Freedom Transcript: The Idea that Explains the Political Order w/ Jason Kuznicki

First, thank you for being among our first supporters. We're looking forward to sending you lots of cool bonus content, and hearing from you in our Discord community. Our first episode launched today, and as a supporter, you get access to transcripts. So here it is, our conversation with Jason Kuznicki.

001: The Idea that Explains the Political Order w/ Jason Kuznicki

Aaron: For the first episode of our new show, we wanted a big idea, one that has the potential to reconfigure how we think about politics and political institutions. That meant bringing back one of our favorite guests, our good friend, Jason Kuznicki. Jason is the author of the fascinating book, Technology and the End of Authority: What Is Government For?

Today, he introduces us to the domus complex, a way of understanding the power structures of politics and culture as downstream consequences of the lords, wives, servants, and slaves structure of historical households.

We frequently think of the rise of civilization as coinciding with the rise of agriculture or being enabled by the rise of agriculture, but you make the fairly stark claim, I will quote from your essay that is the topic of today's conversation, that “the first settled agricultural societies took the form of increasingly permanent prison camps.” What does that mean?

Jason: There's been a lot of recent archeological discoveries about this time in history. A lot of new methods used, things like satellites and drones to reveal structures of production in the earliest ancient civilizations. The term civilization means a group of people who live together and have both writing and social classes. One of the first places we find this is in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley in the former Sumerian civilization.

We are more and more discovering that agriculture, while in some ways a step forward technologically, was also enabling of a lot of things that we might find very troubling, including slavery on a mass scale. It does appear that the hunter-gatherers who preceded the first settled agriculturalists and the very earliest settled agriculturalists before the rise of the state, both may have had much easier lives, much freer lives, better nutrition, fewer parasites. They may or may not have been more violent. It's difficult to say, but as I say in the essay, one thing we don't find in their artifacts are big piles of fetters and irons to bind the feet of captives to take them as slaves.

Trevor: If this is true, and I have no reason to believe it's not, but obviously this is a great conversation for the very first episode of our podcast called Freedom, where we talk about what this means. If this is true, where does the normative point that this might matter? Is it the case that we tend to take the happenings of the past and regard them as inevitable or desirable in a way that we shouldn't?

Is that the kind of thing you're trying to get at this essay that the things could have been different? Do we get to a normative point, even if things could have been different that that therefore means they should change now?

Jason: Well, the first implication of this research, which by the way, is summarized in James C. Scott's book, Against The Grain. One point of this research is that whereas we have often told history as the story of everything that leads up to us, and we tend to view past developments as paving the way for where we are now and building up to where we are now in the sense that there's been some progress in the past, and now we've reached the pinnacle of civilization where we are.

This research calls that into question. Early civilization was not a straightforward, unmitigated good. It was full of, frankly, horror for a lot of the people who lived in it. It was a miserable time. The reason that's important is that we can't really tell that comforting story about how ancient Sumer is paving the way for where we are right now. It's a morally very troubling society.

Trevor: I guess the question I'm asking is that it doesn't seem to me like people actually tell that comforting story. I mean, no one says, "Hey, look, it was the only way history could have done." I mean, what you said there, history obviously is the story of what came leading up to us now. I don't think anyone tells the story that “ancient world was awesome, things were great, and then something happened different.”

Jason: No, no, no, not that. No, but that they were a step on the path of progress, and that agriculture improved the human condition. That certainly is a widespread belief, and this isn't so clear anymore, certainly not in the way that it was deployed. If you were to have a settled agricultural society that did not enslave and that did not practice conquest using an army that was fed by calories extracted from slave labor, if you were to do agriculture without all the rest of that, that's great. In fact, it does seem that for quite a few centuries that took place, but agriculture did open up the possibility of mass enslavement, and that is exactly what happened.

The major civilizations that we recognize in the early civilizational period, these all practiced slavery. They all practiced conquest based on calories extracted from slave labor being used to feed an army which goes out and rounds up more slaves. They all did that.

Aaron: How does this get us to the rise of lords? Because I think I was telling Trevor ahead of time that this is one of those essays that threatens to reconfigure one's worldview in the sense of once you see things through this lens, you increasingly see things through this lens and it changes the way that we think about a lot of our contemporary culture. The question of whether agricultural societies in Sumerian times were horrors or slave states doesn't seem to have an immediate connection to the kind of reconfiguring one's worldview that I just mentioned, and so how do we get from there to here?

Jason: I wanted to write an essay that was a companion to the work that James C. Scott has been doing. He is very concerned with material practices and economic history, and I am an intellectual historian by training. I asked myself, "How is it that the material practices of the far ancient world, the deep history of the ancient world, how do those material practices shape the intellectual and cultural development of that same society? How did they set the trend for history that followed? How did they influence history into much more recent times?"

Scott refers to what he calls the domus complex. Domus is a Latin word. It means household, but the Roman household was a much larger and more complex and socially stratified and coercive thing than our households today. Household today might be a nuclear family and a small amount of land that it owns, but they generally are not subsisting on that land. A Roman domus would be a nuclear family, plus extended family members, plus enslaved people, plus their animals, plus a whole lot more land in general than a typical American family might own, and it is all very, very, very hierarchical.

If you are an adult male who lives in a domus, you might even so still be dependent on a salary basically that was paid to you by the patriarch. If you are a woman, you have very, very few legal rights in Rome. If you are a slave, you have even less, and the person who is in charge of you is again, the patriarch. This mode of social organization can be found not just in Rome, but in ancient Greece.

There are similar formations. Ulysses appears to have lived in something very similar to this, where the household owns agricultural land. The household does a great deal of production itself. It has the family, the extended family, the slaves, the animals, the land, all working together in a very, very similar way, and he traces this back with admittedly changes to even ancient Sumer and proto-civilizational formations. It is a pattern that gets repeated again and again and again.

Always at the top, there is a lord, there is a patriarch. There's someone who is in charge of the domus. How do you justify a setup like this? How do you say, "Well, this is good." One way to do that is to reflect it in the cosmos. It is often a case that the gods of the peoples that we are talking about have similar social arrangements, and they use similar terms for their gods. The Semitic word "Baal," B-A-A-L, is both a god and a landlord. It can mean either one. Sometimes it can even be hard to tell which one an author is talking about.

We have a long history of likening rulers to gods, and we can see this even in the Christian tradition, which prides itself on supposedly being monotheistic, if you look at the ideology of the great chain of being, God is at the top. There are angels below God, and right below that, there are absolute monarchs. The absolute monarchs are akin to God. They're answerable only to God, and purportedly, that's how the whole social system runs. You are below the absolute monarch, you know your place, you have your place, and you stay in your place, and that's how we're going to get along.

Trevor: One reason I really like your essay is because in an abstract way, it's about contingencies versus inevitabilities. In many ways, when we have political conversations of any sort, it is a conversation about contingencies versus inevitabilities. 

People who take on naturalistic arguments for how things have to be say that this is therefore normative and people who say, "Though it didn't have to be this way." We could apply that to everything from the household, as you talk about, to power relationships, to sexuality, to all these things that people either think are contingent or natural or inevitable in that way. When it comes to the domus, which is such a huge center of your essay, to clarify your argument for listeners, you are arguing that it was essentially contingent on certain agricultural arrangements and you could have had a different situation where there were, I don't know exactly how to say this, different family structures, different hierarchical structures, then became the centerpiece of Roman society and that matters.

Jason: Absolutely. The domus complex and the civilization that I'm talking about had some material requirements, and they're not necessarily intuitive. I'm going to talk a bit about that now. Above all, what's important here is to be able to use grain as a vector for taxation. If you are a peasant, even in a country as far removed as Japan, in traditional Japan, you have a tax per person that they're supposed to supply of a set amount of rice. You fill up your rice box, you turn that in, that is your tax portion, and you've paid your taxes. This is really, really important because grains, like wheat and rice, have a crucial property. They can be stored for years and still be valuable and still be consumable. They're also easy to move. You can take that on the road with the army. The army can go somewhere else and expand and conquer the next valley over or what have you.

Not all crops are like that. Some crops, you can't easily store. Some of them, you can't easily measure. Some of them are best left in the ground. If you're growing root crops like potatoes or taros, they should stay in the ground to be stored. They aren't as effective for feeding a massive army. There's a whole lot less point in trying to extract them also because they can be hidden very easily. You can plant upland taro in the mountains and then just not tell the tax collector that you have this valuable taro patch.

You can't really do that with rice, because rice requires a massive setup with irrigation and fields, and it's all grown together in a big patty, an organized area of land that is measurable and knowable and therefore taxable. So yes, the preconditions for this society are very much material, but then we can't stop our analysis there, we ought to continue on and ask about the types of cultural formations that that makes possible. One of them is slavery.

Aaron: We abolished slavery, though, at least in this country. It exists in pockets throughout the world still, but most of the civilized world does not hold slaves. We moved to democracy, to a system where we don't have a king anymore, or if we do, they tend to be a figurehead, and where ordinary people have a say in the rules that govern them. How does this domus mindset still exist in today's world? I'll give one kind of flip example as you a couple of a little while ago when you were characterizing this as these lords, that have this superhuman ability over us, and we report to them and we're subject to them, and we get our largess from them, sounded, on the one hand, very much the way that orthodox objectivists talk about businessmen. These are the Randian superheroes, these lords that give us then that we then benefit from. It also put me in mind on Trevor and I had had some conversations in the past with the Professor Elizabeth Anderson at University of Michigan, and she talks about the relationship within a firm between employer, boss, and employees, and the kind of controlling nature of, "I want to dictate your time. I want to dictate your behavior. I will pay you, but you will be subject to my will. If you don't like it, you can leave, but if you leave, you'll probably come back because you're not going to get a better job elsewhere, and I'm going to surveil you increasingly."

Jason: I don't know if I want to lay all of this at the feet of Ayn Rand’s heroes and say that this is them. I think that seems like a bit of a stretch. What absolutely does not seem like a stretch to me is to point out that the plantation in the Old South was exactly a domus. It was nothing else. It was exactly the sort of setup that I'm talking about. Crops were extracted from an enslaved population. Their labor was taken from them. Their freedom was taken from them in a very hierarchical system. There was a family at the top. There was a master who was in charge of the family. There were other hangers on, and various officials and overseers of the system. It was militarized. It was understood to be a system that was maintained by violence and that contributed to a still larger collective which had an army, and without which the slaves obviously would have gone into revolt and overthrown the system.

While this is an ancient formation, it's also one that certainly played a role in American history and a major role in American history. We have absolutely moved away from a lot of the features of this system, which I think is a very good thing obviously, but it's worth asking, how exactly did we do that? One of the steps that I think is crucial for taking the next step in civilizational development, if you will, is to move away from subsistence agriculture. That was already happening in the Old South because the major crops that were being grown under compulsion were in many cases not subsistence crops at all. They were cash crops. They were things like cotton, of course, and tobacco. Then those crops were sold in what was increasingly a globalized market. There's a bit of a hybrid there between the traditional domus formation and the modern capitalist economy.

Then the question is whether long term the two are compatible with one another, and I would argue that they are not. I would argue that when we can specialize and apply more advanced agricultural technologies to the problem of feeding the population, when that happens, suddenly we don't all have to work on just raising enough food to feed ourselves. We can find other ways of making a living.

The vast majority of people in the developed world do not work in agriculture. Yes, agriculture is still essential obviously, but it's a small percentage of people who actually do it for a living. That in a way allows us to be much more flexible with our social relations. The mythological explanation for the domus is that it's what the gods want. The real practical explanation for the domus is that it is a bad but very stable equilibrium. Because if you're not organized in a way that compels everyone to pay into a tax system to support an army, then you're going to get conquered by the people who do have that setup. You're going to get conquered by the people who are already practicing to build an empire.

If you don't want that, well, then, you need to develop your own setup, and develop your own tax system, develop your own army, pay them with the grain that you have taken from the people that you have enslaved, put yourself at the top of the hierarchy, and thereby escape foreign domination. That plays in very directly to the Roman concept of liberty, which is not that each individual gets a wide variety of different things that they may blamelessly choose in their lives. The Roman idea of liberty is that we exercise self rule instead of foreigners ruling over us. Self rule in Roman society was rule of the patriarchs who were the organizers, the administrators, and the military leaders of a system based on the domus, based on extraction, based on the army paid for out of taxation.

Trevor: Slavery features heavily into your essay, but one question is just, you mean literal slavery when you-- Other people sometimes say-- You have a slave, if you mean a literal slave, meaning his legal status or her legal status is not as someone who has freedom and freedom of choice or to leave, but you also have workers who some people will call existing in a state of slavery, like serfs or even possibly women.

Jason: I'm not talking about wage slaves. I am talking about chattel slaves, and I am talking about serfs who while they were not usually bought and sold, they were still bound to the land and legally forbidden from leaving it. Which there are degrees of slavery, and I'm not going to get into an argument about the relative badness of them, but I will say that being a serf is a substantially unfree condition. You miss out on the indignity and depravity of being sold away from your family. Still, it is not a great situation to be in, and it's not one we should regard as morally acceptable either.

Trevor: The reason I ask if there's legal conditions of people in this domus, in different societies some can leave, some can be sold, some can't leave, some have different legal opportunities, does it matter more that there is a legal relationship within this domus depending on the society, or does it matter more that the hierarchies are internalized and the legal status matters less, say, for women than it does for, say, actual slaves in one of these domuses?

Jason: I think the question you're asking is about whether politics is downstream from culture or vice versa. My view on that is that they're entangled. That culture and politics are in conversation with each other, and there are some ways in which material conditions or standing intellectual formations in some ways determine the law, but the law can also end up working changes in either of those. It's complicated and looking to untangle that causal knot, that's an appealing project for a historian, but I don't know that it always works out one way or the other. I don't know that we can say, ah, the law is the master here, and it's always in charge, and if you just rewrite the laws, everyone will be good.

I also don't know that if we just get the culture right, we'll always have good laws. It seems as though to me that they're both in conversation with each other and both of them have some influence on one another. I've seen attempts to say one or the other is always in charge. If you're a Marxist, you believe that things flow all from the material conditions. I would say certainly material conditions and technological capabilities are very, very important to this story, but I don't know that they are the key that explains everything. I think often people who try to write big history go astray by thinking that they found the key that explains everything when really they found just one useful puzzle piece.

Aaron: The culture part of this, I found particularly fascinating because so far we've been talking a lot about, concrete's not the right word for it, but actual relationships of domination and power, slavery you are held in bondage, and will be punished or hurt, or killed, if—

Jason: Yes, so far it's been about who gets their hands dirty, who gets their hands bloody.

[crosstalk]

Aaron: One of the really interesting parts was even when we don't think of ourselves sit around saying, "I am in a domus relationship with this group of people or this person," how much we have internalized this almost metaphor for the world. Can you speak a little bit to that? How this plays out outside of immediately obvious power relationships?

Jason: This essay is drawing on two of my favorite books. One of them is-- I've already mentioned James C Scott's Against the Grain. This is going to come out of left field for anybody who knows it, but the other book that this essay is really driven by is Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies. I read this book in 1998 when it first came out, and it's been one of the biggest influences on how I think about the world.

In that book, there is an argument that the real consequential political division in the world is not between left and right, between conservatives and progressives, but between rather stasists and dynamists. The stasist worldview, which can be progressive or conservative, is a worldview that says there is one best way to do things, and we're going to do it, and that we're going to stop. Our civilization, our culture is not going to change very much after we've gotten to the one best way. The dynamist way of thinking about politics and about culture is that the world is open-ended and full of surprises. It always will be, and that, by the way, is a good thing.

She finds that dynamism is relatively rare and that there is a strong bias toward stasis. She blamed both of the political parties in the late '90s for being essentially stasis of two different flavors. I think she was right about that, and I think that has continued to be right. Both political parties, in a sense, have a one best way that they have in mind, and when they get to that way, then they promise things can stop.

I have asked myself over the years, why is it that there seems to be this bias toward one best way, toward returning to traditional society, perhaps, or toward building a technological Marxist utopia in which then there doesn't have to be any change? Either one of those is a stasis division, really. This essay, "The Domus Mindset", is an attempt to suggest that a lot of our bias toward stasis, a lot of our bias toward finding one best way to do things and then stay put is an artifact of hundreds of years, thousands of years, really, of our various cultures conditioning us to favor stasis.

We have many, many, many folk tales and myths and religious stories that are more or less centered on or taking place on a domus. I've already talked about the Odyssey as a story of getting back to the domus. That's what it is. I don't want to upset our Christian listeners, but I will just point out that the Lord's prayer is a prayer asking that you be taken to the place where the Lord is in charge, and he will give you bread. He will protect you from your enemies.

This is a prayer that comes out of a domus-like cultural vocabulary. What does heaven look like? It's a really great domus. It is a domus where the Lord is good, where the bread is abundant, where the enemies are kept out. This is a domus doing what it's supposed to do. You may interpret that in other ways. There are other readings that are available for it, but taking it on its own terms and not trying to apply any fancy hermeneutics to it sounds an awful lot like what a surf would be asked.

Say you're a surf, but what's the best you can hope for in your current condition? That's it. Why did it appeal to a culture like the European culture? Because there were a lot of surfs and this was a prayer that they could relate to. This made their everyday concerns into something that were written larger, were spiritualized, and that was why it was appealing.

Trevor: I'm also a big fan of Virginia's book. If we have a reason why there are, as you said, stasists, and dynamists, and that there are obviously status quo bias and cultural contingencies and cultural investments that would lend themselves to them as a matter of economics and sociology, where does the whole concept that you lay out in your essay and including Virginia's thesis, where does it put human freedom in there? Some people want to say this entire thing of political theory is just a question about human freedom, say libertarians want to say that. It seems like your essay wants to challenge the simplicity of a definition or sense of human freedom.

Jason: I definitely want to do that. I think that we're bad at thinking about freedom. One of the ways that I would suggest that we are bad at thinking about freedom is that the domus mindset constantly seems like it's trying to creep back in, even despite ourselves. The domus requires a great deal of discipline about gender and sex and reproduction. That's necessary because it's got a whole bunch of people living in very unequal but relatively crowded conditions.

It is nonetheless necessary to be constantly turning out more workers and more soldiers. For people to carry on doing that in relative stability requires certain discipline and certain ethos as far as sexual relations go. Societies that are marked by the domus complex tend to be very gender-inegalitarian. They tend to have relatively fixed gender roles. They tend to insist that people must stay there. They tend to frown on things like abortion, birth control, homosexuality.

There is very much a strain of conservatism in the United States today that is still insisting on that type of program. It has not gone away. Not only that, but they will tell you that they are trying to enact this program out of a search for an attempt to secure liberty. What are “Moms For Liberty” doing? They are censoring books that have views of gender and sex in them that they don't approve of. For liberty, they are censoring for liberty. This is a contradiction that deserves to have a light shone on it, I would say.

Aaron: One of the most important facts, I think, about the political world that often gets downplayed when we talk about political theory and we talk about ideal institutions and we talk about how to structure a society is that somewhere between a quarter and a third of people have an authoritarian personality type. You can give the batteries of tests to tease this out, but it is fundamentally their personality is drawn to authoritarianism.

What that means in practice is that they have a strong desire for stasis, and they view dynamism and difference as really scary threats to themselves and their way of life. When things change too much or they become aware of people who are different from them, it can trigger, and they start demanding that the state intervene. They start embracing strong man leaders. They have moral panics about groomers and so on. They just like they at some level are psychologically incapable of existing in a cosmopolitan, dynamic. modern society. It seems like that's what laches on to the domus mindset to a great extent is that what the domus is, is a structure of stability, and knowing one's place in this great chain of being, I know who is above me. I know who is below me. I know what my role is every day is to do this thing, and anything that might disrupt these relationships.

I think that can be where the freedom thing comes in because if a lot of people, I think, just view freedom as my ability to live my life the way that I want to live it. If I can do that, then I am free. They may not articulate it that way.

Jason: You've already said too much there. You've already said too much because there are many forms of life wherein I want to live the way of life that I want. Already, that is incorporating a demand that others must live in certain ways. My way of life requires that you also go to Church on Sunday and avoid drinking alcohol and raise your children in certain ways and not others, and et cetera, and et cetera, and et cetera.

That is the problem. That is exactly the problem. One of the ways that the domus mindset lives on in modern liberal democracies is in the management of the morals of our neighbors, which we still use the state to try to do. The Romans did it, and we do it. We both have very strongly moralizing states that do things like prohibiting alcohol in some jurisdictions or just no sales on Sunday, or we would like this curriculum are not, that curriculum in the schools, or laws about obscenity and pornography, and et cetera. There are a lot of different ways in which we seek to reinforce a particular moral vision using machinery of liberal democracy, using the outward forms. I would say in the service of an ethos that comes from those past societies that had domus-like requirements on their populations if they were to survive, and that it really is the origin of a great deal of traditionalist morality and political efforts to enforce it.

Trevor: If someone has a metaphysical commitment to a God that has specific beliefs about good and bad or even a God that punishes certain things if they're done and punishes the entire community if they're done by one person. Does that matter or are you simply saying that all such metaphysical beliefs or most of them come from the sociological organization to justify it as opposed to vice versa?

Jason: Well, this is where I would have to ask that people with those sorts of metaphysical claims, make testable empirical claims alongside them if they want their metaphysical program to be realized in a society where not everyone agrees with the metaphysical things that they believe. They need to do a bit more legwork at the very least, and show that there will be some viscerally harm, some cognizable, demonstrable harm to allowing people to have the liberty to pursue same-sex attractions, for example, or the use of birth control.

I don't see that we have the kind of constraints that domus having societies operated under anymore. I think that we are materially escaped from that equilibrium, and we are not yet fully culturally escaped from it, and that's I think the next step.

Aaron: The harm line is interesting because for a lot of people who would stick to the domus mindset are fully immersed in it and believe that society should be structured around it, and that a drift away from it is at the very least immoral and probably should be prevented through state action, social shaming, whatever it happens to be. I think they would listen to that and say this is harmful, like you are kidding yourself if you think that the kind of cosmopolitan hedonistic, everybody do what they want, hyper individualist, society of these leftist enclaves on the coasts is actually beneficial.

The more that society reflects those values, the more directly harmed we all are. We can imagine situations where someone is not actually just punching you in the face, but if the environment around you is so toxic, that it bleeds into being actually harmful, and for these people, especially if they're neck deep in an authoritarian mindset, it is actually traumatic for them to be in that kind of environment, which looks like a harm. I don't buy that argument obviously. I think cultural dynamism is a moral imperative, and that it is actually unethical to be socially conservative, but they're going to say like, "Look this is harm. Actually it is harmful to me." How do you—

Jason: They may not even get that far. One of the objections that I would expect someone from the right to make to this essay is just to say, look, this isn't a continuation from ancient Sumer, through Greece and Rome, down to medieval Europe, down to the present. That's not what this is. I just want the family structure of the United States in the 1950s. That's all I want. I would urge them to consider that that structure was inherited. I would urge them to consider that that structure had a racial dimension, which we probably ought to talk about. I would suggest that racial dimension does very much take us back to the ancient world.

I would suggest that this is in fact something that they are more attuned to than perhaps they realize. I would think that that conversation has to start out very slowly though because it's not going to be so clear to them that they are participating in a super long historical trend. But let's try to be clear on this: they are. And the reason we don't have to keep doing that, the reason we don't have to keep to the structures and the practices that we find in the 1950s, is that those were conservations of a primarily agricultural way of living.

I'll just give an example from from my own life. I used to live in the suburbs of DC, and then I took an old remote job, and I asked myself, "Okay, with an all remote job, where in the United States would I like to live? The answer was Hawaii. I moved to Hawaii, and I moved my family out here. My husband—by the way, my husband, not my wife—has an all remote job too, and we are raising her adopted daughter out here on the big island of Hawaii. The reason that I was able to do that is that I'm not tied to the land. I'm not in either the material sense or in the psychic sense tied to the house in the suburbs with the white picket fence.

It looks exactly like my neighbor's house, and we're all suburban conformists. We're not out here. we live in agricultural land, and it's a very different experience now. I'm an agricultural tourist in a sense because I can get one papaya tree and some pineapple plants, but I'm not subsisting on them. I'm not, and most people don't have to. This is the kind of cultural dynamism that I think might be good to have more of.

Yet, I found that, man, it is a lot of bureaucratic work to move out to Hawaii. It is a huge amount of work. Governments, and banks, and other institutions view you with a lot of suspicion when you try to do this. Now why are you doing this? Are you sure you're going to be okay? Do you really think you want to, and can you document this for me? Why are you moving out of this house? Something wrong with your house? No, nothing is wrong with my house. I just want to live somewhere else. Is nothing really per se wrong with, it's just I'd rather have a house here than there.

Trevor: Well, the interest, I think listeners your remarks about response to Aaron's question, is the reductio would pop into their head? That on one level, and this is one reason I asked you at the beginning, what's the normative point? Because on one level, we could say many things you think are inevitable are in fact contingent. On the other level, we cannot get to, therefore we can organize human society however we want, if we just will ourselves or understand that things are not are contingent. Of course, that doesn't follow from [crosstalk].

Jason: Right. I'm not seeking to organize human society.

Trevor: If things are contingent in how we organize human society, therefore it doesn't mean that any social relationship is beyond, anything that's traditional clearly might-- If it's traditional, it does not mean it's bad. Right, it could be good. On the other side, there are some limits to how we could put people together that we might care about, and tradition might inform some of those

Jason: Conservatives in the United States were absolutely right, that the 20th century efforts to reorganize all society by powerful central governments, like the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Nazi Germany were horrible. They were horrible disasters that we should absolutely not seek to emulate, but that doesn't mean that individual-level social experimentation is wrong. That's a hasty move. That's a move that I don't think can be justified. I'm not seeking to reorganize society. I'm certainly not saying everybody needs to move to the Big Island of Hawaii. I'm saying this is where I wanted to live, and so I'm doing it.

I think that because people are all different, people became more mobile, are going to end up living in lots of different places. That is a bit more hunter-gathering, and a bit less like living on the domus. That's great.

Aaron: I think you just touched on what I was about to ask for our final question, but I'll ask it anyway. Let's say that we could somehow undo the dominance of the domus mindsets, that we could pull this out of people's subconscious, and get rid of the myths that prop it up and the beliefs that keep it so alive. What would that look like? What would society look like if it were not reorganized but just allowed to organize itself in ways that weren't directed by this mindset?

Jason: I think we would have to give up on a lot of moral busybodiness. We would have to care less about the way that our neighbors live, which we would often find surprising but also wonderful. I don't expect that I can trace out exactly what all of the implications to that would be. If you see your neighbor doing something that you didn't expect, and if it doesn't pick your pocket, and if it doesn't break your leg, and if you can put up with it, I would say this is what you need to do, put up with it, because you are probably living in a way that causes some amount of moral concern to others already, and so are we all.

We are nonetheless drawn to one another through relationships of commercial advantage. We trade with one another. Preserving those relationships, preserving relationships of trade with one another is really important to all of our smaller individualized or family-sized goals. We have an important allegiance to conserve which is not to the lord anymore. It is to a system of impersonal relationships with others that allow us to coordinate our economic activity through trade. That is harder to keep in one's head. As human beings, we always look for a person to be in charge or a person to be the agent of any particular situation.

Really, what made it possible for me to do my big move and what makes it possible for many different people to pursue many different modes of life all in the same society is not personal loyalty. It's the presence of a legal system and a system of property relations that allow for individual choice with predictable outcomes and with the ability to make long-range plans in harmony with the long-range plans of others through buying and selling. A greater allegiance to the marketplace and a much-attenuated allegiance to at least the terrestrial lords as it were.