 One of the great, one of the characteristics, put it this way, one of the characteristics of a pre-capitalist world, a characteristic of a pre-enlightened world is that, you know, to a large extent, my wife just turned off all the lights. So hopefully you like this dramatic look better than the previous one because she likes it, so she's keeping it, all right. So the thing that categorized the pre-capitalist world is with a few exceptions, with exceptions of, you know, particular periods of time or exceptions of particular geniuses. For most people, for most people merit, ability, capability, hard work, didn't matter. What mattered predominantly in terms of the kind of work you had, what mattered predominantly in terms of the prospects for your economic success and the kind of life you were likely to live, is who your family was, what your, quote, bloodline was, where you came from, what race you belonged to, who your parents were. That was the primary determinant of success of the kind of life you were going to live. And you could be a genius in a particular field, you could be brilliant, you could be passionate about it, and you would not be able to even enter the field if you were in the wrong, if you were born of the wrong family at the wrong time in the wrong place. In other words, life in a pre-capitalist, certainly pre-enlightenment world was determined predominantly by the luck of the draw, by the family you were born into and by, you know, and by the circumstances. Now, yes, at the margin you could make a difference, more ambitious people, people with greater ability within a particular context could show themselves to be particularly good at something and succeed, but it was rare and very unusual. I mean, I tell the story of Leonardo da Vinci, because I think it's fascinating, you know, during the period in the Renaissance when Leonardo da Vinci was born, men were basically did what their father did, almost everybody did what their father did. There were some exceptions, and as I said, you know, if you saw extraordinary talent like Michelangelo did, and you happen to be in Florence, and they happen to be patron of the arts like the Medici's were, and your father was open to this and willing to do it, you could be sent to work in sculpture even though Michelangelo's father was not a sculptor. But for the most part, for 99% of the people, you did what your father did. You basically joined the guild your father belonged to. The extraordinary thing about, you know, that Leonardo is that he didn't, and that he landed up being what we consider an Renaissance man and doing all kinds of things and super interesting things and living a super interesting life and being an amazing, world-changing artist and being an engineer and being a consultant to rulers and being an engineer and being an architect and doing all kinds of military engineering and military tactician, doing all these kind of things. And part of the question is, why? I mean, Leonardo da Vinci's father was a notary. Well, the reason is that Leonardo was a bastard. He was born out of wedlock so that he could not, indeed, become a notary. The guild would not accept him because he was an illegitimate child. So in those days you had to be an illegitimate child to have the freedom to pursue your talents, to pursue your skills, to pursue your particular genius, to pursue your interests, your passions, your values. If Leonardo had been born a legitimate son of his father, who knows what would have happened. Now, one would like to believe that he would have expressed that genius anyway and broken out anyway. But he might not have. He might have been stuck being an otary. 99.9% of people were stuck being whatever was determined for them to be. Their life was, indeed, determined by their social context and by their genes, not so much by their genes in terms of dictating their behavior, but by their genes in terms of their heritage, in terms of who they were. Aristocrats, if you were born an aristocrat, you had one path of life, you were born a peasant, you had another path in life, you were born a blacksmith, you had another path in life. And one of the great achievements of capitalism is the shattering of that. Now, the shattering takes a long time and it doesn't happen all at once, but it is shattered. By the 19th century, it doesn't matter who you are born to. It doesn't matter what your family is, or at least it matters a lot less in places like England and certainly in America. It doesn't matter at all who you are born to. It's what you make of your life that matters. It's what you do with your talents and skills that matters. Think about the justice of a system where your fate is basically determined by random luck, a system where your fate is determined not by your choices, not by your passion, by your energy, by what you focus on, but by things that are completely outside of your control. It's a deterministic world. It's a ugly world. It's a dark world. And it's a world in which those people with ability, those people with a genius, those people who could do extraordinary things are completely stifled and limited and live shadows of lives because they never get to express their true ability. They never get to express what they're capable of. They're never able to live up to their full potential. How sad. This is humanity for 100,000 years in the beginning of mankind until about 250 years ago. We were constrained and limited to what society was willing, what people in society, what our rulers were willing for us to do, and to the family from which we were born. And it's tragic and sad and horrible that people had to live these kind of lives. And yet most of humanity, all of humanity, overwhelming majority of humanity lived exactly that type of life. Again, capitalism broke that. Suddenly, individuals were free to pursue their life they chose. They didn't need to ask permission. Their chains were broken. It didn't matter if you were born an aristocrat or a peasant. If you were good at math, you could become a mathematician. If you had an idea for a new product, you could become an entrepreneur. You could become a businessman. You could, you could, you still faced, let's say in England, you still faced some barriers if you weren't from the white families. If you didn't have the right accent, if you didn't go to the right schools. But the beauty of the 19th century is those barriers were starting to be shattered. They were breaking down slowly but systematically. And indeed, I'd say by the late 20th century, early 21st century, many, if not all of those barriers were gone. It's true that in the 19th century if you were black, you still faced barriers well into the 20th century. That was true. But by the early part of the 21st century, those barriers were being shattered and broken down and gone. If you were a woman, suddenly you faced barriers throughout all of human history. You relegated a particular duty, a particular responsibility, and you couldn't deviate for that if you wanted a paint, if you wanted a right, if you wanted to be an engineer. With luck, none of that was possible until in the 19th century, slowly this gets eroded and in the 20th century it gets eroded fast and one could argue that today those barriers don't exist on women. They can do whatever they want. They can pursue whatever values they want and think about what a massive achievement that is and to that extent, another reason not to be so dark about the world in which we live. If you're a woman, if you're black, if you're gay, in many respects has never been a better time to be alive. You've never had so much freedoms, but that's true of most of men as well, particularly those of us who do not come from truly privileged families, the kind of privilege that aristocracy granted you. The last 250 years have been amazing. The end of the 20th century, early 21st century, it is truly amazing and that is because we are treated as individuals and therefore our abilities, our talents, our genius, our merit matters and that has been a path for the last 200 years, 200 plus years that civilization has gone by. It has gone to valuing merit more and more, to where merit measured in a whole variety of different ways is ultimately determinant of success, of achievement, of what you do with your life. Ultimately all the idea of merit is the idea of individualism, the idea that you're rewarded based on your individual effort, talent, ability, merit and then we each get to do what we want to do in life, pursue the values that we want to pursue and benefit from the riches hopefully that bestows on us or that we create and we achieve. And indeed over the last 250 years you've seen step by step by step the barriers, the barriers of ability, the barriers of achievement for individuals to achieve and to live the lives based on their own standards have been shattered and the old view of you are your genes, your heritage, your father, whatever your father did you have to do, you're determined by your sex, if you're homosexual you're out, all of those are gone or were gone. And while we were achieving with a lot of, again with a lot of challenges and a lot of inconsistencies granted what was slowly being achieved was a true society of individual liberty and of people rising to whatever level they could achieve based on their own ability, a society of ability, a society that's celebrated and rewarded, ability. There's a story from the city of London, you know, Wall Street is a good example of this, I mean and we'll get the city of London, it used to be in Wall Street you know up until the 1980s investment banks run by Jews for example were looked down upon, they were second class investment banks, they didn't count as much. Well that was shattered in the 1980s with Drexel Burnham and ultimately Goldman Sachs becoming the premier investment banks in the world and taking out the kind of the old stuffy semi aristocratic, you know, white Protestant I guess, ethic of Wall Street that celebrated particular people and admitted particular people, that was even more so in England. And if you go back to England, into the city in England, investment banking in England, investment banking is different than banking, it's mergers and acquisitions, it's advising, companies are taking, companies public, it's a very, very, used to be very, very stuffy old boys network, very male, very white and very in England having the right accent and wearing the right shoes and knowing and wearing the right tie and knowing, you know and really having the right accent may be more important than anything. And if you didn't have one of those things, you just weren't part of the boys network, you weren't part of the club and you were never, you could never join kind of the inner circle of the city. Well in 1970, Goldman Sachs opened an office in London, in the city of London and started hiring people based on only one criteria, only one criteria and that criteria was ability. They hired, they didn't care what ratio they didn't care what your background was, they didn't care what neighborhood you grew up in, they didn't care what school you went to, they didn't care if you're a woman, oh man, okay, you're not and over the next 20 years, you know, maybe 30 years, Goldman Sachs became the premier investment bank in London and in the world based on that and forced every other bank or most other banks in the city of London to change. And the city of London today is a very, very different place and if you go there you can see. And it's not because of anti-discrimination laws, it's because it's just not very profitable in a competitive market to not hire the most talented people. Goldman Sachs taught them that, broke them old, took their business away. And that's happened time and time and time again, you know, racism, sexism of all kinds are just not profitable. So we were getting close to a kind of world where at least in business and in work what really mattered in life, what really mattered was ability. Think of Silicon Valley, think of startups, think of that, the energy behind that and nobody cared where you came from, nobody cared what country you immigrated from, nobody cared again what color of your skin was or how you spoke or whether you spoke English at all. It was your ideas, it was your ability, it was your hard work, that's all that mattered. Silicon Valley, I think, represented that more than any other place on planet Earth and was he caught up and the rest of the world really caught up to that. And then it seemed like the old devil from the pre-enlightenment from pre-capitalism, it never dies. It always tries to resurrect it, it always is resurrected, it always comes back. And I think it doesn't die in, it always resurrects itself because it's never been actually philosophically, ideologically crushed, stomped upon, demolished, really until I ran. And it always comes back whether it's, you know, to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability, right, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, right, to help with merit, you know, at least economic rewards, economic rewards should be distributed based on need. And socialism and Marxism has been alive and well and an undercurrent throughout. But indeed it wasn't socialism and communism that eradicated the feudal and aristocracy-based and racist-based systems. It was capitalism that eradicated those. But it keeps coming back. Yes, we should treat people by their merit, we are told. But the outcome should be equal. That is, people should be able to exercise their merit. But they should not be rewarded based on their merit, they should be rewarded equally. Equality of outcome keeps sneaking back into the discussion. It certainly didn't in the 1960s with the new left. But it didn't really last because it didn't really have legs and people didn't really buy into it. And the 60s were a period in which there was a lot of talk and a lot of angst and a lot of attempts to bring about this equality of outcome. And the welfare state was established as part of that. But at the end of the day, the world seemed to revert back to a system of respect for merit and the barriers coming down and Jim Crow being eliminated. Again, I think it being eliminated more than anything by the marketplace, by business, by work, now unfortunately aided by affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws that actually I think have led us to a place today that undermines all the achievements we've made. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. 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