My guest today is friend of the pod Blake Smith We talk mostly about Blake’s recent essay for Colossus magazine, “The Education of the Broligarchy,” which is about what we can learn about the tech elite from what’s become known as the Silicon Valley Canon, a widely shared list of books that all aspiring tech overlords should read. .

Unrelated to that, I want to share an exchange I had on Substack notes with Vladislav Davidzon, an Eastern European Jewish writer now based in the US. It began when I posted this note.

I don’t really get the logic of Trump’s decision to invade. Even if it goes amazingly well, even if a mature liberal democracy magically coalesces in the aftermath, there’s no real constituency for that in the U.S. No one will care in nine months much less two years and nine months.

His response: “You really are this clueless??”

What’s amusing to me in retrospect is that I genuinely didn’t know which way he was going to go with this, given the dizzying array of theories about the motives for this war and the fact that you can’t even predict, in this case, what someone will say from knowing which side of things they’re on. Is it oil? Israel? Epstein? Dementia? Was it the frictionlessness of the operation in Venezuela?

I’d already seen all of these theories, and more, all of them always offered with utter confidence, and I didn’t know which one Davidzon would proffer. The answer was none of them. He sent to me a piece on Tablet by Park MacDougald that was an (utterly deranged, from my perspective) argument that the attack was a carefully calibrated action that followed organically from the very well thought through theory that Trump hold of US foreign policy in the middle east, “an overdue correction to decades of a flawed U.S. Iran policy instigated by Barack Obama that transformed the globe into a more dangerous and more unstable place than it has to be.”

I said in response that this seemed deranged to me, given what we know about Trump’s psyche, and Davidzon’s response was this:

You seem to be deeply integrated into a fanatical worldview - so it seems like a waste of time to engage with that- Trump derangement syndrome is as real as much as he skillfully and sardonically ratchets it up to make the people maddened by him froth at the mouth and attack him - however - Trump - whatever his other failures may be - is a radically perceptive and intuitive about power relations. He has brutal and unsentimental and predatory and often correct judgments of power relations. He is a savage bruiser and that approach is very well matched to the way that things operate in the Middle East.

I recount all this not to try to dunk on Davidzon, but to reflect on the fact that 23 years ago I supported the war in Iraq.

I was 26 at the time, and wasn’t publishing, so I had the good fortune not be to responsible, even in the tiniest measure, for pushing us towards that terrible mistake. But my reasoned conclusion was that on balance it was a good idea. And I say “reasoned conclusion” earnestly, because even though it was a dumb thing to believe, I really did think it through in a fairly rational way. Doing something to upset the cruel status quo over, I concluded, was better than just tolerating or propping it up, as we’d seemed to cynically be doing for so long. Even rolling the dice had to be better than leaving Hussein in power, right? Right.

Every war is its own thing, and I genuinely hope that somehow this war makes things better for the Iranian people, and the world, somehow. Maybe Davidzon sees things more clearly than I do. I doubt it in this case, but it’s always possible.

My point is that I continue to be amazed at how radically differently people who are smart and not overtly crazy can view the same set of facts.

I find it fantastical that anyone could look at Donald Trump at this point and see what MacDougald and Davidzon see, which is someone capable of acting strategically in any way, even a brute intuitive way. Davidzon finds it “fanatical” that I view Trump this way, as a captive of his own broken psyche; this is evidence of my Trump Derangement Syndrome.

There isn’t a set of algorithms we can run this kind of dispute through in order to resolve who is right and who is wrong. What we can do, I think, is continue to put our ideas and premises and prejudices in genuine conversation with other people who see the world differently than we do. My experience has been that if this process is undertaken earnestly and openly, it tends to move one toward greater self-knowledge and wisdom. Which doesn’t, to be clear, miraculously enable one to arrive at the right answer on thorny questions. But just the fact that there’s a thing we can do, a process we can engage in, that will reliably move us toward greater self-knowledge and wisdom is pretty damned miraculous in its own right.

In that spirit, hope you enjoy this conversation with Blake. Peace.

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