As you may have noticed @ReturnToReason and I did not release a new episode of Revisiting the Road to Serfdom today, but we have a good reason. First of all, this series has been one of the most fun and insightful experiences I have ever had. I appreciate Truman for taking on this challenge with me, and I appreciate everyone who has been following along. Secondly, this series is not as easy as reading a chapter and jumping on camera.

We’ve logged in over 20 hours of on-camera review and you can basically add in another double or triple that in zoom calls and independent research in prepping for those reviews. We did all of that for a book you can get for free on Audible and listen to in under 12 hours. Yet, we are extremely happy with the amount of people following along with this series, but, honestly, I would do this even if only my mom would listen to it. This is not the reason I am writing this post, but I still want to show my appreciation for everyone following along. I know Truman feels the same.

We are not releasing another episode today is for a few reasons: (1) Truman and I want to do more historical research to fully explain the context of these chapters, and (2) we are combining chapters 13 and 14 into one episode because of the overlapping material. The latter reason is kind of a last-minute switch we decided to make, but the former reason is what I want to talk about more here. @ReturnToReason also talked about this during a livestream earlier today, so make sure to go check that out if you have not listened to it already.

One of the themes of the last few chapters we reviewed is humility. If you want to be a leader, you must be humble. If you want to build on the successes of the geniuses of the past, you must be humble so you do not tear everything down that they built up. And, most importantly, if you want to do a good book review in the context of historical events, you cannot just pretend you know, assume, or skip over a bunch of important history that the whole lesson is built on. You got to be humble and admit you don’t know squat about history.

I am certainly no history buff or did particularly well in my history courses. Heck, I could barely figure out why the people right in front of me did what they did half the time, what makes me think I could figure out the motivations of old-timey people who lived before the invention of TiVo? It is not that history never interested me, but I never found a real application for it… until recently. I also figured the fact that I know Benjamin Franklin was never the President of the United States puts me in the top 90th percentile in terms of historical knowledge of the average American. But the last few years have taught me that knowledge of history is a prerequisite for all future knowledge.

This brings me to F.A. Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom. While reviewing Chapter 12: The Socialist Roots of Naziism, we found that one of the main themes of the chapter is the social and political trajectory of Germany from Liberal-Western society to Fascist-Authoritarian hellhole. Hayek starts out by refencing famous economists and professors in Germany pre-WWI. Already at this point Truman said to me, “do you know anything about WWI?” And I responded, “that’s the one where Luke Skywalker and Han Solo rescue Princess Leia from the Galactic Empire… right?” At this point we both knew we had some research to do.

Okay, so it was not that bad, but we both felt like we did not have a good grasp on what happened during WWI and, more importantly, what happened leading up to the Great War. After hours of researching, we both found we had to dig even farther back to understand this particular trajectory. As Hayek said at the beginning of the book, and I am paraphrasing a bit, “Germany did not turn into Nazi Germany because they were ‘German’.” If we truly believed that, which many of us do, we would conclude by using the incredibly naive phrase, “that could never happen to us.” Hayek often references the German trajectory and how Britain is heading down the same path, something he gets into more specifically in Chapter 13: The Totalitarians in Our Midst. So, we found we must research more of pre-WWI Germany in order to understand the domino effect.

This is the part that really humbled me. I not only knew very little about Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but I barely knew anything about Europe during that period. Fun fact: Germany was not even a country until its unification in 1871. My dumb ass was over here thinking Germany was always a country since… like… forever ago (I swear there is a part in the New Testament where Jesus drank beer out of a boot in a German pub). Another fun fact: Europe effectively abolished slavery in 1833. There are some exceptions to this (like this was only technically for Britain and its colonies), but I assumed, since I am constantly told slavery is uniquely America’s original sin, that slavery was outlawed for centuries before the United States abolished it in 1865. I feel like I have been, and continue to be, lied to.

I also found out, while researching the Franco-Prussian War, that Europe was in a perpetual state of war over silly things leading up to WWI. I find this troubling considering I am told that American land was stolen as opposed to conquered as is the history of every nation ever founded, but now I know that conquering land via all-out-war and invasion was practiced way after we stopped doing it in America. I was very surprised when I took a look at a map of Europe in 1850, compared to a map of Europe in 1914, compared to a map of Europe in 1939, compared to a map of Europe in 2021. There has been a ton of changes.

These are only a few things I learned while doing my research, and I am excited to share what else I learned as supporting context for our next chapter review. Mapping the societal trajectory of Germany is of utmost importance if we want to avoid their mistakes. It looks like everyone else in Europe is failing to learn this lesson, and America is not far behind. I hope we can do justice to this chapter by giving you that added context during our review so we can jump off the road to serfdom and get back on the road to freedom.

Thanks for listening and supporting this work! We will be back with another episode on Monday.