Chapter 1: What biological reasons explain why communism fails?
You basically did something that I've been trying to explain for a very long time, the biological reasons for why communism worked. And you give a fascinating example of voluntary communism, which was the kibbutz system in Israel.
That was a wonderful natural experiment. So the founders who decided in Israel they would not just start anew, but they would build a whole new world based on a new kind of person who would be a good, unselfish person. It's a very dangerous system when you don't reward people on the basis of their merit.
This is one of the big problems of not taking human nature seriously, not accepting the fact that we have certain behaviors written into our genome by evolution because of our survival values. Our instinct is entirely warlike. I mean, we have genocide written into our genes.
Chapter 2: What is the kibbutz system and how does it serve as a natural experiment?
Nicholas Wade, welcome to Trigonometry.
Thanks for having me.
It's so good to have you on. Francis and I picked up your book a few days ago. You know, to be honest, we have to read a lot of books because we interview a lot of people, so it can sometimes feel like a chore, but the moment we opened your book, we were like, whoa, give me more of this, because it was so fascinating.
You talk, it's called The Origin of Politics, and it's about evolution and how evolution evolutionary history shapes the way we do everything, actually, in a way that we've totally forgotten in our society now. So we're going to talk about all of that. But before we do, tell us a little bit about you. What's your story? What's been your journey through life?
Well, I grew up in England and I worked for Nature, the scientific journal, who sent me out to Washington to be their Washington correspondent. And after a year, I was asked by our big rival, science, to join them. So I worked for science for 10 years. And then I joined the New York Times as an editorial writer covering scientific environmental subjects. And I worked for the Times once.
I guess, right before 30, 40 years. Wow. That's it. Very brief biography.
Yeah. Well, you've written a number of books. Some of them have caused a bunch of controversies as well. We'll maybe talk about that later. But let's talk about what you are actually talking about in Origin of Politics. You give this... You basically did something that I've been trying to...
explain for a very long time as someone who was born in the Soviet Union, which you basically explain why communism never works, the biological reasons for why communism works. And you give a fascinating example of voluntary communism, which was the kibbutz system in Israel. Talk to us about that.
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Chapter 3: How does human nature challenge socialist ideals?
That was a wonderful natural experiment. So the founders who were of fleeing the anti-Semitism in their homelands, decided in Israel they would not just start anew, but they would build a whole new world based on a new kind of person who would be a good, unselfish person. So it was a really great and noble ideal, but it required doing things that run right against the grain of human nature.
So the first astounding thing they did was to abolish the family. So the family has been sort of the basic unit of human society since the dawn of time. So the kibbutz is arranged that the children would live apart from their families in sort of dormitories. They were allowed to see their families just at the end of the day for a brief period, but otherwise they were raised communally.
And the idea was that the woman would be released from the patriarchy of the father. So these guys came from sort of patriarchal Jewish families that they really wanted to get rid of entirely. So women didn't depend on their husbands for anything and they could have whatever jobs they chose. Those were the features of, that was one big thing that the kibbutzim did.
And the other was to abolish pay. So everyone got the same pay, whether they worked hard or slacked off. And the reason was to make sure that you had a condition of total equality. No one was richer or better than anyone else. No one could boss anyone else around. So on paper, it was ideal. Women weren't dependent on men. No one... No one was superior to anyone else.
And it's a great tribute to the idealism of the founders. The system did last, at least while they were alive. But when a second generation grew up who weren't imbued with the founders' ideology, they started to reject all these things. The women wanted to have their children with them during the day. The families were reconstituted.
the kibbutzim had to go through a massive rebuilding program to build apartments instead of these communal living arrangements.
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Chapter 4: What evolutionary forces shape competition and cooperation in human societies?
And they also had to drop the equal pay system because when they were founded, Israel was quite a poor economy and it didn't really matter what wages were outside the kibbutzim, they weren't much better. But as Israel grew more prosperous, people started leaving the kibbutzim for much better paying jobs.
So pay differentials were reinstituted, and the kibbutzim, which had been in a very bad way, then started to get more prosperous. So the interest of the whole experiment was that this was a pure test of socialism. Defenders of socialists often say, well, it's never really been tried, meaning that the communist governments that operated it were so corrupt and inefficient, that wasn't a fair test.
But the kibbutzim were a fair test. It was voluntarily entered into, and it was voluntarily rejected when people saw it simply didn't work.
And you do a brilliant job in the book explaining where the tension between the desire for equality expressed ultimately in something like the kibbutzim and the desire for merit-based hierarchy, let's say it like that, right? Where they come from evolutionarily. Can you share that with our viewers and listeners?
Yeah, so the root of that is that men had to compete very hard to survive. So in early societies, it wasn't sort of one man, one woman. It was the chief guy got most of the wives, and many men were left without a wife at all. So unless you competed like hell, you had no chance of having a family and leaving any descendants. So your Darwinian fitness was zero.
And we are the descendants of the men who survived this system by being highly competitive with each other for women. Then they had to turn around and be very cooperative with the other men in their society for the society's defense.
So another tribe wouldn't come and kill all of you and take all of your women?
Right, which is what happened if you failed to defend your country, the men would be killed and the women, and the children as well sometimes, and the women would become the property of the conquerors. So it was a really bad thing to be defeated. So that's why men have these sort of two very strong drives in them to compete. with each other and yet to cooperate for reasons of defense.
And to answer your question, I think this comes back to why an equal pay system goes so against the grain of human nature. People don't want to just have a system where their efforts aren't rewarded. They are sort of programmed to fight as hard as they can for the means to sustain and protect their family.
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Chapter 5: How did the kibbutzim evolve over generations?
So there's a wonderful book by Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist, where he describes how the major civilizations of the world in different ways got rid of their tribal structure and instituted a single ruler with a sort of state bureaucracy. In Europe, it was done by the church. So the early Europeans were all tribal. And...
In those days, it was often quite hard to produce a male heir because people died very young. So you very much needed to keep the wealth inside the tribe. So there were stratagems for like adoption or marrying your cousin for keeping wealth inside the tribe. So the church came along and said, no, all that is incestuous and absolutely forbidden.
And so when people were on their deathbeds, the church would say, well, You should leave all your money to the poor, meaning the church. And the church became fantastically wealthy. At one stage, it owned like half of Germany and a third of France. The net result of this policy was that the tribes lost all their money and just disappeared.
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Chapter 6: What role does merit play in societal structures?
Like people now treat their political party as their football team. Whereas it felt to me like in the late 90s, early 2000s, yeah, people had some kind of political allegiance. But but it's in the same way that like if you're a fan of the Green Bay Packers, you're not going to hate Patriots fans. It was like, well, look, I'm a Democrat. He's a Republican.
But we sort of are going to be able to get on. Now it's become tribal in the sense of like this is warfare almost is what it feels like to me.
Yeah, I think tribalism can sort of break out in almost any context because it's so inbuilt in our systems. You embrace your friends and you hate or despise or kill your enemies. And tribalism itself hasn't really gone away. It's just been transformed into the nation state. So the nation state, I think, has emerged as the most effective way for humans to organize themselves.
And yet it really is just an extended tribe. It's got everything except kinship. And what it has is... Our kinship is the glue of tribes. A nation-state has various surrogates, like people usually have a common language, a common religion, a common ethnicity, a common sort of founding narrative of how their nation came to be.
And these things are very effective, because nations are so effective, their problem often is not that they're too weak, but they're too strong, so they will make war against their neighbors. I definitely think that nations are the best way we have yet evolved of organizing ourselves.
And it seems to me a great shame that the sinews of nationhood are often ignored or rejected or repudiated, particularly by the left. So this is a particularly serious problem, I would think, for the U.S., because many countries are sort of natural nations, and they have a little Scandinavian democracy. They all speak the same language. They have the same religion. They have contiguous borders.
So the U.S., It used to be like that when it was primarily settled by English Protestants very early on. Because of its wonderfully flexible constitution, it was then able to embrace lots of other nations, mostly Christian nations, mostly Europeans. and while retaining its cohesiveness. But if you look at it now, many of the sinews of nationhood are fading. Americans used to be very religious.
They're not so religious now. They're following Europe in that pattern. The ethnicity is quite mixed and changing. It's all stable at the moment. You never know how long that's going to last. They used to be a common language, but now they're sort of Spanish-speaking enclaves that resist adopting English. You have to ask, well, what is it that holds Americans together?
It seems to be money right now. It seems prosperity. Prosperity holds everyone together. No need to sort of rock the boat of everyone is reasonably prosperous, at least in relative terms they are. But if that should fade for any reason, what would happen? I don't know. I don't see the natural bonds of a nation-state being so cohesive that one needn't worry about them.
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