Episode #205 ... Why a meritocracy is corrosive to society. (Michael Sandel)

Hello, everyone.

I'm Stephen West.

This is Philosophize This.

Thanks to the people that do all the things that support the show.

So, last episode was all about the importance of participating in a democracy, taking responsibility, having the sometimes tough conversations with each other that eventually make up the norms of the societies we live in.

And if you wanted an example of one of these norms, a social ideal that Sandel thinks we'd benefit a lot from if we talked about it more,

how about an ideal that drives the way we think about a lot of things in Western culture?

That what we should be aiming for is a society based on the concept of a meritocracy, or a system where the rewards of a society are distributed based on who's the most talented, who works the hardest, and who's the most qualified for the job.

In a true meritocracy, you could say, talented, hardworking, qualified people would be the ones that are the most socially rewarded.

Everybody knows this is a common way that people wish our societies could be set up.

And Michael Sandel, in his 2020 book called The Tyranny of Merit, is going to question whether that's actually a good way to to be giving recognition in a society.

And before we get into his critique, one thing needs to be acknowledged here right at the start, I think.

Well, I guess a question that needs to be asked here is, why would anybody want to do it in a different way?

Why would anybody want the incentives of their society set up in any way that doesn't primarily reward these people?

I mean, when I need a heart surgery, for example, I want the best possible surgeon you can find.

You know, I don't want some man or woman that, you know, they've seen every episode of Gray's Anatomy or MASH.

As Sandel says, when you're on a flight, you want the pilot that's the most qualified to be flying the plane.

I mean, seriously, what else are people really even making a case for here?

We don't want a society where people are incentivized to sit on the couch all day, complain, and then expect to get the same outcomes as everyone else.

Nobody wants a society like that.

We need people doing great things.

Everybody benefits when people provide value to the world.

And we want things set up in a way where the people that work hard are rewarded over the people that didn't apply themselves.

We want a situation where if somebody is the best for the job, they get the job and are not held back by some immutable thing that they happen to be born with.

I mean, we've seen nepotism and prejudice be the selection method throughout history.

What society doesn't want to do away with all that and pave the way as much as we can for the people with the most merit to rise to the top?

And I think if we're able to acknowledge all these points as a place to start, you know, plant a flag in the ground right here, then I think we can open ourselves up to the rest of the discussion, a few more layers to it, that Michael Sandel wants to turn us on to today.

What he wants to ask is, does us setting things up to be a meritocracy, as much as we possibly can, come with certain unintended consequences that we can see in the world all around us, but that we often don't attribute to the meritocracy?

Again, building off the ideas from last episode, if we want to take responsibility for the norms and ideals that we organize society around, and then do the work every day to engage with them, then the idea of meritocracy is going to be one of these things that we need to take a closer look at from Michael Sandel.

And there's two main problems, he thinks, with the theoretical idea of our meritocracy.

Number one, he says, is that we just don't actually achieve it in practice.

This is important, of course, but it's also something everybody listening to this has already heard no less than 800 times before in your life.

For example, Sandel talks about how 50% of the people that go to Ivy League schools are from the top 1% of families in terms of income.

That's the fact he gives here.

But it doesn't need to be this fact.

You don't like that one.

Just enter in any statistic you want here that's more persuasive to you that certain people get certain privileges simply because of something about how they were born.

Plenty of examples of that, no matter what your politics is.

Point is to him, problem number one with our meritocracy is that we don't actually achieve the meritocracy.

Problem number two though, which I think is far more philosophically interesting, is that he says, even if we could start providing a perfect meritocracy and remove all the barriers out of people's way, that would still be a very flawed way to be structuring society that's filled with all sorts of bad results for the people that live in that society.

In fact, the person that originally coined the term meritocracy was a guy named Michael Young back in the year 1958.

He wrote a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy.

It's a fiction novel that's about a dystopian future, where a society organizes things around a meritocracy.

And then in the year 2034 in the book, there's a violent populist uprising of all the citizens that feel betrayed by the leaders of the society that they're a part of.

And it's funny, you can hear that and be like, oh, oh my God, what could possibly be wrong with a society based on merit?

Well, Michael Young saw the problems that Sandel thinks are playing out in the real world all around us.

See, fans of a meritocracy will say that one of the strengths of it is that it's a situation where everybody gets exactly what they deserve.

And then maybe more importantly, everybody feels like they got exactly what they deserved.

So one version of that is that a young, smart, talented, hardworking, motivated person will do great things and society will benefit from their work and they will be compensated well for doing those things.

Everyone will give them a ton of social recognition and these successful people will feel like everything that they got in life is something that they deserve.

I worked hard.

I was smart.

I deserve all the things that I have because it was me doing the things that got them.

But the flip side of that, Sandel says, is that in other cases where tons of people are struggling, for whatever reason they might be struggling, those people in this same method of determining social value are also left to feel like they got exactly what they deserved.

Which would be fine if individual effort and talent were the only factors that determined whether somebody's doing good or not.

But unfortunately, in the world we live in, there's a lot of other factors that just fall outside the control of what a single person can wake up and have an effect on with their daily effort.

For the sake of an example that I think Sandel wouldn't object to here, take the difference between income levels relative to cost of living between the years 1980 and 2024.

This 44-year time span, by the way, that no doubt is going to go down in history is a pretty unique period of change.

By the way, I originally saw this example on a random YouTube chart a few weeks ago.

Don't know who it was.

It was one of these big channels where they do cost of living comparisons.

Anyway, I thought it was a great comparison of pre- and post-neoliberalism.

Anyway, in 1980, in the United States where I live, for example, federal minimum wage was at $3.10 per hour, and the average apartment rental back then was between $250 and $300 per month.

Which means if you worked 40 hours a week for four weeks, your take-home pay would be $496,

which means that your apartment rental, if it was $250 a month, would be about 50% of your pay.

Fast forward to 2024, you know, past this period of neoliberal, get the government out of my way, globalized market fundamentalism, and the federal minimum wage today is $7.25 an hour, with the average apartment cost being $1,713 a month.

Now, if you worked 40 hours a week at $7.25 an hour, all the money that you make in a month, if you didn't eat or do anything else with it, all of it wouldn't be enough to afford this apartment.

So then you consider states like Washington that have mandated a minimum wage increase to $15 an hour a few years ago, and it's going to keep rising up for the next five, 10 years.

That's nice of them.

And you'll hear people that are a little older that used to make 20 bucks an hour back in 2003, and they'll hear that and they'll go, man, I cannot believe what these delivery drivers expect to be getting paid these days.

What are they?

They're driving a Lamborghini when they go to pick up my loaded baked potato fries.

At least my baked potato fries will be warm when they get here, right?

No, $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, makes your take home at the end of the month $2,400 before taxes.

Now compare that to the $1,713 you need to get an apartment, and that would be 71% of your monthly income.

So then you say, okay, come on though.

Who can really expect to be able to rent an apartment simply with a minimum wage job anyway?

Shelter like that is a privilege, not a right.

Well, okay, let's look at college graduates then.

Out of school, they start out averaging $24 an hour, which makes their monthly take-home around $3,800 a month before taxes.

Compare that to the 17-13 cost of an apartment, that would be 45% of their monthly income.

In other words, a college graduate today has about a 5% better situation than the person making the federal minimum wage did back in 1980.

Hopefully the intent here is clear.

It's not to say that there are no other factors to these numbers here.

The point is to illustrate how there are things other than individual effort that determine whether someone's struggling or not.

And there are often things that individuals have no control over.

Macroeconomic factors like inflation, wage stagnation, jobs being sent elsewhere, growing inequality in general.

There's historical factors too, like the events of the world that dictate many of the opportunities and challenges that your specific generation will have to deal with.

More than that, there's the way your particular historical moment is going to prioritize your skills.

Like if you're a person listening to this and you have a really high IQ and you get paid a lot because you have a job that requires a high IQ and you found a way within this current setup to make all that happen.

Yes, you have a skill that is highly valued in this world right now.

But you also know that at another level, if you were born into a different society a thousand years ago, you'd likely just be the highest IQ person pushing a plow, you know, looking for pattern recognition and how your pet cockroach moves around in the box you keep them in.

See, from macroeconomics to historical factors, to even biological facts about a person, these things all play an undeniable role in how someone may be struggling in life.

And when you ignore the importance of these in determining where people end up, and you replace it instead with this attitude towards people that everybody's getting exactly what they deserve, all sorts of ways of thinking about things stem out of this that you wouldn't necessarily expect.

For example, in this meritocratic setup, as he calls it, to Michael Sandel, people are more skeptical towards public assistance as a thing that we need to be providing.

After all, if the reason you can't afford your own house is just because you're a loser that made bad decisions getting the wrong degree, degree, or you're not side-hustling enough to make more money, then why do my tax dollars got to pay to fix your situation?

You go out and fix it.

Another thing this leads to, he thinks, is a situation where our society flatters the successful people in it and humiliates the unsuccessful.

He says this because, again, it tells successful people that you're the reason for all your success, and you don't have to consider all the factors outside of your control that made your situation a pretty fortunate one.

And then again, for the unsuccessful, you too are the reason for your lack of success.

And you really shouldn't be sitting around complaining about these outside factors.

Nobody cares.

Nobody needs to come and rescue you.

You just need to work harder and overcome these things like everybody else does.

In other words, this is an attitude towards each other that is corrosive to a society.

In fact, more than that to Michael Sandel, it's corrosive to the common good that we talked about last episode, our ability to have the conversations that are going to make our society into something that we all want to live in.

It's corrosive in a few different ways.

One, it makes it so that we don't focus on the bad economic policy that got us into the situation we're in if people are struggling.

When we fail to have substantive conversations about how politicians and economists made huge mistakes a couple decades ago that have led to this place, and instead we just blame the people who are struggling for not working hard enough, All that does is leave these people in a place where they become humiliated and resentful.

Because from their perspective, all they've done is go to school, get a degree, and do everything society told them to do.

You know, they followed the recipe, and now they're being told they can't afford to function in the world.

What?

Because they lack the willpower to start a side hustle and what little time they have off already?

Is that the kind of society that we would want to collectively design if we were drawing it up in a brainstorming session?

I think most people would say no.

And Michael Sandel says this anger and resentment from the people being sent this message, that they're the problem when it comes to why their life has gotten worse in recent years, make no mistake, this anger is what has created the recent rise of populism all across the political landscape in the last 10 years or so.

See, if populism is usually grassroots political movement that's centered around a distaste for some elite group who people generally think are hurting them in some way, then as we talked about in one of the G-Check episodes, big pieces of both the modern left and the right would have to say that that's a pretty accurate description of them.

And the meritocratic ways of thinking that produce this resentment, where people feel as though elites are out of touch and don't appreciate anything that they provide to the world.

For Michael Sandel, this allows for populist candidates to swoop in and take advantage of this resentment by promising that everything you're upset about with the elites, well, I'm not one of those elites, and trust me, I'm going to fix everything by getting rid of them.

As a quick detour here, it's interesting to consider where Sandel says this all comes from in the history of philosophy.

As he puts it, where did this idea that merit is connected to deservedness even come from?

And he says, interestingly, in the Western world, the specific way that we think about it may come originally from conversations we used to have about God and salvation.

The quick version of this is that there used to be a problem in the philosophy of Christianity where the question was, do I go to heaven if I'm a good person?

You know, if I perform the sacraments and I do good deeds, you know, 12 Hail Marys, 400 Lord's Prayers, if I do all this stuff, do people that do good things go to heaven and people that do bad things go to hell?

Or does God have the ability to let me into heaven whether I do any of this stuff or not?

It may seem like a weird question on the surface, but it actually has pretty big implications for people who are Christians.

And if you're not Christian, don't worry about it.

Just treat it like it's the trolley car problem.

Because when Augustine thought about this problem, if getting into heaven requires that you've done certain good things, then in one sense he says God cannot be omnipotent with that picture.

Because if you haven't done any of this good stuff, then in that case, his hands would be essentially tied.

I wish I could let you into heaven, but you haven't done your Lord's prayer.

Sorry, my hands are tied here.

Doesn't seem likely that's the case to Augustine.

More than that, though, he thinks that it can't be the case, because if it were, then he says the whole thing about sacrificing his one and only son to forgive people of their sins, that whole thing would be completely unnecessary.

You wouldn't need it if you could just live your life as a good person and get into heaven.

On the other hand, though, if God can just let you into heaven regardless of whether you're a good person or not, then do we even do good things during our time here?

I mean, sure, it'd be nice if you did if it's something that makes you happy, but do you really need to do good things in order to get into heaven?

So the implications of this are huge for Christian thought at the time.

And the further thing to consider about this conversation, if you're Michael Sandel, is that depending on which position you take in this debate, that will determine a direction that your thinking starts to steer into.

For example, if you take the line that you need to be a good person to get into heaven, that bad people go to hell, then salvation, as Sandel puts it, becomes a bit like self-help.

where as long as you live as a good religious follower, then you can feel a sense of pride about the good deeds that you've embarked on and earned your place in heaven.

And then you can look down on all the people who did bad things.

But if you believe that it was God's sacrifice of his son, Jesus, that gets you into heaven, then the alternative way to feel about it is a sense of humility towards God's grace.

Again, depending on what your answer is to this question, you'll either feel pride for your own good deeds or humility in the presence of God's grace.

And here's the point.

We live, for Michael Sandel, in a dialectic between pride on the one hand and humility on the other.

And we live in an age where pride is overrepresented in our political, economic, and civil relationships.

And it originated in the history of our thinking from the results of these sorts of conversations.

And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everyone that goes through the sponsors of the show today who signed a contract to make Philosophize this a possibility.

First up is NordVPN.

I'm guessing that many of you, like me, spend a good portion of time online, whether that's for work, entertainment, or just keeping up with the world.

But here's the thing.

Every time you connect to the internet, especially on public Wi-Fi, you're leaving a digital trail that can be exploited by hackers and other people that, quite quite frankly, just don't have your best interests in mind.

That's where NordVPN comes into the equation.

It's a virtual private network that acts like a shield for your online activity, encrypting your data, hiding your IP address.

Not only does it protect your sensitive information, but it also allows you to access content that might be restricted in your region.

And think of the whole new world of information and entertainment that could open up to you.

NordVPN is the fastest VPN in the world.

It's easy to use and won't break the bank.

For about the price of a cup of coffee per month, you can protect your entire family because one account covers up to six different devices.

If you're ready to take your online privacy seriously, give NordVPN a try.

To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com slash philo this, P-H-I-L-O-T-H-I-S.

Our link will also give you four extra months plus a free bonus gift.

There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee, and you'll help support our podcast.

The link is in the podcast episode description box.

Last up today, this show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

Hey, can you believe it's already halfway through 2024?

It's got me thinking about all the things I've been proud of this year, and all the stuff I still want to get done.

It's easy to get caught up in work every day, but taking a moment to reflect is so important, don't you think?

Let's be honest, life isn't always a smooth ride.

We all face challenges and setbacks, and sometimes these bumps in the road can throw us off balance.

That's where therapy can be a game changer for someone.

Therapy isn't just for those who've experienced major trauma.

It's for anyone who wants to grow, learn, or to live a more fulfilling life.

And if you're thinking about starting therapy, but the idea of finding the right therapist feels overwhelming to you, BetterHelp might be the answer.

BetterHelp is an entirely online platform designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule.

Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and you can switch therapists anytime for no additional charge.

It takes the hassle out of finding the right fit with someone.

So with that said, take a moment.

Visit betterhelp.com slash fill this today to get 10% off your first month.

That's betterhelp, h-el-l-p.com slash fillthis.

And now, back to the podcast.

Because if you transpose this point about salvation to our conversation about the meritocracy, the idea that you've done good things, so you deserve your good place in the world, and people that haven't done good things haven't earned a good place in the world and need to do better, well, you can see the direct parallel Sandel's talking about there.

On the other side of this, too, you can see how the acknowledgement of outside forces that you as an individual really have no control over, acknowledging how much of those have played into the exact spot that you're at in life, that's a type of humility that people who are doing well in the world that think it's all because of them might benefit from exploring a bit more in their worldview.

So to tie the first part of Sandel's points together here and put it into a neat single sentence version of this, it's not that a meritocracy is bad because we shouldn't be compensating people or appreciating them if they do something valuable.

Meritocratic thinking over-indexes the way people look at the world on the pride end of this pride versus humility dialectic.

And to Michael Sandel, that is corrosive to society and the common good.

And as you'll see throughout the rest of the episode here, there are so many examples of the corrections he thinks we should be making that are going to be centered around the main civic virtue he thinks we're in dire need of in the Western world right now, and that is more humility.

Michael Sandel has said that the biggest inequality that exists between people today is not when it comes to purchasing power.

Although that is important, don't get him wrong, but he'd say the bigger inequality that people face is the one of social recognition or social esteem.

It's worth asking the question, if we're going to examine the norms that make up the society we're a part of, what is it that makes someone valuable to the society that they're in?

What counts as a valuable contribution that we should feel instant respect for when we hear that someone's doing it?

Well, with the way that we currently look at the world, people usually feel this way about people like doctors, about scientists, maybe about judges.

But obviously we have respect for far more than just these careers, so what is it that warrants this social recognition more generally?

Well, to Michael Sandel, we have this sort of default respect for people when they've gone to school and spent years of their life to get a degree.

Or more accurately, we have respect for someone's career when they are well credentialed at what they do.

I mean, these are the kind of people where you go to a party, you hear about what they do, and you're like, wow, wow, you really are doing something important with your work.

Not like me.

I'm just one of those delivery drivers making 15 bucks an hour.

But is this level of respect of someone, simply for having a college degree hanging on the wall, is that something that's well deserved?

There's not an easy yes or no answer to to this, which is why it's something we got to examine deeper to him.

Michael Sandel would say that one of the reasons we see people with college degrees in this way is because of the messaging we've been receiving from a meritocratic culture for the last three and a half decades of our lives.

Bill Clinton, he says, way back in the 90s, told everyone when he was pushing school that what you earn will depend on what you learn.

This is a tagline back in the 90s.

Actually, it was one of...

Clinton's chief advisors, Dr.

Seuss, that came up with that one.

You know that guy wasn't actually a doctor, by the way?

And to Sandel's point, why would he have said that he was a doctor when he wasn't?

Well, it's because of all this unquestionable recognition that we give to people that are credentialed.

But in all seriousness, back in the 90s, this was the tagline.

And for Michael Sandel, what this was, was a meritocratic workaround of the situation we talked about before, where bad economic policy produces uncertain economic times for people.

And instead of dealing with that directly as a way to safeguard against it, politicians, teachers, parents, everybody told everybody that if you want to make it in the world, what you do is you go to school, you get credentialed, you make your resume into something that when people see it, they just have a coronary.

They fall over.

In other words, to Michael Sandel, becoming a valuable member of society has become essentially to go to a college and get a certificate to hang on your wall that then arms you to engage in what he calls meritocratic warfare.

But not only is it not the case anymore that you go to school and you get a degree and you're set for life in whatever field you got the degree in, but this whole message that we send to people en masse, what he calls the rhetoric of rising, it comes with certain unintended consequences as well.

We start to view the entire concept of education in our societies as just a way for people to acquire credentials so they can get paid in the world.

Economic justice then becomes about making sure there's no barriers in the way of people being able to get these credentials so that they can then enter into a lifetime of meritocratic warfare with all the other people.

With the sheer numbers of people that are going to college and the instant judgment you get if you say you're not going to go to college, the whole thing starts to not feel like education anymore, but more like a private industry that's been heavily subsidized by government funding and political propaganda for the last 35 years.

Now, none of this is to say that college isn't important to Sandel.

It is, especially if you want to get into highly specialized fields.

And to him, we would do well as a society to make college as accessible as possible for the people that want to go.

But that is a very different situation than what we're currently doing.

We are currently, at least in the United States, spending $162 billion a year of taxpayer money to send people to college and only $1 billion a year to help people go to trade school.

162 to 1.

What is the message we are sending about what a valuable contribution is to society?

It's no wonder why everybody knows what I'm talking about when I say we have a special level of default respect for people with credentials.

It's no wonder people that do the jobs that keep the world running often don't feel appreciated by the society they're in.

It's no wonder why in Michael Young's book about the dystopian future of a society built on meritocracy, why there was a populist uprising in the year 2034 where people felt like certain types of work and intelligence were being valorized in a way that made them feel like the elites of their society barely even cared about their existence.

So the takeaway from all this is that education becomes one of the unexpected casualties of the meritocracy for Michael Sandel.

He thinks collectively it would be really good for us to rethink the way we see education from the ground up, maybe to reform it in a way where instead of it being focused so much on giving people credentials, maybe we focus more on producing the types of people we need to maintain a society that can solve its own problems.

We need better education about civic virtue.

We need better teaching of how to engage in a real way with the issues of your day.

We need to teach a type of practical wisdom that's invaluable for being able to manage families and communities.

And we also need to be making education something that teaches our future citizens how to love the process of learning, not to just learn this thing today so that maybe you'll get a promotion tomorrow.

These are the things that are missing from our education system.

And in keeping with our conversation from last episode, it is our job to make these things a priority moving forward.

But how am I supposed to change the education system, Michael Sandel?

What am I supposed to take over the classrooms and scream at all the children?

You all need more practical wisdom in your life.

Well, no, the answer is through voting.

which directly connects to another unexpected casualty of the meritocracy if you're Michael Sandel.

That is, the way we see people that represent us in government.

To put it briefly, when you look at the numbers, we are extremely biased towards electing people that have these special credentials hanging on the wall.

I mean, can you imagine voting for a president or a prime minister or a city council member that didn't even graduate college?

On one hand, it can seem ridiculous to do that.

But on the other hand, knowing that a lot of people's college experience hasn't exactly been focused on the purest form of education for the last 40 years, and thinking about whether a president or a prime minister, once they're elected, are they really solving some problem that's going on in a community by pulling something out of political science class from 25 years ago?

No, no, what skills are they using to get the job done there?

Well, likely to Sandel, the kind of civic virtue, practical wisdom, and leadership that we should be teaching kids more in school.

In other words, it's not the degree that's hanging on the wall.

And until we stop electing people, simply because they can recite platitudes about the economy while handing out photocopies of their resume, we will never get to a place where we move beyond the meritocratic thinking that has led us to the place we're in.

This idea that you're not worthy of respect or that your job is just not important if you don't have a degree, this has to go for Michael Sandel.

One, it's just not true.

Two, again, if you were examining the social norms of your society and tending to the care of the society you live in, It's a horrible social norm to have that does nothing but make most people that do most jobs feel unimportant.

It's toxic to the way that we see each other.

In fact, Sandel thinks that in his country of the United States, what the Democratic Party used to represent was the life of working class people.

But now he says both parties have bought into this meritocratic nonsense that makes them parties of elitist thinking, where you're either well-credentialed in a certain type of work or you're unimportant.

If you wanted some ways to move forward with all this, to Sandel, it comes down to two main things we need to focus on.

We need to first collectively understand that individual upward mobility can never fully account for all the factors that lead to inequality.

And second, we need a political project that has at the center of its focus the restoration of the dignity of work.

COVID taught us a little bit about how important frontline workers are, but it's not enough.

We need a new awareness campaign connected to actual policy decisions that has the workers that make our societies even possible at the center of the consideration of the movement.

Sandel thinks that the political actors that manage to do that in an authentic way are going to be massively successful.

And again, maybe part of the solution in some places will be electing people locally that are truly from these types of positions, people who therefore draw on a different kind of wisdom from people that actually know what's going on.

So as you can see, these ways to move forward for Sandel are not going to be things that involve overthrowing the broken capitalist system altogether.

You know, this is more of a communitarian approach, a shifting in the way that we think about each other.

It has almost a spiritual component to it at times, as well for Michael Sandel.

And it comes from bringing people a renewed awareness of their position within a society.

See, the team freedom approach that we talked about last episode, it highly values the protection of individual preferences.

You know, just stay out of my way and let me do what I want to do.

But the problem with having that much of an individual focus is that the people that live in societies like that often just assume that the common good, what's best for everyone, is just the sum total of everyone's individual preferences.

But what your life in a society is to Michael Sandel, to be a citizen is not just I'm going to wake up every day and exercise my freedom.

Your life as a citizen is more than just meeting up with some guy off Craigslist in a Walgreens parking lot, seeing if you might could want to buy his jet ski for 400 bucks.

It's more than that.

You're part of a country or a community that stands for something far greater than that.

Every community to Michael Sandel, every system for that matter, every country, every company, every Bible study group presupposes some common conception of the good.

So to be a citizen, and this goes all the way down to his views on subjectivity and the self, to be a human being is not to be an independent, rational agent that's making free and autonomous choices.

It's to be an interdependent member of a community that presupposes some conception of the good.

And then obviously, with the whole conversation we've been having for the last two episodes, there's a responsibility that's incumbent upon you as a member of that community.

Again, Michael Sandel represents not one of these people that wants to overthrow capitalism, though he does think there need to be some structural changes to it.

He represents a very optimistic side of the conversations that are going on today, where he believes in our ability to arrive at civic agreements that allow us to coexist in peace with each other, hopefully for extended periods of time, if we are willing to do the work.

In this way, an important thing to realize about Sandel is that he represents a type of thinker these days who's highly skeptical towards the idea of liberalism as being some rational way past the negative emotions of political disagreement.

See, that's another very popular take when it comes to thinking about the issues of our day.

There's a lot of thinkers that believe that some of the central tasks that things like liberalism, communism, or socialism are trying to accomplish are just missing something important about what the challenges are that we're really facing in politics.

That each one of those strategies, this person will say, tries to come up with some grand mechanism that's going to remove the negative emotions from human beings organizing themselves.

In communism, you could say, it's about removing the class struggle that causes so many problems.

In liberalism, you could say, it's about using rationality and science to arrive at a sort of objective consensus that makes disagreeing with things seem impossible.

All of these and more, this person might say, are just ways of trying to avoid the inevitable, that human beings will disagree.

And it will be a messy business when they do disagree.

But maybe that's what society needs to move forward.

And that maybe the path forward shouldn't be about trying to remove political disagreement, but maybe the whole task of politics should be far more focused on channeling this disagreement in a way that is productive.

The work of Chantal Mouf and her concept of agonism comes to mind, which could be coming up soon on this podcast if it's something that you guys want to hear about.

Anyway, as always, for those of you out there who get it, thanks for getting it.

You know, if you've been listening to this show for years, you know this podcast is not a soapbox for my own political beliefs, and it never will be.

The goal, what I'm always trying to do, is to make these ideas more accessible to people because I have an enormous amount of respect for these thinkers and the value they provide to the world.

And I remember working at a warehouse doing manual labor every day, wishing that I had a podcast like this to listen to.

And I get it, it can be frustrating.

If you don't like one of these ideas that you hear, who do you yell at about it other than the host of the show, who's clearly trying to indoctrinate people to be just like him?

I just will never be that.

And I'm sorry there's not a clearer person to yell at sometimes, I guess.

But if you like what we're going for here, thanks for making a show like this possible.

Patreon.com/slash philosophize this.

And as always, thank you for listening.

I'll talk to you next time.