Don't Believe Everything You Think (Expanded Edition) Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering

Not to be a big nerd, but in his first memoir, Don McCarvey talks about if you have something scratching on the other side of a door, but you never show what it is, the reader's mind goes insane from fear.

And if you open the door and it's a 10 foot spider, they freak out for two seconds and then they go, well, if it had been a hundred foot spider, that would have been worse.

Okay yeah it's definitely on my list That is a long one that's less of a read I think most People are gonna be less of a read in one sweep than like Maybe for over the course of the year like gradually yeah

Yeah it's very very dense and very long but very readable Like not to say that it's like dense and the I got to like Slug through this textbook it's extremely readable it's Just like there's a lot in there and you're gonna want to Pause and think about shit yeah so so the thought of Everything is this is the last book David Graeber ever Wrote and it's David Wengro also they wrote it together And it's it's this basically an attempt to reassemble I Guess early human history and but the thing that they're Doing that that's that's really unique is that so they They're David Wengro's as archaeologist David Graeber's An anthropologist and they're going you know so they spend a Whole bunch of time going through the sort of early Archaeological records and what they find basically is that None of the things that you see make any sense at all unless You're willing to unless you're willing to accept that people You know twenty thirty fifty thousand years ago and then even You know people like four or five thousand years ago were as Smart as we are and have the have the capacity to recreate And redesign their own political arrangements Self-consciously which is something that doesn't sound that Weird except everyone assumes that they can't and that you Know everyone that's you know one of the other things they're Really sort of heavily doing here is trying to break this Idea that you know human society sort of evolves in these This linear progression you know you start out with like These small hunter-gatherer bands and they get more complex And more complex and eventually they develop farming Farming developed the state and the answer is just you know When you look through the actual archaeological record none of This is true you have you know they have a lot of very Interesting sort of historical examples of this looking at Like what looked like incredibly democratic and egalitarian Cities and then you know on the outskirts of those cities you Have the emergence of the states among things that look like States among barbarian groups and they have and what I think Is maybe the most interesting part of it is that they're Concerned with the question of human freedom but freedom in a Way that like we don't like freedom on a level fundamental Enough that like we can barely imagine it so they have these Things called the three freedoms which is one of them is so The first one is the freedom to just move to leave and to It's a freedom to you know be in a place and then leave and Know that you will be cared for when you get to wherever You're going yeah though these kind of networks that were set Up to travel that have like the descendant of those ideas is Sort of the way if you've ever if you've ever spent time in The Middle East not in like hotels and shit like it's that Same idea that kind of deeper than religious belief about The importance of that has gotten added to like Islam and To a number of other faiths in the area like but this idea That like there's nothing more sacred than taking care of A guest like and how that that existed to enable kind of a Sort of cross cultural contract and contact and like Recreational travel in a way that I think is would be deeply Surprising to people who just sort of assumed everyone before A certain age died within five miles of their house or was Yeah, you know yeah part of a band of wandering hunters Yeah, and it's interesting in that like like you like we in a Lot of ways travel less than early people did because you Know that people would just leave and people you know people Just didn't like their families and so they'd walk like 500 Miles and they'd come to a place and they'd be accepted and Yeah, yeah, it's you know the second one that I think The one that is the the one we have the least capacity I think To understand which is just the ability to disobey orders To just like anyone tells you do something you could just tell Them no at any time and it's not only can you just tell them No like the social expectation is that you is that you don't Act is that it's it's not just that you have the ability to Do it it's that someone giving you an order is treated as Weird and this is the thing that you know it But like this This is the thing this is a freedom that used to exist and No longer does and was sort of destroy in various ways along With sort of the third freedom they talk about which is about How people have the right to sort of just shift and recreate Their social political arrangements And yeah, and people used to do this sort of common people Yeah, a lot of the what their early part of the book is about Is about how societies use there's a lot of societies that Would you know flip seasonally right so what like one half of The year you have this just like absolute dictatorship the Other half of the year it's like well it looks like a hippie Commune and you know the fact that we do not like the fact That like we we just don't like it cannot conceive of Completely shifting our political arrangements like that Is it's also there's this fascinating discussion of like The the fact that and this is kind of counter to what I Always I had always kind of thought that like once you As a group groups of people when they when they made the Decision to like move to agriculture and like set Founded cities that it was kind of a one-way street you know You just keep going along that road and there's actually Multiple examples of people's like this is what happened to The British Isles or at least in what is currently Great Britain people's like developing agriculture settling Down and then being like oh you know what fuck this and like Going back like that that short it should happen all the time And and one of the things that's really kind of optimistic About the vision of the sweep of human history in the dawn Of everything is the idea that like no we don't have to keep Like it's not inevitable that we just keep doing more of what We're doing now all throughout history large groups of people Have been like it's time to let's do something else let's Make a radical change like it happens and it's probably more Normal to do that than it is to do what we've been doing and We've been doing it for a long time and I think that's Probably more normal to do that than it is to do what we've Been doing and when you I think one of the things that kind Of one of the things that leads to the sense of inevitability Of development along the lines that we have is the fact that We only really have about 10,000 years of even vaguely Reliable like data or vaguely comprehensive data on human History but people have been around for tens of thousands Of years longer than that and for most of it we've been a lot More experimental than we are now and it's it's always Possible for people to try different things in a way that Maybe seems impossible to us now but but necessarily won't For our kids

That is a long one that's less of a read I think most People are gonna be less of a read in one sweep than like Maybe for over the course of the year like gradually yeah Yeah it's very very dense and very long but very readable Like not to say that it's like dense and the I got to like Slug through this textbook it's extremely readable it's Just like there's a lot in there and you're gonna want to Pause and think about shit yeah so so the thought of Everything is this is the last book David Graeber ever Wrote and it's David Wengro also they wrote it together And it's it's this basically an attempt to reassemble I Guess early human history and but the thing that they're Doing that that's that's really unique is that so they They're David Wengro's as archaeologist David Graeber's An anthropologist and they're going you know so they spend a Whole bunch of time going through the sort of early Archaeological records and what they find basically is that None of the things that you see make any sense at all unless You're willing to unless you're willing to accept that people You know twenty thirty fifty thousand years ago and then even You know people like four or five thousand years ago were as Smart as we are and have the have the capacity to recreate And redesign their own political arrangements Self-consciously which is something that doesn't sound that Weird except everyone assumes that they can't and that you Know everyone that's you know one of the other things they're Really sort of heavily doing here is trying to break this Idea that you know human society sort of evolves in these This linear progression you know you start out with like These small hunter-gatherer bands and they get more complex And more complex and eventually they develop farming Farming developed the state and the answer is just you know When you look through the actual archaeological record none of This is true you have you know they have a lot of very Interesting sort of historical examples of this looking at Like what looked like incredibly democratic and egalitarian Cities and then you know on the outskirts of those cities you Have the emergence of the states among things that look like States among barbarian groups and they have and what I think Is maybe the most interesting part of it is that they're Concerned with the question of human freedom but freedom in a Way that like we don't like freedom on a level fundamental Enough that like we can barely imagine it so they have these Things called the three freedoms which is one of them is so The first one is the freedom to just move to leave and to It's a freedom to you know be in a place and then leave and Know that you will be cared for when you get to wherever You're going yeah though these kind of networks that were set Up to travel that have like the descendant of those ideas is Sort of the way if you've ever if you've ever spent time in The Middle East not in like hotels and shit like it's that Same idea that kind of deeper than religious belief about The importance of that has gotten added to like Islam and To a number of other faiths in the area like but this idea That like there's nothing more sacred than taking care of A guest like and how that that existed to enable kind of a Sort of cross cultural contract and contact and like Recreational travel in a way that I think is would be deeply Surprising to people who just sort of assumed everyone before A certain age died within five miles of their house or was Yeah, you know yeah part of a band of wandering hunters Yeah, and it's interesting in that like like you like we in a Lot of ways travel less than early people did because you Know that people would just leave and people you know people Just didn't like their families and so they'd walk like 500 Miles and they'd come to a place and they'd be accepted and Yeah, yeah, it's you know the second one that I think The one that is the the one we have the least capacity I think To understand which is just the ability to disobey orders To just like anyone tells you do something you could just tell Them no at any time and it's not only can you just tell them No like the social expectation is that you is that you don't Act is that it's it's not just that you have the ability to Do it it's that someone giving you an order is treated as Weird and this is the thing that you know it But like this This is the thing this is a freedom that used to exist and No longer does and was sort of destroy in various ways along With sort of the third freedom they talk about which is about How people have the right to sort of just shift and recreate Their social political arrangements And yeah, and people used to do this sort of common people Yeah, a lot of the what their early part of the book is about Is about how societies use there's a lot of societies that Would you know flip seasonally right so what like one half of The year you have this just like absolute dictatorship the Other half of the year it's like well it looks like a hippie Commune and you know the fact that we do not like the fact That like we we just don't like it cannot conceive of Completely shifting our political arrangements like that Is it's also there's this fascinating discussion of like The the fact that and this is kind of counter to what I Always I had always kind of thought that like once you As a group groups of people when they when they made the Decision to like move to agriculture and like set Founded cities that it was kind of a one-way street you know You just keep going along that road and there's actually Multiple examples of people's like this is what happened to The British Isles or at least in what is currently Great Britain people's like developing agriculture settling Down and then being like oh you know what fuck this and like Going back like that that short it should happen all the time And and one of the things that's really kind of optimistic About the vision of the sweep of human history in the dawn Of everything is the idea that like no we don't have to keep Like it's not inevitable that we just keep doing more of what We're doing now all throughout history large groups of people Have been like it's time to let's do something else let's Make a radical change like it happens and it's probably more Normal to do that than it is to do what we've been doing and We've been doing it for a long time and I think that's Probably more normal to do that than it is to do what we've Been doing and when you I think one of the things that kind Of one of the things that leads to the sense of inevitability Of development along the lines that we have is the fact that We only really have about 10,000 years of even vaguely Reliable like data or vaguely comprehensive data on human History but people have been around for tens of thousands Of years longer than that and for most of it we've been a lot More experimental than we are now and it's it's always Possible for people to try different things in a way that Maybe seems impossible to us now but but necessarily won't For our kids.

So I'll be signing copies of my book, uh, Shikwan Anxiety, Playing Tricks on Me, which is my second national bestseller that talked about my experiences with mental health.

This is called Health Is In You. So kind of what we were just talking about. Health Is In You, that's right. Don't worry, I got a vaccine you're gonna want to take. Don't even worry about a thing.

We also had John A. Cuff on overthinking do you do it? I don't know do you maybe I do I'm not sure and what we can do about it both excellent episodes that I'm really proud of here for you this week so make sure you listen to those if you haven't yet.