Hello fellow kids. And we'llcome back to what is politics and to our critique of greyburn wengrow's new book, the dawn of everything. Today, in this third instalment of our critique, will be circuitously covering chapter one from the book, which is called farewell to humanity's childhood, or why this is not a book about the origins of inequality. Before i dig in, i want to outline where i'm coming from and why i'm spending so much time and energy criticizing this particular book. I don't destroy my income spending insane amounts of time making pod casts about political theory because i like blathering on about abstractions and i like not having any money. I do it because in politics, like in any field, bad political theory leads to bad political instincts, which means doom political actions. If you're a doctor and you don't understand how germs work, or how the human body works, you'll treat illnesses with leeches and mercury and historectomes, and you will harm your patients instead of helping them. And if you're a human being engaging in political action and you don't understand how human beings work, youare going to build social movements that hamper your objectives instead of advancing them. You're going to write laws that can't be enforced or that produce the opposite effect what you're trying to achieve. You're going to be easily seduced by bad ideas and by people who don't share your interests, and by carismatic idiots and charlatans who don't really have any ideas. And if your goal is to change the world in major ways, you're going to end up making revolutions that fail, or else that succeed, but then end up replicating the same types of hierarchies to the ones that you're trying to overcome in the first place. Now in a society with a hie al power structure, where some people have power and freedom at the expense of other people's power and freedom, be it capitalism, the soviet union, mediaeval europe or ancient babylonia, one would always expect that the political theories and concepts coming out of the main institutions in these societies will be confused and convoluted, particularly when it comes to understanding the most basic features of these societies, how power is structured, how power works. For example, if you took a course on marxism at one of the top soviet universities in the 19 seventies, you were going to be taking one of the most boring, minumbing classes imaginable. And that's because if mark's work had been taught in a straightforward and easy to understand manner, students would immediately recognize that the ruling party needed to be overthrown and that the workers should take power directly. And it's the exact same reason that christianity gets such mangled interpretations in the mediaeval catholic church, which jesus probably would not have been a big fan of. To day, in the rich, industrialized countries, we have a political culture where none of the basic terms of our political vocabulary have any consensous definitions. So terms like left and right, the market, socialism, capitalism, these mean something different to each person who uses them, and we just kind of feel what they mean. People with poly sie pge ts write entire books about these topics without defining them, or even really knowing what they're talking about. Terms like politics and government are routinely used in ways that obscure power by hiding the fact that politics and government exist in the private sphere, not just in the public, state sphere. So people think that they love democracy and they hate top down government, but they don't notice that when we go to work, we're spending most of our waking hours subjected to a top down government, where the dictator is the owner, with only our bargaining power and the state as a check on the owner's power. And then we have all these stupefying ideologies, ideologies that make us stupid, these myths that obscure the nature of power. Take contracts for example. Contracts are supposed to be the foundation of our economic system. And the ideology of contracts is all based on this total falsehood that you will learn in every single law school, that contracts represent the will of the parties who sign theon therefore every contract is a windwind situation. But in the real world, your will is only expressed to the extent that you have bargaining power. Like if you've ever paid weigh more in rent than you can afford because the market is a nightmare and you have no other choice, you know that your lease contract reflects 95 % of your landlord's wishes and about five % of your wishes.