September 25, 2025 • 54 mins
What insights can our ancient past shine on our political future?
Were hunter-gatherers the ultimate traditionalists—or proto-communists?
Is it possible hunter-gatherers lived with greater equality and more political freedom than most societies today?
And why do both communism and capitalism, despite being sworn enemies, rest on the same assumption of endless growth?
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that humans are wired with both liberal and conservative tendencies—and that societies function best when those forces stay in balance. Where can we find the liberal and conservative elements in our hunter-gatherer past? And how might it reframe our political future?
In The King Is Dead, Now What? we explored modern political history. Now we zoom out, connecting the dots to a much broader civilizational story.
Plus, we’re debuting a new segment: The State of Civilization, featuring our up-and-coming optimistic reporter Jeff Opolis, reporting on the fantastic news coming from civilization right now. Everything is great! Or… is it?
If you’d like to support Human Nature Odyssey, please subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts, leave us a review, and visit humannatureodyssey.com.
Join us on Patreon and get exclusive access to audio extras, writings, and notes.
Additional music for this episode by Adam Tell, from the albums Peripheries, This Time With Feeling, and Object Impermanence. Courtesy of Adam Tell. All rights reserved.
CITATIONS
Haidt, Jonathan. “The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives.” TED, 2008.
Fiddler on the Roof. Directed by Norman Jewison, United Artists, 1971.
“Net Energy and Sustainability, or… The Story of the Overstuffed Strongman.” Crazy Town podcast, Post Carbon Institute, 2021.
Ryan, Christopher. Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress. Avid Reader Press, 2019.
“Ken Burns.” The Joe Rogan Experience, episode 1745, Spotify, 2022.
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. Hill and Wang, 1983.
Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875.
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Vintage, 1983.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Norberg-Hodge, Helena. Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. Sierra Club Books, 1991.
Ho, Fred. A World Where Many Worlds Fit. Big Red Media, 2008.
World Health Organization. (2024, July 24). Hunger numbers stubbornly high for three consecutive years as global crises deepen.
Colquhoun, P. A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis.
Elhacham, Emily, et al. “Global Human-Made Mass Exceeds All Living Biomass.” Nature, vol. 588, no. 7838, 2020, pp. 442–444.
Music: Celestial Soda Pop
By: Ray Lynch
From the album: Deep Breakfast
Courtesy Ray Lynch Productions © Ⓟ 1984/BMI
All rights reserved.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You want to be referred to as Pascalor Doctor Wallace?
Pascal is fine.
I served as a clinical professor
of data science,neuroscience, and psychology at NYU.
And yeah,I'm interested in a variety of in human
cognition. Yes.
Tell us the story
of how you first heard about the dress.
(00:23):
Where were youand what did you initially think?
So this was February 27th, 2015,
and it was a Thursday, andI was coming home from work on the train.
So I think it was browsing Twitter.
A student had sent me on on a DM.
Hey, what do you think about this?
I was teaching psychology at the time.
Perception specifically.
And honestly, I dismissed it as likeI saw it was white and gold.
(00:47):
And then I went home and told my wife
how silly people out onlineand showed her the image.
And I saw it clearly.
White gold.
And she, you know, straight up told me.
So we read the eyes at the well,obviously black and blue.
And that's the momentI meant like when I was like 000000.
What?
(01:10):
And sofor people who don't know about this,
who miss this phenomenon,I hard to believe, but sure
tell the story of the dress.
Oh, okay. So.
And where did this photo come from?
Yeah.It all begins with Cecilia Bleasdale.
Her daughter was getting married,and on the occasion of getting married,
they were obviously shoppingfor a wedding. Dresses? Yes.
(01:32):
They didn't actually buy any that day.
I thinkbecause there were so many options.
So they took picturesof them, review offline,
and as they were themselvesreviewing the footage,
they got into a fight of like,what color this dress was?
Was itblack and blue or was it white and gold?
And they couldn't result.
And then they consulted,you know, friends.
(01:53):
And it's reached larger, larger circlesuntil one of the band members
that's playing at the wedding put it online, and the rest is history as it itself.
So this image of a dress
that some people sawas obviously black and blue,
some people saw, is clearlywhite and gold became viral.
(02:15):
Can you describejust how widespread it became?
Yes. So to my knowledge,this was at the time
at least the most viral thing, period.
It quicklyreached Wyre who had reposted it,
and then BuzzFeed,who was still think back then.
Who reposted it and everybody reposted itand celebrities got into it.
Logan had a take on it.
(02:35):
Everybody had taken this.
Everybody.
I'm interested to that.
So this dress meme wasn'tjust a pop sensation.
It was taken scientifically, seriously.
It seems to have been like somewhatdefining for you as a phenomenon,
a momentwhere you realize that this is real.
I was like, yeah, we need a biggerabout this is this is life.
You know, it.
(02:56):
It reshaped my research. Yes, absolutely.
So why did you find itso shocking and puzzling for the science
that you gained your expertise in thatthat very fact that you have an image
and we can all agree on the wavelengthsand the pixels and all of that.
And yet the digital is looks very different depending on your assumptions about it.
(03:17):
So in
other words, what this shows you ina very nice way is that you bring
a lot of yourself to every perceptualand probably cognitive interaction.
I remember people being pissed.
Yes about it.
It kind of created thislike anger response.
Like why do you thinkwhy do you think that is?
Well,I think most people believe the world is
(03:39):
the way it isbecause that's the way they see it.
And this object challenges that notion.
Not saying that everything's relative,but we all have equally valid positions.
That's actually not true.
I'm not saying that there is obviouslyan objective reality out there.
All I'm saying is what it shows you.
Our brain filtersobjective reality for you.
(03:59):
Because the weird thing is,is that the dress, it's not like
it was just the color of the dresswas just in the eyes of the beholder.
The dress actually did have a color.
So why would you have to dressso that the dress is black and blue
under normal lighting conditions?
There's no question about that.
The argument is about them.A lot of people didn't get this.
This is about this specificimage of the dress.
(04:20):
The lighting is ambiguous.So this actually is ambiguous.
What's going up is a flash isor exposed was cell phone was back lit.
Was it inside. Was it out? Yeah.
It was unclear. Unclear.
We actually studiedthat some people in our in our study
I was inside, some was outside.
So I was unclear. Right.
It seems like the disagreementabout the dress was because
a lot of the context forthe image was missing.
(04:43):
Like, we don't know where it wastaken. That's right.
What the lighting could be.
And therefore
people had to make assumptionsto fill in the gaps and say, we disagree.
I'm arguing about the entire backstoryof assumptions and meanings of words mean.
And that's all in the room of us.
You just can't see it.This is human nature.
So to jump to conclusionsand to assume that if someone else chose
(05:04):
to a different conclusionthat they're wrong and that you're right,
there's this interfacebetween reality which is objective
and what you perceive.
Well, maybe we should take that seriously,that this interface
might be different than people.
It was just by different peoplesee or hear different things.
This is not just about the quest.This is much beyond that.
This is happening here.
Maybe this is all happening in general.
(05:25):
There's much deeper implicationsfrom this.
Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey,
a podcast exploring our modern world,
our ancient past and where the two meet.
(05:47):
I'm Alex.
This episode begins
(06:08):
the third season of Human Nature Odyssey.
God, have you.
All right.
So in the last threeepisodes of season two,
we talked about the history of the leftand right
political spectrum,the debate between hierarchy
and egalitarianism, democracyand authoritarianism
(06:33):
that's been ragingover the last 250 years.
But 250 years is
nothing comparedto the grand scheme of human history.
All the way back in seasonone of the podcast,
we talked about our huntergatherer origins
and the major shift that happenedwith the agricultural revolution
(06:57):
10,000 years ago.
So you might be thinking,
what kind of freaking podcastis this anyway?
Are we talking about modern politics?
Are we talking about hunter gatherers?
Well, my friend, this is a podcastwhere we can talk about both.
In this episode, we're going to try
and bridge the gapbetween our modern political
(07:20):
and economic historywith our hunter gatherer origins.
You ready for this?
Okay, hang on tight.
It's going to be one bumpy ride.
Actually,it's it's not going to be that bumpy.
And I'm hoping it'sgoing to be smooth and easy.
(07:47):
In 2008,
psychologistJonathan Haidt gave a Ted talk
on how our psychological tendencies
can predict our politics.
He startsby telling the story of two dudes
going to see Michelangelo'sstatue of David.
Suppose the two American friendsare traveling together in Italy.
(08:09):
They go to see Michelangelo's David,and when they finally come face to face
with the statue,they both freeze dead in their tracks.
You ever see the statue of David?
You know, the curly haired guy chiseledinto marble, just chilling in the nude.
One guy is in awe of the statue's beauty
and the other guyis embarrassed by the statue's penis.
(08:29):
Just flopped out there for all to see.
Now, height says the Americanpolitical stereotypes
would tell us that the guyappreciating the art is more likely
to have voted for the relatively sociallyliberal Democratic candidate.
And the guy embarrassed is more likelyto have voted for
the relatively sociallyconservative Republican candidate.
(08:52):
He tells the
audience these aren't just stereotypes.
It's reflective of what research has shown
that people who vote for a left leaningliberal candidates tend to be more open
to new experiences than people who vote
for right leaning conservative candidates.
As Hite explains, it really is a factthat liberals are much higher
(09:14):
than conservatives on a major personalitytrait called openness to experience.
People are high on openness to experience.
Just crave novelty, variety, diversity,new ideas, travel, people low on it,
like things that are familiar,that are, that are, safe and dependable.
He quotes researcher Robert McCrae,the main researcher of this trait.
Robert McCrea, says that open individualshave an affinity for liberal,
(09:37):
progressive, left wing political views.
They like a societywhich is open and changing, whereas closed
individuals prefer conservative,traditional right wingers.
Apparently that's what the data shows.
But this obviously wouldn't apply toeveryone.
There are liberals who value traditionand conservatives who seek novelty.
And I got to imaginethe point is not really about
(09:58):
whether you vibe with Renaissance artor David's cute little penis specifically,
but whether you have an initial draw
or revulsion to new experiences.
Essentially,what he is trying to demonstrate
is that some people just inherently havea tendency towards new experiences,
and others have a tendencytowards the familiar, if that's true.
(10:23):
The debatebetween liberals and conservatives.
It seems like a debatebetween those who value change
and those who value tradition.
You ever see figure on the roof?
It's a musical set in the quiet Jewishshtetl of Anatevka.
Russia, not unlike the villagemy great great grandparents
(10:45):
would have been born in.
Back in the old country.
The story begins with TVA,a patriarch of the town,
breaking the fourth walland talking directly to us,
telling us all about his village,how hard yet simple life is,
and most importantly,the value of tradition.
In fact, he even breaks out into song.
(11:09):
Tradition. Tradition.
For copyright purposes,I can't sing the rest of the song.
And also, this isn't a musical podcast.
I'm sorry, but in this opening song,
Tavia explains here and then a tough guy.
We have traditions for everything.
How to sleep. How to eat.
How to work. How to wear clothes.
(11:31):
Tradition even explains the proper roleof each member of the family.
The men he tells us well,
sings us must workand provide for their family.
The women Tevye accounts are to raise thechildren and run the home.
Life is hard in rural Russia,
especially for the Jewish peasants,who were often not welcome.
(11:55):
And tradition, Tavia informs us,
is how they survive.
Good luck
trying to find a culturewithout tradition, rituals,
customs, roles, expectations.
Traditionsare like a guidebook for society.
(12:18):
Traditions mean that new generations
don't have to figure outhow to live from scratch.
The concept of tradition
is kind oflike that dress on the internet.
Some might hear it and think, well, well,of course, tradition is a good thing.
If only we stuck to them.
Others might hear it in French tradition,
(12:40):
or feel so restrictiveand limiting and backwards.
But regardless of whether you feel
a pull towards tradition or not,
let's give the conservative argumentfor tradition its credit.
There's a lot going for tradition.
Tradition is like chess.
(13:00):
The rules have been honed overa very long time.
Chess is a fun gamebecause the rules all make sense.
As a system,
I bet if you tried to make up a new boardgame on the spot,
it would have a lot of issuesthat need to be worked out.
This is called Lindy's.
All that something already long standing
(13:22):
is more likely to survive into the future.
Then a recent trend.
For something to become a tradition,
it has to have gone through a sort of
filtering process that preserves
what works and gets rid of what doesn't.
Whatever you come up with todayhasn't had time to cook and mature.
(13:44):
Therefore, the systems we've inheritedshould be stronger
than whatever cockamamie ideassome hipster came up with last week.
We cansee this reflected in nature as well.
The older an ecosystem,the stable it usually is.
Tradition one.
Change zero.
(14:05):
But if you like tradition, don't get cockyjust yet.
There is tradition in nature.
There's also a lot of change.
Individual mutations are a necessarypart of life.
In fact, it'sthe only way an organism can adapt.
Okay, that's one point for change.
(14:27):
When tradition and change both worktogether.
Ecosystems are strongerand more adaptable.
So the same is probably true
for culture too, right?
Culturesneed a balance of tradition and change,
and some traditionsare more sturdy than others.
(14:48):
If everyone has a sayand different concerns
and perspectives can be addressed,
I imagine that's going to makea pretty good tradition in the long run.
But some traditions
are built on wobbly legs, a traditioncreated by kings
and aristocrats might workgreat for kings and aristocrats,
but probably isn't too idealfor the peasants forced to participate.
(15:13):
If a tradition is too resistant
to change and other people's opinions,
then it becomes more and more brittleuntil it breaks.
After all, the French monarchy
existed for 1000 years
but was constantly riddledwith peasant uprisings that were ignored
(15:33):
or squashed until finally,
in 1789, peasants stormed the Bastille,grabbed King Louis
the 16th and his wife Marie-Antoinette,and sent them to the guillotine.
Towards the end of his TedTalk,
Jonathan Hite remarks on how once you seethat liberals and conservatives
(15:53):
both have something to contribute,that they form a balance on on change
versus stability, then I think the wayis open to step outside the moral matrix.
Hite then connects this to the wisdomof many eastern religions
like Buddhism's concept of yin and yang.
And two of the main gods in Hinduism,
Vishnuthe preserver and Shiva the destroyer.
(16:16):
So we all have natural inclinations
to either favor tradition or favor change,
but we shouldn't be too blindedby those inclinations.
Like,what's the actual value of that tradition
or the value of the change?
Because here's a very important question.
(16:36):
What exactly are we considering?
Traditional, All these kids on TikTok, these days?
I've never even been on TikTok.
All my friends post pictures of their kidson Facebook.
Facebook is good enough for me.
Tik. Facebook.
Is that what you whippersnappersare calling it these days?
(16:58):
I remember the good old dayswhen TikTok was just the sound
the clock made, and a book was somethingyou read with your face.
No sirree.
That's too much liberal change for me.
I know I know, I'ma bit of a conservative.
I value tradition.
That's why I use Myspace.
(17:22):
Traditional conservative
values are relative, right?
It depends on where you're startingyour history.
Again,it's like the dress on the internet.
What color you thought the dress was.
Depended on the context.
The same is true of tradition.
So the question iswhat is the context of a tradition?
(17:46):
Take something like private property,for instance.
It's private property,a conservative tradition.
Well, as my colleagues overat the Crazytown podcast
pointed out in an episodethey recently reared,
up until 1773,
most English peasants collectivelyshared their common spaces and decided
(18:08):
as a community how to settle disputes,who farmed what land, who could hunt what.
But then the English Enclosure Act of 1773
privatizedthose commons for the first time.
And as you can imagine,while the Lords were big
fans of this innovation,it was very upsetting to many peasants.
(18:31):
When you assume that private property
is the norm, then callingfor the abolition of private property.
Sounds pretty dang radical.
But in reality,if traditional conservative values
just mean being in line with the past,then in the grand scheme of things,
private property is the radical new thing
(18:52):
that's been implementedonly relatively recently.
After all, for most of human history,
there was no private ownership of land.
So in this case,
what would be the conservative move?
What would be the liberal move?
What the.
What's the music coming from?
(19:12):
This isn't in the script.
Yes. Hello, this is Jeff
Opolis reporting live for a new segment,The State of Civilization.
What is happening?
I'm here to cover the absolutelyfantastic news coming out of modern
civilization right now.
Really?
That's right. Things are just great.
(19:34):
In fact, they've never been better.
What's going on? You haven't heard?
Well, Kobo literacy is on the rise.
Child mortality is at an all time low.
Modern medicine has helped preventor cure countless of once deadly diseases.
And there hasn't been an all out warbetween the major world powers
(19:54):
in 80 years.
From space explorationto instant global communication,
humanity is achieving more than everbefore.
Civilization is killing it.
Oh, wow. That. That is good news.
I thought we were in waymore trouble than that.
I feel like a lot of peopleare not having a very good time right now.
(20:15):
Well, yes, there are some downsides,and not everyone can experience the perks.
But, just don't worry about it.
Don't worry about it.
What are the downsides?
Well, wealthinequality worldwide continues to rise.
Power is consolidatinginto fewer and fewer hands.
And the entire foundation of moderncivilization is built on an ever
(20:37):
expanding extraction of natural resourcesthat, unless seriously address
its root causes, will inevitably leadto a complete collapse
and widespread calamityfor the world's population, the likes of
which will be difficult,if not impossible, to recover from.
Life as we know it may come to an end.
But hey, I told youcivilization was killing it.
Jesus.
(20:58):
I mean, the downside seemed prettyimportant.
Not really.
Don't know.
I haven't thought about it too much.
I like to keep things positive.
Yeah, I get it.
But you're a journalist, right? Sure am.
Communications degree at civilization.
You back in the early aughts.
Those are the days I feel like
(21:20):
you should look a little deeperinto the state of civilization.
It would probably be useful information.
You know, Alex, you're right.
I'm going to get right on that.
There's no scoop too heavy for Jeff Arbus.
I'm going to do some real honest digging,and I'll let you know what I find.
Okay. Thanks, Jeff.
I appreciate it.
(21:43):
Man. Okay.
Where were we?
Oh, right.
What is tradition?
Some things we think are traditional,like private property,
are really much newer than we realize.
But just because something's new doesn'tmean it's bad.
Humans are adaptable.
(22:03):
We can adapt to all sorts of things.
We can eat kale from our garden,or we can eat Doritos.
But just because we can eat
Doritos doesn't meanthey're the healthiest option for us,
and that a Doritos based diet
wouldn't come with some side effects.
Some foods satisfyour biological needs more than others.
(22:29):
The traditional Inuit
diet of whale blubber and seal meat,
or the traditional Polynesiandiet of fruits and nuts and fish,
are going to leadto much healthier people.
Then diets based on deep fried fast
food and processed sugars.
And if some diets are healthierfor us than others,
(22:51):
what if the same is true
for all kinds of societies?
Like, what if some economicand political systems
are better suited for human beings?
For example, not
all humans like to laugh.
A governmentthat bans laughter is probably
(23:14):
ill suited to our natural laughingneeds, right?
A government that allows laughter.
That's probably a preferable government,
but how else would we know which
economic and political systems workwell for humans?
Well, this might be where the conservativeinclination can help us out.
(23:35):
Is there a
tradition that helped humanssurvive, thrive,
and spread across the entire planet?
It's like what the Lindy Effect says.
Whatever exists for a long time
probably means there was a reasonit was so successful.
Well, what if I told you thereactually is a tradition
(23:57):
that humans lived with for a long time?
And I'm talking about a really long time.
Like tens of thousands, hundreds
of thousands of years, long time.
For hundreds of thousands of years,
humans lived in smallforaging communities.
We evolved as hunter gatherers.
(24:19):
We were generally nomadic,lived off the land,
and didn't have too many materialpossessions.
Now, you might scoff at this.
Oh, yeah. Great hunter gatherers.
Come on.
What kind of primitive society is that?
Well, hold on, hold on just one second.
I even heard some of youconservatives scoff at this.
(24:42):
But isn't that kind of funny?
Because if you value tradition,
then isn't it possiblethat there might just be
something we could all learn from thehunter gatherer tradition?
Isn't that the wisdom of conservatism?
I mean, private propertya few hundred years old.
That's a tradition, I guess.
(25:03):
But if we wanted to lookfor a real tradition,
something that we know worked for a very,very long time,
that some communitiesstill practiced to this very day.
I mean, I don't know.
Seems like hunting and gathering isa pretty fair tradition to look back on.
If you zoom out enough, hunter gatherers
(25:24):
start to look like the real conservatives,
and their valueslook like the real traditional values.
And don't worry, don't worry.
I'm not saying we all pick up a bowand arrow and go become a hunter gatherer,
hunting and gatheringfor all your food requires a far
lower population density than a planet of8 billion people can allow.
(25:47):
But what about
the kinds of societieshunter gatherers lived in?
If small scale foraging societies
worked for hundreds of thousands of years,
is there anything they could teach usabout what economic
and political structuresare better suited to us
as human beings?
(26:10):
Recently, documentary
filmmakerKen Burns went on Joe Rogan's podcast
to talk about his new serieson the Revolutionary War,
and they uttering this warcry that they have,
adapted from the Cherokeefrom Native American tribes,
which is a yell that will reverberatein southern battlefields for decades.
(26:32):
Wow. Wow is right.
I love Ken Burnsand I love Ken Burns films.
We even went to the same experimentalcollege in Western Massachusetts.
Now, at the same time,that dude's like 40 years older than me.
But Ken Burns was telling Joe Roganthat for all of human history,
there was always this authoritarian ruler
(26:53):
until the American Revolutionchanged that.
We invented that.
Everybody, up until the point ofof our revolution, where subjects
the whole history of human beings,is like, okay,
I'm going to be under the bootof an authoritarian.
I just, you know, that's my life.
The greatest thing that we inventedwas the idea that we could
govern ourselves, that we have no longerbe under the boot of a
(27:17):
an authoritarian masterwho had just set himself.
But that's not really the full picture.
Sure, since the agricultural revolution,most civilizations
have been ruled by pharaohsor lords kings.
But long before the American Revolution
and before the Agricultural Revolution,hunter gatherer societies
(27:40):
were far more politicallyand economically egalitarian.
Archeologist Robert
Kelly defines egalitarian societiesas, quote,
those in which everyone has equal accessto food,
to the technologyneeded to acquire resources,
and to the pathsleading to prestige, unquote.
(28:04):
That doesn't necessarily meaneveryone has the exact same stuff,
but everyone at least has accessto the essentials
and a say in how things are decided.
Now, there are instances
where top down leadership is necessary.
We can imagine thatin certain emergency situations
(28:26):
that require quick decisionmaking, it's helpful to follow one leader.
You don't want too many cooksin the kitchen
bickering over choiceswhile danger closes in.
That's what my friend Nick always said
when we worked for this theatercompany together.
He used those theater productionsas examples
for how the whole nonhierarchicalegalitarian thing doesn't work.
(28:52):
He'd make the
point that it really helpedthat we had a boss, a director
with a vision who could give clearinstructions without one.
Nothing will get done.
And I agree.
That kind of leadershipcan be very helpful.
But there's a big difference between
a director and a dictator.
(29:13):
It's kind of like how leadership worksin sports.
Michael Jordan may be the team captain,
but he's not the king during the game.
He can tell you to pass the ball,but he can't make you do it.
And once the game is over,
he's not going to follow you homeand make you brush your teeth.
But that's theater and basketball.
(29:34):
What about government?
Could societies really be that functionalwithout one strong permanent leader?
Everybody's got to have a leader right?
In our stories about aliens,what's the first thing
we always assume aliens would saywhen they come down to earth?
Take me to your leader.
But maybe that's only because that's what
(29:54):
the English colonists saidwhen they landed in North America.
When the English first settled
in the landthey conveniently named New England.
Like the aliens of our stories,they told the native Algonquin.
Take us to your leader.
But for many of the native people,
who their leader was wasn't so simple.
(30:17):
Among the Algonquin tribes
who practiced a mix of hunting,gathering, and subsistence agriculture.
Some individual peopledid see more influential than others.
At first, the English assumedthese were the Algonquin kings and queens.
But the English soonrealized these kings and queens
(30:37):
were quite differentfrom the ones they knew back home.
In 1634, settler William Woodobserved, quote,
The kings have not many lawsto command by.
Yeah, bro.
Maybe that's because they're not kings.
The Algonquin had a different wordfor the leaders
that, to the English, sounded like him.
(31:00):
As historian William Cronin wrote, quote,
none of these were the sole speakersfor their nation.
Each nation had multiple sections
a speech himwho could either be male or female.
Asserted authority only in consultation
with other powerful individualsin the village.
(31:20):
In 1648, fur traderWilliam Pynchon came to an Algonquin
village and reported, quote,there are several small sections,
and in all near placesthere are other small sections.
No one said to him that through all.
I believethey will stick no longer to him.
(31:40):
Then the sun shines upon it.
Not only were the termspower limited and shared with others,
but if you didn't like your local section,
you could leave and go to a groupwith a leader you prefer.
But from the English perspective,
this was not going to work.
It's like if aliens landed on earth
(32:02):
asked to see our leader and we responded,
well, you know, we got lots of leadersand they don't really speak for all of us.
That might confuse and irritatethe aliens.
It certainly pissed off the English.
They wanted a single ruler that could beheld responsible for all their subjects.
So the English passed colonial lawsdeclaring, quote,
(32:25):
some principal Indian be appointedand declared to be the supreme of them
to whom the English can reportwhen wrongs are done by Indians.
In case the Indians do not agree,the court may appoint
and declare some mento be their chief or surgeon.
But before the English came in
and turned Seagram's into kings,the Sikkim leadership
(32:48):
had been much more like theaterdirectors and basketball captains.
Their leadership was limited, flexibleand temporary.
This kind of loose leadershipwasn't unique to the Algonquin,
but demonstrated in huntergatherer societies around the world.
And this sort of egalitarianism,as Robert Kelly
(33:10):
explains, quote, requires effort.
Anthropologist James Woodburn,
who lived with the Hadzapeople of Tanzania, agreed.
Quote Hunter gatherers are not passivelyegalitarian, but are actively so.
They are fiercely egalitarian,having to work at resisting their own
(33:31):
and others tendencies to dominatethrough rigorously enforced norms
that prevent any individual or groupfrom acquiring more status,
authority, or resources than others.
But, but, but this is wherethe classic critique comes in.
Right on cue.
Okay, okay, I know what this is.
(33:53):
Go ahead.
Tell me how life was just peaches
and cream for hunters and gathererswith the oil.
Noble savage theory.
Well, actually, author Christopher Ryan,
who we talked to in the last episode,
points out how the label noble
Savage didn't originally mean noblein the sense of being more moral
(34:13):
or just but noblein the sense of aristocratic nobility.
Those same English colonistsfirst encountering Native Americans?
I couldn't help but notice
how much more leisure timeand personal freedom they had,
as well as in unhindered accessto the entire landscape.
(34:34):
Back in England,if you wanted freedom, free time,
and access to land like that,you had to be part of the nobility.
Hence the term noble savage,
because Europe had
been the land of kings for so long.
These more egalitarian native societieswere initially shocking to them.
(34:54):
But those examplesof egalitarian societies
may have influenced Europeansmore than they would have liked to admit.
In part one of our recent King is Dead.
Now what? Series episode 12.
Go check it out.
We talked about the French Revolutionwhen peasants overthrew
the 1000 year old monitor to debatewhat to do next.
(35:16):
There was a national Assemblythat divided itself into a literal left
wing and right wing of the room,which is where we get the terms.
Left wing and right wing.
Terms like liberal and conservativecame soon after.
Those who sat on the right wing
argued for reinstating the monarchy.
Those who sat on the left wing arguedfor a more egalitarian society.
(35:42):
These left wingers were labeled radicals.
Are you guys seriouslytrying to upend 1000 years of tradition?
The conservative tendency of honoringtradition did not like that one bit.
But are you catching the irony here?
If we follow the conservativeimpulse to honor tradition
(36:02):
and go back in timelong enough to incorporate
our more egalitarian hunter gathererorigins, tradition starts to sound a lot
like what the so-called radical leftwing was arguing for.
But hold your horses.
The left wing shouldn't get too giddyjust yet, either.
Egalitarianism might have workedfor small scale hunter gatherers.
(36:25):
But what if you're trying to dolarge scale civilization?
The right wing of the FrenchNational Assembly argued
that hierarchy and classare essential to a functioning society.
And I will say,
if youlook at the history of civilization,
that does seem to be the case here.
(36:46):
After all, most civilizationsfrom ancient Egypt, China, Rome, you name
it relied on a system of the very richand the very poor.
And that wasn't just an accident,
but how those civilizations wereso dominant.
Think about it.
Who's going to build all those pyramidsand fight in all your armies?
(37:07):
I'll tell you right now, it'snot going to be the rich and powerful.
Someone's got to do all the menial
tasks to keep civilization running.
If everyone is well fed and taken care of.
Why would anyone want to wastetheir limited time on this earth
hauling bricks in the hot sun all day?
Poverty is an excellent motivator.
(37:29):
As Patrick Calhoun, founder
of the Modern Police Force in London,wrote in 1806, quote,
poverty is a most necessaryand indispensable ingredient in society
without which nations and communities
cannot exist in a state of civilizationwithout poverty.
(37:50):
There could be no labor.
There could be no riches, no refinement,no comfort,
and no benefit to thosewho may be possessed of wealth.
But not everyone believedit had to be this way.
Karl Marx certainly didn't think so.
Not only did we not need kings,Marx argued, but we didn't even need
(38:14):
the wealthy.
Inspiredby the left wing calls for egalitarianism,
he advocated for a systemcalled communism.
As Marx described it in 1875.
Quote from each according to his ability,
to each according to his needs.
That was the idea, at least.
(38:35):
And in
1917 there was the Russian Revolution,and Communism
finally found a home basein the brand new Soviet Union.
In part two of The King is Deadseries, episode 13.
Go check it out.
We talked about the Cold Warwhen the Soviet Union tried to prove
that communism was superiorto that other economic system.
(38:58):
The West was so obsessed with capitalism.
But spoiler alert,the Soviet Union collapsed
and communismproved to be no match for capitalism.
Why is that?
Maybe capitalismjust works better than communism.
But what do we mean by working?
As ancient Egypt, China and Rome
(39:20):
showed us to win at civilization.
You need to economicallyand militarily dominate other countries.
To do that, you're going to needan unbelievably enormous
amount of raw materials to be chopped,dredged and mined from the earth.
To do that,most people are going to have to spend
(39:41):
their lives doing the most menial,soul sucking, dangerous jobs imaginable.
If poverty is an excellent motivator,
then by concentrating wealth in fewerand fewer hands, maximizing profit
instead of compensating for laborcapitalism is really dang good at,
let's just say, motivating peopleto do those jobs.
(40:04):
Communism can't motivate people like that.
If we're asking which
economic model is the best suitedfor civilization,
capitalismmay take the cake and sell it back to you
for profit and add ingredientsthat give you diabetes.
But what exactly is capitalism?
(40:26):
We usually say capitalism beganaround the time Adam Smith coined the term
back in 1776, but there wasn't
really one clear start to capitalism.
Capitalism isn't like communism.
There wasn't a manifesto or a revolution
or one day when capitalism was installed.
No one really had to tryto make capitalism happen.
(40:49):
When Adam Smith came up with the termcapitalism, he wasn't inventing a system.
He was just describingwhat he saw happening because in a sense,
capitalism wasn't a change,of course, from what came before.
But just further down that direction.
As authors
like Lewis Side and RobinWall Kimmerer have explained,
(41:11):
hunter gatherer and indigenous economies
emphasize reciprocity and gift giving.
In contrast, civilizationstend to treat resources and labor
primarily as commoditiesto be bought and sold.
Capitalism,seeing everything as a commodity
or capital was the path of leastresistance.
(41:34):
Capitalismis going with civilization's flow.
The Soviet Union tried to stop
that flow and build something else.
Communism was like a big metaphorical dam.
The Soviet Union builtin the river of capital,
which is ironic because dam building
is a classic civilizational move.
(41:57):
Civilization loves buildingdams to assert control.
But dams eventually burst.
The forces of civilization's marketeconomy were too powerful,
and along with its own internal problems,the Soviet Union collapsed.
(42:19):
A dam is
just trying to control the flow of water.
It's not stopping the source of wateritself.
And likewise, Soviet style
communismwas trying to control the flow of capital
but wasn't addressing its sources.
Surplusstored wealth and hierarchy itself.
(42:41):
Plus was the Soviet Union's version
of communism, even egalitarian?
The Soviet Unionwas an authoritarian state
whose elite class ruled overthe commoners.
The average personhad very little personal freedom.
I'm not sure that'swhat Karl Marx had in mind.
It goes to show just how hard it
is to create an egalitarian society
(43:04):
under the confines of large scalecivilization.
So capitalism and communism
may seem like the ultimate economic beef.
But hey, guys, listen, I gotta say,
I know you're all focused on the waysyou two are different.
Like how under capitalism, businesseson the means of production.
(43:26):
Whereas under communism, the governmentowns the means of production.
But, I don't know.
You guys might have more in commonthan you're willing to admit.
Both of you.
Capitalism and communism are built
on the same obsession with progress.
What kind of progress?
More technology and more industry. Duh.
(43:47):
Both you guys love talking aboutdevelopment,
modernization, mass production.
You didn't agree?
Who should run the factories?
But you were both totally on the same pagethat there should be
factories and lots of.
In 1991,around the fall of the Soviet Union.
Author Helena Norberg Hodge wrotethat, quote,
(44:10):
progress has reached an advanced stagein many parts of the world.
Wherever we look, we can see it'sinexorable logic at work, replacing people
with machines, substituting global marketsfor local interdependence.
In this light, even the differences
between communism and capitalismseem almost irrelevant.
(44:32):
Both have grown out of the same worldview,which places
human beings apart fromand above the rest of creation.
Both assumed that it is possible to go on
stretching natural resources indefinitely.
The only significant point of differencebeing how to divide them up.
And author Fred
Ho also wrote about how capitalismand communism both took for granted
(44:57):
the quote, inevitability of technocentrism and industrialism.
Just like capitalist countries,
the Soviet Unionbuilt their own coal mines,
nuclear weapons intensive space programs,
and fought their own imperialist wars.
I said it all the way back in episode two,and I'll say it again.
By the 1980s,the Soviet Union was responsible
(45:20):
for one and a half times the air pollutionas the US was at the time.
In other words, communismdidn't reject the civilizational system.
It just wanted to run that systemdifferently.
Communism, whether under the Soviet Union,China or Cuba, didn't
challenge the idea of industrializationand unlimited growth.
(45:44):
And capitalism seems to be way betterat generating those things.
But, how that industrial
expansion and whole unlimited growth thingworking out for us?
Yes. Hello.
Thank you. Alex.
I'm Jeff Opolis,and this is the state of civilization.
I'm coming to youlive with some breaking news.
Breaking news.
(46:04):
Hi. Okay. What do you got?
Well, I'm standing here rightoutside of civilization,
and there seems to besome significant signs of distress.
All right, Jeff, what are you saying?
Yes. According to the UN refugee agency,the number of people displaced
from war, violenceand persecution has doubled
in the last decadeand is continuing to climb.
(46:27):
The World Health Organization reportsthat over 700 million
people are going hungry.
That's 1 in 11 people worldwide.
Not to mention the damage being causedto the natural world at large.
Industrial activity is causing the declineof bee pollinator populations,
crucialto the existence of fruits and vegetables.
The oceans are acidifying.
(46:48):
Ice caps are melting.
About a fifth of the Amazonrainforest has been cut down.
This is a giant island of trashand plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean,
the size of Texas.
The size of Texas. Yes, Alex.
Or the size of two Germanys.
Oh, and also another headline for you
by Nami.
As of 2020, there is more anthropogenic
(47:09):
mass than biomass on all of planet Earth.
Wait, what do you mean?
That means if you add up all the weightof human material output, like concrete,
metal and plastic, then it weighsmore than all the organic material
like trees, rocks, and elephants combined.
That's a lot of human made mass.
It is Alex.
The global economy is growingat such a rate
(47:30):
that even with a switchto renewable energy, the world's resources
will face serious depletionby the end of the century.
All without halting the rapid decline inbiodiversity, if not even accelerating it.
Scientists warn we're in the midstof a mass extinction of life on Earth,
the scale of which the planet has not seen
since the demise of the dinosaurs65 million years ago.
(47:52):
Oh my God. Oh. I'm sorry.
I'm being told that. Yes.
Okay.
I'm receiving reportsthat record numbers of podcast
listeners are migratingfrom human nature Odyssey to more light
and carefree shows like true crimeserial killer podcasts.
What that made the news?
It's a lot of listeners, Alex.
They've just completely gone.
(48:12):
All right. Oh, let's stop there.
Are you sure you don't want to hear
about the increasingstockpiling of nuclear weapons?
No, no. That's fine.
We get it.
What about the existential threatof artificial intelligence?
Okay. Thanks, Jeff.
Oh, man.
It almost sounds like civilization's
(48:34):
expansion and endlesseconomic growth is leading to the demise
of the natural worldwe depend on, which, ironically,
would lead to the collapse of civilization
itself.
Capitalism is really freaking good
at industrial expansionand endless economic growth.
(48:58):
But what if those goalsare fundamentally incompatible
with continuing to exist?
What if human and ecological
well-being are better goals to have?
If so, I'm not so sure.
Capitalism is our best tool in the toolboxfor those goals.
(49:21):
So one hunter
gatherers, liberals or conservatives?
Well, they're conservatives in the sensethat small scale
foraging societiesare the ultimate traditional society,
and the left wing in the sensethat they're fiercely egalitarian.
But obviously huntergatherers are not really either.
(49:44):
It's temptingto use modern political labels
to understand past societies,but I don't think it's quite right to say
huntergatherers are like proto communists.
I think we actually have it in reverse.
It's not that foraging societiesare primitive forms of communism,
but communism is a clumsy, modern attemptto arrive
(50:05):
at some of the same egalitarian resultsour ancestors enjoyed.
So maybe it's not just about capitalismor communism.
Left versus right,liberal versus conservative like that
dress on the internet.
Our perspective and context shapeswhat we see.
But the dress itself wasn't subjective.
(50:28):
There are some realitiesthat are inescapable.
Sure, your perspective might be differentbased on your context,
but that doesn't change reality itself.
Nature has limits,
and we ignore them only at our own peril.
If industrialization, authoritarianism,
(50:52):
hierarchy, and class are all flowingtowards our collective demise,
then maybe we don't just need a damto temporarily stop the river,
but try and get out of that riveraltogether.
Fortunately for us,
we have a pretty goodegalitarian tradition to draw from.
So next time someone calls you a communistfor advocating for egalitarianism,
(51:17):
or an anarchistfor being against authority,
you can tell them, no, no,
I'm a hunter gatherer ism.
You know, real conservative values.
Think of it like this.
If everyone is free and has a say,they're not going to want to do the B.S.
required to build industrial civilization.
(51:39):
So egalitarianismmay not be the most effective
way to achieve industrial civilization.
But if industrial civilizationis inherently self-destructive
and that even communism couldn'tescape it,
then maybe trueegalitarianism might be a wiser choice,
because the kind of equalitywe find in many hunter
(52:02):
gatherer societiesmight just be essential for our survival.
Thanks for listening.
Until next time, I hope you'll consider
that if we can't all returnto hunting and gathering,
how can we adapt that egalitarian wisdomto our present moment?
(52:24):
This is where our two sided psychologymight come in handy.
Those with the conservative
tendency can help recover and preserve
what worked for our huntergatherer ancestors and contemporaries.
While those with the liberal tendencycan help us embrace the changes
we need nowseems like a pretty good balance to me.
(52:46):
Maybe then we'll learn how to surviveand thrive
in the centuries to come.
If you enjoy Human Nature Odyssey,please share it with a friend.
Leave a friendly review and come say hion the Human Nature Odyssey Patreon.
There you'll have access to bonusepisodes,
additional thoughtsand writings, and audiobook readings.
(53:08):
And thanks so much to everyonereaching out on the Patreon, adding
your thoughts and comments or suggestionson what I should explore next.
It means a lot and your supportmakes this podcast possible.
Thank you to
Tom, Mark, Charlie and Nick for your inputand feedback on this episode,
and a very specialthank you to Doctor Pascal Walsh.
(53:32):
You can watch my full hour
long interview with Pascalon the Human Nature Odyssey Patreon.
Also, additional music for thisepisode is by Adam Tel.
I'll link to his music in the show. Notes.
This series was made in associationwith the Post Carbon Institute.
You can learn more at resilience Storyand as always,
(53:52):
our theme music is Celestial SodaPop by Ray Lynch.
You can find the link in our show notes.
Talk with you soon.
You want to be referred to as Pascalor Doctor Wallace?
Pascal is fine.
I served as a clinical professor
of data science,neuroscience, and psychology at NYU.
And yeah,I'm interested in a variety of in human
cognition. Yes.
Tell us the story
of how you first heard about the dress.
(00:23):
Where were youand what did you initially think?
So this was February 27th, 2015,
and it was a Thursday, andI was coming home from work on the train.
So I think it was browsing Twitter.
A student had sent me on on a DM.
Hey, what do you think about this?
I was teaching psychology at the time.
Perception specifically.
And honestly, I dismissed it as likeI saw it was white and gold.
(00:47):
And then I went home and told my wife
how silly people out onlineand showed her the image.
And I saw it clearly.
White gold.
And she, you know, straight up told me.
So we read the eyes at the well,obviously black and blue.
And that's the momentI meant like when I was like 000000.
What?
(01:10):
And sofor people who don't know about this,
who miss this phenomenon,I hard to believe, but sure
tell the story of the dress.
Oh, okay. So.
And where did this photo come from?
Yeah.It all begins with Cecilia Bleasdale.
Her daughter was getting married,and on the occasion of getting married,
they were obviously shoppingfor a wedding. Dresses? Yes.
(01:32):
They didn't actually buy any that day.
I thinkbecause there were so many options.
So they took picturesof them, review offline,
and as they were themselvesreviewing the footage,
they got into a fight of like,what color this dress was?
Was itblack and blue or was it white and gold?
And they couldn't result.
And then they consulted,you know, friends.
(01:53):
And it's reached larger, larger circlesuntil one of the band members
that's playing at the wedding put it online, and the rest is history as it itself.
So this image of a dress
that some people sawas obviously black and blue,
some people saw, is clearlywhite and gold became viral.
(02:15):
Can you describejust how widespread it became?
Yes. So to my knowledge,this was at the time
at least the most viral thing, period.
It quicklyreached Wyre who had reposted it,
and then BuzzFeed,who was still think back then.
Who reposted it and everybody reposted itand celebrities got into it.
Logan had a take on it.
(02:35):
Everybody had taken this.
Everybody.
I'm interested to that.
So this dress meme wasn'tjust a pop sensation.
It was taken scientifically, seriously.
It seems to have been like somewhatdefining for you as a phenomenon,
a momentwhere you realize that this is real.
I was like, yeah, we need a biggerabout this is this is life.
You know, it.
(02:56):
It reshaped my research. Yes, absolutely.
So why did you find itso shocking and puzzling for the science
that you gained your expertise in thatthat very fact that you have an image
and we can all agree on the wavelengthsand the pixels and all of that.
And yet the digital is looks very different depending on your assumptions about it.
(03:17):
So in
other words, what this shows you ina very nice way is that you bring
a lot of yourself to every perceptualand probably cognitive interaction.
I remember people being pissed.
Yes about it.
It kind of created thislike anger response.
Like why do you thinkwhy do you think that is?
Well,I think most people believe the world is
(03:39):
the way it isbecause that's the way they see it.
And this object challenges that notion.
Not saying that everything's relative,but we all have equally valid positions.
That's actually not true.
I'm not saying that there is obviouslyan objective reality out there.
All I'm saying is what it shows you.
Our brain filtersobjective reality for you.
(03:59):
Because the weird thing is,is that the dress, it's not like
it was just the color of the dresswas just in the eyes of the beholder.
The dress actually did have a color.
So why would you have to dressso that the dress is black and blue
under normal lighting conditions?
There's no question about that.
The argument is about them.A lot of people didn't get this.
This is about this specificimage of the dress.
(04:20):
The lighting is ambiguous.So this actually is ambiguous.
What's going up is a flash isor exposed was cell phone was back lit.
Was it inside. Was it out? Yeah.
It was unclear. Unclear.
We actually studiedthat some people in our in our study
I was inside, some was outside.
So I was unclear. Right.
It seems like the disagreementabout the dress was because
a lot of the context forthe image was missing.
(04:43):
Like, we don't know where it wastaken. That's right.
What the lighting could be.
And therefore
people had to make assumptionsto fill in the gaps and say, we disagree.
I'm arguing about the entire backstoryof assumptions and meanings of words mean.
And that's all in the room of us.
You just can't see it.This is human nature.
So to jump to conclusionsand to assume that if someone else chose
(05:04):
to a different conclusionthat they're wrong and that you're right,
there's this interfacebetween reality which is objective
and what you perceive.
Well, maybe we should take that seriously,that this interface
might be different than people.
It was just by different peoplesee or hear different things.
This is not just about the quest.This is much beyond that.
This is happening here.
Maybe this is all happening in general.
(05:25):
There's much deeper implicationsfrom this.
Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey,
a podcast exploring our modern world,
our ancient past and where the two meet.
(05:47):
I'm Alex.
This episode begins
(06:08):
the third season of Human Nature Odyssey.
God, have you.
All right.
So in the last threeepisodes of season two,
we talked about the history of the leftand right
political spectrum,the debate between hierarchy
and egalitarianism, democracyand authoritarianism
(06:33):
that's been ragingover the last 250 years.
But 250 years is
nothing comparedto the grand scheme of human history.
All the way back in seasonone of the podcast,
we talked about our huntergatherer origins
and the major shift that happenedwith the agricultural revolution
(06:57):
10,000 years ago.
So you might be thinking,
what kind of freaking podcastis this anyway?
Are we talking about modern politics?
Are we talking about hunter gatherers?
Well, my friend, this is a podcastwhere we can talk about both.
In this episode, we're going to try
and bridge the gapbetween our modern political
(07:20):
and economic historywith our hunter gatherer origins.
You ready for this?
Okay, hang on tight.
It's going to be one bumpy ride.
Actually,it's it's not going to be that bumpy.
And I'm hoping it'sgoing to be smooth and easy.
(07:47):
In 2008,
psychologistJonathan Haidt gave a Ted talk
on how our psychological tendencies
can predict our politics.
He startsby telling the story of two dudes
going to see Michelangelo'sstatue of David.
Suppose the two American friendsare traveling together in Italy.
(08:09):
They go to see Michelangelo's David,and when they finally come face to face
with the statue,they both freeze dead in their tracks.
You ever see the statue of David?
You know, the curly haired guy chiseledinto marble, just chilling in the nude.
One guy is in awe of the statue's beauty
and the other guyis embarrassed by the statue's penis.
(08:29):
Just flopped out there for all to see.
Now, height says the Americanpolitical stereotypes
would tell us that the guyappreciating the art is more likely
to have voted for the relatively sociallyliberal Democratic candidate.
And the guy embarrassed is more likelyto have voted for
the relatively sociallyconservative Republican candidate.
(08:52):
He tells the
audience these aren't just stereotypes.
It's reflective of what research has shown
that people who vote for a left leaningliberal candidates tend to be more open
to new experiences than people who vote
for right leaning conservative candidates.
As Hite explains, it really is a factthat liberals are much higher
(09:14):
than conservatives on a major personalitytrait called openness to experience.
People are high on openness to experience.
Just crave novelty, variety, diversity,new ideas, travel, people low on it,
like things that are familiar,that are, that are, safe and dependable.
He quotes researcher Robert McCrae,the main researcher of this trait.
Robert McCrea, says that open individualshave an affinity for liberal,
(09:37):
progressive, left wing political views.
They like a societywhich is open and changing, whereas closed
individuals prefer conservative,traditional right wingers.
Apparently that's what the data shows.
But this obviously wouldn't apply toeveryone.
There are liberals who value traditionand conservatives who seek novelty.
And I got to imaginethe point is not really about
(09:58):
whether you vibe with Renaissance artor David's cute little penis specifically,
but whether you have an initial draw
or revulsion to new experiences.
Essentially,what he is trying to demonstrate
is that some people just inherently havea tendency towards new experiences,
and others have a tendencytowards the familiar, if that's true.
(10:23):
The debatebetween liberals and conservatives.
It seems like a debatebetween those who value change
and those who value tradition.
You ever see figure on the roof?
It's a musical set in the quiet Jewishshtetl of Anatevka.
Russia, not unlike the villagemy great great grandparents
(10:45):
would have been born in.
Back in the old country.
The story begins with TVA,a patriarch of the town,
breaking the fourth walland talking directly to us,
telling us all about his village,how hard yet simple life is,
and most importantly,the value of tradition.
In fact, he even breaks out into song.
(11:09):
Tradition. Tradition.
For copyright purposes,I can't sing the rest of the song.
And also, this isn't a musical podcast.
I'm sorry, but in this opening song,
Tavia explains here and then a tough guy.
We have traditions for everything.
How to sleep. How to eat.
How to work. How to wear clothes.
(11:31):
Tradition even explains the proper roleof each member of the family.
The men he tells us well,
sings us must workand provide for their family.
The women Tevye accounts are to raise thechildren and run the home.
Life is hard in rural Russia,
especially for the Jewish peasants,who were often not welcome.
(11:55):
And tradition, Tavia informs us,
is how they survive.
Good luck
trying to find a culturewithout tradition, rituals,
customs, roles, expectations.
Traditionsare like a guidebook for society.
(12:18):
Traditions mean that new generations
don't have to figure outhow to live from scratch.
The concept of tradition
is kind oflike that dress on the internet.
Some might hear it and think, well, well,of course, tradition is a good thing.
If only we stuck to them.
Others might hear it in French tradition,
(12:40):
or feel so restrictiveand limiting and backwards.
But regardless of whether you feel
a pull towards tradition or not,
let's give the conservative argumentfor tradition its credit.
There's a lot going for tradition.
Tradition is like chess.
(13:00):
The rules have been honed overa very long time.
Chess is a fun gamebecause the rules all make sense.
As a system,
I bet if you tried to make up a new boardgame on the spot,
it would have a lot of issuesthat need to be worked out.
This is called Lindy's.
All that something already long standing
(13:22):
is more likely to survive into the future.
Then a recent trend.
For something to become a tradition,
it has to have gone through a sort of
filtering process that preserves
what works and gets rid of what doesn't.
Whatever you come up with todayhasn't had time to cook and mature.
(13:44):
Therefore, the systems we've inheritedshould be stronger
than whatever cockamamie ideassome hipster came up with last week.
We cansee this reflected in nature as well.
The older an ecosystem,the stable it usually is.
Tradition one.
Change zero.
(14:05):
But if you like tradition, don't get cockyjust yet.
There is tradition in nature.
There's also a lot of change.
Individual mutations are a necessarypart of life.
In fact, it'sthe only way an organism can adapt.
Okay, that's one point for change.
(14:27):
When tradition and change both worktogether.
Ecosystems are strongerand more adaptable.
So the same is probably true
for culture too, right?
Culturesneed a balance of tradition and change,
and some traditionsare more sturdy than others.
(14:48):
If everyone has a sayand different concerns
and perspectives can be addressed,
I imagine that's going to makea pretty good tradition in the long run.
But some traditions
are built on wobbly legs, a traditioncreated by kings
and aristocrats might workgreat for kings and aristocrats,
but probably isn't too idealfor the peasants forced to participate.
(15:13):
If a tradition is too resistant
to change and other people's opinions,
then it becomes more and more brittleuntil it breaks.
After all, the French monarchy
existed for 1000 years
but was constantly riddledwith peasant uprisings that were ignored
(15:33):
or squashed until finally,
in 1789, peasants stormed the Bastille,grabbed King Louis
the 16th and his wife Marie-Antoinette,and sent them to the guillotine.
Towards the end of his TedTalk,
Jonathan Hite remarks on how once you seethat liberals and conservatives
(15:53):
both have something to contribute,that they form a balance on on change
versus stability, then I think the wayis open to step outside the moral matrix.
Hite then connects this to the wisdomof many eastern religions
like Buddhism's concept of yin and yang.
And two of the main gods in Hinduism,
Vishnuthe preserver and Shiva the destroyer.
(16:16):
So we all have natural inclinations
to either favor tradition or favor change,
but we shouldn't be too blindedby those inclinations.
Like,what's the actual value of that tradition
or the value of the change?
Because here's a very important question.
(16:36):
What exactly are we considering?
Traditional, All these kids on TikTok, these days?
I've never even been on TikTok.
All my friends post pictures of their kidson Facebook.
Facebook is good enough for me.
Tik. Facebook.
Is that what you whippersnappersare calling it these days?
(16:58):
I remember the good old dayswhen TikTok was just the sound
the clock made, and a book was somethingyou read with your face.
No sirree.
That's too much liberal change for me.
I know I know, I'ma bit of a conservative.
I value tradition.
That's why I use Myspace.
(17:22):
Traditional conservative
values are relative, right?
It depends on where you're startingyour history.
Again,it's like the dress on the internet.
What color you thought the dress was.
Depended on the context.
The same is true of tradition.
So the question iswhat is the context of a tradition?
(17:46):
Take something like private property,for instance.
It's private property,a conservative tradition.
Well, as my colleagues overat the Crazytown podcast
pointed out in an episodethey recently reared,
up until 1773,
most English peasants collectivelyshared their common spaces and decided
(18:08):
as a community how to settle disputes,who farmed what land, who could hunt what.
But then the English Enclosure Act of 1773
privatizedthose commons for the first time.
And as you can imagine,while the Lords were big
fans of this innovation,it was very upsetting to many peasants.
(18:31):
When you assume that private property
is the norm, then callingfor the abolition of private property.
Sounds pretty dang radical.
But in reality,if traditional conservative values
just mean being in line with the past,then in the grand scheme of things,
private property is the radical new thing
(18:52):
that's been implementedonly relatively recently.
After all, for most of human history,
there was no private ownership of land.
So in this case,
what would be the conservative move?
What would be the liberal move?
What the.
What's the music coming from?
(19:12):
This isn't in the script.
Yes. Hello, this is Jeff
Opolis reporting live for a new segment,The State of Civilization.
What is happening?
I'm here to cover the absolutelyfantastic news coming out of modern
civilization right now.
Really?
That's right. Things are just great.
(19:34):
In fact, they've never been better.
What's going on? You haven't heard?
Well, Kobo literacy is on the rise.
Child mortality is at an all time low.
Modern medicine has helped preventor cure countless of once deadly diseases.
And there hasn't been an all out warbetween the major world powers
(19:54):
in 80 years.
From space explorationto instant global communication,
humanity is achieving more than everbefore.
Civilization is killing it.
Oh, wow. That. That is good news.
I thought we were in waymore trouble than that.
I feel like a lot of peopleare not having a very good time right now.
(20:15):
Well, yes, there are some downsides,and not everyone can experience the perks.
But, just don't worry about it.
Don't worry about it.
What are the downsides?
Well, wealthinequality worldwide continues to rise.
Power is consolidatinginto fewer and fewer hands.
And the entire foundation of moderncivilization is built on an ever
(20:37):
expanding extraction of natural resourcesthat, unless seriously address
its root causes, will inevitably leadto a complete collapse
and widespread calamityfor the world's population, the likes of
which will be difficult,if not impossible, to recover from.
Life as we know it may come to an end.
But hey, I told youcivilization was killing it.
Jesus.
(20:58):
I mean, the downside seemed prettyimportant.
Not really.
Don't know.
I haven't thought about it too much.
I like to keep things positive.
Yeah, I get it.
But you're a journalist, right? Sure am.
Communications degree at civilization.
You back in the early aughts.
Those are the days I feel like
(21:20):
you should look a little deeperinto the state of civilization.
It would probably be useful information.
You know, Alex, you're right.
I'm going to get right on that.
There's no scoop too heavy for Jeff Arbus.
I'm going to do some real honest digging,and I'll let you know what I find.
Okay. Thanks, Jeff.
I appreciate it.
(21:43):
Man. Okay.
Where were we?
Oh, right.
What is tradition?
Some things we think are traditional,like private property,
are really much newer than we realize.
But just because something's new doesn'tmean it's bad.
Humans are adaptable.
(22:03):
We can adapt to all sorts of things.
We can eat kale from our garden,or we can eat Doritos.
But just because we can eat
Doritos doesn't meanthey're the healthiest option for us,
and that a Doritos based diet
wouldn't come with some side effects.
Some foods satisfyour biological needs more than others.
(22:29):
The traditional Inuit
diet of whale blubber and seal meat,
or the traditional Polynesiandiet of fruits and nuts and fish,
are going to leadto much healthier people.
Then diets based on deep fried fast
food and processed sugars.
And if some diets are healthierfor us than others,
(22:51):
what if the same is true
for all kinds of societies?
Like, what if some economicand political systems
are better suited for human beings?
For example, not
all humans like to laugh.
A governmentthat bans laughter is probably
(23:14):
ill suited to our natural laughingneeds, right?
A government that allows laughter.
That's probably a preferable government,
but how else would we know which
economic and political systems workwell for humans?
Well, this might be where the conservativeinclination can help us out.
(23:35):
Is there a
tradition that helped humanssurvive, thrive,
and spread across the entire planet?
It's like what the Lindy Effect says.
Whatever exists for a long time
probably means there was a reasonit was so successful.
Well, what if I told you thereactually is a tradition
(23:57):
that humans lived with for a long time?
And I'm talking about a really long time.
Like tens of thousands, hundreds
of thousands of years, long time.
For hundreds of thousands of years,
humans lived in smallforaging communities.
We evolved as hunter gatherers.
(24:19):
We were generally nomadic,lived off the land,
and didn't have too many materialpossessions.
Now, you might scoff at this.
Oh, yeah. Great hunter gatherers.
Come on.
What kind of primitive society is that?
Well, hold on, hold on just one second.
I even heard some of youconservatives scoff at this.
(24:42):
But isn't that kind of funny?
Because if you value tradition,
then isn't it possiblethat there might just be
something we could all learn from thehunter gatherer tradition?
Isn't that the wisdom of conservatism?
I mean, private propertya few hundred years old.
That's a tradition, I guess.
(25:03):
But if we wanted to lookfor a real tradition,
something that we know worked for a very,very long time,
that some communitiesstill practiced to this very day.
I mean, I don't know.
Seems like hunting and gathering isa pretty fair tradition to look back on.
If you zoom out enough, hunter gatherers
(25:24):
start to look like the real conservatives,
and their valueslook like the real traditional values.
And don't worry, don't worry.
I'm not saying we all pick up a bowand arrow and go become a hunter gatherer,
hunting and gatheringfor all your food requires a far
lower population density than a planet of8 billion people can allow.
(25:47):
But what about
the kinds of societieshunter gatherers lived in?
If small scale foraging societies
worked for hundreds of thousands of years,
is there anything they could teach usabout what economic
and political structuresare better suited to us
as human beings?
(26:10):
Recently, documentary
filmmakerKen Burns went on Joe Rogan's podcast
to talk about his new serieson the Revolutionary War,
and they uttering this warcry that they have,
adapted from the Cherokeefrom Native American tribes,
which is a yell that will reverberatein southern battlefields for decades.
(26:32):
Wow. Wow is right.
I love Ken Burnsand I love Ken Burns films.
We even went to the same experimentalcollege in Western Massachusetts.
Now, at the same time,that dude's like 40 years older than me.
But Ken Burns was telling Joe Roganthat for all of human history,
there was always this authoritarian ruler
(26:53):
until the American Revolutionchanged that.
We invented that.
Everybody, up until the point ofof our revolution, where subjects
the whole history of human beings,is like, okay,
I'm going to be under the bootof an authoritarian.
I just, you know, that's my life.
The greatest thing that we inventedwas the idea that we could
govern ourselves, that we have no longerbe under the boot of a
(27:17):
an authoritarian masterwho had just set himself.
But that's not really the full picture.
Sure, since the agricultural revolution,most civilizations
have been ruled by pharaohsor lords kings.
But long before the American Revolution
and before the Agricultural Revolution,hunter gatherer societies
(27:40):
were far more politicallyand economically egalitarian.
Archeologist Robert
Kelly defines egalitarian societiesas, quote,
those in which everyone has equal accessto food,
to the technologyneeded to acquire resources,
and to the pathsleading to prestige, unquote.
(28:04):
That doesn't necessarily meaneveryone has the exact same stuff,
but everyone at least has accessto the essentials
and a say in how things are decided.
Now, there are instances
where top down leadership is necessary.
We can imagine thatin certain emergency situations
(28:26):
that require quick decisionmaking, it's helpful to follow one leader.
You don't want too many cooksin the kitchen
bickering over choiceswhile danger closes in.
That's what my friend Nick always said
when we worked for this theatercompany together.
He used those theater productionsas examples
for how the whole nonhierarchicalegalitarian thing doesn't work.
(28:52):
He'd make the
point that it really helpedthat we had a boss, a director
with a vision who could give clearinstructions without one.
Nothing will get done.
And I agree.
That kind of leadershipcan be very helpful.
But there's a big difference between
a director and a dictator.
(29:13):
It's kind of like how leadership worksin sports.
Michael Jordan may be the team captain,
but he's not the king during the game.
He can tell you to pass the ball,but he can't make you do it.
And once the game is over,
he's not going to follow you homeand make you brush your teeth.
But that's theater and basketball.
(29:34):
What about government?
Could societies really be that functionalwithout one strong permanent leader?
Everybody's got to have a leader right?
In our stories about aliens,what's the first thing
we always assume aliens would saywhen they come down to earth?
Take me to your leader.
But maybe that's only because that's what
(29:54):
the English colonists saidwhen they landed in North America.
When the English first settled
in the landthey conveniently named New England.
Like the aliens of our stories,they told the native Algonquin.
Take us to your leader.
But for many of the native people,
who their leader was wasn't so simple.
(30:17):
Among the Algonquin tribes
who practiced a mix of hunting,gathering, and subsistence agriculture.
Some individual peopledid see more influential than others.
At first, the English assumedthese were the Algonquin kings and queens.
But the English soonrealized these kings and queens
(30:37):
were quite differentfrom the ones they knew back home.
In 1634, settler William Woodobserved, quote,
The kings have not many lawsto command by.
Yeah, bro.
Maybe that's because they're not kings.
The Algonquin had a different wordfor the leaders
that, to the English, sounded like him.
(31:00):
As historian William Cronin wrote, quote,
none of these were the sole speakersfor their nation.
Each nation had multiple sections
a speech himwho could either be male or female.
Asserted authority only in consultation
with other powerful individualsin the village.
(31:20):
In 1648, fur traderWilliam Pynchon came to an Algonquin
village and reported, quote,there are several small sections,
and in all near placesthere are other small sections.
No one said to him that through all.
I believethey will stick no longer to him.
(31:40):
Then the sun shines upon it.
Not only were the termspower limited and shared with others,
but if you didn't like your local section,
you could leave and go to a groupwith a leader you prefer.
But from the English perspective,
this was not going to work.
It's like if aliens landed on earth
(32:02):
asked to see our leader and we responded,
well, you know, we got lots of leadersand they don't really speak for all of us.
That might confuse and irritatethe aliens.
It certainly pissed off the English.
They wanted a single ruler that could beheld responsible for all their subjects.
So the English passed colonial lawsdeclaring, quote,
(32:25):
some principal Indian be appointedand declared to be the supreme of them
to whom the English can reportwhen wrongs are done by Indians.
In case the Indians do not agree,the court may appoint
and declare some mento be their chief or surgeon.
But before the English came in
and turned Seagram's into kings,the Sikkim leadership
(32:48):
had been much more like theaterdirectors and basketball captains.
Their leadership was limited, flexibleand temporary.
This kind of loose leadershipwasn't unique to the Algonquin,
but demonstrated in huntergatherer societies around the world.
And this sort of egalitarianism,as Robert Kelly
(33:10):
explains, quote, requires effort.
Anthropologist James Woodburn,
who lived with the Hadzapeople of Tanzania, agreed.
Quote Hunter gatherers are not passivelyegalitarian, but are actively so.
They are fiercely egalitarian,having to work at resisting their own
(33:31):
and others tendencies to dominatethrough rigorously enforced norms
that prevent any individual or groupfrom acquiring more status,
authority, or resources than others.
But, but, but this is wherethe classic critique comes in.
Right on cue.
Okay, okay, I know what this is.
(33:53):
Go ahead.
Tell me how life was just peaches
and cream for hunters and gathererswith the oil.
Noble savage theory.
Well, actually, author Christopher Ryan,
who we talked to in the last episode,
points out how the label noble
Savage didn't originally mean noblein the sense of being more moral
(34:13):
or just but noblein the sense of aristocratic nobility.
Those same English colonistsfirst encountering Native Americans?
I couldn't help but notice
how much more leisure timeand personal freedom they had,
as well as in unhindered accessto the entire landscape.
(34:34):
Back in England,if you wanted freedom, free time,
and access to land like that,you had to be part of the nobility.
Hence the term noble savage,
because Europe had
been the land of kings for so long.
These more egalitarian native societieswere initially shocking to them.
(34:54):
But those examplesof egalitarian societies
may have influenced Europeansmore than they would have liked to admit.
In part one of our recent King is Dead.
Now what? Series episode 12.
Go check it out.
We talked about the French Revolutionwhen peasants overthrew
the 1000 year old monitor to debatewhat to do next.
(35:16):
There was a national Assemblythat divided itself into a literal left
wing and right wing of the room,which is where we get the terms.
Left wing and right wing.
Terms like liberal and conservativecame soon after.
Those who sat on the right wing
argued for reinstating the monarchy.
Those who sat on the left wing arguedfor a more egalitarian society.
(35:42):
These left wingers were labeled radicals.
Are you guys seriouslytrying to upend 1000 years of tradition?
The conservative tendency of honoringtradition did not like that one bit.
But are you catching the irony here?
If we follow the conservativeimpulse to honor tradition
(36:02):
and go back in timelong enough to incorporate
our more egalitarian hunter gathererorigins, tradition starts to sound a lot
like what the so-called radical leftwing was arguing for.
But hold your horses.
The left wing shouldn't get too giddyjust yet, either.
Egalitarianism might have workedfor small scale hunter gatherers.
(36:25):
But what if you're trying to dolarge scale civilization?
The right wing of the FrenchNational Assembly argued
that hierarchy and classare essential to a functioning society.
And I will say,
if youlook at the history of civilization,
that does seem to be the case here.
(36:46):
After all, most civilizationsfrom ancient Egypt, China, Rome, you name
it relied on a system of the very richand the very poor.
And that wasn't just an accident,
but how those civilizations wereso dominant.
Think about it.
Who's going to build all those pyramidsand fight in all your armies?
(37:07):
I'll tell you right now, it'snot going to be the rich and powerful.
Someone's got to do all the menial
tasks to keep civilization running.
If everyone is well fed and taken care of.
Why would anyone want to wastetheir limited time on this earth
hauling bricks in the hot sun all day?
Poverty is an excellent motivator.
(37:29):
As Patrick Calhoun, founder
of the Modern Police Force in London,wrote in 1806, quote,
poverty is a most necessaryand indispensable ingredient in society
without which nations and communities
cannot exist in a state of civilizationwithout poverty.
(37:50):
There could be no labor.
There could be no riches, no refinement,no comfort,
and no benefit to thosewho may be possessed of wealth.
But not everyone believedit had to be this way.
Karl Marx certainly didn't think so.
Not only did we not need kings,Marx argued, but we didn't even need
(38:14):
the wealthy.
Inspiredby the left wing calls for egalitarianism,
he advocated for a systemcalled communism.
As Marx described it in 1875.
Quote from each according to his ability,
to each according to his needs.
That was the idea, at least.
(38:35):
And in
1917 there was the Russian Revolution,and Communism
finally found a home basein the brand new Soviet Union.
In part two of The King is Deadseries, episode 13.
Go check it out.
We talked about the Cold Warwhen the Soviet Union tried to prove
that communism was superiorto that other economic system.
(38:58):
The West was so obsessed with capitalism.
But spoiler alert,the Soviet Union collapsed
and communismproved to be no match for capitalism.
Why is that?
Maybe capitalismjust works better than communism.
But what do we mean by working?
As ancient Egypt, China and Rome
(39:20):
showed us to win at civilization.
You need to economicallyand militarily dominate other countries.
To do that, you're going to needan unbelievably enormous
amount of raw materials to be chopped,dredged and mined from the earth.
To do that,most people are going to have to spend
(39:41):
their lives doing the most menial,soul sucking, dangerous jobs imaginable.
If poverty is an excellent motivator,
then by concentrating wealth in fewerand fewer hands, maximizing profit
instead of compensating for laborcapitalism is really dang good at,
let's just say, motivating peopleto do those jobs.
(40:04):
Communism can't motivate people like that.
If we're asking which
economic model is the best suitedfor civilization,
capitalismmay take the cake and sell it back to you
for profit and add ingredientsthat give you diabetes.
But what exactly is capitalism?
(40:26):
We usually say capitalism beganaround the time Adam Smith coined the term
back in 1776, but there wasn't
really one clear start to capitalism.
Capitalism isn't like communism.
There wasn't a manifesto or a revolution
or one day when capitalism was installed.
No one really had to tryto make capitalism happen.
(40:49):
When Adam Smith came up with the termcapitalism, he wasn't inventing a system.
He was just describingwhat he saw happening because in a sense,
capitalism wasn't a change,of course, from what came before.
But just further down that direction.
As authors
like Lewis Side and RobinWall Kimmerer have explained,
(41:11):
hunter gatherer and indigenous economies
emphasize reciprocity and gift giving.
In contrast, civilizationstend to treat resources and labor
primarily as commoditiesto be bought and sold.
Capitalism,seeing everything as a commodity
or capital was the path of leastresistance.
(41:34):
Capitalismis going with civilization's flow.
The Soviet Union tried to stop
that flow and build something else.
Communism was like a big metaphorical dam.
The Soviet Union builtin the river of capital,
which is ironic because dam building
is a classic civilizational move.
(41:57):
Civilization loves buildingdams to assert control.
But dams eventually burst.
The forces of civilization's marketeconomy were too powerful,
and along with its own internal problems,the Soviet Union collapsed.
(42:19):
A dam is
just trying to control the flow of water.
It's not stopping the source of wateritself.
And likewise, Soviet style
communismwas trying to control the flow of capital
but wasn't addressing its sources.
Surplusstored wealth and hierarchy itself.
(42:41):
Plus was the Soviet Union's version
of communism, even egalitarian?
The Soviet Unionwas an authoritarian state
whose elite class ruled overthe commoners.
The average personhad very little personal freedom.
I'm not sure that'swhat Karl Marx had in mind.
It goes to show just how hard it
is to create an egalitarian society
(43:04):
under the confines of large scalecivilization.
So capitalism and communism
may seem like the ultimate economic beef.
But hey, guys, listen, I gotta say,
I know you're all focused on the waysyou two are different.
Like how under capitalism, businesseson the means of production.
(43:26):
Whereas under communism, the governmentowns the means of production.
But, I don't know.
You guys might have more in commonthan you're willing to admit.
Both of you.
Capitalism and communism are built
on the same obsession with progress.
What kind of progress?
More technology and more industry. Duh.
(43:47):
Both you guys love talking aboutdevelopment,
modernization, mass production.
You didn't agree?
Who should run the factories?
But you were both totally on the same pagethat there should be
factories and lots of.
In 1991,around the fall of the Soviet Union.
Author Helena Norberg Hodge wrotethat, quote,
(44:10):
progress has reached an advanced stagein many parts of the world.
Wherever we look, we can see it'sinexorable logic at work, replacing people
with machines, substituting global marketsfor local interdependence.
In this light, even the differences
between communism and capitalismseem almost irrelevant.
(44:32):
Both have grown out of the same worldview,which places
human beings apart fromand above the rest of creation.
Both assumed that it is possible to go on
stretching natural resources indefinitely.
The only significant point of differencebeing how to divide them up.
And author Fred
Ho also wrote about how capitalismand communism both took for granted
(44:57):
the quote, inevitability of technocentrism and industrialism.
Just like capitalist countries,
the Soviet Unionbuilt their own coal mines,
nuclear weapons intensive space programs,
and fought their own imperialist wars.
I said it all the way back in episode two,and I'll say it again.
By the 1980s,the Soviet Union was responsible
(45:20):
for one and a half times the air pollutionas the US was at the time.
In other words, communismdidn't reject the civilizational system.
It just wanted to run that systemdifferently.
Communism, whether under the Soviet Union,China or Cuba, didn't
challenge the idea of industrializationand unlimited growth.
(45:44):
And capitalism seems to be way betterat generating those things.
But, how that industrial
expansion and whole unlimited growth thingworking out for us?
Yes. Hello.
Thank you. Alex.
I'm Jeff Opolis,and this is the state of civilization.
I'm coming to youlive with some breaking news.
Breaking news.
(46:04):
Hi. Okay. What do you got?
Well, I'm standing here rightoutside of civilization,
and there seems to besome significant signs of distress.
All right, Jeff, what are you saying?
Yes. According to the UN refugee agency,the number of people displaced
from war, violenceand persecution has doubled
in the last decadeand is continuing to climb.
(46:27):
The World Health Organization reportsthat over 700 million
people are going hungry.
That's 1 in 11 people worldwide.
Not to mention the damage being causedto the natural world at large.
Industrial activity is causing the declineof bee pollinator populations,
crucialto the existence of fruits and vegetables.
The oceans are acidifying.
(46:48):
Ice caps are melting.
About a fifth of the Amazonrainforest has been cut down.
This is a giant island of trashand plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean,
the size of Texas.
The size of Texas. Yes, Alex.
Or the size of two Germanys.
Oh, and also another headline for you
by Nami.
As of 2020, there is more anthropogenic
(47:09):
mass than biomass on all of planet Earth.
Wait, what do you mean?
That means if you add up all the weightof human material output, like concrete,
metal and plastic, then it weighsmore than all the organic material
like trees, rocks, and elephants combined.
That's a lot of human made mass.
It is Alex.
The global economy is growingat such a rate
(47:30):
that even with a switchto renewable energy, the world's resources
will face serious depletionby the end of the century.
All without halting the rapid decline inbiodiversity, if not even accelerating it.
Scientists warn we're in the midstof a mass extinction of life on Earth,
the scale of which the planet has not seen
since the demise of the dinosaurs65 million years ago.
(47:52):
Oh my God. Oh. I'm sorry.
I'm being told that. Yes.
Okay.
I'm receiving reportsthat record numbers of podcast
listeners are migratingfrom human nature Odyssey to more light
and carefree shows like true crimeserial killer podcasts.
What that made the news?
It's a lot of listeners, Alex.
They've just completely gone.
(48:12):
All right. Oh, let's stop there.
Are you sure you don't want to hear
about the increasingstockpiling of nuclear weapons?
No, no. That's fine.
We get it.
What about the existential threatof artificial intelligence?
Okay. Thanks, Jeff.
Oh, man.
It almost sounds like civilization's
(48:34):
expansion and endlesseconomic growth is leading to the demise
of the natural worldwe depend on, which, ironically,
would lead to the collapse of civilization
itself.
Capitalism is really freaking good
at industrial expansionand endless economic growth.
(48:58):
But what if those goalsare fundamentally incompatible
with continuing to exist?
What if human and ecological
well-being are better goals to have?
If so, I'm not so sure.
Capitalism is our best tool in the toolboxfor those goals.
(49:21):
So one hunter
gatherers, liberals or conservatives?
Well, they're conservatives in the sensethat small scale
foraging societiesare the ultimate traditional society,
and the left wing in the sensethat they're fiercely egalitarian.
But obviously huntergatherers are not really either.
(49:44):
It's temptingto use modern political labels
to understand past societies,but I don't think it's quite right to say
huntergatherers are like proto communists.
I think we actually have it in reverse.
It's not that foraging societiesare primitive forms of communism,
but communism is a clumsy, modern attemptto arrive
(50:05):
at some of the same egalitarian resultsour ancestors enjoyed.
So maybe it's not just about capitalismor communism.
Left versus right,liberal versus conservative like that
dress on the internet.
Our perspective and context shapeswhat we see.
But the dress itself wasn't subjective.
(50:28):
There are some realitiesthat are inescapable.
Sure, your perspective might be differentbased on your context,
but that doesn't change reality itself.
Nature has limits,
and we ignore them only at our own peril.
If industrialization, authoritarianism,
(50:52):
hierarchy, and class are all flowingtowards our collective demise,
then maybe we don't just need a damto temporarily stop the river,
but try and get out of that riveraltogether.
Fortunately for us,
we have a pretty goodegalitarian tradition to draw from.
So next time someone calls you a communistfor advocating for egalitarianism,
(51:17):
or an anarchistfor being against authority,
you can tell them, no, no,
I'm a hunter gatherer ism.
You know, real conservative values.
Think of it like this.
If everyone is free and has a say,they're not going to want to do the B.S.
required to build industrial civilization.
(51:39):
So egalitarianismmay not be the most effective
way to achieve industrial civilization.
But if industrial civilizationis inherently self-destructive
and that even communism couldn'tescape it,
then maybe trueegalitarianism might be a wiser choice,
because the kind of equalitywe find in many hunter
(52:02):
gatherer societiesmight just be essential for our survival.
Thanks for listening.
Until next time, I hope you'll consider
that if we can't all returnto hunting and gathering,
how can we adapt that egalitarian wisdomto our present moment?
(52:24):
This is where our two sided psychologymight come in handy.
Those with the conservative
tendency can help recover and preserve
what worked for our huntergatherer ancestors and contemporaries.
While those with the liberal tendencycan help us embrace the changes
we need nowseems like a pretty good balance to me.
(52:46):
Maybe then we'll learn how to surviveand thrive
in the centuries to come.
If you enjoy Human Nature Odyssey,please share it with a friend.
Leave a friendly review and come say hion the Human Nature Odyssey Patreon.
There you'll have access to bonusepisodes,
additional thoughtsand writings, and audiobook readings.
(53:08):
And thanks so much to everyonereaching out on the Patreon, adding
your thoughts and comments or suggestionson what I should explore next.
It means a lot and your supportmakes this podcast possible.
Thank you to
Tom, Mark, Charlie and Nick for your inputand feedback on this episode,
and a very specialthank you to Doctor Pascal Walsh.
(53:32):
You can watch my full hour
long interview with Pascalon the Human Nature Odyssey Patreon.
Also, additional music for thisepisode is by Adam Tel.
I'll link to his music in the show. Notes.
This series was made in associationwith the Post Carbon Institute.
You can learn more at resilience Storyand as always,
(53:52):
our theme music is Celestial SodaPop by Ray Lynch.
You can find the link in our show notes.
Talk with you soon.
Popular Podcasts
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.