Hahrie Han
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Hahrie Han’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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They want to have these kind of heroic stories, um, um, of, of victory, which is just not how, how most politics works to your point. Um, so that's kind of, I think one thing about that is, is really challenging, but then, um, the other thing is that in a lot of ways, I think there are, um,
You know, I think one of the things that we, those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about how we improve our democratic system, I think one of the things that's underestimated in that conversation is the importance of commitment as a first order priority and being able to cultivate the capacities that people need. And what I mean by that is if you just imagine in a family,
Like I've been married to my husband now for 20 some years. And, you know, when we fight, we can fight in a way that, you know, fight like we want to stay divorced, stay married or fight like we want to get divorced. Right. And of course, because we want to stay married, we fight in a way that, you know, kind of shape, shape the likelihood that we're going to be able to stay married. Right.
And so what, What that intuition, I think, tells me is that people's behaviors flow from the commitments that they have, right? And what we've done is we've created this situation in which we never ask people to really commit to democracy because it's abstract, because it's complicated, because of all these kind of things. But then we ask them to behave a certain way.
And it's like, wait a minute, we haven't solved the first order problem yet. And so I think that's a space where I think there's a lot more conversation that could be had about what it means to solve that first order problem.
I certainly think it's a feature, not a bug. I will say that there's a political philosopher, a guy named Bernard Crick, who has this pithy little definition, which I'm not going to quote exactly, but it's something like, politics are the public actions of free men. men, if you could sort of say people, you know, which is the idea that like, we are all free and independent humans.
We all have our own interests and desires and motivations and things that we want to enact in the world. We may or may not think of them as public, right? In the sense that I want my children to have a good life. I want, you know, my, I want to have a good job. I want to be able to feed my family.
Like there are certain things that, that we all want, but at a certain point when those actions collide with another person, there's a dimension or a way in which they become public. Right. So my desire to feed my family, you know, if I live off the grid and I have my own farm, then maybe it doesn't have to collide with other people.
But in most cases, there are ways in which in our lives, like different things kind of come to interact with other humans. And when that happens, then there's a public dimension to that. And that inevitably generates politics in my mind.
And so I think one of the challenges is that politics has come to take on this kind of dirty – have a dirty connotation in our society, but it doesn't have to be so.
And actually, one more thing that I'll just say, which might be another way to think about it, is one of the things I've been thinking about a lot since working on this book is also related to a set of questions about, you know, what are the ways in which the kind of –
models that we have in our head for how we think about politics might be different than the models that we have when we think about things like markets, which is not an original question. Lots of people have that question, obviously. But one of the things I think is
that working on this book really, I think, helped me understand in a different way is the idea that markets, we build our models from a set of assumptions about like humans, how humans form, generate interest, and then we sort of like reason up to the kind of systems and how they come to interact with each other and create the system.
And I think in a way with politics, we have to start with the assumption that what we're asking people to do in these public actions in politics, right, is countercultural because of the uncertainty, because of all the things that we've talked about. And so the models should start not with an individual, but with a dyad.
right and sort of think about it from this question of let's say we were to because politics only comes into play when you have people interacting with each other so let's start with a an assumption about a dyad and what goes on in that dyad right and then you can reason from there about the kind of system that we need and the reason why i think that's relevant is because when you think about a dia then questions about things like the construction of interests the ways in which we come to understand negotiation you know all that kind of stuff becomes endogenous
to the model in a way that i think it just raises a different set of questions when you start with an individual so it's not to say that you can't end at the same place but it's more that the kinds of questions you're led to ask if you start with a diet are different than the kinds of questions that you start to ask if you start with an individual and so it's a different way of thinking about this question of what is the system that we need for the humans that we have you know for the kind of democracy that we're trying to construct
Yeah. So I'm thinking more about the kind of interactive, the question of interaction, right? And so, yeah, so it could be an individual in a larger structure. It could be an individual in a network or something like that. Yeah. But the idea is that, you know, you don't have politics when you have individuals acting as individuals, right?
Like if we just were to reduce politics down to a model of individual choice, which is essentially what... you know, how markets operate, then it takes out the politics that are in politics in a way.
Yeah. So, you know, voting theory, you know, kind of I think to me what I object to in some of the theories in a lot of way in which the models get applied in voting theory is that it assumes that the whole is nothing more than the added of some of its parts. Right.
And so the whole idea behind voting is that like lots of people make their choices and then we add them up and we see who's got a majority and then we're done. Right. And. And that I think actually is a really reduced form of politics in the technical sense. That is how the system works.
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