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hayek said

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the road to hell is paved with blueprints of heaven

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march nineteen forty four

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london

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the war was not over yet

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german bombers still came every few days

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in that city that could be hit at any moment

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a forty four year old austrian born scholar

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published a thin little book

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everyone assumed

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that when an austrian who watched his homeland get annexed writes a book

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it had to be an attack on hitler

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he did hate hitler

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but when you open this book

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you find something strange

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the real warning inside it

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is not aimed at the enemy

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it is aimed at his friends

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in the preface he said

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this book is bound to offend many people whose friendship he hoped to keep

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and the people it is dedicated to

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are exactly those friends

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the idealists who genuinely wanted to build a better society

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at the start of chapter two

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he quotes a line from the german poet holderlin

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that line is the key to the whole book

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what has always turned a country into a hell on earth

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is precisely people trying to turn it into heaven

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this man was called hayek

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and the book is called the road to serfdom

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hello

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everyone

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this is leo wang

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today we open a new little unit

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this series has unpacked the attachment to love in dream of the red chamber

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the monkey mind in journey to the west

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and the arrogance of acting for heaven in investiture of the gods

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but we have never touched economics

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a lot of people think economics is about money

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a world away from spiritual practice

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today this book will tell you

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that every page of economics is really about people

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about the most respectable the most righteous and the most dangerous thought in human nature

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and that thought is just one short sentence

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i know what is good for you

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let me make one thing clear first

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this episode is not about politics

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and not about isms

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this hayek book is openly published in china

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you can buy it in any bookstore

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but today we read it from an angle no bookstore sells

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we treat it as a book about practice

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because the thing it dissects

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has a precise name in buddhism

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and i will hold that name back for now

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let us start with the story

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hayek

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was born in vienna in eighteen ninety nine

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in the first world war

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he served as an artilleryman on the italian front

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when the war ended

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the empire was gone

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he went back to vienna to study

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and later moved to britain

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to teach as a professor at the london school of economics

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by the late thirties

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all of europe was on fire

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and in britain he saw something that chilled him

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british intellectuals

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were fighting germany to the death on the battlefield

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while envying the german method in their studies

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what method

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one single powerful center

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making the plan for the whole society

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taking all the labor the resources the lives of everyone

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and arranging them under one scheme

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many clever people back then believed

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that this was the future

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that this was reason

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and the loose old order was obsolete

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hayek could not sit still

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he said in the preface

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that writing this book

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was a duty he could not escape

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others were fighting at the front

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and the one contribution he could make

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was this book

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and so we got the road to serfdom

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the argument of this book

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i have compressed into a single chain

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hear it out

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every link in it is human nature

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link one

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if you want one master blueprint for a whole society

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you first need a list of goals that everyone shares

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what matters most

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what matters next

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they have to be ranked

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but among tens of millions of people

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everyone ranks things differently

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some think education for the children matters most

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some think medicine for the elderly matters most

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some just want to quietly grow their own flowers

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a master blueprint can hold only one ranking

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so what happens then

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link two

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since those rankings cannot be merged

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whoever draws the blueprint can only take his own ranking

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and treat it as the ranking for everyone

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notice this

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this step needs no malice at all

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he is sincere

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he truly believes his ranking is the best one

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link three

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the blueprint is laid out

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and there are always people who will not cooperate

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and without cooperation

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the grand blueprint becomes waste paper

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so for the sake of that beautiful goal

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the uncooperative have to be made to cooperate

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if persuasion fails there is pressure

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if pressure fails there is force

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every step comes with a noble reason

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every step says

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this is for the good of everyone

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link four

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and the coldest chapter in the whole book

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the title of that chapter is a question

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why the worst get on top

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the answer hayek gives

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is not the old cliche that power corrupts

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what he describes is selection

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when the task of a position

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is to carry out the master blueprint at any cost

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the people who still hesitate inside

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the ones who lie awake at night asking if this is right

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will drop out on their own

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or be weeded out

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and whoever is left in that position

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is bound to be someone who does not hesitate

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it is not that bad people seized a good system

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it is that the position itself

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filtered out conscience layer by layer

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where does this chain begin

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it begins with one single thought

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i know what is good for you

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and where does it end

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it ends in hell

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and not one link in between needs a villain

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this is the full unfolding of that line by holderlin

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hell does not need bad people to build it

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good people holding a blueprint of heaven

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are enough

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what happened after this book came out

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is even more interesting than the book itself

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keynes

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notice

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keynes of all people

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the rival hayek fought in economics for half his life

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finished it and wrote him a letter

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saying this is a grand book

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morally and philosophically

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i agree with virtually the whole of it

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even orwell

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the man who later wrote nineteen eighty four

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who stood worlds apart from hayek

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also said publicly

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that there is a great deal of truth in the warning of this book

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you see

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even his real opponents conceded the point

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why

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because what hayek hit was not the error of one camp

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it was the piece of human nature that every camp shares

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alright

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now let us set up the buddhist microscope

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the name i held back earlier

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can be said now

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what this book dissects

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is called attachment to the good in buddhism

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the grasp in grasping

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the good in goodness

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this series has covered many kinds of attachment

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craving money craving sex craving fame

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those attachments are easy to spot

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because they simply look disreputable

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but buddhism has one brutal summary for this

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grasping the good is still grasping

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attachment to the good

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is attachment too

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and it is the most advanced kind there is

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why call it the most advanced

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because other attachments feel guilty when they steal

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while attachment to the good steals

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with total confidence

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it comes with its own moral immunity

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a man who controls others for private gain

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knows in himself that he is in the wrong

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a man who controls you for your own good

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believes he is doing good

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and your resistance only becomes his reason to push twice as hard

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when we unpacked investiture of the gods we said

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that everyone in that book is acting for heaven

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everyone believes the blade in his hand is the will of heaven

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the road to serfdom is about the very same thing

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only the blade has turned into a blueprint

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so this attachment to the good

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where exactly does it go wrong in cognition

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here we bring in a core idea from yogacara

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called imagined grasping

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it sounds clunky

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but the meaning is very everyday

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yogacara says

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the way the world truly arises is called dependent arising

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the depend in depending on

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the other in other people

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the arise in arising

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which means

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that everything is produced right now by countless conditions interacting

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like a river

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where the water is new every second

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and our mind has a bad habit

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it likes to freeze whatever flows

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freeze it into a fixed object

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then stick a label on it

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and then take the label for the real thing

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that move right there

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is what is called imagined grasping

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calculating and grasping across the board

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what is a society

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it is tens of millions of people

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waking up every morning

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each with his own worries and his own craft

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each with that sliver of concrete situation only he knows

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bumping into each other trading with each other giving way to each other

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a living network that grows out of all of it

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the baker knows the flour feels wrong today

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and needs a little more water

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the watchmaker knows why the watch of the old lady on the corner always runs five minutes slow

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this kind of knowledge

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is fine grained concrete and rooted in each individual situation

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and there is no way at all to collect it onto one table

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just as you cannot take the dreams of a whole city tonight

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and file them in a single archive

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and what does a master blueprint do

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it takes this rushing river

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and treats it as a block of ice you can carry

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it takes the living network of dependent arising

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and freezes it into a dead object you can push around

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you can draw a beautiful map of a river

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but you cannot hold up the map and command the water

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the mistake of the planner

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has never been in his motives

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it is in his cognition

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he thinks he is facing a machine

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when he is really facing a river

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this is imagined grasping

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mistaking the blueprint in your head

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for the world outside

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now back to that coldest question

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why the worst get on top

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buddhism looks at this

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through the idea of collective karma

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when we normally speak of karma

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we assume it is a personal ledger

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whoever does wrong takes the payback

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but karma has a far more hidden form

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called collective karma

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a structure that a crowd of people jointly join and jointly maintain

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the structure itself produces consequences

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and those consequences do not pick people

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they come by position

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the selection mechanism hayek described

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is an exact portrait of collective karma

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not one person decided to put the worst on top

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the structure did the selecting

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and everyone who hands over judgment and only executes

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adds one more wire to the sieve

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hell is crowdfunded

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that is what makes collective karma so hard to sleep on

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at this point

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you may be thinking

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that this is about history

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about other people

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about those who hold the big blueprints

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hold on

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now let us turn the camera around

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i am going to say something that may make you uncomfortable

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inside every one of us

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a central planning committee runs all year round

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yogacara has a name for it

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the manas consciousness

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that deep process which never rests

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and clings to a self every single moment

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it holds a blueprint of its own

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and the blueprint is called

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i should

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what kind of person i should be

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what school my child should get into

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how my partner should love me

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what my life should have achieved by what age

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think about whether you have ever done this

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the interests of your child sprout like wild grass in every direction

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and you take the blueprint and prune away

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because the blueprint shows a perfectly straight tree

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your partner is good to you in his own way

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and you do not take it

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because what he gives is not on your blueprint

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the harshest one is aimed at yourself

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in those years when you were not doing well

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you scolded yourself daily for falling behind schedule

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as if your life were a construction project

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and you were the holdout blocking the build

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if you have ever sat in meditation

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you feel this even more directly

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almost everyone does the same thing on their first sit

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ordering their thoughts to be quiet

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and the result

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the more you order the noisier it gets

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why

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because you are running the master blueprint routine on your thoughts

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thoughts are dependently arisen

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living water welling up right now from body memory emotion and countless conditions

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block it with a paper administrative order

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and all you get are whirlpools

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the harder you try to be the dictator of your own mind

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the more your inner world looks like a shortage economy

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thoughts queueing everywhere

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black markets everywhere born of repression

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what you forbid yourself to think by day

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opens for business in your dreams at night

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so what if you do not control it

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do you just let everything go

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here we can borrow something from hayek himself as an analogy

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the discovery he prized most in his whole life was this

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a market needs no chief commander

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the price itself is the signal

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everyone watches the price

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and adjusts on their own

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awareness in practice

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does the job of the price

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not the job of the command

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awareness gives no orders to thoughts

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it only illuminates

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this thought has come

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what is pushing it from behind

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what does it really cost

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a thought that has been lit up

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does not need you to chase it away

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it disperses on its own

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you do not need to be the dictator of your mind

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you only need to be the light in it

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the difference between these two ways of governing

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is a century of history on the outside

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and the work of every stick of incense on the inside

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finally

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let us talk about where hayek stopped

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he spent a lifetime telling the world

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how dangerous the urge to decide for everyone is

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and how to guard against it

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but there is one question

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he never went on to ask

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where this urge to control

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comes from in the first place

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he left the answer at the level of institutions

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using rules to keep it in check

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buddhism takes one more step here

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the root of the urge to control

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is fear

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and the root of fear

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is that we treat the self as something to be guarded day and night

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to guard a self

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you must guard its boundaries its expectations its blueprints

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and so the whole world becomes an object to be managed

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blueprints are not drawn out

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they are feared into being

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hayek saw the cost of the blueprint

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buddhism saw why the hand holding it cannot let go

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this one step

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was not his failure

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it was his boundary

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and it is where this twenty five hundred year old body of learning

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is really worth something

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when he was writing this book

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hayek bet his own academic reputation on it

385
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his peers treated him as an outsider for decades

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until he won the nobel prize in economics in nineteen seventy four

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and the world turned back to read him again

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he himself was in no hurry at all

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he once said something to this effect

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the war of ideas

391
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is counted in generations

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for a person to spend thirty years with nobody applauding

393
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and still hold on to what he has seen

394
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that steadiness itself

395
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already tastes a little like practice

396
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alright

397
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here is the question for you

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do you hold a blueprint of heaven you have drawn for years and cannot bear to tear up

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one drawn for your child

400
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one drawn for your partner

401
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or one drawn for yourself

402
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tearing up the blueprint

403
00:13:46,635 --> 00:13:47,965
is not giving up the garden

404
00:13:48,035 --> 00:13:49,355
it is finally crouching down

405
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to see what has actually grown in the soil

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i would love to hear the story of your blueprint in the comments

407
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and tell me as well

408
00:13:55,716 --> 00:13:58,235
about this new angle of unpacking economics with buddhism

409
00:13:58,235 --> 00:14:00,485
do you want me to keep unpacking it

410
00:14:00,596 --> 00:14:01,225
this is leo wang

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see you next episode