The Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, has announced that the country will legalize 500,000 migrants, creating a massive political and demographic shakeup inside the country. Despite all of these efforts, Spain is ultimately racing towards the same progressive open borders many other western nations have pursued. So the question everyone is asking is: if liberalism ultimately makes nations fragile, how did it come to dominate the most powerful countries in the western world?
00:00:54.040Despite all of these efforts, Spain is ultimately racing towards the same progressive open borders
00:01:00.000many other western nations have pursued so the question everyone is asking is if liberalism
00:01:06.840ultimately makes nations fragile how did it come to dominate the most powerful countries in the
00:01:12.300western world most people are lazy selfish and impulsive successful civilizations are created
00:01:19.040by accumulating low time preference behaviors that collectively enable them to overcome the
00:01:24.940negative aspects of human nature. Those lessons are costly to relearn with each generation,
00:01:30.280so the pro-social behaviors are encoded in the traditions, folkways, and institutions
00:01:35.740of civilization. The systems that allow society to function work their way into language,
00:01:42.140religion, literature, song, and art until they're almost invisible to the people who live inside
00:01:48.040them. The people could not imagine living any other way. This thick network of embedded folkways
00:01:54.120and traditions does a great job of cultivating virtue in the citizenry and perpetuating the
00:01:59.940society that gave birth to them, but it makes cooperation with other nations difficult.
00:02:06.220In many cases, even the inhabitants of the society can't really articulate what the behaviors are
00:02:12.720or what makes them work because they've become second nature. The very thing that makes them
00:02:17.640work for the host nation makes them very difficult to explain or implement in other cultural contexts.
00:02:24.120A small, tight-knit society is great for a time, but eventually gets out-competed by larger
00:02:29.880civilizations. The advantages of scale are too great, and to compete, the small, successful
00:02:35.080nation must learn to expand through cooperation. The civilization with more troops, more crops,
00:02:41.440more trading partners, and more allies will eventually crush smaller societies,
00:02:45.920no matter how virtuous those societies might be. This is where liberalism enters the equation.
00:02:51.720Liberalism, in the classical sense, not the modern democratic party, was a project that allowed civilization to scale.
00:02:59.180Specifics of religion, custom, tradition, and even financial transactions have been too deeply territorialized in particular civilizations to allow cooperation or commerce between different peoples.
00:03:10.400In many cases, the differences were so severe as to spark wars.
00:03:14.760To enable cooperation and scale, the scaffolding that allowed cooperation at the local level needed to be removed from these divisive, conflicting cultural contexts and re-territorialized into a neutral space where different peoples could access it.
00:03:30.360By identifying and extracting the behaviors that enabled social cooperation from their cultural contexts,
00:03:38.280liberalism created a framework that enabled different nations to engage in commerce and other forms of exchange.
00:03:44.820A minimum viable morality was reached among nations, allowing them to sign business contracts, diplomatic treaties, and trade agreements that each side understood and could adhere to.
00:03:56.360Rather than go to war, people with very different ways of life could buy, sell, and even ally with each other productively.
00:04:03.180Capitalism was born, and with it came vast gains in wealth and standards of living.
00:04:08.400The benefits of this explosion and cooperation are obvious, but in life, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
00:04:15.060Eventually, the costs of liberalism began to rear their heads.
00:04:18.000As nations began to liberalize and scale, they still maintained deeply rooted cultural identities and ways of life,
00:04:25.300while experiencing an influx of wealth.
00:04:27.840The ruling class would need to manage these new relationships of trade and diplomacy,
00:04:32.640so they increasingly interacted with the ruling classes of other nations
00:04:36.540within the new liberal framework rather than through their own native cultural networks.
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