Hey, they called it “the best”, not me. It’s pretty dang good though. Mostly, to me, since it’s my thing, is that it contains both the psychology of humanity and the great and evil leaders. History books, especially textbooks, will start a chapter with something like, “the people were restless…”. Code for either someone had whipped up their fear of something, or they were oppressed and hungry and desperate because someone really was taking their stuff.
https://youtu.be/kf-bSAnW_E0?t=2390
I skipped to a bit of comedic relief, a clip where some evil lieutenants of some kind are questioning if they are actually the “baddies”. A good point is made that evil, whatever form it takes, has to come up with a story to get people on board, to fight for the cause. The enemy then is idealism, the certainty that the cause is correct and the rules of decency can be set aside for it.
He refers to the “loss of the sense of the tragic”, an earlier bookmarked section at 7:34. It’s the sense that human nature is pretty bad, and your neighbor can turn on you, and people on another continent don’t matter, that slavery is okay. Those are tragedies that many of us don’t face on a daily basis anymore. It was common 120 years ago, and worse the further back you go. As a child in the 60s, I only saw the tragedy of the Nazis in black and white film. It was ancient history to me, and it seemed everyone agreed we wouldn’t let that happen again. But, here we are.
He goes to the possibility of nuclear war, near the end of this talk, and the paradox that the nuclear threat kept us out of another World War. He doesn’t say much about the proxy killing or the take over by corporations, but his point remains, that human nature includes fear and poor logic that believes in utopian vision, and if we don’t address that, we’ll repeat the cycles of history.