Some years ago I realized that one of the reasons I was a good analyst was my upbringing. My parents were alcoholic, my father was, errr, erratic at best and could blow up for what appeared to everyone but him no reason. My experiences with other authority figures, with a couple honorable exceptions, taught me that people with power could not be trusted: they lied, used their power against the people they were to serve, and cared for nobody but themselves and their cronies.

In most ways this was bad luck: it certainly didn’t make me a happy camper. But when it came time to analyze politics and economics in the West, it served me very well because Western leaders from at least Reagan/Thatcher (and often before) could not be trusted, not even to look after their own nations’ best interests. They were selfish, stupid, and almost completely depraved. (Epstein has revealed just how far that depravity extended, as has Gaza.)

Years ago I wrote an article noting that I am not interested in either pessimism or optimism: what matters is realism. The cynic is not realistic, their cynicism blinds them to when people are doing the right thing, sometimes even for the right reasons.

While it’s generally true that I have a slight bias towards optimism (my mistakes are almost always expecting things not to be as bad as they turn out, despite my reputation for pessimism) I first noticed that my priors against authority figures weren’t right almost all the time when I got Xi wrong.

Corruption pre-Xi was endemic in China: a huge problem. Everyone I know who was in China agreed about this. When Xi took over and he launched his anti-corruption purges, I assumed they were just about purging his enemies using the fact that they were corrupt as justification. I figured once he’d finished them off, he’d allow his own faction to continue with rampant corruption.

I was wrong. Oh, he definitely prioritized his internal enemies, but once he’d broken them he didn’t stop, he kept going after corruption, often against his own allies.

HOLY SHIT.

I had never, in my life, seen such a thing. That’s a terrible indictment of Western leadership, but it’s true.

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So I had to look at my priors and my conditioning. I’d just, in some sense, been lucky: my assumption of corrupt incompetence was an accident of my upbringing which had been reinforced because unfortunately, it happened to be true in the West.

Now this isn’t to say that there isn’t still corruption in China, or incompetence. But it’s far rarer in China, and all indications, from actions and results, are that Chinese leaders really do want the vast majority of their population to be better off. That doesn’t mean they’re free of self-interest, breaking corruption saved the CPC because if it had continued, they would have wound up like American politicians: owned by the oligarchs, and China would have descended into oligarchy. That would have derailed China’s trajectory, since oligarchs always want financialized economies, as they produce much higher profits than industrial economies. Problem is, financial economies hurt most ordinary people and weaken the country and the state.

Likewise one can look back to occasional basically good governments in the West: FDR is a good example. He did the wrong, even evil thing sometimes, but overall he was “for the people” and it shows in what he did. He spent a lot of effort cracking down on corruption, just like Xi, and he genuinely tried to make Americans better off. There are other example, including Britain in the immediate aftermath of the war.

The fact is that sometimes governments aren’t fundamentally corrupt and sometimes they aren’t led by incompetents. It’s just that during most of my life (and probably yours) that hasn’t been the case in the West.

If it happens sometimes, it can happen again. It’s simply realistic to acknowledge that their are better and worse governments and some of them are pretty good, at least for their own citizens. (The US in the post war period killed a lot of people it didn’t have to.)

I see a lot of cynicism these days and a lot of people stuck in the past, believing that the US is all powerful, that things can only get worse and that everyone in power is unalloyed bad.

This isn’t the case, and you do yourself an injustice if you believe it, because you fail to see that things change and that they can, and in some cases WILL change for the better.

Don’t be a cynic. Be an optimist if your private life (it’s delusional but good for you) but not in your public one. And don’t be a pessimist.

Instead, strive for realism without letting your realism shift into cynicism and hopelessness. Things have been better. They are better some places. They can and will be better again, though it may be a long time depending on where you live (but remember, you can move.)

Realism doesn’t mean despair and realism isn’t cynicism. For your own sake, understand this.