Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of Left Podcast, where we remember the past and choose to repeat it.

During this week's discussion on the members' show, we got talking about how many Russian people in the wake of Vladimir Putin returning to power in 2012 turned inward,

focusing on themselves and their immediate

surroundings as a way of attempting to block out the horrors of the politics that they

were living through.

One lamented the individualism that took hold in the country and the negative impacts it had

on society.

So today, I wanted to replay this episode from March 2017,

tackling the myth of individualism in the U.S.

as we enter a similar period that is causing many to consciously turn inward and away from the horrors of our politics.

Sources today include Think Again, This Is Hell, Ideas from the CBC, an excerpt from a Connecticut

Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, and You Are Not So Smart.

In a general kind of way, I think that we Westerners are in a bubble, right? And that bubble is individualism. Because we're in this bubble, we have certain ways of looking at the world, which seem completely natural to us, so natural that it really does not occur to us, that maybe other people see things differently.

And I do mean very differently.

The premise of this book is that very broadly speaking, and I know I am speaking, this is an incredible

generalization, but very broadly speaking, my premise is that in the West, we value the self

very, very highly, and we prioritize the self and its needs

in a way which is very unlike the rest of the world. That is to say that, you know,

if we might imagine that here in the West, we have a self that looks a lot like an avocado

with a very large pit.

And we are very interested in developing that pit. We are interested in making sure that

pit is able to express itself. And most other places in the world, and I do mean most other

...