Episode 6.17: The Story So Far. Self-reference and the politics of the world.

We analyse more or less every political system in terms of its attitude to self-reference: to self-criticism; to dissent; to unthinking subservience. And we understand capitalism out of the same concern to allow anything but doubts about its own most fundamental assumptions that reflect its social Darwinism and are embodied in its assumption that differential rewards are the just desserts of those of unequal worth as measured by its own self-reinforcing measures of success. But all political systems endorse the same foundational assumption: that the only reliable measure of success is a person’s manifest command of more than their fair share of the world’s resources.