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I talk to Samuel Miller McDonald about his new book on the history of the idea of progress and how this idea has been used to justify parasitic super-stratified societies that have been denuding and killing our world, going back into antiquity. Pretty much everyone believes in the notion of progress these days. It’s safe to say that progress is a sort of religious belief that unifies all ideologies, even capitalism and communism. And that’s the problem.

Check out the book Samuel wrote: Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It. It’s a really wonderful book. I’d go straight to the first chapter.

—Yasha

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