Peter Thiel: What Trump Represents Isn't Crazy And It's Not Going Away(zzk翻译)

最近一直在思考许多问题,例如双十一,腾讯18周年,物流,自己的未来各个方面的一些问题。

当然也会关注下美国的大选。

这篇文章是这是川普支持者,彼得蒂尔在美国全国新闻记者俱乐部发表的演讲,讲述他为什么支持川普。这是一个可以收入教科书的演讲。

Peter Thiel 是Paypal创始人,Facebook的初始投资人,亿万富翁,硅谷传奇人物,因为支持川普,得罪了他在硅谷的所有朋友。

但是就像之前Paypal,Facebook一样,他的选择是对的,川普当选了美国总统。

这篇文章的主旨是解决问题需要从承认问题开始,而希拉里的支持者生活在虚幻的泡沫中。

美国需要面对现实,用艰苦的工作,变成一个“正常”国家。

Pete虽然讲的是美国,实际上讲的是全人类的命运和个人的发展。方向真的无比重要,要勇敢的承认自己的问题,如果走在错误的方向上,越努力就越悲剧。


Thank you very much for having me here.

谢谢大家邀请我来这里演讲。

Everybody knows we’ve been living through a crazy election year.

每个人都知道,我们刚刚经历一个疯狂的大选年。

Real events seem like the rehearsals for Saturday Night Live. 

现实的事件就像是Saturday Night Live的重演。

Only an outbreak of insanity would seem to account for the unprecedented fact that this year a political outsider managed to win a major party nomination.

唯一出乎意料的疯狂是,一个政治的局外人川普赢得了大选。

To the people who are used to influencing our choice of leaders, to the wealthy people who give money and the commentators who give reasons why, it all seems like a bad dream.

对那些过去能够影响大选的领导者,那些富人,可以左右评论家和时事的人来说,这简直是一场噩梦。

Donors don’t want to find out how and why we got here. They just want to move on.

捐献者不想知道怎么会以及为什么会是这个结果,他们希望事情按照以往期望的轨迹走。

Come November 9, they hope everyone else will go back to business as usual.

在11月9日,他们希望一切想往常一样回归”正常”。

But it is just this heedlessness, this temptation to ignore difficult realities, indulged in by our most influential citizens that got us where we are today.

但这实际上这毫无逻辑,这是一种忽略真实困难的表现,那些最有影响力的人们带我们走到了今天的境地。

A lot of successful people are too proud to admit it since it seems to put their success in question.

那些以往的优势者太成功了,太骄傲了,他们不愿意承认现状。

But the truth is, no matter how crazy this election seems, it is less crazy than the condition of our country.

但事实是,不管这场大选看起来多疯狂,我们今天的国家现状都比大选本身更为疯狂。

Just look at the generation that supplies most of our leaders: the Baby Boomers are entering retirement in a state of actuarial bankruptcy.

看看我们的领导人这一代人,婴儿潮出生的这代人,已经纷纷进入退休年龄,而我们的国家实际上已经破产。

64 per cent of those over the age of 55 have less than a year’s worth of savings to their name.

百分之64超过55岁的人,在他们名下的存款没超过一年。

That is a problem, especially where this is the only country where you have to pay up to 10 times as much for simple medicines as you would pay anywhere else.

而我们的国家的人民买药,要比别的大多数国家贵10倍左右。

America’s overpriced healthcare system might help subsidise the rest of the world but that doesn’t help the Americans who can’t afford it and they’ve started to notice.

美国的医疗系统过于昂贵,美国人已经承受不起。

Our youngest citizens may not have huge medical bills, but their college tuition keeps on increasing faster than the rate of inflation adding more every year to our $1.3 trillion mountain of student debt.

年轻人可能还没体会到医疗的压力,但是他们的大学学费飞涨,学生贷款数额高达1.3 万亿。

America has become the only country where students take on loans they can never escape, not even by declaring bankruptcy. Stuck in this broken system, millennials are the first generation who expect their own lives to be worse than the lives of their parents.

美国的学生逃不过贷款,也不能声明自己破产。因为这破碎的制度,千禧年一代的生活首次成为了低于他们父辈的生活水平的一代人。

While American families expenses have been increasing relentlessly, their incomes have been stagnant.

美国家庭的支出不断扩大,但收入陷入停滞。

In real dollars the median household makes less money today than it made 17 years ago.

剔除通货膨胀,美国的家庭收入中位数低于17年前的水平。

Nearly half of Americans wouldn’t be able to come up with $400 if they needed it for an emergency.

几乎半数的美国家庭在紧急情况下拿不出400块钱。

Yet while households struggle to keep up with the challenges of everyday life, the government is wasting trillions of dollars of taxpayer money on faraway wars.

普通家庭挣扎在生存线的同时,我们的政府花费数万亿美元的费用在远离本土的战争之上。

Right now we’re fighting five of them in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Somalia.

美国现在在五线作战:伊拉克,叙利亚,利比亚,也门,索马里。

Now, not everyone is hurting. In the wealthy suburbs that ring Washington DC, People are doing just fine.

每个人都在承受痛苦,除了华盛顿首府的那些富人区。他们过的很好。

Where I work in Silicon Valley, people are doing just great. But most Americans don’t live by the beltway or the San Francisco Bay.

我自己在硅谷工作,这里的人活的很好。但不是每个美国人都活在旧金山湾区。

Most Americans haven’t been part of that prosperity.

大部分美国人没有享受到财富。

It shouldn’t be surprising to see people vote for Bernie Sanders or for Donald Trump who is the only outsider left in the race.

这些人把票投给桑德斯或者川普并不奇怪,他们是在竞争中被抛弃的。

Very few people who vote for president have ever thought of doing something so extreme as running for president. The people who run are often polarising.

投票的人几乎都不会去想总统的含义,投票的人都是按自己的意识形态和阶级属性去想。

This election year both candidates are imperfect people to say the least.

这届的两个候选人都不完美。

Now I don’t agree with everything Donald Trump has said and done and I don’t think the millions of other people voting for him do either.

我并不同意川普的所作所为,我相信大部分投给他的人也一样。

Nobody thinks his comments about women were acceptable. I agree they were clearly offensive and inappropriate. But I don’t think the voters pull the lever in order to endorse a candidate’s flaws.

没人觉得川普攻击女性的话合适。但是投票并不是看这些。

It’s not a lack of judgement that leads Americans to vote for Trump. We’re voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed.

我们投给川普,是因为我们把领导能力和国家命运联系在一起。

This judgement has been hard to accept for some of the country’s most fortunate, prominent people.

这个国家的精英群体很难接受这种判断。

It’s certainly been hard to accept for Silicon Valley where many people have learnt to keep quiet if they dissent from the coastal bubble.

硅谷的人肯定难以接受这个结果。

Louder voices have sent a message that they do not intend to tolerate the views of one half of the country.

这些能发出更大声音的群体,他们一直在表态:他们不接受美国另外一半人的看法。

This intolerance has taken on some bizarre forms.

这种不同意用一种奇怪的方式表达出来。

The Advocate, a magazine which once praised me as a gay innovator even published an article saying that as of now I am, and I quote “not a gay man”, unquote, because I don’t agree with their politics.

The Advocate(一家同性恋群体杂志),曾经表扬我(Pete本人是同性恋)。

因为我支持川普,他们公开发文把我开除Gay籍

The lie behind the buzzword of “diversity” could not be made more clear.

这就叫”精分”。

If you don’t conform, then you don’t count as diverse, no matter what your personal background.

如果你不同意他们的观点,你就将被”精分”。

Faced with such contempt, why do voters still support Donald Trump? Even if they think the American situation is serious why would they think that Trump, of all people, could make it better?

面对这样的大环境,为什么还有人投票给川普?美国面对这样的困境,为什么这些人,觉得川普能做得更好?

I think it’s because of the big things that Trump gets right.

我觉得,川普在大是大非的问题的方向上是对的。

For example: free trade has not worked out well for all of America.

比如:自由贸易没有惠及全体美国人。

It helps Trump that the other side just doesn’t get it. All of our elites preach free trade.

川普明白精英们喜欢自由贸易,他们不懂这个道理。

The highly educated people who make public policy explain that cheap imports make everyone a winner according to economic theory.

那些受过高等教育的人,他们永远向大家解释:更低廉的进口产品,可以让所有人受益。因为这是经济理论。

But in actual practice we’ve lost tens of thousands of factories, millions of jobs to foreign trade. The heartland has been devastated.

但实际是什么?我们在对外贸易中,失去了成千上万的工厂,数以百万计的工作。核心城市彻底沦为废土

Maybe policymakers really believe that nobody loses or maybe they don’t worry about it too much because they think they’re among the winners.

政策的制定者可能觉得无所谓,因为他们是赢家。

The sheer size of the US trade deficit shows that something has gone badly wrong.

自由贸易中美国的困境说明:我们有大麻烦。

The most developed country in the world should be exporting capital to less developed countries. Instead the US is importing more than $500 billion every year. That money flows into financial assets, it distorts our economy in favour of more banking and more financialisation and it gives the well-connected people who benefit a reason to defend the status quo.

最发达的国家按道理来讲应该输出资本到欠发达国家(中国),但美国现在要进口超过5000亿美金的产品。这些钱流入金融财阀手中,这也是权贵们受益,愿意维持现状的原因。

But not everyone benefits, and the Trump voters know it. I think Trump voters are also tired of war. We’ve been at war for 15 years and we’ve spent more than $4.6 trillion. More than 2 million people have lost their lives and more than 5000 US soldiers have been killed.

但不是所有人受益,投川普的人知道这点。我相信川普的支持者也厌倦了战争。我们打了15年的仗,我们花掉了4万6千亿美金。2百万人失去生命,5000多名美国士兵阵亡。

But we haven’t won.

而且我们没有赢。

The Bush administration promised that $50 billion could bring democracy to Iraq. Instead, we’ve squandered 40 times as much to bring about chaos.

布什曾经说投入500亿美金可以给伊拉克带来民主。但是,我们投入了40倍于此的数额,最重得到了混乱。

Yet even after these bipartisan failures, the Democratic party is more hawkish today than at any time since it began the war in Vietnam.

但是,在这些两党共同造成的失败之后,民主党变得更为鹰派(自越战以来)。

Harking back to the no-fly zone that Bill Clinton enforced over Iraq before Bush’s failed war, now Hillary Clinton has called for a no-fly zone over Syria.

回想起比尔克林顿在伊拉克建立的禁飞区,现在希拉里克林顿又想在叙利亚建立禁飞区。

Incredibly, that would be a mistake even more reckless than invading Iraq since most planes flying over Syria today are Russian planes.

不敢想象的是,这个行为比进攻伊拉克更鲁莽,因为现在俄罗斯控制叙利亚,上空飞的都是俄罗斯的飞机。

Clinton’s proposed course of action would do worse than involve us in a messy civil war, it would risk a direct nuclear conflict. What explains this eagerness to escalate the dangerous situation? How can Hillary Clinton be so wildly over-optimistic about the outcome of war?

希拉里克林顿的计划比发动内战还要糟,会让我们直接面对核战争的威胁。为什么希拉里能对战争的结果如此乐观?

I would suggest that it comes from a lot of practice. For a long time our elites have been in the habit of denying difficult realities.

我希望所有的决策都是基于实事求是。我们的精英们太习惯于否认现实的困难了。

That’s how bubbles form.

这就是泡沫的来源。

Wherever there is a hard problem but people want to believe in an easy solution they will be tempted to deny reality and inflate a bubble.

一旦人们开始忽视现实的困难,去走”捷径”,泡沫就产生了。

Something about the experience of the Baby Boomers, whose lives have been so much easier than their parents’ or their children’s has led them to buy into bubbles again and again and again.

婴儿潮时代就是这样,家长和孩子们建立在泡沫之上的生活,很”轻松”。

The Trade Bubble says “everyone’s a winner”, the war bubble says “victory is just around the corner”, but these over-optimistic stories simply haven’t been true and voters are tired of being lied to.

自由贸易的泡沫则是:”每个人都是赢家”,战争的泡沫:”胜利唾手可得”,但这些过于乐观的故事从来不实真的,投票给川普的人早已厌倦了谎言。

It was both insane and somehow inevitable that DC insiders expected this election to be a rerun between the two political dynasties who led us through the two most gigantic financial bubbles of our time.

华盛顿的那些人期望这次大选也只是两党王权交替的游戏,能够带领我们顺利的度过两次最大的经济泡沫,这种想法太过疯狂,对于他们又是不可避免。

President George W. Bush presided over the inflation of a housing bubble so big that its collapse is still causing economic stagnation today. But what’s strangely forgotten is that last decade’s housing bubble was just an attempt to make up for the gains that had been lost in the decade before that.

布什总统时代制造的泡沫仍然在使得我们现在的经济停滞。。。。

In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton presided over an enormous stock market bubble and a devastating crash in 2000 just as his second term was coming to an end.

1990年代,克林顿总统搞出来一次大的股市泡沫,在2000大崩溃。他的第二届任期也提前结束了。

That’s how long the same people have been pursuing the same disastrous policies.

只要我们一直持续灾难性的政策,就会一直这样走下去。

Now that someone different is in the running, someone who rejects the false reassuring stories that tell us everything is fine, his larger-than-life persona attracts a lot of attention. Nobody would suggest that Donald Trump is a humble man. But the big things he’s right about amount to a much needed dose of humility in our politics.

现在总算有人跳出来说真话,面对这些。川普不是个善类,但是在大方向上,他是正确的。

Very unusually for a presidential candidate, he has questioned the core concept of American exceptionalism.

没有人,像他那样,质疑美国的"天然伟大”。

He doesn’t think the force of optimism alone can change reality without hard work.

他不认为乐观就能解决现实的困难。

Just as much as it’s about making America great, Trump’s agenda is about making America a normal country.

川普不想再编织“美国的伟大”,他要的是美国重新成为”正常国家”。

A normal country doesn’t have a half-trillion dollar trade deficit. A normal country doesn’t fight five simultaneous undeclared wars.

一个正常的国家,不会有5000亿美金的贸易逆差。

一个正常的国家,不会同时与五个国家不宣而战。

In a normal country the government actually does its job. And today it’s important to recognise that the government has a job to do.

一个正常的政府,要踏踏实实干好本分的事物。

今天,我们的政府,首先要明确自己的本分。

Voters are tired of hearing conservative politicians say that government never works.

投票给川普的人,已经厌倦了不工作的政府。

They know the government wasn’t always this broken.

他们知道,现在的政府是崩坏的,应该恢复正常。

The Manhattan Project, the interstate highway system, the Apollo program, whatever you think of these ventures you cannot doubt the competence of the government that got them done.

我们过去的政府完成了很多壮举:曼哈顿工程,夸州的高速公路,阿波罗登月项目。

But we have fallen very far from that standard.

但是我们的政府离那个标准已经降格太多太多。

We cannot let free market ideology serve as an excuse for decline.

我们不能用市场经济的意识形态来作为衰退的接口。

No matter what happens in this election, what Trump represents isn’t crazy and it’s not going away.

不管这次大选发生了什么,川普肯定不是疯狂的那个人。

He points towards a new republican party beyond the dogmas of Reaganism.

他的方向超越了里根的保守主义。

He points even beyond the remaking of one party to a new American politics that overcomes denial, rejects bubble thinking and reckons with reality.

他要的是面对现实,拒绝泡沫。

When the distracting spectacles of this election season are forgotten and the history of our time is written, the only important question will be whether or not that new politics came too late.

当竞选的硝烟散去,历史被写下,我们将见证,这样的改变,是否已经来的太迟。

Thank you.

谢谢大家。



参考文章:

https://www.douban.com/note/591675525/『阿男闲聊』Peter Thiel: What Trump Represents Isn't Crazy And It's Not Going Away

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