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Transcript
Rob Johnson:
I’m here today with a dear friend and colleague, Andrew Sheng, who helped me early on in the experience of INET get much better acquainted with Asia and Asian philanthropy at the Fung Global Institute. He’s been a Securities regulator, he’s been a really, really creative thinker. He’s a member of our Global Commission on Economic Transformation, and it’s just a delight to see you in CGET, and continue exploring. Welcome, Andrew.
Andrew Sheng:
Thank you very much, Rob. It’s a real pleasure.
Rob Johnson:
So, I said to you at the start of our pre-discussion, what’s on the platter is a splatter. We’ve got a world right now that is divisive across, how they say, the tectonic plates of different philosophical systems. We’ve got divisiveness within countries like the United States which has been, obviously, quite daunting for the world because it’s considered kind of a metronome or a leader of the world system. We have environmental crisis on the horizon. We have crises of the legitimacy of governance. It used to be people would want more government or less government. Now they don’t even know what they want because they think both the corporate world and governments are lacking credibility, expertise is fake news. There doesn’t seem to be what you might call a focal point about anything anywhere other than the sense of anxiety that things are in disarray. How do we put Humpty Dumpty back together again in this world system? What’s the picture that you would paint for me? Here we are in February of 2021.
Andrew Sheng:
This is the existential question, right? We won’t be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Life moves on. The issue is that we’ve set up Humpty Dumpty, the shining house on the hill, and it has fractured, put it this way. And we are now seeing… This is not just in the United States. You must remember this. The society everywhere, families are split, parents are not talking to their children and vice versa over many issues. The Greta Thunbergs is telling our generation, “What are you doing? Why are you continuing the pollution? Why don’t you deal with climate change?”
Andrew Sheng:
And then the left is demonizing the right. The right is demonizing the left. Can this continue? Can this continue? So this is not just in the United States. Everywhere in the world you see this. Okay. Now, some societies are better at managing this, others are now, as you have seen, engaging in military coups or migrations, because they don’t like what they see, they don’t know how to handle this. But I came to the conclusion, we are in one world. We are all in the same boat. Demonizing each other won’t solve anything. Cooperation, but competing at the same time. TINA, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, there is no alternative except cooperation. Because the alternative-
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, extermination is the alternative.
Andrew Sheng:
Exactly. Exactly. Buckminster Fuller put this very well in the ’80s. “Mankind is on a critical path between, on the one hand nuclear Armageddon, and the other one, slow climate warming and ultimate human extinction.” So we have to tread that path and work together on the same spaceship earth and steer it so that we can resolve all these problems. And what major problem did we have? In my view, the mind. The way we have looked at the world is to look at the 21st century with 19th century and earlier glasses. If we tell everybody that we’re wearing pink glasses, the world will be pink. But the world is not pink, right? The world is not pink because the world is both light and dark, and if you search for only solutions in the light, let’s call it rational thinking, you forget that there is the other side which is in the dark, which is our emotional side, which is our angry side.
Andrew Sheng:
So, we suppose in the scientific age, in the age of reason, and our anger is that that reason has excluded our emotional side. And so our anger is with reason, and this showed up on January the 6th, because suddenly I realized, “My goodness, after the elections you would have thought everything is… The rules of the game is very clear. The majority has won.” But then 47% says, “No, we deny this. This is rigged.” So reason and anger are now polarized. Now, the new president, his job is to heal because if he does not heal internally, he cannot heal externally. The world is split now, as the cliché is, Trump may be gone, but Trump hasn’t gone.
Andrew Sheng:
The issue is that since 2016 we have seen the rise of anger in rich societies, but that anger was always there even in the poor societies. Why do people migrate? Because they are angry that their governments are not helping them. That they are facing climate change, no food, no water and civil strife, and therefore they want to migrate. And if they migrate, their migration itself creates eddies of political discussion in the rich countries. So, Trump wants to build a wall, Europe doesn’t know how to handle this. And the issue is not to say, “Well, I’ll build a wall.” How do we solve our common problems? If you do not solve the problems of the people who migrate, they will migrate to your cooler climate, where is richer and with more food. And that’s what’s happening.
Andrew Sheng:
The bottom line is that the elite has forgotten about the masses, and a lot of these ideological fights is between plutocrats. It’s the elites that are fighting the other elite claiming to represent the masses. And the problem is that that ideology has not delivered. The problem is that that ideology has been corrupted because part of that plutocracy, the elite, has benefited themselves on the claim that they’re going to go for justice, rule of law, freedom, et cetera, et cetera, and yet the middle classes have never felt more in despair. They have become the precariat, right? They don’t know where their health is going to come from, they don’t know where their next job is going to come from, next income is going to come from, where they’re going to feed their families.
Rob Johnson:
Where their children are going to find opportunity. This is one of the most haunting things. They don’t think their children… If I get sick, I think my children go down the drain with me, because there isn’t an underpinning ladder of opportunity within these societies.
Andrew Sheng:
Exactly. Exactly. And so, now, once that is stated, then the divide at the elitist, one says, “Less government,” the other says, “More government.” And we know, one says, “More government in terms of military spending,” and the other says, “More government in terms of spending for the poor.” So, you get these very jumbled up and tangled but highly emotive demonizing of each other. And if you try to be objective you suddenly find, “My goodness, objectivity is not right because we and the community, the context, is one. I, as an individual, has responsibility for the collective.” We cannot pretend that every air I breathe, everything I consume, every time I drive, I am polluting the environment. And this may be so negligible but the negligibility, externality of billions, nearly eight billion, is polluting the whole climate.
Rob Johnson:
When every time I walk into a restaurant without a mask on, I’m putting other people at risk with the coronavirus.
Andrew Sheng:
Exactly.
Rob Johnson:
Any time I shoot a gun where guns are legal, I run the risk of that bullet going through another person’s body. There’s a lot of interactive dimensions which I might call moral dilemmas because the freedom to do and the freedom from intrusion by someone else are not mutually exclusive notions.
Andrew Sheng:
Rob, you introduced me to Stephen Toulmin who wrote about Cosmopolis, and he was the one who said that the Cartesian-Newtonian revolution which set the west into science started with the division of mind and body. Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” Yesterday afternoon taking a walk just to get some fresh air, I am reminded of that African saying, “We think, therefore we are. We are a community.” Yeah, we are. But actually it’s more than we are, because I am is a moment in time. But actually thinking and acting are one, right? This is Wang Yangming, was the Ming dynasty philosopher, knowledge and action are one. And actually, the minute you say that knowledge and action are one, we think, we act and we become.
Andrew Sheng:
Every one of us think. Either we think for ourselves or we think for the community. And then, if our thinking is wrong, our actions are wrong. I’m not saying that is absolutely right or wrong because what is right can be later be wrong, and what is wrong is later turn out to be right. So, the point is that… But we become because we unfold. The society unfolds. We are in the Big Bang. The earth is evolving all the time. Each individual with how many trillions of neurons in our mind is firing and interacting at the same time. Each human being is a open complex giant system. And an individual is now interacting with some point eight billion people, and with the planet, with all the species.
Andrew Sheng:
So the whole earth is one open giant complex system. Now, we fight over fossil fuel, but the 90% of the energy of the world comes from the sun, and fossil fuel is basically the sun converted into dead matter which we now burn for our own use. If we actually use the sun for solar energy, we have a lot of plentiful of resources that we can use. So technology would enable us to work together, and so we should be working on the moonshot of converting free solar energy into circular economy, recycling the green, right? Helping each other rather than fighting each other. That is the more hopeful side of technology rather than the technology of making more sophisticated nuclear bombs or greater sort of cruise missiles or drones, or whatever. That, to me, has to be the way for mankind to move forward. It’s a mindset issue.
Rob Johnson:
So let me bring us to the US-China interface. You talked about the elites and plutocrats fighting with each other, and this and that. The story I would tell about the US and China was, at some level, it was a beautiful thing to see over a billion people engage on a trajectory of economic development. They learned from local technological infusion, from gaming skills practices and so forth. At the same time, because this wasn’t the island of Tonga, this was over a billion people, the ramifications for the livelihood, the wages, the opportunity of people, particularly in the manufacturing sector at the start, was threatened. And the United States did not create what I would call adjustment assistance. They allowed the people to suffer and to perish.
Rob Johnson:
They go to the cities that were impacted by globalization. The restaurants closed up, the movie theaters closed down, the schools didn’t have revenue, and you went into a downward spiral. Yet we talk about free trade. Everybody can be better off and nobody worse off, provided you do the transfers. There was a thing that the US Treasury has had which was the assessment each year of whether someone is, “the currency manipulator,” keeping an undervalued currency to promote their export surplus.
Rob Johnson:
In the United States the foreign direct investment companies, we can talk about Walmart or Nike or a whole bunch more, all lobbied against China be called a currency manipulator as the stressful adjustment was going on. The winners all lobbied to have tax cuts and to keep their money offshore, and turn tax evasion into tax avoidance, which is the legal rather illegal way of hiding your revenue. And then Wall Street thought they were going to get into China and help modernize and integrate the financial markets, and that didn’t play out. And then America also, with its comparative engine in what we call the tech sector, thought their cyber platforms would be pervasive, particularly as commercial platforms like Amazon.com around the world.
Rob Johnson:
None of these things panned out, and China 2025 comes along and companies are saying, “I did a foreign direct investment, I did a technology transfer, now they’ve replicated my firm and the competitor is favored by the government. We’re losing market share.” Even before Donald Trump. 2014. You can go to Council on Foreign Relations reports by all kinds of… Kurt Campbell and Mr. Stilwell, and all these people are citing these grievances. But what are they? Those are grievances of one segment of power vis-à-vis Chinese power. And what they did in what I’ll call genius of Donald Trump, was they went to the disadvantaged, the people who were trampled by the adjustment that I described at the outset, and said, “We’re going to defend you,” as they went to fight about pharmaceutical and movie property rights and Wall Street access.
Rob Johnson:
So the whole game shifted when the American interests felt like, if you will, China wasn’t adopting to our pattern of leadership and comparative advantage, and then we mobilized the anger from the previous window of time to be anti-Chinese. And when I talk to people, and sometimes you were with me at the meetings in China, Chinese leaders, they would say, “We had no power over this. The Americans didn’t handle their domestic transformation while knowingly engaging in this large globalization, and now we’re being demonized. I understand there’s pain there but I don’t know how to counteract it.”
Rob Johnson:
So now we come with fights that are taking place about the powerful versus the powerful, the people who were trampled had their emotions enlisted in this nationalistic-type politics, but they’re not getting any payback or reparations or whatever you want to call it. And, climate challenge that requires the cooperation, not extermination, that you described at the outset, is right on center stage. How do we unravel and overcome this story that I just told that leads to dysfunction, exacerbation rather than amelioration of social inequality, and runs the risk of destroying the earth? Where do we go? How do we heal this?
Andrew Sheng:
I think it takes humility from both sides.
Rob Johnson:
That’s the I Ching talking.
Andrew Sheng:
Yeah, yeah, it is the I Ching. It is the I Ching. I mean, when they talk about decoupling, they talk about… I put it down to something that most people… Well, not everybody goes through divorces, but divorces are getting more common. Divorces is the result of a loss of love, and then it’s moving to hatred or worse, completely ignoring each other and talking past each other. And it’s extremely painful. So, the US-China has been love affair, I mean in the sense that America, because of their missionary history in China, had a very beautiful view of the poverty-downtrodden China. But America supported the nationalist, the communists tried to deal with some of the internal issues. Anyway, the communists won, and then there was this period of demonization again. The Bamboo Curtain, the Iron Curtain.
Andrew Sheng:
And then in the competition against the Soviet Union, China was sought out as the ally to balance. And so, if you really go back to that recent history, including the recent strategy towards decoupling, strategic decoupling, if you really go back to that history from ‘78, the first priority at that time US-China relations was not because of humanitarian issues. It was as a bulwark against Soviet Union’s rise. Right? And now China has, instead of the Soviet Union, China has emerged as the strategic competitor. So, then, this demonization begins. So, in the demonization that starts, the Chinese on the other side has always admired America.
Andrew Sheng:
In Chinese, the Chinese word for America is beautiful country. San Francisco is the golden hill, right? So, there is this idea amongst the Chinese that America is the land of free and hope, and to be admired and to be copied. So, to a large extent, since 1978, not just tens of millions, probably a hundred million to three hundred million have learned American and Hollywood films, students studying at the top universities. Why do they come? It is, how shall I say? Copying is the best form of admiration. They want to be like you. But then, when you go back to China, as one former premier in China said, “China is an extremely complex big country with tons of problems.”
Andrew Sheng:
And can you share… Can every Chinese enjoy the same standard of living, consuming the same resources, the same fossil fuels, as the average American? Impossible, because you reached that bottleneck. So, what is the limit to that? Can the free market solve this? And that’s when you come to really existential problems which is exactly what we’re discovering. Within China there is this debate. How much of the market should be used in dealing with climate change? And the answer is, well, they will experience with common markets, but will the market alone solve climate change? The answer is, no. Climate change has to be solved by a combination of state and market.
Andrew Sheng:
But even more than that is a change in individual, because if every individual decides that they’re going to use less plastic, pollute less, use less fossil fuels, the cumulative effect of that is enormous. I mean, for example, when I think in one of the Scandinavian countries they put a simple regulation that put the electricity meter just outside the electric switch when you go out the door, so that every morning when you go out the door you look at that meter, you actually save electricity somewhere between 15 to 30%. Now, that means individual behavioral change, partly market, partly state, because it depends on what happens in schools, education, et cetera, will have huge impact on this.
Andrew Sheng:
But the minute you start demonizing each other, then you are cutting yourself from ideas from the other side that can help you, and the other side is also denied good ideas from your side which could help them deal with their social problems, et cetera. That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to compete. People tend to forget when there’s this complexity between US and China, that, I always say, there is this… The world is facing three if not four or five one billion population problem. There’s 1.4 billion in China. There’s 1.3 billion in India, and rising, faster than population in China and GDP growth, faster than China. So in a matter of 15 to 30 years, somewhere around that date, India may overtake… is already taken Britain, and will probably overtake Germany. And it’s catching up as number three. But then you think about it, there’s 1.3 billion Muslims all the way from Indonesia down to the Middle East. And there’s a billion-plus in Africa, and a billion-plus in Latin America. If each one billion-
Rob Johnson:
Projection in Africa, according to the International Office of Migration, is that by 2070 it will be 5.3 billion in Africa.
Andrew Sheng:
Exactly. Exactly. But you can see already the disease, food, water, all this, jobs, especially, right? All these, if we don’t handle it properly will create massive human conflicts because we’re all competing for the same water. We’re all competing for the same clean air. We’re all going to compete for the same energy. Technology is possible for Africa to solve their problems, but we all know, behind technology is that social organization that interplay between state and market, not one or the other. The interplay. In fact, there’s three. It’s state, market and society. All three will interact how you use technology positively or negatively.
Rob Johnson:
Yes. And in the United States many people take that triad, let’s say from the vantage point of society, they may trust neither the state or the market because they think that the large participants in the market dominate and capture the state, and it, how do I say it? The state is used to subsidize the powerful to the detriment of the many. And that’s part of where Trumpism comes from.
Andrew Sheng:
Yeah. But if you just… I mean, America has got lots of issues that is now coming to the surface, but I’m just at a point of reading, I haven’t finished it yet, Arthur Kleinman’s book Deep China. He’s a psychoanalyst, he’s an anthropologist. He was the head of the Harvard Asian Center. And he wrote this book which is a collection of analyses of Deep China. Deep China really is saying, “Let’s not look at the surface issues of economics or politics. Let’s deep down goes into the minds of hundreds of millions of Chinese who are migrating out from the rural side to the urban area, who have dealt with the problems of the cultural revolution, the complexity of modernity,” right?
Rob Johnson:
The structural families on the farm that are disintegrating, all the things.
Andrew Sheng:
Exactly. Exactly.
Rob Johnson:
It’s like the Wizard of Oz played out in China now.
Andrew Sheng:
Exactly. That’s right. But the west don’t read about this because a lot of this internal discussion is in Chinese, which is not accessible to non-Chinese readers. But that debate is ongoing. And that debate, increasingly, comes from the young who have huge aspirations about better jobs, better environment, family relations, and the whole Chinese New Year which is a family time, same as Thanksgiving is a family time, is no longer possible because the grandparents cannot have the baby. Even in China, there is a social distancing going on. So, these emotions are now going on in every society. The struggle between, as you rightly put it, is not just mind and body, but the soul. We need more than just money.
Andrew Sheng:
The old days was, if I give you money, I solve every problem. That’s economics. But money can’t buy justice. Money can’t buy love. Money can’t buy happiness. And these are conversations that are going on within every community, with every individual. Okay? And so, economics, by going down that path of being quantitative, by becoming a pseudoscience, has ignored that part. Now, since 2008, we’re beginning to shift because it’s become more complicated. There’s econophysics, there’s behavioral economics, is begin to become more eclectic. But, even that eclectic behavior boils down to a very fundamental, rational man thinking. That rationally we can deal with this anger, this emotion.
Andrew Sheng:
And out of all this we’ve struggled with the core problem, how do we cooperate rather than how do we fight? And so, basically, the real danger of economics as a profession is shoveling decks on the Titanic. The point that we blame each other. “Oh, your side of the boat is wrong. Oh, my side of the boat is wrong,” ignoring completely that we have become alphas fighting in a burning forest. It’s nice to be an alpha and maybe if I beat you, you beat me up. We will deal with the forest. In fact, the forest is already burning.
Andrew Sheng:
Rob, you know, four million virgin forests in California has burned just this year alone, and how much money would it take for us to plant new trees and invest this for the long-term? So, we are struggling with these existential issues. So I have come to the conclusion, let’s not fight. Let’s not even criticize. If you want to criticize, let’s go deep down into ourselves to find where our souls touch each other. And that’s why our age lacks the Leonardo da Vinci. We lack the Picasso, which in one Guernica signal the horrors of war. We don’t have this at this point of time. The arts maybe have not caught up because society’s changing so fast.
Rob Johnson:
And in some respects the arts have become a commodity and are poisoned by the disease of what I call neoliberalism, in a way where they don’t play the role they used to play. They’re not entertainment-
Andrew Sheng:
Right. Right.
Rob Johnson:
… rather than spiritual illumination.
Andrew Sheng:
Right. Right. So, to a large extent we have seen the corruption of the old without the rejuvenation and birth of the new.
Rob Johnson:
There is… Groucho says that, I think.
Andrew Sheng:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so to a large extent, we have to, with humility, allow 1,000 flowers to bloom. Okay? I mean, in my own country, in Malaysia, we’ve had domination of a leader, Dr. Mahathir for 30, 40 years, and he’s 94, 95, and he’s still active in politics. But the issue is… There’s an old Chinese saying, “Below a giant tree, the grass does not grow well,” because it blocks the sun. It blocks the sunlight. It blocks the… et cetera. So a new generation of young politicians, young thinkers, have not blossomed. And the result is, we are now searching. After this generation of politicians, who’s next?
Andrew Sheng:
It’s an open question. It’s not a critique. It’s an admission that we have all failed and that we really need to talk to each other until we have that conversation. We sit down and have that conversation. Now that conversation could be done in the open, but it could be also done behind closed doors where you could actually allow that emotion to run so that we are able to understand each other much, much better. This is very critical, and that’s why I think the platform such as the Institute for New Economic Thinking is doing great by having these podcasts, absorbing very different voices in the system. And I hope not to criticize the others, because we’ve already reached a crescendo of this, but to open up the conversation.
Rob Johnson:
To look for the healing point. To-
Andrew Sheng:
That’s right.
Rob Johnson:
… for the pathway. That’s right.
Andrew Sheng:
That’s right. And I think the pathway will be found because, in my view, there is sufficient understanding from this side of the Pacific, in China, that China alone cannot solve the problems. China cannot solve the global problems. China alone cannot solve China’s own problems because China is so entangled in the global economy. And then China has seen some successes, but has also seen some failures, I mean, in the sense that, look at the African situation.
Andrew Sheng:
Well, a lot of Africa’s rapid growth is due to Chinese investments into Africa. But at the same time, there are a lot of non-performing loans also. So you can’t just see it as a non-performing loan, because much of that money was due for infrastructure, and that infrastructure is not completely altruistic because actually it improves all the extraction of natural resources from Africa. So the next stage of African development clearly has to be job related. How do we create the jobs in Africa so that they will be contributing to global growth rather than fighting amongst themselves because they always become a larger precariat if they are ignored.
Andrew Sheng:
So you can see the rising anger within the young Africans, and some of it is directed at anti-colonialism, and some of it directed at language. But the African is also… I mean, the global hope because it is again so diverse. We cannot talk about Africa as one unity. It is extremely diverse population-wise, language-wise, but the society’s growth got disrupted by colonialism, and that we have to admit that.
Rob Johnson:
That’s right. And some of the cynicism of the young people comes from a complete lack of faith that the elders who governed are actually stewards of the society, as opposed to what you might call rent collectors who put their money in a Swiss bank account in Geneva.
Rob Johnson:
There was a beautiful survey. I went to an Ivory Coast conference two years ago of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, and they talked about the confidence… First of all they talked about the average age of the population in the continent of Africa was about 27-year-old. And the average age of those in government was 63. Compare that to the United States, it was 37 average age, and 53 in government. And so the distance was much greater. But the second part of the survey was that only 8% of the African population thought that the government was working towards a better future for Africa.
Andrew Sheng:
Well, it has difficulty working because, you see, the elite have been trained in one particular model. In a particular model, so whereas, if you really look at the Indian, which is a really true post-colonial system, they adapted it to their own culture in their context and then managed that. The Chinese was never fully colonized, but the absorption, the biggest absorption of foreign influence came from, number one, Buddhism since the second millennium, right? And then communism. And today modern science and international global multilateralism. And they’re still absorbing it and then it’s struggling with it, okay?
Andrew Sheng:
So as China begins to internalize this, as India begins to internalize this, it’s going to be extremely painful. We need to understand this in the same way that America needs to internalize. Can America still play the role of global policeman at huge costs? Right? Okay. At huge cost. I mean, every year a trillion dollars spent on defense, and in Trump’s words, seven trillion was spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with very little result. In fact, failed societies, and [crosstalk 00:42:42]
Rob Johnson:
But if you look at the post-traumatic health disorders of the Iraq war that involved taking care of veterans for 20 or 30 years, that’s a massive underestimate. Seven trillion is… It’s probably double that-
Andrew Sheng:
Well, that’s exactly is-
Rob Johnson:
… ultimately.
Andrew Sheng:
That’s right. So, whatever you do, we must understand the long-term consequences are even greater. A lot of this is to do with how we look at the world. I mean, you see, I was trying to think through Trump’s view. He looked at the vaccine as the silver bullet, that once we discovered the vaccine, the economy will recover. Now we’ve suddenly become aware that even with multiple vaccines, we’re not sure because even as we invent the vaccine, the coronavirus is mutating faster. So, as I said, once Humpty Dumpty, which is before the pandemic, and after the pandemic will no longer going to change back to what it was before, just like once after 9/11 standard checks in airports, security checks, were accepted.
Andrew Sheng:
Today masks are accepted. Social distancing will never go back to where it was before. It’s become a fact of life. And that sets up profound… So there are no silver bullets to solve. It’s no longer one medicine to solve everything. It’s about building up human immunity. But human immunity alone won’t solve this because it’s really life is about a combination of both. We have to live with-
Rob Johnson:
There is a new book that has been disallowed to be released in the United States which is a collection of essays by social activists, called Capitalism on a Ventilator, and it is contrasting the Asian and the American experience. Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and China, on the one side, United States on the other, and talking about the what you might call… Perhaps the naivety or the simplicity of focusing on individual rights, when we’re in societies where the effect we have on each other is so profound. And the pandemic, obviously, illustrates this, and it is raising the specter of the question of whether that liberty and justice for all has anything to do with justice in the American credo, and that liberty, if not respectful of expertise and authority, which might call submitting to collaboration, can destroy a society, and the question of whether that paradigm… And I don’t know enough myself about the response of China to the pandemic other than it looks relatively more successful than the United States.
Rob Johnson:
But the notion of decentralize, let the market do it, versus deciding what’s right, is in play right now based on the pandemic and based on what you might call the analog to war preparation for meeting the challenge of climate change. So I do think what people will say is a good life isn’t all one thing or the other. There’s dilemmas. There’s lots of people who criticize things in China that I would agree there’s a basis for the criticism. But there’s no longer that utopian vision of the United States, and this book, Capitalism on the Ventilator, makes that vividly clear, that we’ll have to find some balance between mind, body and soul, and collective action and individual rights to heal and evolve our societies in a sustainable way.
Andrew Sheng:
Yeah. Healing takes a long time. I mean, if you read the Deep China you would see the cultural revolution was such a deep scar on memories, individual memories. And yet for a lot of young people the Cultural Revolution was a good time because they were set free. They made friendships. It’s a period that everybody has difficulty. So in good fortune there is misfortune. In misfortune there is good fortune. I mean, China made the right decision to close down. It preserved the supply chain. But suddenly, if you really think about this now, with the mutation of the coronavirus and the race, China bought time for the vaccine to come into being. But now the coronavirus has mutated to such a degree that the Chinese population is not immune without a vaccine to these new variants.
Andrew Sheng:
So, it’s not so simple. You see, this is who wins, who loses is not a end game. When we talk about zero-sum games, we think that not only the rules is fixed, the boundaries are fixed and the time is fixed. No, life is actually a continual game and the rules keep on changing because for every rule you invent, somebody will game it and the minute you invented neoliberalism of this idea of free markets, rule of law, et cetera, the gaming and the capture and the corruption begins. So the minute you set up a ideal structure, that structure, the Camelot begins to corrode, and then eventually the Round Table disintegrates, right?
Andrew Sheng:
So that’s why we have to appreciate that life is a cycle of idealism versus pragmatism, pragmatism moving towards idealism. But it cannot deviate too much from both. When you are too realistic, sometimes you sacrifice individual life or rights for the collective. When you are too idealistic, you sacrifice the collective for the individual. How many lives have to die before we accept that the mask is a necessity? Not an absolute right. It’s a relative issue. It really is relative. So there is no perfection. If we were to take that the total rights of the collective over the individual, that cannot be right also because it’s the individual that contributes to the community. And the community contributes to the individual.
Andrew Sheng:
So, when both sides talk about absolutism it can’t work. Something’s got to give. And that’s where we are. It is this ying-yang stuff. No, it’s an interaction of the individual and the collective that creates chance and the random. But the random itself is the beauty, because the individual… No, the genius of the individual artist, the scientist, the innovator, which later becomes unknown because the genius of everybody builds into Wikipedia. It’s individual geniuses that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And that’s life. That’s what life is all about. And that’s what we need to nourish [inaudible 00:51:29]
Rob Johnson:
I once read in the Guinness Book of World Records, what was the shortest poem ever created? And the answer was a poem that was improvisationally presented by Muhammad Ali when he was at Harvard University’s commencement, and he got off the stage and they said, “Hey, Ali, what about a poem?” And the poem that he got up, he looked at the audience and he created in that moment was, “Me, we.” Me and we-
Andrew Sheng:
Absolutely right.
Rob Johnson:
… is what you’re talking about. It’s the ying and yang of this conversation. It’s the dilemma, it’s the unresolvable, but in between those two words, hence the balance that we’re grappling for.
Andrew Sheng:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. So, there is no definitive solution. We just have to work at it in the relationship. Sometimes distance, sometimes time will help, because everybody need to concentrate on their own internal issues, and this conversation is ongoing. So, when everybody blames everybody else, and I can totally understand why they do it, because if you scold me I have to scold back. But does it help matters? If it worsens the relationship, nothing happens. If anything, you go your way, I go my way, and sometimes it’s necessary but sometimes, often, we all lose more because the relationship is gone. So life is really about relationships.
Rob Johnson:
Yes. I remember at the time of 9/11, I was living in Connecticut, a suburb of New York, and there were parents from my children’s school who died and it was quite disorienting. And someone gave me a novel by an author from India, whose name was Rohin Mistry, M-I-S-T-L-E-Y. And the name of the book was A Fine Balance. And that came from the expression, “Life is a fine balance between hope and despair.” And this conversation tonight I’ve enjoyed tremendously because I can see that you can see the splatter that I mentioned at the outset, and I can see that you’re grappling with shining a light in that constructive direction.
Rob Johnson:
So I’m going to suggest a metaphor about who you are. If you look back into the 1960s there was one artistic entity that was radiant and hopeful, and tonight I heard their work come out of your spirit when I heard Money Can’t Buy Me Love. When I heard Here Comes the Sun, and when I hear Come Together. You’re the Asian Beatles, Andrew. You’re the Asian Beatles of the evolution of consciousness and social organization, and I’ve really enjoyed, as I always do, the spirit that you bring to this audience and to me, and you keep us curious, you keep us searching, you keep us moving forward so that we can, as the Beatles sang in their last album, Come Together.
Rob Johnson:
And I’ll tell you, the last thing ever recorded by the Beatles, even though Let It Be was released afterwards, the last thing recorded was a little coda at the end of Abbey Road, and it said, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” And that’s the spirit in which I see you not just tonight but ever since I’ve known you. So, thanks for being that beacon.
Andrew Sheng:
No, I’m not a beacon.
Rob Johnson:
And thanks for that exploration.
Andrew Sheng:
No, thank you. Thank you for being part of my journey to discovery. And sometimes one looks outward but the older I grow the more inward I look. And remember this, John Lennon was very much influenced by Indian philosophy, and also [crosstalk 00:56:24]
Rob Johnson:
That’s exactly right.
Andrew Sheng:
And-
Rob Johnson:
And George Harrison, too.
Andrew Sheng:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, he capsulated what is the best of east and west, and the rest. Thank you very much indeed.
Rob Johnson:
So, we will leave here tonight and we’ll each go back to our music system and we’ll listen to Imagine by John Lennon-
Andrew Sheng:
Absolutely.
Rob Johnson:
… and think about what we’ll build next time we come onto this podcast together.
Andrew Sheng:
Thank you. Thank you, Rob.
Rob Johnson:
Thank you. Thanks. We talk again soon.
Andrew Sheng:
Yeah. Thanks. Bye-bye.
