Hey everybody, it's James Lindsay and you're listening to New Discourses Bullets, where I give a short bullet point-like summary of a single topic relevant to woke that we all need to know about so we can defeat it.

And I don't want to talk about anything too big or small today, just how society works.

And if, you know, parents out there are listening, this is probably a good one for your teenagers to hear.

We're really going to talk a little bit about ideas that were presented by an economist,

a very famous theorist and economist, a 20th century named Friedrich Hayek. I'm not going to go

into Hayek in detail. I'm just going to kind of talk a little bit about this. But we're actually

going to talk about, and what I said, I really mean it, how society works. Like, this is the answer to how

society works. So when I say a society here, what I actually mean is what Friedrich Hayek

referred to as the extended society. That was his term. So I'm not talking about something small,

just like he wasn't talking about something small.

What we're actually talking about is a society that is large enough to be composed of effectively lots of strangers.

And so we're not talking about a small community or a small commune or a neat little organization that calls itself a society.

We're talking about a society at large.

And he refers to this, like I said, as the extended society.

And the idea in an extended society is most people are strangers.

Now, every society has to solve a particular problem that we could call. I don't know what

Hayek calls it, but I might call it. I don't know if this is a real name for it even, but I might

call it the problem of collective action. Now, this isn't an appeal to collectivism, which is a

philosophy that approaches a solution to the problem of collective action.

But what it basically boils down to is that societies achieve things through the activity of all of the people collectively,

not necessarily working as a collective, but collectively, that are very difficult to achieve

individually or even in small groups. Just take, for example, the idea, maybe you've seen

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