Auckland Clip 5: On Starting a Political Career

What would you say to a young man looking to get into politics?

Well, the first thing I would say is it's a mistake to be fatally cynical about politics because, for all the reasons there are to be fatally cynical about politics, there's much more reason to be fatally cynical about the conflict that will inevitably arise or the tyranny that will inevitably manifest itself if we can't handle the dirty business of politics properly.

So, I would say don't become prematurely cynical about it. The next thing I would say is, what do you know? And that's a very important question. It's like, what does it mean to get into politics? Exactly. Does that mean to seek political power? Does that mean to seek power? Well, first of all, you shouldn't be seeking power. You should be seeking competence.

In order to seek competence, you better know something, and so I would say, well, if you want to get into politics, you want to educate yourself. You know, and all the things you need to be educated in life, I mean, you can start to play the political game to familiarize yourself with it. But you know, it's not such a bad idea—well, it's not such a bad idea to have a job for a while, and maybe a career, and maybe it's not such a bad idea to have a successful career upon which people are dependent on you so that you start to understand what that sort of responsibility means.

And then maybe it's not such a bad idea to have a family because, like human beings, mature adult human beings tend to have families, and they transform when they have families because when you have children, then someone becomes more important to you than you are, and you're not mature until that happens. And so that's necessary.

And so I would say, well, make sure that if you're looking to get into politics that you're even more looking to get into competence and that you learned everything you can possibly learn that would make you a reasonably wise person by the time you attain whatever level of power you might—authority, let's say you might be seeking.

I mean, I've seen lots of people get into politics. You know, this happens with ideologues, and the way they ratchet themselves up the power hierarchy is by being more effective avatars... puppets of their particular ideological stance, and there's nothing about that that's useful. There's nothing in it that will solve any real-world problems, and there's plenty that will make it much worse.

And so if that's what getting into politics means, I would say stay the hell away from it. But if it's a matter of developing your character and then at some point adopting your social responsibility, then go for it, and more power to you because we need people who are competent and careful and truthful and courageous and forthright to enter the political sphere so that things don't degenerate and hopefully have some chance of at least maintaining themselves or improving.

So, there's... you need... what do you need to know? You need to be really good at at least one thing; you have to specialize. You have to be a great networker. You have to know a lot of people. You have to be honest. You have to be articulate. You have to... you have to have a vision. You have to have a strategy. You have to know something about history and economics and politics.

It'd be good to know something about science. You know, you have to be a polymath of sorts before you should dare to enter that realm with any degree of confidence because otherwise, all you are is a loose cannon, and you'll come up with global proposals to improve the world, you know, by waving your wand that will do nothing but make everything worse.