Both Dumbrill and Janssen talked about how western media are biased against China. Janssen offered a few examples of how western reporters had said things that are obviously not true.
The vlog on April 16, 2021 by Dumbrill cuts deeper and cited video clips of talks and debates on how to stop China being a “peer competitor” at any cost. Thanks to Dumbrill, I watched Mearsheimer a few days back for the first time. I did not pay attention to Mearsheimer before even though heard about him, as I rarely check someone out just because the person was famous. It’s more interesting or more efficient to check out someone when you have a personal need or interest to do so. After watching the vlog by Dumbrill this time, I felt that need arrived.
Learning How Conservatives Think & Talk
I am glad I had the opportunity to see how the conservatives do their thinking and talking. The nice thing about Mearsheimer is that he is not a politician, which means he can be very straight in his talks without worrying too much about how the public receives and reacts. An even bigger advantage is that he wears a hat of “expert” so can speak authoritatively, which stop many from even raising questions, let alone putting themselves in a critical thinking mode like they will toward politicians. Most people in the audience will use their dominant hand to take notes of what the expert said, rather than to debate the speaker.
Simply put, conservative scholars like Mearsheimer are the best people to listen to when you want to understand what conservatives really think of China and its relationship with the US. Another reason for watching the debate video: A debate requires fast thinking and reacting, little space or time to beat around the bush, as debaters tend to speak from the depth of their minds. Watching a hour (or 90 minute) long debate is equivalent to reading four books, one by each debater, the most efficient way of learning and understanding the issues quickly without sacrificing depth.
A Crusader Country & Its Mission
I will focus on the debate in 2015 on the motion of “China and the US are long term enemies.” But the important idea that the US is a “crusading country” was presented by Mearsheimer in his Australia talk. This provides one useful perspective to understand the US, which according to Mearsheimer is highly addicted to war, with an ultimate goal of turning all other countries in the world into itself, just like God created humans based on his own image.
In order to reach that goal, says Mearsheimer, the US will do everything in its power to eliminate peer competitors like China, even if it meant to slow down its economy, harm its healthcare system and trash its education system. But the notion of peer competitor includes enemies like China & Russia and allies like Japan, as the top priority of the US is to maintain the US dominance of the world. In a game of zero-sum for the region or the world, everyone is forced to “win by all means.” I will come back to this “crusader” notion later.
Debates Are A Fascinating Way of Learning
I watched the entire one hour 40+ minute episodes on the Intelligence Squared debate back on October 14, 2015, in which John Mearsheimer and Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation argued for the motion that China and the US are long term enemies, against Robert Daly of the Kissinger Institute on China & the US and Kevin Rudd of the former PM of Australia who opposed the idea.
The other episode with Mearsheimer in it was almost four years later in 2019, when he was invited to speak at the Center For Independent Studies, an organization in Australia for one hour 16+ minutes. The latter is less informative, proving the point that debates (or more generally idea competitions) bring out more valuable insights than lectures or speeches.
To be honest, Robert Daly and Kevin Rudd could have just sat among the audience to listen to Mearsheimer, perhaps asking a few questions at the end that Mearsheimer may or may not take seriously. But as we all know now they were commissioned to debate Mearsheimer — with a desire to win — and that suddenly changed everything!
Another point is that the real winner of the debate is the general audience like you and me (live and on YouTube), because the debate helped us understand the issue better and think differently — regardless which team won on the spot.
In case you were curious, in the end the Daly and Rudd team won and the Mearsheimer & Brookes team was defeated. The result was unquestionable or, no pun intended, not subject to debate, as the organizers had a smart way of measuring which team convinced the (live) audience more than the other. We can say it with confidence because the live audience (in Chicago I think) were asked to cast their votes on the motion before the debate started. When the debate was over, they had to cast their votes again on the same motion. The differences or the changed vote proportions before and after provided a clear measure of which team was more convincing, which is the core idea behind any debates.
The votes before debate came out like this: 27% supported the motion, 35% rejected it, while 38% “undecided.” I don’t know how representative these proportions are to the nation today, given the highly negative view of China these days from national polls. The tickets are not free so one must be curious enough to purchase the ticket to hear the debate. It is thus safe to say that we had a more “concerned audience” than the general public.
These votes meant the two teams must win the “undecided” group, who were sitting on the fence. But they could also make the original “for” and “against” voters changing their mind, as the organizer did not ask for how strong their minds were before the debate, either “for” or “against.”
After the debate we saw 32% for the motion, so 32-27=5% higher than before; but 56% voted against the motion after debate, 56-35=21% higher than before, beating the opponents hands down. What about the fence riders? They were down from 38% before to only 12% after, 12=38=-26% lower than before. Apparently, the debate convinced more fence riders to switch to the “against” side than the other team did.
Power Speaker & Power Thinker
After watching Mearsheimer across videos, I must say I was impressed by his speaking power but less so by his thinking power.
To be a power speaker you need to understand “Audience psychology” and then cater your speech to that psychology. It is best if you can speak with everyday language and use easily understanding examples. You need to speak with extremely high confidence, with a tone that is unquestionable, conclusive, self affirming or self consistency. Even more importantly, You need to make simplifying assumptions and stick to them throughout the speech, building your entire reasoning and conclusions to them. You do not want to make your conclusions too complicated, because that will possibly lose your audience half way through. Most people prefer simple conclusions they can understand and memorize to the extent they can share them with others.
A power thinker must first of all be a critical thinker, being critical to others as well as to oneself. They can make simplified or simplifying assumptions but they will come back to remind the audience in the end that the foregone reasoning and conclusions are based on those assumptions. Better yet, if time allows, they will present their thoughts on what would happen when these assumptions fail.
A power thinker focuses not on oneself but on facts, reasons, assumptions and conclusions. Note I put an ending “s” on the above items, because that’s the defining feature of power thinkers. They know facts are complicated and messy; they know any one of the reasons could be shaky and error prone; they know we should make at least two assumptions and go from them; and they know any single conclusion is almost always imperfect and needs to be complemented by other conclusions.
Power thinkers do understand audience psychology and will use it when it fits. But they will not overexploit it to the extent of only serving themselves. The goal is to improve or to enhance audience welfare more than self welfare. This is similar to what Michelle Obama said when asked about the Meghan and Harry interview with Winfrey: It is always about the public audience rather than oneself.
To improve audience welfare, a power thinker would leave open ended questions to let the audience think about them on their own. Sometimes these open ended questions are deeper than the questions addressed in the speech.
Ultimately, power thinkers all have what Jeff Bezos calls a “growth mindset,” not a “fixed mindset.” Unfortunately, even in the states it is easy to see many parents preaching the fixed mindset rather than the growth mindset. The former explains why there are so many voluntarily give up thinking and take uncritically whatever experts said about something as the ultimately final answers. They did not understand there is no Supreme Court when it comes to thinking. The only supreme rule is that the more people with critical thinking, the better off we all are.
How is power speaking related to power thinking? Power speaking is about delivery while power thinking about learning and knowledge accumulation. Speaking is giving, while thinking is taking in. Of course the two are related. To be a power speaker, you must be at least a good thinker, otherwise how can you deliver a convincing speech? However, you can be a good thinker but a power speaker like Mearsheimer, if you focus on how best to convince the audience with your good but not great idea. On the other hand, you can be a power thinker but poor speaker, if you unskilled in organizing thoughts to pass them on to others.
Will present more details from the debate, with my own comments later.