Democracy and the Laminated Beam
Hi, Steve Kaufmann here.
I'm back in Vancouver and this is the second of my videos on political subjects. Those of you who follow my language learning-related channel here at YouTube, LingoSteve, you can continue to follow what I have to say on language learning over there, but at this channel I'm going to talk about current events, politics and so forth. One more thing I should say is that while I call my channel Steve's Café, I'm wondering whether I shouldn't call it Steve's Tower with reference to Montaigne's Tower near Bordeaux where he surrounded himself with his books and had various mottos written in Greek and Latin on these beams and so forth and that was where he did a lot of this thinking.
I'm not sure how much thinking I do, but today I want to talk about beams. I want to talk about the relationship between democracy and glulam beams. What is a glulam beam?
I hope you can see that. That happens to be a glulam here in my study and you notice that it consists of thinner pieces of wood laminated together. So rather than having one big beam, which in some ways might be more attractive, a natural beam, in fact, it's wood that's been cut into thinner pieces and then laminated together. The laminated beam is quite a bit stronger than the natural beam, why? The defects are distributed. In a natural beam, you might have a concentration of say a large knot or some other defect, a weak point in the beam, but once you cut it up and redistribute the defects the corresponding beam is stronger and, in fact, the strength value of that beam can be calculated, which is not so easy to do with a natural piece of wood. What's that got to do with democracy?
Today, in the world there seems to be a search for simple solutions. We have, for example, Putin, who seems to decide everything in Russia and he's very popular, if we believe the polls. He is popular in Russia, not necessarily so popular in the surrounding countries. We have Erdoğan in Turkey, who is also -- call him a strong-armed ruler. We have the Donald Trump phenomenon, who constantly says I know more about whatever than anybody. I've read more, I know more and, in fact, he doesn't know very much. Even if he were knowledgeable in these subjects, there's a limit to what one person can know. There's a limit to what one person should be deciding on behalf of everybody, along the principles of the laminated beam. It's sometimes frustrating for people that in our society there are many centers of decision making, many influence centers.
We can't get a pipeline built in Canada because we have to cater to local interests and so forth. In terms of the strength of society, the fact that these power centers are distributed is a good thing and, in fact, maybe they should be more distributed. Maybe economic power should be better distributed. Maybe senior executives of large corporations are paid too much and have too much influence. To my mind, democracy or call it the distribution of decision making and the distribution of power within a society makes that society stronger not weaker and so the attraction of someone like Trump who can just cut through the nonsense and decide.
Well, first of all, he won't be able to because the American Constitution and political system won't allow for that. Nevertheless, while it's a very tempting option, it's not a formula for success and we have seen that in the twentieth century, the kind of damage that an overconcentration of power in a very small group or a small number of peoples' hands has proven to be a disaster. So remember the laminated beam. Bye for now.