Anand Giridharadas

I'm so happy to be with you.

Well, first of all, I'm so happy to be on the show.

I've admired it from afar and it's a thrill to be talking to you.

I actually want to start where you were a second ago.

which is that every ruling class throughout history invents a story to do a few things, I think, to make it seem like this is the only way, to make it seem like this is fair, this is justified, and that it would be too difficult, too costly, too dangerous to change it, right?

And the reason I think it's worth starting there is it is easier to see how this is done

when you are looking at other people's times and places.

It's actually hardest to see this in your own time.

Precisely because of how the story works.

Let's pause before we get to now.

Think about slavery time.

You can't just have slavery.

You can't just have a material system

in which some people are enslaved and put in bondage and killed if they break rules and chased if they leave, you can't just do that activity.

It's incredibly important to invent a narrative if you want that kind of regime.

And we all know that, right?

Because it's a different time and place.

And by the way, you gotta invent a narrative, ideally, if that's what you wanna defend, that the people on the top of that system believe, obviously,

But you got to invent a narrative, ideally, that even some of the people who are not benefiting from that regime believe.

So in the case of slavery, you wanted to get a lot of the poor white people who are not benefiting from the capitalist exploitation of enslaved labor.