What kind of animal are we? On the one hand, there’s this idea that we’re each individuals in competition with other individuals over a finite amount of resources, and on the other hand there’s the idea that we’re actually cooperative by nature and tend to work together to continue the species. In life, we end up somewhere in between these two positions most of the time depending on the circumstances, but in politics these two ideas of what human beings are have become polar ideologies that help give shape to the contours of how we see ourselves as a society. If we’re going to have public discourse over the kind of place we want to live in, we’re going to have to talk about how we see ourselves as human beings. The question of who we ought to be as a society, it turns out, has a lot to do with what we take ourselves to be. Welcome to my new politics podcast.

Original music by Kevin McCloud is licensed through Creative Commons and is available through the Free Music Archive: https://files.freemusicarchive.org/storage-freemusicarchive-org/music/no_curator/Kevin_MacLeod/Jazz_Sampler/Kevin_MacLeod_-_I_Knew_a_Guy.mp3

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