Episode 11 - The Brutal Price of Civilizational Change

The discussion explores the theme of the brutal cost of civilizational change by analyzing seemingly disparate historical and intellectual shifts. The conversation starts on the battlefield, examining the Siege of Constantinople in 1452 as an example of technological innovation—like the primitive mortar—forcing military and psychological change, leading to the collapse of an old order through fear and sheer brutal human effort. This idea of violence and cost is then traced to medieval Europe, where private wars deliberately destroyed peasant agricultural resources, maiming people and leaving a visible, lasting legacy of suffering for generations as a core strategy for economic warfare.

The theme then shifts to massive economic and social transformations. The rise of agriculture is presented as a "paradox of drudgery", where hunter-gatherers were likely forced into back-breaking farming, leading to a poorer diet and life, by external pressures like climate change and hostile neighbors. Centuries later, new economic ideas imposed similar hardship, such as the British imposition of individual land ownership on communal Indian systems and the Enclosure Movement in England, which destroyed the support systems of the rural poor, making them completely reliant on money wages and market insecurity. This hardship was often justified by classical rationalism and theories like Malthusianism, which asserted that poverty and suffering for the masses were inevitable and necessary "natural laws".

The episode concludes by examining the psychological and philosophical costs of change. In contrast to Malthus's grim certainty, Marxism is presented as an opposing theory where change is driven by class struggle, with the proletariat as the only truly revolutionary class. The discussion then pivots to the uncertainty of the inner world, contrasting Keynes's focus on confidence and the precarity of long-term investment with Machiavelli's warning about the peril of being an innovator due to fierce opposition and "lukewarm defenders". Finally, modern neuroscience is discussed as posing an unsettling cost by potentially dissolving the importance of subjective experience, thus eroding the very basis of our modern ethical and moral systems.