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Stephen Fry: Suffering, Capitalism & What it Means to be Human
Into the Magic Shop
The Pros and Cons of Social Democracy
It always amuses me how if you will, social democracy, where you have a social contract to benefit everyone, it's transitioned into a negative term of socialism. It's particularly true in America. I mean, you know, that we regard the Democrats as a very right wing party if they were in Europe. They're very right wing and they naturally, every American political figure except a few like Bernie Sanders would regard almost every British party as Looney left. But a lot of it is to do with that deep sense in America of the individual,. The primacy of the individual overriding any sense of a common good or... You see it with the way that compared to Britain, Americans just
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Speaker 1
It always amuses me
Speaker 2
how if you will, social democracy, where you have a social contract to benefit everyone, it's transitioned into a negative term of socialism, which somehow is to be
Speaker 1
avoided at all costs. It's particularly true in America. I mean, you know, that we regard the Democrats as a very right wing party if they were in Europe. They're very right wing and they naturally, every American political figure except a few like Bernie Sanders would regard almost every British party as Looney left. But a lot of it is to do, isn't it, with that deep sense in America of the individual, the primacy of the individual overriding any sense of a common good or, and you see it in traffic. You see it with the way that compared to Britain, Americans just, hey, I can get in the traffic here, even if waiting and letting someone else in would allow the traffic to move faster, it's the individual wanting to get their atom in. And the idea that there is such a thing as traffic is like saying this such a thing as society. It's a kind of anti. And in that sense, there's a Randian kind of libertarianism or sort of atomism at work, isn't there?
Speaker 2
Well, you know, I think this is the, this cons, and I think it's a false notion of this rugged individualism in the sense that it sold the people, they buy into it to justify certain types of behavior. But the system that is telling them that is manipulating them to take everything away from them, except for them being able to cut into traffic. Yes.
Speaker 1
To be a unit in, yeah, yeah, that's a great idea.
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