democracy in which “basic people’s congresses” would meet at a grassroots level and debate all policy issues with no higher-level representation. In fact, he attacked political representation as undemocratic. Qaddafi claimed that this would be a “third way” between US and Communist approaches, but of course it was nothing but a cover for his personal control of the country. Since he’d become a dictator at such a young age, there was never anyone to tell him that his ideas were nonsense and that he should go back to school and learn the basics.
His limitations were evident from the beginning. He had a zero-sum view of wealth: wealth could not be created, only taken from someone else. I asked him then where Bill Gates—at that time one of the richest men in the world—got his money. Qaddafi said he stole it from his customers. I pointed out that they got useful software in return; he thought about it a bit and said that Gates stole it from the companies that made computers. But I said that these companies were themselves very wealthy, making money selling computers with Gates’s software. The “Leader” then conceded that perhaps this wealth was created rather than stolen, but he quickly asserted that this could only happen in the West. In the Middle East, value only moved from one pocket to another and was never created. This actually made a certain amount of sense for a country whose only valuable product was oil that just gushed out of the ground; either you owned it or someone else did. He mentioned in a speech a couple of weeks later that in the West value could be created, and the Monitor people thought that was a big breakthrough.
After the interview was done, I emailed Fukuyama the following question:
You mention meeting with Muammar al-Qaddafi. I actually laughed when you quoted him saying “You wrote an important book, and I have written an important book.” What did you think about him trying to connect with you on an intellectual level? How familiar was he with your ideas? Did you get the impression that he had actually read your book?