All right, so we should be talking today about what America is and what it is becoming. You game?

Sure, let's do it. All right, so I want to start this in an odd place. The country was obviously

founded well before Darwin had written the origin of species and a century or more before we

understood cultural evolution well enough to see ourselves through an evolutionary lens, but

I do think there's an important evolutionary take that we all need to have.

America is a very special country based on what it was founded to do, but there's too much focus

on the Constitution. The Constitution is an important document. It's essential to this unique purpose,

but the purpose is never really stated. Human beings like other organisms are built to compete on the

basis of their genetic relatedness. The United States is first and foremost a grouping of people who

are not related closely to each other, and the Constitution is a document designed to stabilize

that strategy. All of the content of the Constitution is built to take the conflicts of interest

and other things that would tend to make an attempt to group people who are not genetically

related to each other. It is an attempt to make those structures stable. So that is to say

that under normal circumstances evolution has one group competing against another based on who

is closely related to whom. In the United States an attempt was made to do something else, and that

was to take the idea of reciprocity, which is itself an evolutionary concept, and to make it

structurally sound such that we could continue on indefinitely profiting not so much from collaborating

with those who are closely related to us, but collaborating with those who have a shared interest.

And it is a beautiful concept. It is a concept so good that it has been highly contagious. And I think

we are all noticing now that as we look out across the world, we are seeing our protests spread

across oceans, even though some of the things that are being complained about aren't necessarily

distributed across the oceans. In this way, there's something almost incoherent about the idea of

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