From Unloading Train Cars to Oxford: On Education, Corruption, and the Limits of the State

I'm really glad to be sitting down with you today. I have to find 100 people — that, in all honesty, is my genuine goal. These are the 100 people who should carry this country forward a little further, and already there are people outside knocking at the door. Your generation — there's simply no other way but to bring you in. Why? Because if we don't, the country itself will hold it against us.

Yes — and the country's fate would end up presenting me with a debt later on, and I don't want to be in debt myself, in front of the children of the future. That's why I'm doing this work. I'm making portraits of 100 people and introducing them to the public. Of course, this is really only an introduction. And when we introduce ourselves to one another, we usually only get a partial picture.

You meet one person and, in your mind, you just register: "oh, this is a young man named Chimeddorj," and that's it. But then, some time later, you realize — oh, that was the fellow with the deep, resonant voice, that was Chimeddorj — and eventually "resonant-voiced" attaches itself to the name, and he becomes "Chant-Master Chimeddorj." That's simply the Mongolian way of doing things. I'm sure many people have told you that — that you have a remarkably rare voice. And apparently this man named Chimeddorj is the one who opens ceremonies and prayer sessions with that voice — a real master, they say, quite something.

And does the tone of the whole ceremony that day follow that person's voice? Yes — that's the person who conducts the ceremony, making the chanting come out beautifully, right? So — even though we call you "Chant-Master Chimeddorj," we still need your father's name. What's your father called? Munkhjargal. Chimeddorj, son of Munkhjargal — all right, that's exactly the voice, isn't it? Say it once more, please.

Chimeddorj, son of Munkhjargal. Yes — he pronounces those consonants very clearly. As for my own profession — well, if it were about dubbing a great lead role in a film, the kind of role audiences are meant to fall in love with, he'd do a wonderful job of it. Or as a newsreader — a "dictor," meaning the anchor who reads the news — he'd be quite excellent at that too. Besides that, I'm about to appoint you to a rather grand and important post.

And what would that be? If you were the one reading out Mongolia's state decrees — now that would carry real weight, wouldn't it? Right? Yes. "In the name of Mongolia, this man shall be awarded the title of Hero of the State" — announced like that, it would fall completely silent, and enormous reverence would follow, just from that voice. All right, I've praised your voice quite enough now. Let's move on — where do we go from here? What does your father do?

Munkhjargal: Yes, both my mother and father lived in Bayangol sum, Uvurkhangai aimag. Recently, my father was head of the sum's club, then head of the Cultural Center — when it was reorganized into a Cultural Center, he continued in that role. He's a wind-instrument player, generally on the clarinet. — Oh, I see — so it really is a family on the "voice" side of things. — Yes, and my mother was the chief accountant of the Bayangol sum negdel [cooperative]. — So an economics background, an economics professional? — Yes, my mother graduated from what's now the Institute of Finance and Economics — back then the old Financial Technicum — and later she also graduated from the Agricultural University.

Right, right. And where were you born, as it turns out? — I was born in Arvaikheer sum, Uvurkhangai aimag. But I grew up in Bayangol sum and finished the 10-year school there. — Arvaikheer being the aimag center, so being born there means you were born right at the center of the aimag — you were nearly destined to be an announcer on Uvurkhangai Radio, being born that way.

So how old are you now? — I'm 41. — 41, how nice — 9 and 40, right in your prime, the age when things get built and get done. — So I've been moving in essentially one direction. There's a lovely saying of ours: "preparing oneself," and that preparation, above all, means getting an education.

So shall we talk a little about that direction, the two of us? — Sure, let's. Why didn't you become a radio announcer? Or, for that matter, why didn't you become a temple chant-master? — Well, my very first alphabet was practically musical notation, wasn't it. — Yes.

And the next alphabet was the Tibetan script? — Oh, really? — And after that came the modern Cyrillic alphabet, is that right? — Yes, that's right. Why? Because my father tried a little to get us going in music, coming from a music background himself. And second, on my mother's side there were great lamas and the like — and when I was still very small, about 5, I would go visit my grandparents, and it was there that I first learned to write the Tibetan script.

Yes, yes — and, well, my mother's name was "Gaamaa" as a girl, and they would have me write the letter "Ma" and tell me, "this is Nomma, and this is you," something like that — that's how it was taught to me, it seems. As for my education — I finished the 10-year school in a countryside sum school, Bayangol sum, which at the time only offered an 8-year program — right — and I was among the very first class to complete the 10th grade there. Then I graduated from NUM's School of Economics — right, in business — let's say the School of Economics of the National University of Mongolia as it was called then; today it exists as the Business School within NUM's School of Social Sciences. Right, and I later earned a master's degree at that same school as well, in business administration, so I've been continuously in that field ever since. So, how did that go — you kept some gaps between your studies along the way; what filled those gaps?

Well, both of us finished the 10-year school — after finishing general secondary school, I came to Ulaanbaatar, but then I actually left my first university and went straight back to the countryside. — Why did you leave? — Well, at the time — I sometimes think my school just wasn't the right fit for me. Maybe the class, my classmates and I, just didn't click — that might well have been it. On the other hand, I honestly hadn't decided, from the very start, that I wanted to study economics at NUM; when I finished the 10th grade there was some thought of applying there, but — right, right, I see.

And then, over the course of several years, I did all sorts of different jobs before eventually going back and finishing at the School of Economics. — What kind of work — you were a student, after all? — Yes, the work I did really ran the gamut. The hardest job was at a place called "44," where they unload railcars.

At the Gurvaljin bridge — the military bridge there — I unloaded cement for a period, just to earn money, because I wanted to live in Ulaanbaatar. — How old were you then? — 18 — well, 17, really — I'd just finished the 10-year school at 17. And after that I did plenty of other jobs — I made dairy products for a while, worked at a bakery kneading dough, worked as a barber at a barbershop. Later, while at university, I also had to earn my own tuition, so I even ran a car-repair shop for a stretch — one I'd rented and operated myself.

Did you have any kind of support along the way, generally? — Not really — well, what can you say, I was young and just had to push through. In a single day, the three of us together could unload two whole railcars of cement, is that right? — Yes. Back then it really was hard work. Cement wasn't packaged the way it is now — it came loose, in bulk, by rail, and we'd shovel it into sacks ourselves and unload it that way. That's just how it was.

As for work, I think of it the same way, actually — my grandfather had me practice softening leather straps even when I was very small. In the height of summer, softening a leather strap by hand is genuinely not something a boy wants to do. — You grew up wrestling with sheep and livestock, then? — Yes, I grew up in the countryside. — So back then I'd get a bit tired of my grandfather telling me to soften the strap, and I'd try to slip away from the heat. And my grandfather once told me: "Chimeddorj, you're not just softening that strap — the strap is preparing you." What a wonderful thing to say, I thought.

I look at work from that same angle too. If you keep doing something over and over, it stays with you, it shapes you. It can be hard at the time, sure, but a person also needs to hear something like that — what a powerful line, a powerful thing to say — not "go study," but "by doing this, you are being prepared, my son." What a fine saying. Well, I've now passed the old man's words on to everyone. All right, so what happened after that?

And then I studied at the School of Economics. From my third year there — well, our school had many professors involved in international organizations' research projects in Mongolia. I started out doing survey work myself — going door to door, knocking, having people fill out questionnaires — and from there I moved into research proper; you become a researcher simply by doing it. I studied business economics, but my real interest leaned more toward economics and statistics, and that's what drew me into that kind of research work. After university, I set up a research company with some classmates, in 2005. I worked as that company's director for two years, and then in 2007 we each went our separate ways professionally — 2007…

Anyway, I just carried on doing research work. Between 2005 and 2009, over four years, I did research, and then from 2009 I went back for my master's at that same university. By then I'd saved up enough to cover the tuition — right, exactly. I finished the master's program in 2011, though even during that time I was doing nothing but research. Honestly, the work I've spent the most of my life doing is economic research.

But doing research work means constantly recharging and refining yourself — right — and research has two sides to it: on one hand it's simply a way of earning a living — right, right, right. And because it's often tied to tenders issued by international organizations, or to work commissioned by client companies, you sometimes end up in fields you know nothing about — you're not necessarily an expert there, you just know your own research methods. And that's exactly what I mean — you keep getting stretched wider and wider. You inevitably end up studying things you've never known before.

And you learn it all from scratch. — Actually, something surprised me earlier — the moment you walked in, you mentioned the plants outside. What did you say? — Well, your garden is really lovely. — Actually, that ties into something I'm working on — I'm just finishing up a project. It's a project to build a gene bank for Mongolia's rare, Red Book–listed plants, and I've been advising on it.

Right, right. And in this garden of yours, it would be wonderful to plant one of those Red-Book, Mongolia-only species too, wouldn't it? — Yes, that would be lovely — lovely enough that visitors would love it too. Actually, this touches on the bond between people and nature, doesn't it. — Right, it lives in the human mind. I came to understand that in England, because when I was studying there, the English are very…

They understand this very well, so, for instance, they'll name their meeting rooms after rare plants found in Britain — every conference room named that way. I remember hearing about one hotel — Clint, or something like that — where all the rooms were named after rare plants like that. How lovely, right? And inside, they use that plant's colors in the décor, put up images of the plant, and even plant that very species somewhere on the grounds. Because we, going about our daily work, don't tend to notice these things much, do we? But that keeps reminding us constantly that such rare plants, such living organisms, exist in our surroundings. And because of that, everyone who comes there ends up feeling closer to nature. That's lovely too — this hill of ours is like that, isn't it, it really is lovely.

And so, come spring, our garden's caragana bushes bud right on schedule — these tiny buds appear exactly on time, right, my wife's the one who planted them. And then the red flowers come out — the potato flowers, the pink ones — right on time too, exactly on schedule. Cultivated flowers are always dependable that way, over a long stretch of time. So, going forward, I think this is really a lovely idea. If people made use of it — imagine walking into a Mongolian hotel where the rooms were arranged just like that, right — named after animals — yes, yes — or named after mountains and rivers, named after this river, that spring.

Or named after our own many magnificent dinosaurs — what a wonderful idea that would be. Well, I'm sure our people have already picked up on this idea. — All right, moving forward in time — you finished your master's in 2011, became a certified specialist in 2012, and then, with your growing research experience, your income gradually rose too, didn't it? And you began working on somewhat larger projects, right?

Yes, and from 2012 I worked for a bit over two years as director of the Labour Research Institute, a research body attached to the Ministry of Labour. Then in 2015 I left that job and went to the UK — I spent about a year in Scotland. When I came back, I had thoughts of going to study in the United States, but I couldn't secure a scholarship for it. So I decided to study in England instead, went there, and did my master's at the University of Oxford.

As far as I've heard most recently, it's number one in the world. The University of Oxford — this university has a 900-year history. A university founded even before the Mongol Empire itself, and it's operated continuously for 900 years. And for the last five or six years it has ranked number one among the world's top universities — what a wonderful thing. I once saw a photograph — well, let's both — let's speak plainly and with facts here, both of us, all right? — this will go onto Facebook, right? Shall we go ahead? — going onto Facebook will make it even better. Let me remind myself of something here — actually, I want to remind other people, not you — you yourself are an honest person, I know that, and you speak on television yourself too, don't you?

But people don't really settle down and get properly acquainted before that — this getting-to-know-you is really happening only now, in earnest. Being honest yourself, and having acquired such great knowledge, having studied at such a distinguished school — of course you'd truly despise corruption and everything of that sort, isn't that obvious? — Right, right, so we'll get to that later, shall we? Now, once you open up Facebook, who knows what's tangled up and murky in there — that's what I keep telling people. Let's skip that question and go straight in, shall we?

Let's do that, let's do that. So under what handle do you appear online? — Chimeddorj Munkhjargal, or — Enkhsaikhan says — Chimeddorj Munkhjargal — right, though sometimes that order gets scrambled, and people shorten their names too, or go by nicknames their friends call them. For instance, you're someone who's fairly plain and ordinary on social media, aren't you? — Yes — on Twitter I'm quite an active user, and there's a fellow on there called "Arka" — right, right — do you know his real name? — It's Tumen — that's a real mix-up, isn't it? — Right, that "spider's" real name is Ider-Ölzii, I believe, and he's since changed his own name — right, so this one here is the correct name — all right, let's move on — what's this, this one just popped up, never mind that. On my Facebook, I post short explanations of certain basic concepts.

That "Erkh Chölöö" ["Freedom"] movement — are you the head of that movement? — Yes, this is a movement founded by the Democratic Party's youth wing that carries out political activity under the name "Freedom." — Right, and what does it say? Go ahead and read it. — "Freedom is the foundation of democracy, the guarantee of justice, the immune system of sovereignty" — that's rather good too. All right, that's settled, let's move on.

So what's next? On this Facebook page of mine there's, say — "hey, are you teaching a class or not" and all sorts of things — all right, and the next item here is about a talk I gave last year at an academic conference held for the 60th anniversary of NUM's School of Economics, Department of Management, on how technological development is affecting our lives. What was it about? I called it "imagining a possible future" — so what does "disruptive technology" even mean? Now, our lives — well, we humans are strange creatures.

If you look at the development of humankind, we've really only passed through a handful of great cycles. The very first was when we were hunter-gatherers, and then came the stage where crops were grown and livestock domesticated. That stage lasted an extremely long time. What forms the basis of today's modern era of humankind is what's called the First Industrial Revolution. Someone invented the steam engine, got a locomotive moving — right, those fellows in the tall hats, exactly, exactly, just like the ones on that silver badge of yours — didn't someone pull off something impressive at an Olympiad once?

Ah, right — yes, there's Musk, there are Russians too, in Moscow — anyway, that First Industrial Revolution essentially replaced mechanical power that used to come from the human body — from the bodies of people and livestock — with machine power. So we became able to draw on power beyond our own muscle power, and that alone was one of humankind's great achievements — discovering and harnessing power beyond mere muscle. Right, right. And within that, the greatest revolution in industry was the internal combustion engine — the engine that got that locomotive moving. After that came what's called the Second Industrial Revolution — we found a further new energy source, electricity, ran power lines, turned on the lights — that's when the Second Industrial Revolution produced an enormous new energy source for humankind. And after that came what's called the Third Industrial Revolution, the age of automation, which is just now coming to a close.

This era is coming to an end. In this age of automation, the most interesting material was plastic, its energy was electricity, and its industry was automated. Now, when did this era begin? It began with Henry Ford, the great American inventor who built the automobile industry, when he began automating the industrial production line — he created the assembly line, the conveyor line. Then, on top of that, information technology arrived, and computers began to run the automated systems. That was the enormous achievement of the Third Industrial Revolution.

Now, as for the plastic products we use every day, all around us in our lives — these are mass-produced goods, and if you look at the material behind most of them, it's plastic — and that whole era, in terms of nature, is now coming to a close. So, so — we now stand at the threshold of an entirely different world. Completely different — that's exactly why I titled my talk "imagining a possible future: disruptive technologies," because these technologies are going to disrupt, and tear apart, the life we currently live. Our very routine, everyday way of life — though that doesn't mean that life disappears altogether. It's that, in order to build a different kind of life, there are technologies now tearing apart the life we live today.

Second, we don't actually know very well what this is going to look like. I try to constantly follow what the world's major research institutes publish about how this technological shift is affecting our lives. And from what I can see, most of them don't know either. What sort of life it will be — nobody knows, nobody knows, right? Right. Thirty years ago, for example, if you'd tried explaining a program like Word — the one we use every single day now — to even the most senior professor at some huge university, they simply wouldn't have believed you.

Thirty years ago — right, there was no such thing back then. Impossible, that's just how it was. We're now at exactly that same kind of turning point — the next era is arriving. In this era, most of the businesses that exist in our lives today are going to become entirely different kinds of businesses. Let me give you an example.

In the economic theory we study today, the thinking goes like this: producing one more unit of a product incurs costs tied to that product, and you try to minimize those costs — that's what we call productivity. On the other side, producing that extra unit also brings in additional revenue. And the belief was that our industries operate at the equilibrium formed between these two flows — cost and revenue. But now, in modern businesses, companies have emerged where producing one more unit of the product no longer incurs any associated cost at all. Take, for example, one of the businesses in our own lives — the mobile operator Unitel. Today this company has, say, 500,000 — well, 550,000 subscribers now — but for that company, gaining a subscriber adds no additional cost whatsoever, none at all — it simply brings in additional revenue.

Just more revenue, revenue keeps rising. So if we look at the other side of this from society's broader foundation, what do we see? Producing one more unit of a product used to raise costs. And what was that cost? It used to flow, as wages, into households, into families. But once producing an additional unit no longer generates any cost, that extra income earned no longer flows down to people through wages. So what do we do then?

So, as I understand it, the income-distribution mechanism that has explained modern economic theory throughout human history right up to today is going to disappear, to a significant degree. So what happens in that case? Everyone still needs to be able to live, right? On top of that, here's another curious thing — the sector where the world's most intensive robotics technology is being introduced in industry, for example, is the automotive manufacturing sector. Automobile production.

Right. And as things stand today, if you bring in one machine to replace six jobs, that machine pays for its own cost within two and a half years, measured against those six workers' wages. Which means people are going to end up out of work — that's what's happening behind the scenes of this very process, isn't it? So some people take a rather pessimistic view of that, seeing it as — oh no, this world is falling apart. But if you look at it the other way, industrial revolutions have brought about situations exactly like this before, over the course of history.

Humankind has already grappled with and studied problems like this before. For example, the cargo that a thousand horse-carts used to haul is now hauled by a single train, right? Right — it's exactly the same kind of process happening again. But now, what matters most to us is knowledge. Because any job that requires little knowledge can be replaced by a machine. Right.

So we — humankind, and Mongolians especially, since we're so few, only about three million people — need to acquire skills that machines cannot replace. Machines replace — well, it's machines, machines, right, right. Because — and this fits with something I've been thinking about — why did China's economy grow so incredibly fast in the past? Because it had an enormous pool of cheap labor — that's why it grew so quickly. That was China's advantage, wasn't it, because there, people had to work in order to get ahead.

But now this is turning into China's weakness — becoming its weakness now, because — and this is genuinely frightening — if you bring in machines instead of people, the question of how to keep a billion people earning a living becomes an entirely different problem. So Mongolia's real path to development, I think, is not coal, obviously — I mean, the mining sector is necessary for Mongolia, it is needed — but let's take the revenue earned from mining and put it into education. Every single Mongolian needs to acquire skills that machines cannot replace — not just skills better than other people's, but skills machines simply cannot replace at all — and then those people will be valued anywhere in the world. It's the people opposing renewable energy, still wanting to haul coal into the furnace, who are really just standing in the way here. So really, what should Mongolia be doing?

If I talk about the general state of Mongolia's economy today — our country's economy is, roughly, about 30 percent purely extracted wealth, things dug out of the ground. Right, and then another roughly 30 percent comes from our agricultural sector plus industry combined, something along those lines. And on top of that there's our services sector. That's roughly what makes up our economy as it stands. But if you look at these sectors, our mining sector is not — it is not Mongolia's long-term development policy, it's not a shop, not…

Not that — but it is absolutely necessary for laying the groundwork of a long-term engine of growth; at the very least, the sector needs the money, that's the core issue, the money is needed — and then it becomes a question of what you spend that money on, what you build with it — that's policy, right, that's policy. But going forward, simply looking around — there are plenty of small countries in the world today competing on equal footing with developed nations. For example, there's Israel, there's Singapore, right, there's Taiwan, there's South Korea. Judged purely by population, they wouldn't make it into the world's top rankings, would they? Right. And by land area too, they're small — and there are small European countries as well, aren't there?

Behind the strength of all these countries lies nothing but knowledge. It's intellect. How does a nation bring that knowledge into itself? Right, and the most basic thing here — something I personally feel strongly about — is that the Mongolian language, in terms of its structure and its richness, is genuinely capable of expressing anything, expressing everything. In its flexibility, in its vocabulary, it is one of the great languages of the world — one of the world's seven root language families.

The Mongolian language is like that. Unfortunately, the question of whether knowledge actually exists in the Mongolian language today is a frighteningly big question. Right, and not only that — because of it, people of my generation end up scolding the younger generation, saying they don't know their own Mongolian, don't we? Right. We scold them over a word like "adasga," meaning cracked, worn leather from livestock, and write them off as ignorant fools.

But what is the word "adasga" actually used for, going forward? What's the point of it? In general — human language as such is a strange thing. Now, aren't we caught between two things here? I understand — I understand what you're getting at.

I understand what you're trying to say. I'd put it this way: we should ride two horses at once — developing and strengthening our own cultural heritage and values in the Mongolian language, reinforcing our own way of thinking as we go — while, at the same time, brilliantly mastering the technological language we need to learn. And there's another thing too: the Mongolian language is the immune system of Mongolian culture, its very protection. If this language disappears, nothing at all will remain of Mongolian culture, will it? Right, right. So the thinking, the way of life, the culture, and the history of the Mongolian people — all of it rests within this language.

So we must develop the Mongolian language — carry it forward, preserve our heritage and pass it down — and whether the Mongolian nation continues to exist or not will be decided through this language. Of course, right. But on the other hand, there's a huge obstacle for Mongolians: if you can't learn a foreign language, you can't gain access to any scientific knowledge at all — and that is a tragedy. So on one hand, we must protect and preserve our own language and culture, strengthening and carrying this language forward. But on the other hand, we must also bring humanity's knowledge into this language. Today, if you go to Japan, only about ten percent of the population knows English, yet the most cutting-edge technological knowledge in the world exists right there in the Japanese language itself.

This is exactly the knot at the heart of development, isn't it. Right — and then there's health too, right. So the two of us have now touched on three connected topics, haven't we — right, right, culture, education, and — education, health — we've briefly covered health too. And if one goes into your Facebook, one can see all of this laid out in full, right? — Yes, you can see it, you can see it there.

I'm curious about one thing — as they say, "if only I'd been young too" — do you have photos, memories, stories about your time at Oxford? — All right, let me show you some photos. — Let's do that. — So, this is the School of Government, the policy school — I studied public policy there. — You did public policy at Oxford. — I earned my master's degree there — right, of course I'd studied English back home in Mongolia, and I was in Scotland before that too — right, right, right — and then I arrived at Oxford. Now, why did I bring up this photo? Because this school's building is genuinely fascinating.

A glass building — a glass building, standing among the oldest towns in England, among old town buildings, a single glass building, right there among them, visible from the outside as such. And this building won England's top architecture award in 2015. I haven't actually told you what the building itself means yet — let me explain. This building was constructed using only three materials — reinforced concrete, glass, and wood — no other material was used anywhere in the entire building. Why only these three materials? First, reinforced concrete, because it's sturdy — this symbolizes that government policy decisions, and the people working there, should be equally sturdy and solid. Second, glass — because all of government's activity should be transparent; since this is the policy school, it has to be glass, so that people looking in from outside can see straight through to what's happening within — a genuinely novel kind of building. Third, wood was used — specifically oak.

A wooden building — because we must stay close to nature, to the earth, to everyday life, to all of it. That's why, both outside and inside, the school reads as a single, tightly unified glass structure. And I think that, essentially, is the whole point of it — that's how I understood it. Among so many old buildings, this one policy school stands out as a glass building among British institutions. All around it, only — well, it's a policy school about state policy, but it was built with genuine meaning behind it, right? — Right, so, moving on, what a building.

How lovely — well, why concrete, of all things? — The sturdiest, most solid, immovable material — right, and we — government policy should be exactly like that. Government policy should be that way, and there's something I should add here too. In general, the relationship between the state and the citizen is a fascinating one — interconnected. The state arises from its citizens — it's us who live within it, us who create it. Right, we ourselves are the ones building the state, that's how it works.

But we grant power to the state when we build it, and we ourselves choose the people who work within it — right, that's how it goes. But the person who ends up there reaches straight into people's lives. That's power, isn't it — right, right — when we set taxes, that's reaching straight into our lives too, isn't it? Right. So the boundary between an individual's rights, a citizen's rights, and the power of the state is one with no fixed line drawn between them, and we must never forget that.

Where exactly that line falls is our own choice. If we keep adding to the state's power, individual rights just keep shrinking. Overall, it's a fixed total — only the point in the middle, this indicator, shifts up or down. Right. There's no such thing as it simply vanishing on its own. So the more power we grant to the state, the more an individual citizen's fundamental rights diminish.

And the greater an individual's rights, the smaller the state's power — now you're talking political philosophy, aren't you. — Right, political philosophy, philosophy, right? Who originally said that? — Well, it was one of my Oxford professors who put it in similar terms — as I recall, this idea actually traces back to — whose was it? — John Stuart Mill's idea, John Stuart Mill's theory, from a book called "On Liberty."

In "On Liberty," the idea is that any action the state takes without asking destroys a person's life — a state that acts without asking. If, without asking me, the state, or him, or some person makes some decision affecting you without your consent, that decision is destroying your life, over and over, endlessly. Right now, someone beside me stepped out for a moment — I've forgotten exactly who. Anyway — in theory, the state we've built today is one where we ourselves have specified the scope of authority, and the people working within those positions are meant only to carry that out, nothing beyond it — that's how we set it up and established it. And then we choose who exactly is to carry that out. So really, the fundamental meaning behind the choices we make comes down to exactly that, doesn't it?

Right. But if that elected person then takes any action beyond the authority we assigned them, they are destroying our lives. That truly is a profound piece of philosophy. Moving on — I wanted to turn this photo I took with this young man into something worth talking about. In general, countries around the world train people for both policy work and public administration.

You studied policy — well, I only really earned my master's in policy. What I studied is called "public policy." And "public administration" is translated into Mongolian as "state administration." They train their people for it — and they train them over many years. Now, this young man here is Japanese, and he works at Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He's now continuing his studies at Cambridge.

Japan, South Korea, Israel, Singapore, Germany — these countries, in the field of public policy — because this isn't the business sector, opportunities for scholarships tend to be quite scarce. So behind the scenes, these countries build enormous scholarship programs and use them to train their people. They genuinely train them deliberately, year after year, without interruption. That's exactly why, if we look back at the states of the countries I've just named, their governments are among the most powerful in the world, and their policies genuinely get implemented — they take effect in real life and deliver real results. Over many years, the continuity of policy is never broken, is it?

There are people behind it who combine solid grounding in theory with hands-on experience. That's what's behind it, that's what's behind it — and now we need to look in the mirror ourselves. People say Mongolia's state policy only has a four-year lifespan, tied to the election cycle, right? Right. And behind that lies another major problem — the lack of a stable, continuous personnel base.

Not to make too much of it, but even my own wife puts it this way: "every four years the two of us get jolted around." Right, we get shaken up on exactly that cycle. Otherwise my own life has been quite calm. Now, how old is this young man here — he's 34. This young man is part of the personnel being groomed for state service, and altogether he's worked six years at Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at Japan's international cooperation agency.

Six years, six years — but on top of that, he's also studying abroad on a government scholarship for another six years. So altogether that's twelve years he's put into this. — And they work him, train him, put him back to work, then train him again, and it goes on like that. Are you the first from Mongolia to do this, or not — specifically in public policy? — The third, the fourth? Who came before you?

Before me — I can't remember them all off the top of my head — 2015 — no, not the most recent one, let me think — in 2015 there were two people, and in 2018 there were three who graduated. All right, so altogether there are five of us, specifically in public policy. — So, does work come easily to you these days? — Well, I earn enough to live on doing my research work. — And you've built your own life this way, settled down, yourself — yes, and now you have a family, a family, you've settled in. That's no small thing — you'll never take a bribe, you'll never sell out, you'll never bring shame on your homeland — and now it's your time to be put to use, that's the knocking you hear at the door. It's not some old-timer's knock at the door, it's the sound of a new generation making itself heard — that's exactly why I'm making this program. What a wonderful home, I really do like this family.

What a wonderfully warm household — do many young people come onto this program and get to express their own views, share their thinking with people? — To be able to say, even once, "I've studied this, I have this knowledge, this is how I think" — not everyone gets that chance. These are people who ride out ahead, so to speak — not people who just sit around talking, nomadic people. Moving on — here's a photo taken with our university's scholar, Jonathan Wolff, in his office — we took this there. He's one of the well-known scholars of modern political philosophy — he studied politics, economics, and legal theory at Oxford, of course.

This man — I've brought a copy of his book here, the one I translated into Mongolian, called "Political Philosophy" — I translated it and had it published. Are you about to give it away? — This copy has his own signature in it — he gave it to me. Later, in his own hand — yes, yes, right, I'll give you one too — this one has both the English and Mongolian versions in it, right? — All right, let's do that, I'll give it to you. It's here, right here, sign right here. So — a person who doesn't understand politics isn't simply failing to understand politics; it means they have no notion at all of what "practical affairs" even means.

No, if you don't understand politics at all, then, well, you don't understand social life either — and, dare I say, you don't even understand love. Right? Right, right, isn't that so? Not even understanding love — and yet loving is a marvelous thing, isn't it — right. Humanity, having lived through these great eras, keeps falling into despair, doesn't it.

And then, in order to climb out of that despair, it discovers vast new things — that's exactly what keeps happening. That's exactly right, isn't it. It gathers enormous amounts of knowledge, brings it together, and then finds its own way forward, and flourishes again. And that's precisely the kind of era we're in right now. The very first seeds that were planted have now reached all the way to you.

I've waited 30 years for this. There's a fellow named Beckett — a wildly imaginative Irish playwright named Samuel Beckett — he wrote a play in the 1960s called "Waiting for Godot," and we staged that play in this very theater. In it, someone is waiting for something — waiting for God, or a tyrant, or some creature to arrive, or for a good person to come, or maybe God — they just keep waiting. It's a play that runs over three hours, and it keeps the entire audience waiting right alongside it.

Right now, we're exactly in that state of waiting. It's people like you who are meant to arrive. I can't quite recall who said this, but — "good times," as we call them, are when our whole life turns out well, that's what we call a good time — but a good time never arrives on its own; people bring it about, and people build it themselves, curiously enough. And then, once a nation's development and progress starts sliding into decline, people look back longingly on that good time, saying, "ah, those really were good days."

So as for Mongolia's social situation, its circumstances today — honestly, in terms of governance and in terms of development alike, we've arrived at the hardest period we've faced since 1990, right at this very moment. This is something we absolutely need to change and reform again. But my own conviction — my inner conviction — is that this can only be brought about by people who were themselves born and raised on Mongolian soil. Because it's the people who know this culture, this way of life, these customs and traditions, this people, and this very land who are the ones capable of changing it. It can't be done by bringing in some outsider to fix it for us.

But it also has to be someone capable of carrying forward the very peak of humanity's accumulated knowledge — only such a person can truly bring about change. Otherwise, anything done on blind guesswork just comes back to us as negative consequences, doesn't it. I'll give you one example. People talk about "avligal" [corruption] all the time. But "avligal" — well, in truth, that word — it's not really about the act of taking a bribe at all. "Avligal" means corruption, decay — that's the true meaning of the English word, isn't it.

In Russian it's "kor-," in English "corruption" — that word literally means decay, rot. So I find myself thinking again about that same point on language. Why don't we understand this word as meaning "decay" to this very day? Let me give you a small example. My mother passed away — from an injury — and at the time she was in the hospital at the Trauma Center. In the final days of her life, as I sat there keeping watch, that hospital was riddled with mold, its ceiling was peeling and collapsing, its windows were cracked — and in 2007, they'd already announced it would be torn down and a new hospital built. That was 2007, the very year my mother passed away. Today, in 2020, thirteen years have gone by.

That's practically an entire chapter of a person's life gone by. A whole era has passed, and the story is very nearly over too. So why, to this day, has this building still not been put into use? There's exactly one reason. Someone announced that the Kuwait Fund would put up 12 million dollars to build the hospital.

And then, because of that promised money, this became pure corruption — corruption straight through — an example, right out of my own life, of a society thoroughly eaten away by decay. Squabbling over an unskinned bear's hide while the officials in charge kept rotating in and out, and to this day it still hasn't opened. Just think about it — a 36-billion-tögrög hospital, with the fund's money supposedly already promised, and thirteen years on, look at what we still see — the state of the Trauma Center today. People say the corridors are jammed with patients. And that entire burden ends up landing squarely on the Trauma Center.

So it isn't just the health sector — it's the same everywhere here — education, and agriculture, mining, farming, every single sector — this corruption isn't merely eating away at us anymore, it has already decayed us, and we've now sunk to practically the very bottom of it. And nations like this — Mongolia is far from the only one in human history to face this. There have been plenty of nations like it. Some lost their sovereignty outright, lost their independence, and their state eventually collapsed and disintegrated — those are history's tragic stories, aren't they. And we are heading down a road scarred by the wounds of civil war.

And right now, today, this very road has brought us to exactly that hardest stretch. So we need to grasp what this "avligal" truly means — its real meaning of decay. Right now, all Mongolians need to arrive at a shared understanding of what is happening, what isn't working, and why it isn't working — we need to reflect on it calmly and carefully, rather than dragging it straight into political factionalism and quarreling. Otherwise — what do you even call the kind of governance structure Mongolia has now reached, at its hardest point? It's called kleptocracy. "Klepto" means theft, fraud. "Cracy" means rule, right?

Thieves and fraudsters seize power in order to steal and commit fraud, and in doing so they corrupt it further, and then use that power again to commit yet more theft and fraud. And this cycle just keeps on destroying the nation. It simply keeps decaying it, right down from the bottom. Now, when I invited you onto this program, there was one thing — let me have a look at that diploma from your prestigious school. That one with 900 years of history — I'd love to hold it, if I may.

No, no — looking at it, it's really nothing much — "humble yet great," that's what it ought to be, right? This diploma of our school, following tradition, really is just a plain piece of paper. So what exactly is written on it? Let's see: "Munkhjargal's Chimeddorj" — [reading it out]: "Universitatis Oxoniensis, Institutum…" certified, "Chimeddorj Munkhjargal, University College, having satisfied the examiners…" "Magistro Publicae Politicae…" — and below that there's even more precise wording. Right — "Master of Public Policy" — right, and does it carry this person's signature, a stamp, a seal, all of that? What's that other thing called again?

There's some kind of registration mark too — remarkable information. All right, shall we have some coffee? — Let's do that, let's do that — coffee has become a big part of our culture too lately, hasn't it — though when it comes to tea culture, Mongolians are truly excellent. People wear their academic gowns to work, to evening receptions, to formal events, and they always wear their gowns — and the gowns differ: some wear a master's gown, some a doctoral gown, and undergraduate students wear their own distinct gowns — you can tell people apart by their robes alone, and out on the street it's become its own kind of culture.

Walking down the street, if someone in higher academic robes than yours passes by, people step aside and make way in front of them. I've stood aside myself when someone in doctoral robes came through — that's the etiquette. But there's one thing, though — when you're doing your academic work, writing an essay, writing a thesis, doing research, there's an expression for taking off that academic gown, setting it aside — a term for it, drawn from the very name of the gown itself.

Why does one do that? Because once you're out there seeking the truth, you have to start from the premise that there should be no truth greater than your own, at least psychologically speaking. Because, since you're the one seeking the truth — let me give an example — when I was doing my master's and reading someone's doctoral thesis, I told myself: don't assume that just because it holds a higher academic degree, it must automatically be the truth. If you think that way, then what you're doing stops being your own academic work at all. It isn't that.

So you take off that academic gown, set it aside, and within your own inner world, you examine it stripped bare, and say: this person might be entirely wrong, too — that process of checking is precisely what academic work is. That is academic work — something written 800, 900 years before us. In general, isn't the whole point simply the pursuit of truth? — Right. What's your school's core philosophy? — At its heart, its philosophy is the pursuit of truth — you must find truth for yourself. There's another interesting thing about the school too: what our professors used to tell us was — "we will drag you into the darkest, deepest place, where you won't even know where you are."

"And from there, you will search for your own truth, and only once you've managed to find it will you climb back out into the light — until then, we can only help you so much." That was the school's underlying philosophy — the pursuit of truth. Someone else who once appeared on this program said something similar — he said that by the time he graduated from that school, he realized he was nobody. No — you see, originally you go there thinking you'll gather a great deal of knowledge and rise to the top. But afterward, that's exactly when you realize you're nobody. And especially within this education system, the deeper you go in this pursuit of truth, the more you come to grasp just how much you still don't know — that's the kind of world it is. So you come to understand just how vast and directionless that dark, unknown world really is, and that's how you emerge from it.

And I think, generally, that acquiring an education is really a lifelong task, isn't it? — That's right. Now, these wall photographs of yours are lovely — photographs of people who fought for Mongolia's sovereignty, freedom, and national independence. What comes to mind for you? For us — well, for me, since I work in politics, there are subjects that can become politicized, and there are subjects that shouldn't be.

For instance — one thing that genuinely worries me about Mongolia is that we've spent a long time doing politics against the very unity of our national roots. For example, political parties have taken hold of the word "freedom" and made it their own private property. They've claimed the word "democracy" as theirs. They've claimed "sovereignty" as theirs too. They've claimed the word "justice" the same way — as if the party championing "justice" is the only one that stands for justice, and the rest don't care about it at all, or as if the other parties don't even want justice in the first place.

Right — as if the party "for sovereignty" is the only one concerned with sovereignty and the rest don't care about it at all. Now, taking these shared values that exist within our society, within our nation, and splitting them apart, pitting them against one another — for a single nation-state, that is something that must never, under any circumstances, be allowed to happen. To put it briefly: without freedom, without human rights, without a democratic system — and, absent a democratic system, even across the whole of Mongolia's history, the Mongolian people were never able to be free throughout the entire time Mongolia's sovereignty remained fragile. Behind the concept of sovereignty lie two major ideas.

One is what we usually mean by it — the integrity of our borders, having a sacred, inviolable border, "my border is my border," right. The other is the concept of full sovereign authority itself — the state's full authority, that's what it is. This notion of full authority is quite interesting. On one hand, when does a state's full authority become distorted and degraded? Either it falls under outside influence — say, coming under the influence of another country's government or foreign armed forces — and thereby loses its full authority. Or, on the other hand, when it's eaten away by corruption, by domestic political and business cliques, the state simply loses the capacity to exercise its full authority at all.

Right. For example, if a decision that ought to be made in Mongolia's State Palace instead gets made in some business office, or wherever a certain group of people happens to gather and meet, then full sovereign authority is being lost at that very moment. Because Mongolia's state — meaning the people who represent its citizens — holds full authority only when it makes decisions on behalf of the people, independently, free of outside dependence. People who make decisions independent of outside influence are, in a legal sense, the ones with the right to represent the Mongolian people. Making decisions independent of outside influence — that is what we call full sovereign authority; isn't that so, from the other side too?

Right. But when a certain group of businesspeople, or a certain group straddling both business and politics, are the ones actually exercising state power and making those decisions, then we can say that full sovereignty has become fragile and is disappearing. Unfortunately, in Mongolia today, the country's sovereign authority has become fragile to a certain extent — there is a genuine concern, in some cases, that decisions of state are being made not in the State Palace, but by people who, legally, have no right to make them at all. As for me — third, there's the concept of justice. We measure justice in various relative, differing ways, and it's difficult to pin down precisely. But there is one clear thing: justice has just one golden rule — non-discrimination. And there are only three places where justice takes root — it's actually quite simple.

First, justice takes root in the chamber of the legislature — laws must be passed without discrimination. Second, in the activities of government — government actions must not discriminate. For example, you can't give one person ten years for a crime and let another off with a suspended sentence for the exact same offense — that would be discrimination, and it must not happen. Third, justice takes root in the courtroom — courts must not discriminate when handing down their rulings. If justice holds in these three places, then justice exists in society. And behind justice lies yet another question — truth; only where truth exists can justice exist. So, behind everything happening today — amid all the murky, dark information flowing through the media and through social networks — if we can find the truth, base our decisions on it, and make non-discriminatory rulings in just those three places, then justice will exist in Mongolia.

And finally, I'd say this: freedom, sovereignty, and justice — these three things must never, under any circumstances, be pitted against one another or used to divide Mongolians against each other. They must always coexist side by side, mutually reinforcing and strengthening one another — shared, unified values. Now, let me put this "100" emblem on you. But — with a black background and white lettering — this too is a pursuit of truth, between black and white, isn't it? Because if you call black "black," you're also making a claim, aren't you — this isn't really black at all, this is just your own perception of black — my black is my own black, right? Right. So are we, as a society, drifting away from this kind of rigorous, academic way of thinking? — Yes, I do think that, as a society, we feel somewhat removed from the truth.

Because falsehood — outright lies — have come to dominate our society far too much. And we're growing used to it, more and more accustomed. It's becoming part of our very way of life. In the end, we grow averse to the truth itself, and behind that state of mind, first, decay is taking place, and second, our shared values are fraying apart. So the more we strive toward the truth, the more we reinforce it, the stronger our values grow as well.

So that word — "decay" — really ought to replace the word "avligal" ["corruption"] in translation. — Yes, I think so too, don't you? — Right, right — in the original English it truly means "decay," not simply "bribery." So, for the sake of this, there's a song along the lines of "harsh soldiers" — right? — and in that same spirit, for the sake of the words you've just spoken, let me put this on you.

You are someone with every right to wear this "100" emblem. — Thank you — this was far too short, our time together has been far too brief, there's so much more I'd like to talk about — let's sit down and talk again sometime. — All right, there's plenty more to discuss. What do you want, what do you dream of, what do you wish for? — Right now, my wish is for progress, for development, and for strengthening Mongolia's full sovereignty. My dream is that the state, in involving itself in people's lives, must recognize its own limits — if it oversteps those limits, long-term progress will not follow.

For a while, we might feel more comfortable, more at ease. But whatever is gained by overstepping those limits comes back to haunt us — throughout human history, it always returns at great cost, paid in blood and tears. So this limit — exactly where this boundary of the Mongolian state ought to sit — is the question I have focused my thinking on, the question I've devoted real thought to. As someone who has thought about this, I believe Mongolia's state needs to correctly determine where and how it should be involved in people's lives — that boundary needs to be properly drawn. And, on the other hand, let me add this too: the state must be right, and the citizen must be right as well — on one hand, every individual citizen must choose their own destiny.

They must work hard, put in real effort, and build their own lives with their own two hands — right? That is the fundamental foundation, the very root, of progress and development. It's not that the state can step in and change people's lives for them — the state cannot change a country all on its own. What should a democratic state do, then? It must never devalue people's own will and effort — it must protect that will and effort from being devalued. That is the very first principle, and only by upholding it can it protect the foundation on which a country grows and develops. So, I genuinely wish to take part in building that kind of state. — What a wonderful thing. You've spoken this whole time from the foundations of philosophy, of politics, of society — really, from the fundamental questions of human philosophy itself.

And in the end, there's one powerful phrase of yours that has stayed with me. What was it — that in the pursuit of truth, far from losing your academic rigor, you will go on proclaiming that rigor ever more boldly — before the state, before the public at large. — Right — Chimeddorj, son of Munkhjargal, a man with a resonant voice. The one who opens that great ceremony, that great Buddhist ritual, with that magnificent, deep, resonant voice — the moment that voice begins, everyone falls silent, the whole world seems to hush, so quiet you could hear a fly buzzing overhead. And I am truly, deeply glad to have introduced to this nation such a fine young philosopher and politician — someone who thinks about, and reflects deeply on, this country's future, for the generations still to come.

I am truly, utterly glad. This is simply my own small contribution. — Thank you — yes, thank you, thank you, this has been truly wonderful. — Enjoying your coffee — yes. All right, thank you.