Explaining the Enlightenment

Hi everybody. Uh today's topic is the

enlightenment. I am Redard Lynch. He is

Austin Padet. How's everyone doing?

>> Excellent. Time to get enlightened. Or

maybe not.

>> I love being enlightened. It beats not

being it. It It beats being

unenlightened. Um,

>> how enlightened were was the

enlightenment? I guess we'll figure it

out.

>> I actually don't have a good answer to

that. You'll have to figure it out by

the end of the video. Um, so

the enlightenment

is hard for us to read today for two

distinct reasons. For a frame of

reference, the Enlightenment was a sort

of philosophic breakthrough that

occurred over the course of the 18th

century, which was the transition from

the medieval religious to the modern

mechanistic worldview. And that's the

briefest summary I could give, but it's

one of the most important events in

human history ever. And the two reasons

we have trouble comprehending it as a

society today is firstly, the world of

the Enlightenment was vastly more

complex and mentally advanced than us.

And that's something modern people don't

like hearing because the the level of

our tools are better than the

Enlightenment. But the reason that we

have these nice tools is that we're

living off a smarter earlier era of

history that set these incentives and

structure. Once we developed these

systems like capitalism or democracy or

science, we could live off the

consequences which allowed the people

inside the systems to become too weak to

maintain them. And it's impossible for

less complex forms to understand more

complex forms because people can only

handle the thing that they can handle.

It's why you can't expect ISIS or the

Taliban to understand classical liberal

theory or the philosophy of the

founders. You can't expect tribes in the

Amazon or Babylonians to understand

modern science. And that's fundamentally

a taboo thing to say in our culture, but

it's so so real to the world. And we

have grown more stupid than the

enlightenment which you if you read

thinkers from the American or the French

Revolution that's just beyond obvious in

every way. So we can't actually

understand their motivations because

we're less intelligent than them. And so

we sort of mentally project the things

we think about onto them which leads to

the second reason that we live in a

world created by the enlightenment. If

you want to look at Peter Turin's 250ear

cycles, this year it will be or next

year whatever it will be exactly 250

years since the American Revolution. And

every major player in the world today

claims to be a descendant of the

Enlightenment. Most actually aren't. But

when you look at classical liberals or

leftists or scientists, they all claim

to be a descendant of the Enlightenment.

But the truth is the Enlightenment is an

open-source toolkit. It's not a religion

with dogma. And so every part of the

political spectrum can use this

open-source toolkit for whatever their

aims are. And then they retroactively

paint the entire Enlightenment to be

what they think it to be. While the

Enlightenment itself was a highly

intellectually diverse movement with

ideas on a wide variety of topics that

basically spanned all of the options of

human thought or at least all of the

secular options of human thought,

>> right? Because when you're transitioning

from the religious to the mechanistic

worldview, there's a million things on

that spectrum, including a proper

integration of those things.

>> Yeah. Um, I think a Spanglerian analysis

of the Enlightenment is super useful.

For those that don't know, Oswald

Spanker was a German thinker from like a

century ago who made um, like the

2,000page book Decline of the West,

which is one of the most singularly

unreadable documents I have ever read.

Like, he needed an editor. Same thing as

Young. Uh, but it has a lot of useful

concepts. And as a historian, his work

maps very closely onto what I've read

about history. But the best parallel for

the enlightenment is the comparable

intellectual movements in the ancient

world where Greece and Rome are the most

obvious examples. And in Spangler, he

talks about and he got this from Nietze

life affirming and life-dying phases of

civilization. And there's the tilt from

the spring to the summer where

in a growing society lives through the

world unconsciously. It just sees its

religion as a totally accurate framework

for how the world works. And so when it

acts, it's acting inside its mental web.

Once a society gets to a certain level

of advancement, it then starts

critically selfanalyzing its web to

optimize it. This causes a series of

factors. You see a toppling from

aristocratic society to democracy um and

then Caesarism, then socialism, then

decay. And this has been a consistent

pattern across civilizations.

And the enlightenment is a tipping point

because it's the west using its own

intellectual tools to analyze its own

culture. And the best parallel to this

is the Greeks who did the exact same

thing with the Socrates

being a classical civilization

what Rouso was to western civilization.

But then you see this trend in India and

China and even Islam where 500 BC was

the axial age tipping point and with it

you saw in India and in China and in

Greece the growth of a wide variety of

philosophies between idealism,

materialism,

communism, social Darwinism,

um spirituality, rationalism where

humans use the same ideas over history

and then we recycle because there's only

so many ways to process the human

condition. And so different societies

will take from this open-source toolkit

that we sort of archetypally have in our

minds as humans based in the context of

their society. And so in the ancient

world, you saw the same trend of all

these different philosophies and

questioning and these things. And what

happens is you have an age of empires

and nihilism and then you the society

breaks through the nihilism and develops

a new synthesis and every civilization

goes through a phase of doubting its old

religion. Um this happened even in Egypt

and Babylon and the society may or may

not die if their culture dies. But in

every case, this is a transitory phase

that then causes the degree of

separation from the old world creates a

challenge to reintegrate the world view

into a new frame that um means that this

that means you you do this and this is

going to happen no matter what either

through the society's death and its

replacement or it makes a new frame. And

in our worldview

everything since the enlightenment has

been disintegration. There was this

unified worldview in the 17th century

that uh stemmed from Aristotle and Plato

and the Bible and then the enlightenment

has

analysis is splitting up. Synthesis is

adding together. So the world since the

enlightenment has been the great

analysis which has ultimately resulted

in nihilism. But this is a highly

complex topic. So do not take that

little sliver of what I'm saying as my

total argument.

Got it. I I So then it relates to

I mean we talk about this often in terms

of the logos and truth principle in

Christianity getting people to question

society so much that they undermined its

structure. But like you said, it's it's

even broader than that because it's

happened before in history. And um

there's al there's

Christian and non-Christian variations

of it basically.

>> Yeah. Um it's um it's a universal in

society is where um if you want to enter

into religious philosophy there's the

duality of unity and disorder or the

masculine and the feminine or order and

chaos whatever. And um you use so

societies are born and die religious and

then they use the separation from God to

understand more of the world and the

more they separate the more they process

the world on a more complex level. But

if they can't reintegrate they're going

to die. Um

>> right because you can't figure

everything out because it's too complex.

So if you leave God in the attempt to do

so, eventually you're going to be soled

and so far away from your destination

that you become hopeless.

>> And that's what killed both the Greeks

and the Europeans. And in these

civilizational patterns where Spangler

and Amori Dorian as well as recently

Philipe Fabri have done a good job with

this is the Greeks are parallel to the

Europeans, the Americans to the Romans

where where both the Greeks and the

Europeans

peninsulas

in opposition to large oriental empires

which they later colonized

um went through a dark age. Uh I have a

video talking about this from a few

years ago. I go into a lot greater

detail, but their histories really sync

up between dark age, then growth of

their society, renaissance um of

cultural creativity that their

enlightenment turns on. They then go

through a phase of rapid economic and

technological and colonial growth before

they turn on each other in the

pelpeneisian and world wars. They fall

into socialism and atheism and nihilism

which kills them and then their

republican their republican cultural

colony to the west. America or Rome

conquers them creates sort of

federations like the Aan League or the

European Union. Greece and Europe fall

into decay so much that they end up

becoming de facto American or Roman

colonies because their socialism and

atheism destroys their ability for

self-governance. Um, and

then you see the Pax Americana and the

Pax Romana. And so for both the Greeks

and the Europeans,

the way they structured their logical

systems was like an acid against their

own culture. And that's why um the

Athenians killed Socrates where Socrates

sort of opened up a vault in the human

world to reason. Socrates sacrificed

himself for reason but then reason

allowed the Greeks to conquer everything

out to India and Spain. Um but it

ultimately killed their own culture

which is why um the Greeks had a huge

issue with socialism and constant civil

wars because they lost the unifying

social glue. But as I like to say,

you're going to die anyway. It's better

to die rich than poor where all

societies die. What makes the Greeks and

the Europeans so incredible is that

before they died, they accomplished so

many incredible things. Um, and if they

hadn't done those things, their

civilizations would have still died.

Look at the Spanish or the Ottoman Turks

or the Muggles in India. They still had

their empires fall, but they

accomplished nowhere near as much. And

what the Enlightenment did was it

rapidly expedited Europe's social power.

Um, but in the long term, it set Europe

up on a track to decline for a different

reason. Well, Europe would have declined

for

it meant Europe died rich rather than

died sort of middle class,

>> right? And that puts them in a better

place to recover because their kids

taking this metaphor further have

something to build off of rather than if

they never went through this process and

Europe was one of the less significant

places in the world.

One of the disagreements I enter into

with right-wing circles is there's lots

of people who um sort of think modernity

was a mistake. And I want them to shake

them like you [ __ ] idiot. Like the

world is eight times the population. We

have we can go to space. Um we've ended

real poverty in the western world at

least until very recently. Um and so

many other blessings. We ended horrible

disease where um we did incredible

things. It's just we have a meaning

crisis now that eats at us, but we could

solve the meaning crisis and keep the

nice things. And you are not a serious

person if you think we never if you

think we should still be medieval

Catholicism,

>> right? We

>> I can look at that society or the

premodern societies, figure out what

their good elements are and then

integrate them into modernity. But if

you think all of modernity was a mess

and we should return to monkey, you're

just not a serious person,

>> right? Because we know the flaws in

trying to rely completely on

rationality. At the same time, we have a

huge amount of advantages to pursue what

is

actual val actually valuable um if we're

allowed to do it basically. Cuz can you

imagine what the founding fathers

generation could have done with this

level of uh information connectivity and

technology? They could have they could

have built a you know a beautiful

whatever

city or

>> ace

>> services or buildings or like

>> pursuit of what people value basically

enable the pursuit of humanity at at a

tremendous level where we're just kind

of like sitting around with all this

potential and either not using it or

being prevented from using it through

bureaucracy. It reminds me of a line

from Julius Caesar because in the Roman

civil wars, much like the Europeans

today, the Greeks kept backing the

oligarchic globalist faction in Rome.

And then um so the Optimate who were

closer or the best were closest to the

Roman aristocrats. They had consistent

support from the Hellenistic world while

the Populararis were the um were the

Roman populist party who were more like

Italian nationalist. And so the the the

Roman armies went through Greece many

times. And Julius Caesar, this was like

the fourth time a Roman army went

through Athens in those wars. He spared

the city of Athens, but he said, "How

how many more centuries can you live off

the accomplishments of your ancestors?"

Because Athens didn't produce anything.

Its college was sort of mediocre at that

point. Um, it had had so many Latin

America-esque civil wars for centuries

that the Julius Caesar was like, "Guys,

I respect that you sort of did this, but

you can't keep living off the your

ancestors forever." And that's a lot how

Europe is today, if I'm being perfectly

blunt. um and they faced a lot of the

same issues as Greece did between

socialism or hunters or nihilism or

Roman authors would walk through uh

Greece and say that the countryside and

the cities were empty. Um a lot of

cities in Greece opened their walls to

the Romans because they were so trapped

by intractable regional disputes. Um,

and so there is that historic parallel.

And

to get to the topic at hand, the roots

of the enlightenment lie in the 17th

century in a way that people don't

really think because our culture, we

probably should have more enlightenment

sort of culture than we do because our

age is in a lot of ways dependent on the

enlightenment. But I think we don't have

a lot of enlightenment pop culture

because if we did, it would sort of

shatter the left's lie that this highly

aristocratic

um white male society was bad because we

would see that they were smarter, they

were more cultivated, they had a higher

degree of humanity. Um and

um

so

yeah, even if they were um

even if the Enlightenment had a lot of

different factions that were often wrong

in many various ways and ways that we

often can pick apart, their meme plex

was more sophisticated than ours that

they base their conversations off of.

And we've our society is largely built

off of some of the worst um branches of

the Enlightenment.

>> Yeah, that's true. Um and

the basis in the 17th century um

the enlightenment was sort of the the

hangover to the 30 years war where from

the reformation until the 30 years war

Europe engaged in constant religious

wars between Protestants and Catholics

and then between different subgroups of

Protestants and Catholics. So by the

year 1650,

Germany, Ireland, Spain, the Ottoman

Empire, and Russia, probably a lot of

more countries had onethird the

population they did at the start of the

before their wars in the early 17th

century. And so

you saw several elite implicit

agreements that occurred in the 17th

century, which then colored into the

18th century. The enlightenment was the

backwash from all of these subconscious

elite negotiations which occurred in the

17th century. as an example with the

Treaty of West Failia, which people like

bringing up in sort of diplomatic

political circles because it was the

start of the creation of the modern

European nation state where the Treaty

of West Failia established these are the

borders and we are going to make a

unified European political system with

these complex alliances that stretch

across the continent and we as European

elites do not want to have to wage

religious wars anymore. they still did.

You had figures like Louis the 14th who

was really against Protestants.

The English had the p the popish plot

where they were hysterical about um they

were hysterical about uh Catholicism and

the potential for a Catholic takeover of

Britain. But you saw this gradual

simmering down of religious tensions

over the n over the 17th century and a

lot of European elites became quite

cynical about religion because they saw

all of the political motivations that

went into it. And in this process of

conflict between Protestants and

Catholics, religion became highly

dogmatic and autistic and removed from

the living breathing sort of mystical

magical worldview of medieval

Catholicism where it was no longer

possible to exist within a completely

religious worldview frame like it was in

the Middle Ages. we saw the breakaway of

a certain secular sphere. And um part of

this over the course of the 17th century

was the growth of something that no one

knows about but was super influential to

western history. that being the Republic

of Letters because the Enlightenment was

an outgrowth of the attempt to implement

science into the society because science

developed over the course of the 70th

century. And it used a thing called the

Republic of Letters where across Western

Europe you had intellectuals who would

develop scientific concepts, send it out

across to someone in France or the

Netherlands or Spain and then have them

share ideas. So the scientific community

developed from these sort of like signal

chat groups of European intellectuals

and scientists who would share their

ideas with each other. And I saw a map

of this where England was vastly

disproportionate for the Republic of

Letters. England has been

disproportionate even when they were a

far less important European country in

the development of science. Um but

England, the Netherlands, it was in

France as well. Um and it's the 500 mile

circle that generated most innovation um

since the high middle ages around

France. Um and there are several sort of

cognitive bugs in the republic of

letters that we see manifest over modern

history. One is that the global

community is a descendant of the

republic of letters because or our

concept of secularism is a descendant of

the republic of letters because you had

all of these conventions in it where you

couldn't write about your nationality

because you were writing for a global

audience. It was all educated experts of

a certain social class. And a huge part

of the development of science and the

enlightenment was that aristocrats had

an enormous moral aversion to lying

where an aristocratic culture if you

ever told a lie that was just beyond the

pale of social interaction. And um so

when aristocrats dealt with each other

they dealt through a position of

enormous intellectual trust. And the

enlightenment was an incredibly

aristocratic movement which is something

that has been written out with the

attempt to make the enlightenment

populist due to the French or the

American revolutions. Um but the

republic of letters created this concept

of globalism where it's these experts

around the world writing about the

science and the topics but it stripped

them of a lot of different types of

context. And so when the managerial

class or the left talk about the global

community, they're really talking about

a modern republic of letters or experts

and scientists and figures of sort of

pseudo technocratic authority

communicating with each other, stripped

away from their nation or context or

human culture or the human animal. And

this detached secular worldview became

the dominant operating system of modern

civilization. But it stemmed from a

highly particular concept. And the goal

for a lot of modernist thinkers is how

do we have a society where the republic

of letters is in charge of everything,

>> right? because they kind of had to keep

religious arguments out of the chat, so

to speak, because there was so much

tension from the political wars that it

would have interfered with what they

were doing towards advancing their their

scientific knowledge. Yeah.

>> Which prevented them from actually

integrating it with religion properly

because everyone probably had a sort of

different idea or different implication

of how that would work. So, they just

couldn't even talk about that. A core

issue with the Republic of Letters is it

literally does not have any place for

responsibility where um one of the

things I think about is that in the

preodern world they didn't have a sort

of backdoor in their worldview for you

making a really good intellectual

argument and validate something. So in

the in the middle ages you had it half

but it was or like a quarter of what it

is now where medieval Catholicism

established frameworks for how to decide

things rationally that very directly

evolved into modern science. But in most

societies in history if you're a

nobleman we listen to you and if you're

lower class we don't listen to you.

there isn't the option. Their option

would be a priest class, but there

wasn't um a sort of hero of letters as

uh Carlile would call them. Um like he

refers to Ben Johnson or Rouso or

whatever. He hated Russo by the way, but

he would still put him in the same

mental category. And um the issue with

the Republic of Letters is you end up

with weird incentives where you say all

of the opinions much like peer review

which the other people in the chat want

to hear which always results in the

rational mind is addicted to power. It's

always how do we increase power for the

sort of people in this chat as much as

possible and there's zero attachment to

responsibility or consequences of the

actions. So it's how do I get as much

power without having to live with the

consequences of my own actions? And this

causes a worldview which ultimately

culminates in communism where all or

practically all of the enlightenment

thinkers were against capitalism. Most

of them were aristocrats who supported

monarchy um or at the very least

aristocratic republics. But um when you

have this open-source toolkit with no

factchecking mechanism, which was the

enlightenment's big issue, is you end up

with

the most pleasant fictions like equality

or communism or um mankind is a god

capable of constructing its own reality

where when the enlightenment started, it

was this e fllororesence of creativity

and openness, but because it didn't have

factchecking or verifying intellectual

structures, it spirals into placating

the mob over the course of a century,

>> right? Because it's not actually the

rational mind like you said. It's the

animal mind

>> because you can you can put like

rationality on top of a religious

impulse or on top of just your base

impulses which is going to lead to

rationalizing ways for power or sex or

whatever uh or equality if that benefits

you. When the enlightenment started, it

was aristocratic networks. And so it was

people who had to sort of like be

respons. It was like CEO chats where if

you have a chat of CEOs who at least

have like productive companies, they

have a sort of understanding of what

does and doesn't work because they have

to sort of manifest their own power. Um

and it's why um conspiracy theories are

very sort of placating the mob because

in the conspiracy theories it operates

under the assumption that a single

person can control all of reality and if

you have enough responsibility you

realize that that's just not how this

works where Hitler and Stalin and Mao

had the most totalizing states in

history with total authority over every

element of their citizens lives. But at

the same time, if you read about their

regimes, they were utter shitows. Things

barely worked. It was chaos. It was just

operating off the dictator's whim. And

um and due to that uh you have to

realize that like singular cabals cannot

actually manage the world. The reason

that the Marxists took over is they

appealed to certain social classes which

could uh operate out of their own class

interest to push their own

self-interest. So it was an emergent

cooperation from a shared ideology, not

a single Marxist cabal directing

everything. And um and so you had these

assumptions in the early enlightenment

that sort of just bled out outwards from

it or you saw the gradual erosion of the

Christian logical structure where

Christianity created rules of what

discourse was allowed and the Christians

had a actually a very open intellectual

overton where you could argue at every

political position except communism. you

could argue for um anything any

philosophic position as long it was not

directly opposed to Christianity and the

church. Um and so they had these rules

were like you can argue while you're

still on our side. And a lot of the

enlightenment was taking away the rules.

You can argue until you're on our side.

And um

and a lot of the enlightenment had um it

was sort of the pushing through of all

of these barriers and that caused a wide

variety of consequences. Some of which

very good and others very bad. There was

a lot of good in the enlightenment. I

consider it to be an overall good

movement. Right.

>> The good stuff is stuff we don't think

about where when will Durant said part

of the reason that we don't respect the

importance of Voltater at the time where

he was a celebrity. He was like a a rock

star like Elvis and just his level of

popularity is that the good things

Voltater said just became the water we

swam in. Voltatered for freedom of

speech, freedom of religion uh against

sort of hierarchical aristocratic

authorities and those worked and got

implemented in society. Um, and then the

uh we we remember the sort of edgy

things Voltater did like uh his

like incredible anti-Christianity at

certain points of his life or his um his

like sort of the French Enlightenment's

issue was sort of Reddit rationality. Um

that was the French re the French

enlightenment was very Redditor energy.

Um, and so with the Enlightenment, the

things that did really well and the

things that worked was sort of the um

things we don't think about because

they're so simplified where at the time

of the French Revolution, France was

legally two different countries at

least, often like a dozen between

Britany, the North and the South of

France, which all had internal tariffs.

France had like over 20 internal legal

designations. And with the French

Revolution, which was the turning point

between the Enlightenment and

Romanticism, you saw the French

government rip apart all of these

regional designations

for the departments which destroyed

France's regional culture. And um so

what you're seeing here was that Europe

had this highly developed at times

deeply inefficient and sort of corrupt

unconscious culture. And what the

enlightenment did was turn a critical

eye on Europe's own unconscious culture

and it cut away a lot of brambles where

what they should have done is gone

through it carefully and think this is a

bramble to cut out. This is a bramble to

cultivate. We should put more light on

this tree. We should water this tree.

They just cut away they just cut away

the entire forest. And so you're cutting

away both good and bad things.

How does this relate to the straw man of

the enlightenment that um the religious

monarchists represented the completely

like backwards cultural forces and the

enlightenment was

like secular

progress.

>> Yeah. So there have been three sort of

factions in Europe since the Middle Ages

or since I'd say the the the end of the

wars of religion that being the

conservatives, the liberals and the

leftists. Um so the conservatives or

true conservatives are monarchists and

noblemen. Um the liberals are classical

liberals like libertarians or business

or parliamentarians and then the

leftists are socialists and Marxists.

And we live in a world where the left

has near total dominance. Even the

classical liberals are very much on the

defensive. And true conservatives

basically don't exist. Now there the

true conservatives we have are in most

cases sort of edgy youth who are

rebelling. If you're making arguments

from the Catholic Church having total

dominance or for nobility or for

feudalism, you're not actually someone

who grew up in one of those societies.

You just hate the left. Um and

>> and the left wants us to think in that

frame, right? Because they always for

the last 10 years have said, "Oh, the

right they they want to bring back

feudalism. They want to do all this

stuff because cons the um secular

enlightenment versus backwards religion

is a much easier frame for them to

compete on."

>> Yeah.

>> With taking out that middle option. One

of the points to who's one of my

favorite authors of this era makes is

that um the reason the French Revolution

and the political events around it

happened was this enormous disjoint

between Europe's feudal institutions and

um the modern world and in France this

was really stark because it was arguably

the most advanced country in the world,

one of the wealthiest uh the most

populous and powerful country in Europe.

But France had all of these protections

for the nobility. So you couldn't become

an officer or get a lot of government

jobs or

if you were not a noble or the nobility

weren't taxed where free farmers had to

pay three times as much taxes as

peasants on a lord's land and the

nobility didn't have to pay any taxes.

So you had this huge amount of

corruption and inefficiency and it was

better in France than it was in Eastern

Europe. Russia, Prussia, Denmark,

Austria were just a wash in surfdom. And

so most of Europe practiced surfom that

was comparably bad to black slavery. It

was significantly worse than West

European high medieval surfom. And then

France and Spain and Italy had these

corrupt government monopolies that

evolved into socialism. They had most of

Europe did not have religious freedom.

And it it's really we forget how much

the enlightenment accomplished where in

France a hypereducated nation you could

you legally had to be a Catholic and the

Catholic Church worked with the

enlightenment very well actually in

France. However, the French monarchy

maintained this theocracy to control the

public. And so in Latin Europe, you saw

the growth of atheism in the 18th

century which occurred in wealthier more

developed parts of Spain right after

France where the French enlightenment

was very atheist coded and the German

and the British enlightenments were more

complex. They they had more religious

elements uh because in France there was

this enormous disjoint between the

corrupt social authorities and the

actual capability of the population. The

issue though was that by the time of the

French Revolution, the public had not

had enough training in self-governance

that when they finally got it, they

didn't know what to do with it because

France had this totalizing state which

stopped the French people from rising to

leadership. Um, and you could magnify

that across all of Europe. And the two

exceptions are the British and the Dutch

because in in in some cases sort of the

other the other Nordic nations where uh

the British and the Dutch in the 17th

century they had de facto religious

toleration although there were

exceptions. They had free market

economies. They got rid of the distinct

legal titles for nobility and commoners.

They had federalized republics. So the

English and the Dutch made a sort of

seamless organic transfer from a

medieval to a modern society where you

would still have a nobility but the

nobility would mix with and mate with

and invest in the normal society. So

there was a lot less resentment. And in

the rest of Europe, these overtly

oppressive structures dominated until

the French Revolution. And you had all

of these hypereducated, capable people

who were just seething under the

surface. And so the good thing the

French Revolution did was remove these

layers of corruption and inefficiency

and decay from the old European order.

The issue is that in doing so they

destroyed Europe's culture because they

didn't allow protections to stop from

the most from when you open up the box

of the Enlightenment's open- source

toolkit,

you have to keep track of all the

consequences and they didn't have any

structures for once they broke through

on how to do quality control. And could

you argue the Catholic Church

contributed this to this dynamic a bit

of this um hard dichconomy between

religious monarch and secular

enlightenment where the Protestants were

more easily able to incorporate

>> the other elements. The Protestants

adapted to the Enlightenment seamlessly

because they had gone through a previous

process of rationalizing their own

religion through solar scriptor or they

had sort of rationalized their religion

pulling from the Bible so that they

could integrate into the enlightenment

very easily where all of the Protestant

countries had enlightenments that were

not directly opposed to religion. In

France and in the Catholic countries,

the Catholic Church held the line that

we're going to maintain our traditions

even if they're not rational because

this is our big sticking point versus

the Protestants. Because the Protestants

said, pulling from the Bible, the

Catholic Church does not have a monopoly

on church on the on the church authority

or Christendom. Well, the Catholic

Church said we have this monopoly

pulling from a living tradition that

stems back to Christ. And

>> and the Catholics thought of the

Protestants as atheists in some sense

because of how heavily they leaned into

that frame.

>> And the Protestants thought the

Catholics were superstitious cultists um

and idoltors. Um but

so the enlightenment crossed the

foundations of the enlightenment stem

from pulling analysis from what Tarnis

who's a great philos philosophy writer

calls the Galileo Spinosa daycart axis.

And in the 17th century, these three

thinkers, you can throw in others like

Kepler or Lives developed a worldview

that separated the old religious

scientific worldview from a scientific

materialist worldview. Galileo showed us

that the earth revolves around the sun

and is not dependent on um on on this

highly complex tears of spiritual

consciousness that you would see from

thinkers like Dante in the middle ages.

Um and so that taught us that we live in

a cold dot in space. Um as the only life

complex life forms we know about which

created a materialist concept of matter

in the world. Spinosa integrated

theology into the material world to say

that the material world is the

manifestation of God. But what that did

is that um it removed God from the

world. Uh because if the world is God,

then God is the world. then God's not

distinct from the world. I'm sure you

guys can figure it out. And then

>> Gavalo Spininoza Daycart, Daycart was a

big founder of the Enlightenment because

he made the mind body distinction. Um,

and earlier thinkers and this these

thinkers are scientifically accurate

from the data we have say that our minds

are embodied and we are connected to the

world. Reality is permeable. What

Daycart said, and I can't overestimate

the importance of this, is

we know we exist because we can

self-perceive our own consciousness. If

we can self-perceive our own

consciousness, we know that our

consciousness exists. Consciousness

exists distinct from material reality.

And he was using this to prove God

because he was an agent of the Catholic

Church. But um it was taken to mean the

opposite by uh his intellectual

descendants and Daycart was a huge

figure in France at the time for over a

century. So you have kittita erosum I

think therefore I am. Then the only

thing we can know about material reality

is what we can measure and you can't

integrate the mind and the body at all.

It's the ghost in the shell. And so what

this did is totally remove human

perception and consciousness from our

understanding of the world. And it split

God off from science by shooting the

mystic. Religion once divorced from the

world that's in our head cannot adapt to

the world. You just have to read the

Bible or the rig religious texts. You

can't look for religion in the world.

Then science becomes this soulless

Prometheian Frankenstein which is

utterly removed from human values or

intentions.

The Dick Hart point about consciousness

reminds me of um the libertarian point

about trying to prove that people don't

having the intent to prove that people

don't have intent disproves your

original

um prognosis or theory.

>> Yes. Um who would ever argue people

don't have intent?

>> Communists, I guess.

>> God,

>> free will relation.

>> So stupid. But like you said, the that

the water we're swimming in is largely

the left enlightenment frame. And it's

easy to underestimate how much this

impacts all of us. And it's not like in

a personal way. It's like how Keynesian

assumptions are baked into a large

percent of the population. We just have

to acknowledge it. And it's uh an

example is how you mentioned the

conspiratorial framework, how it relies

on a perception of power that's actually

inherently leftist because the left

views this power as um totalizing. Uh

when in reality like an alternate less

leftist frame is there's constraints on

the king. There's responsibility with

leadership, right? And that's not

incorporated as much into the

conspiratorial lens. So even if you're a

right-wing person, you might have some

of these leftwing this leftwing water,

you know, left on your clothes.

>> Yeah, that's a very good point. And um

it leads me to two different things and

I'll say this first so I don't forget.

The first is that a lot of the

enlightenment was an outgrowth of the

rise of secular authority in France. And

the second one was um that what the

enlightenment did is it fossilized the

worldview of the mid to late 17th

century and then it analyzed downwards

from that without looking into the

assumptions of if that worldview is

correct where um the first thing is that

France was the first country in Europe

to develop secularism and that was a

trend that went back to the middle ages

um when the French murdered the pope but

it got exacerbated over the 17th century

partly since France was at war with the

rest of the Catholic world or the

Spanish who were working with the pope

and so France developed a position where

we're going to follow the Catholic

rights but um we will not listen to the

pope and so the French government funded

all of this secularism you can look at

the cardinal dishela who was a genius

who developed a lot of the concepts of

modern nationalism through a secular

lens so that France should follow its

own interests. And France, France um was

the first country in Europe to develop a

strong centralized government. England

was unified earlier, but England became

an aristocratic republic where rather

than a bureaucracy, it used the nobility

to enforce power. And France due to the

the many different wars to unify the

most populous nation in Europe um

developed a centralized government with

a bureaucracy. And by the time of the

French Revolution, the bureaucracy

controlled France's social structure,

where in France, even regional townships

did not have self-governance. They were

controlled by a bureaucrat from Paris.

Same thing as the French same thing as

the the French Empire in Africa later

on. and um and uh the French government

often even controlled what crops farmers

in France grew, although the majority of

France was owned by small farmers, not

nobility. Um and so you see this French

enlightenment of the government trying

to think through how can we remove

religion as a social balancing force to

control more of France. And Charles

Taylor, the author of a secular age,

said that this was one of the biggest

motivations in the um in in the

enlightenment and this entire

secularization where a lot of it is how

to give elites as much power as

possible. Um and so you look at the

different enlightenments where the

British enlightenment which is split up

between the English and the Scottish, it

stems from empiricism

and um sort of uh sort of practical

understanding of human nature because in

England there was this uh merchant elite

who gained power who saw the world

empirically because that's how you

measure statistical sets or how to do

your deals or trading and there was this

sort of less a fair attitude because

England had gone through religious wars

for

nearly a century between mostly

different subgroups of Protestants who

are quite similar. Um, and so in England

that's where their empirical tradition

stems from. In France, the rational

redditor tradition stems from the state

creating this bureaucratic monster which

consumed the French society and the

monarchy. And um one of the points that

Toqueville makes that's beautiful is

that the year that the French

bureaucracy developed a bureaucratic

institution that paralleled the king's

power, the French Revolution happened

because the bureaucracy realized that we

don't need the king anymore. Meanwhile,

the German enlightenment stemmed from um

Germany had its own highly distinct

introspective

um

this highly distinct introspective

religious tradition that stemmed from

certain like subgroups of Protestantism.

The Potists were part of this um pyotist

German Quakers where they would meet up

as friend groups and talk about their

own introspective relationship with God.

And in in in Germany, the nobility sort

of became decadent French lovers where

they would speak French, they'd eat

French food, they wouldn't associate

with the peasantry. So the intellectual

and the cultural breakthroughs fell onto

a demographic of

middle class largely Protestant

religious professors who became the

guardians of the German identity. And

this singular social class had an

enormous impact on German history. And

so what they were trying to do was take

these private spiritual experiences and

then rationalize them in a rational

logic system. This is what Kant is

doing. This is what um Hegel did who was

later on. Um it's what uh Linets

um most of the German thinkers of this

era and I think a lot of this German

idealist bent was because Germany was

dising 500 little states. So the

religion in the hyperabstract

was sort of the escape of the Germans

for their powerlessness in material

political reality.

I want to mark down what you said about

the French bureaucracy growing to a

level where they could take over and

that's when the king fell because it

highlights that point again that the

change happens before the change. Rome

didn't transition into a feudal

structure until the local the security

was handled locally and then it just

fell. Another example is the

northeastern states in the US are

talking about making their own

healthcare association because they're

mad about Tylenol or RFK Jr. or

whatever. If all if all the local areas

make their own bureaucracy, that's when

the federal bureaucracy will just fall.

Like is it the you got to instead of

waiting for it to happen look at how you

can make the change inevitable by how

you structure the present.

>> Yeah.

>> And then the the other point was um this

uh what you were talking about fits into

your the distinction between rationality

and science because it's actually not

scientific to not measure spiritual

phenomenon.

>> Yeah. Or to not not treat them as an

element of the human condition because

science is a testing method. And I say

that again and again. Science is not an

aesthetic. Um, and

with with all of these different sub

enlightenments, you're sort of trying to

see these different aims and they

evolved into different directions

between um the French enlightenment led

to equality. One of my friends says,

"French enlightenment is equality.

British enlightenment is liberty. German

enlightenment was fraternity." That's

from the French Revolutions

Libert.

Um and

shifts in the ideal and the philosophic

ripple into the material world later. If

you look at a society's philosophy, you

can see what their political structure

is going to be a century later. And so,

there's a lag that goes on there. And

when you see really rapid historic

shifts that don't make sense, it's

because these unconscious factors and

these material factors built up until

there was a tipping point. Um that

consistently happens with events like

the French Revolution or World War I or

whatever. And what I meant when I said

that um what the enlightenment did is it

froze the worldview of the mid to late

17th century and then it deconstructed

from it without analyzing the underlying

worldview where um with the Galileo

Spinosa dayart axis there's the

assumption that reality is is purely

material um that humans are sort of

robots that do not have their own

distinct soul motivations

um there is that the worldview has to

con correspond to the rational arguments

you make. Um, and there's like a bunch

of other IP speak of this in many other

videos. And

the core issue of the enlightenment was

they weren't factchecking if their own

arguments were accurate. And they had a

huge issue with as if clauses. And

that's I use for when you make the

argument as if blank thing were to be

true and then blank blank blank. You

build these highly complex logic chains

and if any of these arguments are wrong,

your logic chain is broken. And I was

reading this book by Richie Robertson

about the Enlightenment. Um, and

uh, first of all, I would not recommend

it. It's like 600 pages and it really

fails because it autistically obsesses

over this was police this was the

Enlightenment's attitude towards

policing. This was the enlightenment

towards homosexuality,

towards um the great chain of being uh

women. I'm making the book sound more

woke than it is. It's not really woke.

I'm just those are things that come into

my mind talking about. But there's not

the narrative of the Enlightenment's

development over time. And it's

interesting how practically every single

argument that could have been made in

the Enlightenment was. And then people

would debate these arguments back and

forth in a sort of rationalistic logical

sense. But no one actually checked if

these things were true. And I partly

don't blame them because they had less

empirical data than us today. We have

lots of empirical data now which we

don't use to check the things we say.

But um as an example, Frederick the

Great, who was considered an enlightened

death spot, he was told by one of his um

intellectuals around him, he said, "We

used to believe that man was innately

crooked and um innately sort of um

fallible. Now we man innately good." And

Frederick the Great said, "Yeah, there's

no chance that's true." He said, "I led

too many armies. Most of the nation are

surfs. I fought against the Russian

barbarians. zero chance human nature is

innately sort of good. Um,

>> right. He's like, I've seen Eastern

Europe.

>> Yeah, exactly. Um, and so you have a lot

of ideas in the Enlightenment where the

British, the German, and the French

enlightenments all took different

trajectories, which I will explain after

I take a break.

>> Excellent.

>> Hi.

>> Yeah. Can I uh comment on a couple

things you said before you left before

we get into the next part?

>> Sure.

>> Um yeah, so you mentioned that

narratives built on logical chains. I

just wanted to dwell on that for a

second because it's incredibly common.

And even if you have uh a logical chain

where there's not a single step that can

be proven wrong, which is rare, there's

still a lot of assumptions built into

those steps. So it works in the same way

as climate models where like say each

assumption or chain is another year of

prediction and the farther you get away

the more those errors built up to the

point where you're going to be totally

off base. So you need

I don't know what the alternative is but

more coherent or foundational frameworks

rather than logic chains like more

inherent understandings of things rather

than a long chain of of dependent logic.

I so I know the answer to that because

it's something I developed an idea I

developed where um I split thought into

living thought and dead thought and dead

thought is thinking that cannot adapt to

the complexity of the world. It's the

closed loop and living thought is

thinking that can and so the way I write

my videos is that each individual topic

I try to understand it as a living

holistic whole and I can change it with

new data. The issue with most modernist

ideologies is they have this logic chain

and if one thing in the logic chain is

broken, it all falls apart. I'm very

careful to avoid that. I try to explain

things in a way you can see everything

as an indivisible hole as a topic where

I try to sort of build my worldview off

explaining the world, not making

overarching explanations. I force the

world into. And so a lot of European

thinkers, especially Germans, are really

guilty of this. Spangler, Hegel, Marx,

and I've read these works in the

original where they're all trying to

pull you into their argument to get you

into their logical causation, sort of

trick you into their end point. Um, and

um, another element of the Enlightenment

is uh, Europe is strange in that it

doesn't have a traditional culture.

where most societies in the world rever

tradition for its own sake. And so in

Indonesia, you have Islam, but you also

have the traditional Javanese society.

In China, they've turned in China and

India, they turn their traditions into

religions. In the West, for a series of

different reasons, we don't have

tradition for its own sake, which is

mostly a really, really good thing

because it stops us from fossilizing. We

can constantly adapt. The thing though

is that we dropped all of our social

technologies into the Bible. The Bible

is our operating system as a society.

And so once you start pulling away at

it, you're pulling away the entire

social fabric. So there's nothing to

catch you afterwards. And so the

enlightenment can very quickly spiral

into madness like the French Revolution

or it can cause effects like the

American Revolution with the most

successful society ever. And that's

dependent on the self-regulation of the

people using these enlightenment tools

and if they make good choices. So it's a

high-risk highreward strategy.

>> And it's it's basically necessary at

this point.

>> Yeah.

>> Because you someone's going to do it.

You can't you have to play the game. And

it's almost like instead of the

enlightenment which creates the sol this

like idea that there's a single

enlightened

uh result or position out of it. It

should almost be called the conversation

or something.

>> Yeah. It's um life is a conversation and

through your actions you're asking the

world for questions and answers. Um the

process of living is a discussion with

the world. Um

so with the enlightenment you have a

series of sort of different sub

ideologies

that develop in different contexts and

they stem from the sort of baroque um

culture of the late 17th century courts

where this is one of those eras of

history no one talks about. we were

talking about earlier how um there's no

culture on the early 18th century even

though it was a quite important historic

time period where um all of our culture

in the 18th century is the second half

of that century um but even less so is

the second half of the 70th century

where after the 30 years war you saw

Europe develop in these sort of chill

absolutist states where in both Britain

and France there was the parties of

party the politics of partying where

Charles II and Louis the 14th developed

these courts for aristocrats to party

together and engage in luxury um as a

way to offset the enormous civil wars

they had beforehand. Um and

with this you see the um the different

sort of trajectories emerge where in

France as an example you saw the push

towards the manipulation of power

because what the king of France really

wanted was the ability to wield power

and he created this huge social class of

people who had very unified visions of

the world, ideas, artistic tastes and

they wanted the French Revolution in

unity because they saw the social unity

of their social class and they wanted to

enforce it on the rest of the population

and they were profoundly resentful

against the church, the nobility and the

monarchy. But those institutions

although they didn't appear to do it

actually did provide services for France

where there was this um this really

popular article called the or what's the

third estate where they because you have

the the the the nobility in the monarch

the first estate the church or the

second estate and then the third estate

was the common people like the merchants

or the lawyers and over time the third

estate gained total power over society.

They were the people actually waging the

wars. They were they built their own

philosophy with the enlightenment. They

were the old manufacturing and

colonizing. So the third estate kind of

called the bluff of the first and the

second estates and because the first and

the second the the French sort of ruling

apparatus got corrupt. Um but then with

the loss of them, France wasn't really

able to recover after the death of the

Lion regime, which is sort of a tragedy

because the Lion regime really did sort

of suck. There were points where it was

just like I if I was at the time I would

have supported the French Revolution if

I'm being honest. Um,

>> and

in France you have a lot of weird sort

of like uh weird distinct clauses where

18th century France was a legal cluster

[ __ ] where they were a Catholic

theocracy, where there was lots of

atheism, where the entire French

Revolution was atheist coded, but it was

illegal to be a Protestant, where they

had a brutal authoritarian government,

which was not actually brutal enough to

control the population and they also had

freedom of speech with an independent

judiciary. And so you end up in this

weird situation where France as a

country has legal freedom of speech and

the most educated population in Europe

combined with an oppressive social

structure that's not actually oppressive

enough to stop the scent. And so you see

this gradual bubbling up that started

with the aristocracy where um one of the

points both the toqueville and Chris

Dawson made is that the French

enlightenment started with the the

nobility and that was sort of who it was

assumed to be for and

women are instrumental to the

enlightenment in a way they aren't for

most historic events. The Enlightenment

is one of the historic events most

influenced by women because aristocratic

women would throw these salons where um

they would invite interesting thinkers

together and they'd have uh intellectual

discussions and these salons were the

big powering of most of the

enlightenment as well as coffee houses

which emerged in Europe in this time

period and many thinkers have said um

coffee was instrumental to the

enlightenment is it's these rational

energetic discussions where beforehand

Europeans would just drink. Um and

>> all these autistic enlightenment

thinkers needed their wives to socially

organized for them to get together.

>> Yeah. Basically, and so you had um these

uh women in Paris during the

Enlightenment who were absolutely

important social figures. You had a

bunch of them and they ended up becoming

historically instrumental in events like

the French Revolution or Voltaar's Lover

was one of these um was one.

>> So they're like Gertrude Stein figures.

>> I don't know who that is but probably

>> 20s Paris.

>> Okay. Yeah.

>> You have a lot of Gertude Stein figures

like that. Um, and what both Chris

Dawson and Dtoqueville say is that these

ideas emerged among the aristocracy. And

by the time of the French Revolution,

the French aristocracy was predominantly

atheist. Um, because they lived in these

weird artificial environments where the

French monarchy propped up the

aristocracy, but the French monarchy

used the bureaucracy to get all the real

tasks done. So the aristocracy were just

stuck talking to each other periodically

fighting in wars um having engaged in

luxury or hedenism and um so they became

atheist and um the French enlightenment

was highly atheist coded. What happened

though was that when these ideas

trickled down to the lower classes the

aristocracy didn't realize this would

cause the French Revolution because the

church had kept the social structure

together. And one of the points Chris

Dawson speaks of it very eloquently in

his book Gods of the Revolution which

was um I didn't like that book when I

first read it but I I realized later it

was brilliant where he goes through the

different sort of sub ideologies of the

French enlightenment between Voltater

and Montescu were uh they were they were

aristocrats and that the first

generation of the French enlightenment

were aristocrats who supported monarchy

uh social class and Then over time with

a tipping point around Rouso, you saw

the the general public develop a watered

down version of the these ideas um as

the form of the general will where you

use enlightenment ideas to rationalize

sort of mob politics where Rouso said

the will of the rulers is by definition

the rule of the the will of the people.

So in Rousoa's philosophy, small groups

of radicals if they manifest the correct

historic direction are manifesting the

will of the people whether or not they

actually checked what the people want

and this became a completely disastrous

idea. But then you saw this slip into

the French Revolution which ultimately

led to romanticism. And romanticism was

the big philosophic current of the 19th

century with Rouso being the founder of

romanticism. And romanticism was about

emotion and compelling stories and

biological roots.

>> And if you look at like a if you look at

a figure like Napoleon, Napoleon is a

mix of enlightenment and romantic man at

this tipping point.

This parallels a ton of what's going on

today in politics and including on the

right where there's these um

uh

watered down

narratives that Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

So like you said there what did Russo

say about the will of the crowd

manifesting?

>> So Rouso was uh Rouso was

psychologically a woman. I think that's

the best example I can give where said

that the nature of life is to follow

your own internal emotional state at any

given time and something is good if it

pleases your emotions because only when

we go into our deepest heart's emotional

desires can we attain true authenticity

and he wanted to make a social code

called the noble savage where the French

would have these highly ideal laws

idealized narratives about they use the

huron in Canada as an example where we

should build this society of tribal

close to nature peoples. And he said the

way to achieve this was to create sort

of Spartan state led by small

technocratic elites who on the quote

will of the people to get in the correct

direction of history where the will of

the people was quote what would correct

be correct for the people's

self-interest but it was determined

solely by this ruling class. You see

this is so easy to manipulate. you the

the part of this that I think this is

interesting is there's two ways to to go

with that is because Russo could be

talking about elite politics and he

could be more tied into that but it's

also true that it is the will of the

people cuz if you're not able to

marshall elite politics then you're just

and you become an empty vessel for the

crowd then everything Rouso said about

him politicians manifesting the will of

the people is true they're not actually

in control they're not actually exerting

their vision. Some people just figure

out how to AB test and ride that wave

and then you become a a vessel for the

crowd. So Rouso is actually correct in

some ways but just appealing to the

crowd is obviously a recipe for disaster

and it's built off of motion and

narrative.

>> I am going to hard deny you here because

>> excellent

>> the So it's never actually the will of

the people. It's always the will of a

small

elite of the proletariat. God, I hate

the Marxist terms. Um, I'm going to call

it instead um, handlers. It's always a

small group of handlers who make up like

1 to 2% of the population who win and

then they mobilize certain mobs at

correct times. And if the general

public, it's never the case wherein they

did um, anthropological surveys. This is

like one of the first things the field

of anthropology did of uh French

peasants at the time of the French

revolution. And they were almost all

deeply socially conservative. The

Catholic Church was their identity. They

thought the were actually superior to

them. Um and so the these small

bureaucratic elites concentrated in

places like Paris. When they actually

met the French peasants, they were

horrified by them and then shoved them

into the army as cannon fighters saying

they should never be given social

authority. same thing as the Russian

Revolution, small uh elite group. Well,

the vast majority of Russians were

peasants who just wanted to own their

own land. Um and um and so it's these

small corrupt elites who can handle the

mob who claim to be the will of the

people, but they almost always represent

like less than 5% of the general

population's interests. It's just in any

given society, the vast majority of

people will be normies who will go along

with what the social authorities tell

them.

>> So riding the wave of the mob is real,

but it's more like surfing strategically

here to get to there or jumping on it

here to go there. But I guess you can

become captured by it. This is one of

the things I've become highly cynical

about as a YouTuber because I can see

how much framing controls

the mob where I I've I've tested this

where I'll say the exact opposite things

a few months apart and then people will

agree with them even though it's the

same because I set the frame that way.

Or look at other YouTubers who are

either totally captured by their

audiences where they just say whatever

their audiences say or they run their

audience sort of mini cults where I have

seen too much about how the internet

creates mobs to not become very cynical

on this topic. Um.

>> Mhm.

>> And because I look at the internet

constantly self-contradicts. It cannot

keep a line straight for like longer

than 6 months where it's crazy. At the

time of the election, everyone said

Trump would fix America. And this

summer, people became very cynical about

Trump. And I'm like, dude,

>> you can have emotions. Just be

consistent.

If you cannot say this dude is your

savior last year and then say he's an

utter failure now without realizing the

disjoint in rationally analyzing why you

made this shift.

>> Well, the over optimism is directly

correlary with how much the negative

feelings happen after those expectations

aren't met versus having a realistic

positive consistent baseline.

>> It's just exhausting. Like why do I

care? like

>> at the same time you need to get people

excited for the election slightly beyond

the reality but the reality is still

there's a lot of good things in there so

it's I mean it's a hard balance to

manage I suppose

>> you have to to cultivate um

you have to cultivate detachment and

attachment at once which I will not

clarify it's a different topic

>> makes sense to me

>> so French enlightenment two big figures

are volta and rouso and they had their

own rivalry. Um, and I'll throw in the

the physiocrats in Montescu where uh,

Montescu is one of the earlier figures

in the French enlightenment and he made

the encyclopedia

um, which was the attempt to categorize

all of human knowledge like an 18th

century version of Wikipedia. So they

had entries on everything and the

encyclopedia was colored by these

rationalist sort of um, sort of like

secular notions. Although interestingly,

Montescu actually did believe in sorcery

in his private life. If you there's a

great book called the the myth of

disenchantment

and it goes through all of the figures

who argued for a secular disenchanted

world and in almost every case you look

at their private life and they were like

both Marx and Sigman Freud were obsessed

with the spiritual and they did actually

believe in spiritual forces. is just in

their writings they wrote about um

highly secular ideas but Montescu

created this sort of corpus of secular

knowledge distinct from the uh from the

Catholic core worldview and thinkers

like Montescu alternated between being

supported by the French ruling class and

being persecuted by them where France

had a highly uneven policy in this

regards where France in the 18th mid

18th century would still disembowel

people for breaking the law or have

heresy laws, but they would also enable

these enlightenment thinkers. Um, and

Montescu was a huge impact on the

American Revolution because he talked a

lot about the balance of powers where

you need to decentralize powers where he

was one of the most popular authors for

the American Revolution and the

physiocrats were the first economists

because in the medieval and ancient

world you had general concepts of things

like free markets. you would but it was

framed as justice. The king must be just

and not take from his subjects and

maintain rule of law because when he

follows justice it is the will of God

that the nation grows rich. What the

physiocrats did in the 18th century was

say when you establish free market

principles um and uh these various

incentives for growth is that you will

produce radical economic growth. So

they're the first real economists and

there's called the parable of the bee

and that was from England where it's at

this beehive that um everyone's working

together producing the beehive and it

was scandalous because it's not the

noblemen on top sort of directing it.

It's this emergent cooperation and in

France you saw a wide Overton window

across the entire right-left spectrum

between hardcore reactionaries where you

had figures like um you would you had um

Deestraa who was a Savoyard I think he

was ethnically Italian where he used the

Enlightenment to sort of make an Avola

argument of um irrationality is good,

religion is good, mankind's innately

predatory and that's good. But he was

pulling more so from like an oriental

mystic argument, not a normal Catholic

argument. On the other spectrum was the

Marque Assad who was an utter leftist. I

don't want to say he's leftist. He was a

satanic degenerate who would like lock

women in his basement as a nobleman and

then rape and torture them and do weird

sex stuff. Um, please do not look his

life up. You don't want to this. And

there's a there's a book I read about

analyzing the marquee dads philosophy

through the lens of modern feminism. And

it was kind of horrifying because both

of them had these ideas of sort of using

sexual promiscuity to strip you of your

innate sexual polarity and your sort of

humanity. Where the Marquy Assad thought

sex was this underlying force which

stripped us down of our external human

trappings towards our core which in real

reality is just using philosophy to go

to hell. Like I think he probably agree

to that too. He would say stuff like

that. And in between this Overton

window, you have the you have the most

Frenchmen were still monarchists. You

had classical liberals like what you'd

see in America. Dtoqueville or Lafayette

were great examples. Um the French

nobility wanted France to become an

aristocratic republic like Britain. Uh,

and then you have the Voltaire sort of

Reddit atheists and you have the radical

left who developed all of their ideas

they use now at the time of the French

Revolution with St. Simone who I've

spoken about beforehand. I believe being

the founder of the modern leftist

technocratic religion where he wanted to

make a religion of worshiping the

science and the experts, destroying the

barrier between the men and women, using

migration from the third world to cause

a a revolution in the first world. Um,

so stuff that sounds like trans and so

the entire political spectrum as it

exists today

>> fully formed in 18th century

enlightenment France.

>> Yeah, exactly. that relates to people

pointing out more more modern trends or

or thinking this was a result of uh

people partying in the '60s or something

at that large concert that starts with a

W. Uh but it turns out that these trends

are much older and the logic for trans

is based in the um complete separation

from uh

the point about social everything being

about social conditioning in the French

Revolution. Um,

>> if you please.

>> Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I was just going

to say like

>> actually finish your thought because I

think this is more of a tangent.

>> What I was going to say is that if you

look at Thomas Soul's open and closed

view of human nature that the um the

open view is that humans are perfectable

and the closed view is that humans are

fallible and they need social

institutions to regulate them. You see

both of them in 18th century Britain

where Goodwin um or Godwin he was

arguing for the social engineering

leftist view of human nature and Adam

Smith who was as much a behavioral

psychologist as an economist. He was

part of the Scottish enlightenment where

everyone remembers the wealth of nations

which was sort of the bible of less

afair economics. Very few people

remember his book on moral sentiments of

humans where he talked the underlying

trappings of human nature with the

underlying assumption that people are

self-interested and the French in the

American revolutions were within a

generation of each other but the

American revolution had this fallible

view of human nature and the French had

the open perfectable view and even

Thomas Jefferson in America agreed with

the French view but the toqueville and

Lafayette agreed with the American Anglo

view because these were different

widescale trajectories in Europe at the

time. And in the Anglosphere, due to the

rule by the nobility and the merchant

classes, a more realistic view of the

human race developed. And in the

French-speaking world, due to the rule

by the bureaucracy, a more delusional

view emerged. And look at the French

Enlightenment's two core figures. You

have Voltaare and Rouso. Voltater was

from um I think a relatively poor family

in central France. one of the local

nobility um an older woman who

appreciated him. Uh I don't I don't know

if if I mean he was a child. they don't

it wasn't a sexual context but um she

funded his education and so he rose up

and he became quite popular in the

French elite circuit around Paris where

the French enlightenment much like the

rest of the French nation was based out

of Paris and it rippled outwards where

France was the dominant culture of the

time where nobilities in Russia,

Germany, Romania, Muldova spoke French

or they spoke their native languages.

They had French chefs. They followed

French fashion. So this central area in

Paris rippled outwards. So when Voltater

had issued the French authorities, he

lived with the king of Prussia,

Frederick II, who respected French

philosophy. I think Voltater might have

made it to Sweden too, but I could be

confusing him for Daycart. Um and so

Voltater became quite popular in this

and his big thing was railing against

the abuses of the Catholic Church and

social controls where he was um he would

argue for rationality against the

entrenched power of religion. He was

violently for free speech. He volta is

like the psychologically healthy

archetype of a liberal. He believed in

the free market. He believed in social

classes. He was cynical towards

religion. But he did go out of his way

to help Christians who were oppressed by

the regime as well. And it was it was

said by a Christian authority that

although Voltater calls himself an

atheist, I'm sure he'd get into heaven

because he's carried out the Christian

morality in his actions. Um, and

Voltater is a complex figure. He was

part of that French society. So, he'd

have various love affairs with women who

were supporting him. Uh he lived in a

castle with a female patron for a while

till they had a falling out. He went out

to Prussia with the Frederick II until

they had a falling out. He was a highly

disagreeable figure and the French sort

of social authorities I believe turned

their position on supporting him but um

several different times but he was a

sort of rock star and he was a

rationalist and um

the good things Voltater did were things

we've forgotten about and the bad things

were things that um evolved in sort of

Reddit rationality. his main rival,

Rouso, was a Swiss guy from Geneva. And

we talked about his arguments already.

He believed in the noble savage. Um, he

thought that we should have a ruling

sort of totalitarian class that embodies

the will of the people. And he developed

a concept called the social contract,

which is the ruling class in the

population make a deal on the rule and

the ruled. And this powered a lot of

modern political philosophy. Um and

Rouso was actually profoundly

he's been he's become the sort of um

prophet of modern lib worldview and he

was more popular than Voltater by the

end of the 18th century. He was a very

popular figure at the time. Uh he was

Napoleon's favorite philosopher. Um and

he um he was relentlessly sexist. Uh in

his book Emil talked about how like

women shouldn't be taught how to read.

it was their place to just be

submissive. Um he also was quite

spiritual although he wouldn't allow

himself in the confines of traditional

religion. Um and keep in mind that the

first generation of leftists in France

were hearkening back to Sparta and the

socialist societies of Greco Roman

civilization. They weren't trying to go

into the future and they were part of

this like primitivist culture that

eventually won in the French Revolution

with the goddess of reason that they put

up in um in central Paris with like the

least reasonable society ever. Um, but

it's interesting where Rouso and

Voltater they had like a beef where

Voltater would make poems and sorry, he

would make poet he'd make like press

statements and he'd make plays mocking

Russo and Voltater unanimous unanimously

won where uh Russo I think partly for

censorship reasons he fled to to to

first Geneva his hometown and then he

fled to Britain where Humes took care of

him as a close friend. But Rouso was not

a functioning person. He let most

multiple of his children starve. I

believe he liked spanked by his mom. Um

he would had terrible romantic

relationships. He was permanently broke.

Um and even his close friend Hume in

Britain who is the only philosopher who

cared for him. Hume had to kick him out

even though he was considered one of the

most kind and open men of the time

because V Rouso was convinced that Hume

was in a conspiracy to destroy him. And

so the the modern left bases all of

their philosophy on this completely

dysfunctional loser. Well, Humes was the

ultimate humanity guy and it seems that

Rouso had already lost the value for

human life at that point, which

parallels into some other things we were

talking about. And that tangent I was

going to go on earlier cuz isn't there

this the part of the conception is that

a unique value for life and individual

freedom emerged out of Christianity and

could you say Christianity actually got

stronger for the beginning of the

enlightenment in a lot of senses maybe

not in France

>> um before going down this uh the path

which was a reversal of those values

>> that's a very good question one of the

points Chris Dawson makes that's good is

that humanism is dependent on on

Christianity not even most other

religions

>> because Christianity says that mankind

exists in the image of God. So to

desecrate mankind is sort of desecrate

an imitation of God. It says everyone

has a soul. And once you remove the

religious Christian framework, you

develop from humanism that enobles the

human character through art or

philosophy or culture or development to

the horrifying dehumanization of

totalitarian regimes like um the Nazis

or the Soviets or the woke or the French

Revolution. And that's a direct

trajectory where as you get rid of

religion, you get the s get rid of the

sacredness inside humanity which allows

horrifying atrocities. As Voltater said,

once you can convince men to believe

absurdities, you can convince them to

commit atrocities. I I have a t-shirt of

that somewhere.

>> Nice.

>> Yeah. People don't understand how brutal

the world is. And Christian missionaries

would talk about this when they go to

India or something. They'd have a very

basic treatment that could save a kid

and the parents would be completely

nonresponsive. Like they already checked

out, they already uh assigned themselves

to this fate and they wouldn't they

wouldn't do anything to change it even

if it was very very minor cooperation in

a way that really befuddled the people

like don't you care about your kid? Like

no, not everybody cares about their kids

that much or or life being sacred. And

then you see that with the loss of

Christian values where life gets less

sacred. You can do tyranny. You know,

the the uh mass abortion thing ties into

this.

>> Yeah.

>> Um

>> and the there's something tricky because

also the enlightenment gets a lot of

criticism from the right from a

humanitarian perspective because you can

kind of invert that humanitarian access

to care about the third world or the

climate more than you actually care

about your family. And often times

people don't care any about anything at

all. But that's a just a front for

domination at this point because the

values have been so eroded. But it's a

it's a lingering uh habit. And the

tricky part about this is once you start

caring about humanity and viewing life

as sacred, then you can be easily

overwhelmed by the suffering of the

world and extend your boundaries too

far. So some people see that and they

criticize the idea of humanity in

general when it's actually important to

both value life and bound yourself

within a proper uh framework of

prioritization like local out.

>> An issue with both the enlightenment and

the current woke ideology is it's made

largely by wealthy urban people who

don't understand

how precarious most other people's lives

are. Um, and

>> so they remove these social institutions

that support the rest of the society and

then they're shocked by the consequences

like the French Revolution or the coming

Californian chaos. Um, and

so um, pull back. Um, the the core value

of the Enlightenment was the pursuit of

happiness. That was the big theme they

would talk about. And they wanted to use

reason to understand happiness. And in

the start of the Enlightenment, reason

meant common sense. And then over time

it devolved into this hyper

rationalistic redditor logic removed

from reality. Um

so I'm probably forgetting something of

the French Enlightenment but uh I'll see

if I remember it later. Um, with the

British Enlightenment, you see it as a

descendant of the British empirical

tradition, which stemmed uh back to

Francis Bacon in the 16th century who

developed empiricism

and um

and uh with uh Isaac Newton who

developed the laws of motion and people

at the time were obsessed with Newton.

These scientists and philosophers were

seen as heroes of the society where

Newton was frequently compared to a god

in 17th century England. And he had an

enormous state funeral when he died

because he invented the laws of motion

which radically shifted philosophy

because it switched over to a sort of

spiritual worldview to one built around

mathematical equations. And um an

important thing with the enlightenment

is it's one of the historic events ever

which is least informed by religion.

you. It's not something where you can

say like hermeticism or Pltonism or sort

of like esoteric Christian philosophy

influenced it where it's an attempt to

sort of take Isaac Newton's vision-

which is not how he actually perceived

it. He was more schizo into uh like the

Newton's laws of motion for human nature

but that leaves out a lot of context.

And in Britain it was reasonability and

empiricism where you have a distinct

English and a Scottish enlightenment

where um if you want to look at the

Scottish enlightenment which in some

ways shown even brighter Scotland was

coming out of a period of domination by

um the Presbyterian church that was

equivalent to the Taliban's Afghanistan.

They were hyper religious where every

single element of someone's life was

dictated by um was dictated by uh what

they um

their entire life was dictated by a

highly structured religion where every

village had a different group of

Presbyterian elders that enforced the

religion. And Scotland had a rough 17th

century where the English conquered them

multiple times and they were ultimately

integrated into uh the rest of Britain

at the start of the 18th century due to

the bankrupting of the Scottish nobility

with a failed colony in Panama. And so

Scotland's integration with England was

a huge benefit because they they could

finally integrate into the English's

colonial empire and larger economy and

they built up an enormous amount of

social trust from their theocratic era.

So the Scottish enlightenment based out

of Edinburgh was just incredible and

Glasgow became one of the wealthiest

cities in Britain due to trade with uh

with the colonies. And Adam Smith is one

of the most famous figures of the

Scottish Enlightenment. Uh and he w was

the big developer of less afair

economics

um which became the dominant economic

system of the Anglo-Saxon world for at

least the next century. And

>> you could even say he was actually more

of a collage guy than an inventor

because he he basically collected a lot

of the different points around the time

more than he even was the the progenitor

of them. And he gets remembered because

he organized all the thought.

>> Yes. Um he did because you had these

sort of mental constructs that went back

further and he developed as I said

before his theories of economics from

his deep understanding of human nature.

Um the other important figure of the

Scottish Enlightenment was David Hume.

And um Hume is a good philosopher who

argued a sort of silly point. And Hume

is was widely beloved as a man at the

time. And his sort of argument is that

you can't draw sort of logical

inferences without checking them. And

this evolves into schizophrenia where

he'll say like you can see something but

you don't know if your own perceptual

frame of the environment is what you're

seeing or if that's like I don't know um

like something

>> cognitive bias. He's stuck in the

daycart model or the postmodernist

bottle model where you use logical

structures to avoid dealing with

reality. And so he sort of splits up the

world or you can't logically prove

something you can't know it which and he

did a very good job at explaining this.

But the problem is that's not actually

how life works. You can use this as a

logical exercise. You can't use it as a

worldview. So it allows this radical

segmenting of life. So you can't draw

obvious logical connections because

there's a Hume autist who says but like

you're making an assumption and it's one

of those things where the enlightenment

worldview due to neurological biases

it's very easy for it to sort of make

long logical long logical connections

without explaining them but having a

sort of intuitive worldview that these

are the generally the things that make

people happy. These are generally the

life cycles people live through. That's

not allowed. Where one of the points

Mary said is that after lock uh in the

first generation of the English

enlightenment, a lot of the

enlightenment is begging to be autistic

because

people use the term autistic as an

intellectual positive. Um and I don't

think that's true in most cases. It's

true in some because in a lot of cases

doing sort of autistic highly

rationalistic analysis will get the

incorrect answer because getting the

actual correct answer requires sort of

making calculated bets and an

understanding of human nature and um

just sort of common sense where if

you're just cherrypicking which rational

variables you look at you're not going

to get the correct answer because you

need a holistic analysis of the entire

situation. And so the f the American

revolution had these generalized

principles about human nature which they

pulled from um the Greco Roman classical

heritage rather than the modern

enlightenment because once you get into

this highly rationalistic worldview um

you lose all of these contextual clues

which will actually give you the correct

answer. And something I'll say now so I

don't forget to say it is the

Enlightenment was out of step with most

of Europe's culture at the time where

most of Western Europe was still very

religious. It was stuck in the old

society. The Enlightenment could

occurred at the same time as these

religious revivals which you can see

with Methodism um starting in Wales or

the second great awakening spread across

America and Britain. You can see it with

the the pyotist revival or figures like

Mozart who created in and Beethoven who

made Christian art in Germany. So when

we're looking at the Renaissance, we're

really seeing small educated secular

elites who lived in their own

algorithmic bubble where when Kant

pushed back against the atheism of the

enlightenment in late 18th century

Germany, he was pushing up against an

intellectual establishment which was

totally set on agnosticism or atheism

while the societies they lived in were

overwhelmingly still Christian. Um, and

so there's this disjoint. And so by the

end of the 18th century you see the

enlightenment's philosophy itself

returning back to be more religious

while at the same time the populations

finally started to get this seepage from

the atheism which led to the French

revolution in its transuropean

consequences

>> right it was like oh no we were just

starting to get the integration and now

you followed us the the wrong way.

>> Yeah. Um and it's funny that like if if

you say we we can only know anything

based on logical inferences uh based on

empirical proofs then pretty soon you

realize you have two options which is to

be say ah crap I guess I don't know

anything or to start stretching the

empiricism into loose correlations that

you use to build an illusion of logical

certainty.

>> Exactly. It's an the thing that won out

in the enlightenment was the aesthetic,

not the actual scientific method. Um, a

lot of these ideas are designed to not

be sort of um to not be uh falsifiable.

Um, and the English enlightenment,

uh, it's surprising that it was smaller

than both the Scottish and the French

because England was a nation that was

doing very well. The British Empire was

growing and

early 18th century Europe was a very

wealthy period. It was called the

Augustine Age because England was very

prosperous. Um the average Englishman

and Dutchmen had returns to qualities of

life comparable to the period right

after the Black Death due to the

innovations in agriculture and um in

quality of living and

>> the harbingers of the industrial

revolution. So England did very well but

it its two core thinkers were um John

Lockach and um and uh Ben Johnson

where uh you also had other figures like

Edward Gibbon where um John Lockach was

early 18th century and he was developing

a philosophic system to deal with

England's new less afair tolerance

system where the agreement among English

English elite was the Anglicans would

maintain social authority where if you

were in parliament or in universities or

a nobleman, you had to at least front up

as Anglican, they tolerated sort of like

private religious differences, but you

had to sort of maintain the social

facade. So the king of England was

actually a Catholic in the late 17th

century, but he maintained the

Protestant facade, which created a lot

of distrust, but the system fell apart

when he baptized his son as Catholic. Um

and so Loach developed ideas of

tolerance and uh sort of the the he was

less less afair economically than we

think. Although he did believe in an

open system for example he believed in

the Marxist uh theory of labor value

a century before Marx but he believed in

the same theory and lock created a lot

of the concepts for the American

revolution which was a descendant of of

Lach's worldview between tolerance for

different religions because England had

lots of comparable sects of

Protestantism uh social openness freedom

of speech where lock sort of argued for

freedom

um as a simplified version of his

worldview although he had more complex

ideas on a variety of topics which

stemmed ultimately from his locked with

an assumption of not knowing. He said we

can't actually know the spiritual nature

of reality or metaphysics. So it's best

to allow toleration for the best ideas

to win out.

>> Right? And how does that relate to his

conception of uh rational self-interest?

Um his idea is that because governments

and elites operate at deficiencies, if

you allow people to operate out of

rational self-interests in the free

marketplace of ideas or economically,

you'll get the best result, which

doesn't require top- down authority.

>> Okay. I thought maybe it related to

conceptions about cuz I feel like he

gets criticized a lot for being a

rationalist figure, but I also know he

was

>> more of a religious figure.

>> Yeah, it it's funny that the modernist

paradigm will pick all of these early

modern figures who we say are sort of

like developers of the modernist

agnostic worldview. And if you actually

look at them, that was never the case.

Uh Isaac Newton was obsessed with the

hermetica. same thing as Galileo and

Bruno. Um the lock was religious. Um a

lot of the enlightenment thinkers

believed in magic. And so we've we've

built these sort of like facades of a

lot of these thinkers without actually

understanding who they were in their

context because we need to cherrypick on

the road of progress a line that leads

to us.

>> Right. And I guess just to break down

that concept of rational interrupt.

Yeah. Go ahead. Lach said that the one

thing states could not tolerate were

atheists. Um,

>> oh, that's funny. Very different from

the perception that we're talking about

here.

>> And he said that you could not have

atheists in a society because you must

have belief in God in order to have a

stable society. And Voltater even said

that the majority population has to be

Christian because otherwise the poor

will rise up and take the rich's

property. He said

>> this is literally the opposite of the

rationalistic fallacy.

>> Exactly. where Voltaare said, "I don't

actually believe in God, but I don't

want my servant to murder me, so you

should."

>> He said, "Right."

>> Yeah.

>> Right.

>> Yeah. From a purely like practical,

which is that liberal archetype that we

spoke about that kind of barely exists

today where they they maintain that

frame that religion is important without

being able to fully dive into it. That

maybe that fits the French guys more

than luck. Um, and they're like a

dwindling breed because at some point

it's like you have to make a decision.

Um, and then the way that the

rationality works according

I don't know the way that locks

conception gets translated into modern

economics is is an argument that leaves

less a fear people very open for

criticism because there's an assertain

assertion that people are rational. So

if you let them operate according to

their self-interest and everything will

work out great and then people make

obviously idiosyncratic irrational

decisions and that gets pointed to as a

market failure when in reality it's um

the nature is the the universe is

probabilistic. So the only rational

thing is a dispersed idiocentric

behavior because you can't have a a

perfect answer. So people don't even

operate rationally in a free market and

that's actually good because you need a

distribution

>> which leads to the um American

Revolution which we'll talk about as a

manifestation of the British

Enlightenment. But um for the to finish

off the English enlightenment you have

uh

you have Edward Gibbon who helped found

the field of history which was

ultimately sort of calcified in 19th

century Germany. But Edward Gibbon made

his seven volume history of the decline

and fall of the Roman Empire where um

that uh it was a bestseller and it was

written at the same year the American

Revolution started and his argument was

that Christianity killed the Roman

Empire which I largely don't agree with.

I think Rome was dying for centuries

beforehand, but it was really popular

because it was the first history that

offered an anti-Christian narrative of

the world,

>> right?

>> And it he went around the Mediterranean.

He he developed all this stuff himself.

He read the primary sources in Latin and

Roman. And it's really a remarkable

history for being written in the 18th

century because he did a titanic amount

of work for it,

>> right, without the internet.

>> And it's beautifully written. I mean,

it's it's better written than almost

anything today, but I struggle to read

it myself because I don't have the

attention span. Um, it's I can read Will

Durant. That's sort of the edge of what

I can mentally do. But if this was a

bestseller in the 18th century and I

can't really read it, that shows how

much the intellectual level is degraded

in the centuries since. I read 400 pages

in and then gave up. Um, and it speaks

to the formation of this secular

worldview where they pulled back to the

Greeks and the Romans and wanted to sort

of get more of that classical heritage

rather than dependency on the Christian

heritage where in a lot of ways it's

comparable to the Renaissance. But they

failed to understand that rationality

was just one aspect of classical

civilization that was dependent on their

own religious tradition we've forgotten

about.

>> Wow. So the same mistake that we made,

modernists made with lock and separating

from religion, atheists made with the

Romans and Greeks by separating them

from their religion.

>> Great point. And the reason for that is

that when we see rationality, we see it

as a distinct sort of thing. Well, in

reality, it's an organic evolution of a

cultural worldview which is strong

enough to sustain rationality, if that

makes sense.

>> Yes. Right. or base it in something

other than like animal

>> instincts.

>> Another thing is that rationalist

rational societies are almost always

aristocratic because the ideal of

rationality is that you have lots of

free time and space to cultivate these

thoughts. Um and um so in Greor Roman

classical civilization it was highly

aristocratic. The enlightenment was

aristocratic until that lost out to

romanticism which was more popular. Oh,

well this relates to the rejection of

rationality because there is a a correct

point that okay not everything operates

completely rational. It's not just like

you have the conversation and the best

ideas emerge to their the top. There's

these other factors like elite interests

and um other conditions that get in the

way of kind of a a pure rational uh

outcome. So then people kind of

overcorrect from that and abandon

dialogue. But just because you can't

have perfect rationality without being

bound within a religious tradition, it

doesn't mean that uh dialogue is

useless. Just because it doesn't do

everything doesn't mean it's not

useless. There's a reason we have an

information war.

>> We've degenerated so much since the

Enlightenment. Like if you read the

Federalist papers

or primary sources from then, they were

so much smarter than us. In the French

Revolution, there was a huge popular

trend of people wearing the frigian cap,

>> would dress in toas. They

>> Right. Right.

>> And it was said that for the French

parliamentary people in their

revolution, they knew more about the

history of Greece and Rome than France

itself. And if they can have popular

cultural trends about frigians who are

an Anatolian people at the same time as

Greece, they were very literate. They

would see us as an idiocracy if they

went to us today where we can't even

understand the concepts they were trying

to broach, let alone integrate them.

It's just it's horrible. And

>> it's like you say, we don't do a lot of

history before the 1960s even. So, how

would we

>> figure that out? Welcome to the Age of

the Last Men. Uh, enjoy your ride. It'll

end soon. But, um,

so Finnish English Enlightenment, Ben

Johnson was a huge figure, um, where he

wrote the first English encyclopedia. He

was also a best-selling author and he

was known for being a snarky libertine

socialite figure. He was like a rock

star too at this era. Um, and I read a

lot of 19th century English sources, and

the way they treat Ben Johnson is um,

the way we would treat like the Beatles,

early boomers would treat the Beatles.

It's just so self-evident that he's an

incredibly important figure, and he was

a Renaissance man who dabbled in a

variety of topics. Um, the American

Enlightenment pulled on the English

Enlightenment. But it's also interesting

that the American Revolution and the

French Revolutions are sort of holistic

snapshots of what elites at that time

were thinking because you can see it

manifest in their policies. So the

figures of the American Revolution were

pulling as much from the classical

heritage as they were from current

enlightenment thinkers. The only

enlightenment thinkers they were super

influenced by were Montescu and Loach.

Um, and they they buil built their

political analysis of Aristotle and

Palibius. Um, and it when you wonder why

there was such a huge social shift from

the 19th to the 20th centuries, it's

because you went from an elite who read

the Bible and the classics to build

their world to one that didn't. And that

was a huge gulf. And it was related to

the rise of um, mass democracy. But with

the American Revolution, you saw a

series of distinct sub elites who

combined the aristocratic refinement

with the ruggedness of the frontier. And

Ben Franklin, who we I heard so much of

growing up in Philly, who was a

Renaissance man who ran um he was a

philosopher. He ran a variety of

successful businesses, including a press

company. He was a socialite, an

investor. He was one of the great

leaders of Pennsylvania. Um, you had uh

John Adams who was from Boston and he

was a lawyer and a philosopher. You had

the ver the great Virginiaians like

Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or

James Madison who in their slave

plantations would cultivate like the

Greco Roman elites and build these

highly complex philosophies. And you can

look at the founding fathers as a

microcosm of the profound intellectual

diversity of this era between John Adams

and um Alexander Hamilton who wanted

strong elite controls to Thomas

Jefferson who wanted radical

decentralization in support of the

French Revolution. Ben Franklin who was

more of a realist b like Pennsylvania

balancing the north and the mid New

England and the south. And so when you

look at the American Revolution, this is

one of the best manifestations of the

Enlightenment and it's why America did

so well because unlike the French

Revolution, it integrated the ancient

and modern ideas into a new hole where

they could balance the enlightenment's

intellectual creativity

without getting going crazy,

>> right? Or soft. And I loved I think it

was it Ben Franklin who would go to

Paris and wear a [ __ ] skin cap, right?

Which and just kind of u you know you

could you could you could imagine him

knowing that the effect this would have

on the French and getting their

admiration as like a noble savage slash

uber mench who was combining all these

things. um when when if he went to

Pennsylvania, people aren't going to

think of him as a frontiersman in the

way that the French would if he put on

the hat.

>> Exactly.

>> So that's like Ben Franklin's classic

character, knowing how to play off of

those archetypes. And it also makes the

American Revolution just look the

coolest kids in school because we're

actually doing it on the ground in a

real way. And this contributes to this

this like this um the with the Thomas

Jefferson and Hamilton thing both like

libertarian anarchists and not

necessarily monarchists but hobbsian

figures they criticize the constitution

and they bond through their criticism of

the constitution but they're doing it

for entirely different reason one side

agrees with Hamilton the other side

prefers like the articles of

confederation so these guys are agreeing

on their disdain for the Constitution,

but each of them would prefer the

Constitution rather than

>> Yeah.

>> uh their opposing views even though

they're uniting on this. I'm not sure

that contradiction has been like totally

thought out by people.

>> This era was the most intellectually

advanced ever in Western history. Um,

and I I will stand by that and it's kind

of obvious if you like read the

Federalist papers because cross

analyzing all of these hyper complex

theories. And the thing I find really

admirable is the ability to look at an

equation, see the negatives and the

positives and then still make the mature

decision knowing taking responsibility

for all of the negatives. So the

founders made the decision to create a

republic and they knew all of the

negatives this would create from pulling

from the Greco Roman parallels like

socialism or equality and envy and yet

they did it anyway and they establish

these balances of authority so that it

wouldn't be as bad as possible. Um, and

when you look at this era of history,

you're seeing very intellectually

mature, intelligent people. And even

over the course of the 19th century,

that degraded due to the rise of mass

mass democracy and mass society. Um,

because you had these small cultivated

pockets and then over time that got

watered down through the spread of the

general population where the peak of

technological innovation was around 1870

by all the metrics we use. The peak of

cultural refinement was like I'd say the

American to French revolution where even

like two generations after bullfinch's

mythology written in the 1840s was a

book for neuvo ree Americans that

studied the classics and the author will

just say oh people casually make

references to pphanany or prometheus in

their daily conversation and I thought

my I have a lot of smart friends we

don't make casual references to like

cadmiss or prometheus where he'll just

say oh we all know these stories so I

won't say them. Or they would just leave

passages in Greek or French or Roman

because they assumed educated people

must know those languages.

>> Right. Well, like we said, it it it was

their memelex, right? And so smart can

correlate to less is more. If you're if

you're building a limited but quality

data set, that model is going to produce

often a better outcome than something

that opens the floodgates. At the same

time, we can't just artificially limit

ourselves to the classics and just the

Bible and tell kids, don't read

anything. Um because there's lots of

interesting new thinkers and and

statistical concepts and philosophical

uh translations that need to be done to

make them understandable through the

lens that we're at. But it does show you

the value of like limiting your meme

plex.

>> Yeah.

um

with

so you have the American Revolution um

and what you're seeing is a process sort

of natural biological decay um and

that happens to every society and so the

enlightenment was the peak of that

intellectual ability and then it

degraded over time. Um, and

to jump to the final enlightenment, you

have the German enlightenment, which

>> started out as a manifestation of the

French enlightenment that went east and

then because the the Germany's

aristocracy was French and then uh the

general population was um was uh German

culturally, so there was this

pre-established disconnect in this

resentment And so the interests of these

middle-class Germans who were

nationalist, religious, craving of unity

started to manifest in the German

enlightenment which they saw as an

opposition to French culture. And this

only really kicked in with the

Napoleonic wars. The German

enlightenment was the transition to

romanticism where um you had earlier

figures like Linets, but he was a 17th

century figure. Uh but Kant is the huge

figure of the German Enlightenment

because he was pushing back against the

French um he was pushing back against

the French rationalist tradition

um which

was highly atheist and sort of socially

corrosive which the Germans didn't like

and Kant developed sort of brilliant

concept that I don't think we've really

squared but is the argument goes that

when you look at the archetypal

principles of consciousness that ancient

authors pull from, the way our neurology

is wired means that these things do

exist on some level. Like chaos and

order, where our minds do process chaos

and order as real things. And because

our minds are reflections of the outside

world, that means they did exist in the

outside world to impact themselves in

our neurological structure. Um, and

that's very similar to a Jordan Peterson

maps of meaning argument. Um, and

what Kant did is that he caused a revolt

against the French Enlightenment, which

ultimately led to romanticism. But in

the process of rationalizing religion,

he killed a lot of its creative essence

where there's um Georgiani talks about

how Kant went through a youth obsession

with mysticism which nearly destroyed

his career and then he went hard against

mysticism as he was studying

Swedenborg's ideas. Um and so he was

trying to sort of write the spiritual

concepts he had of like these absolute

platonic truths in philosophy which is

why Kant talks of these immortal sort of

ideas and you have to accept the

immortal ideas into yourself like why

it's never okay to lie in his worldview

because he was trying to sort of aist

the Platonic forms

>> to um into sort of material reality. So

he's widely considered the most

important philosopher of the

enlightenment by philosophy circles in

con like he was a widely popular figure

when the Russians occupied Prussia in

the seven years war the Russians still

treated him with grace and he was known

for like hitting on the various Russian

noblemen at the party noble women at the

parties that were coming to because

Russia's elite was highly Germanized at

this point so they were fairly sort of

humane to the conquered Germans and Kant

had a lot of weird habits like you take

the came two walks every single day at

the same time. His neighbors would watch

when he took his walks, his walks to

sort of set their clocks because he was

super exact. People say that to mean he

was like hyper rigid, but it was

actually for long-standing health

reasons he developed over the course of

his life. um where he he thought that if

he controlled his life perfectly, he

could deal with his longstanding health

declines

>> that probably contributed to his health

issues big time. Um and so Kant was the

culmination of the enlightenment where

he was the rejection of the order that

resulted in the French Revolution. But

he also created the German romantic

tradition where you start bleeding from

one to the other in Germany where you

look at figures like Ga or um Schilling

or um you or Herder or this entire

generation of early 19th century German

philosophers who made the romantic

world. I forgot Marx Hegel they were

taking the enlightenment's logic but

they took Kant's idea of these

archetypal phenomena and so the German

enlightenment was like the least

significant in the 18th century but it

created these seeds after or through the

Napoleonic wars for the greatest

philosophic innovation in European

history with the integration of French

enlightenment rate French enlightenment

rationality with these German archetypes

which funnily enough later in the 19th

century a lot of this philosophy was

influenced by India where they were

pulling the French rationality through

the Indian concept of archetypes with

thinkers like Schopenhau or uh Nisha or

Hegel or all of those things and I

believe I could could get this wrong but

the German elite sorry the German

enlightenment was the storm unn knocked

or the storm and night because they

didn't like how clean and rational the

French enlightenment was. So they wanted

to make it more dark and mystical.

>> So basically everything they were

significant because every very gothic

but everything that was under the French

enlightenment

>> sphere versus the English enlightenment

sphere. The French enlightenment sphere

basically eventually converted into

German enlightenment because the Germans

were the ones who earlier were earlier

on with having to deal with not liking

the French enlightenment and having to

modify it within its own paradigm

>> because their elite adopted it.

>> I don't like this framework because for

a variety of reasons but the French

enlightenment led to socialism and the

French Revolution pretty directly. The

British Enlightenment led to the

Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition and the

German enlightenment sort of crashed out

into Nazism where Nazism is the failed

crash out sort of stupid version of

German Germany's trajectory.

>> Mhm.

>> Germany had so much higher philosophy

that better things than the Nazis could

have come from it. It's just the

timeline we're in. And with the rise of

the Napoleonic wars and the French

Revolution created by that you saw the

development of um

you saw the development of romantic

philosophy which was a rejection of the

enlightenment but also dependent upon it

because you look at the French

Revolution it's this clear disjoint

between

philosophers and political ideologues

saying they're rational carrying out the

most insanely irrational things ever.

And people noticed that where they're

like, wait, these animal human these

animal passions actually control human

nature, which you can see in the

horrifying violence of the French

Revolution. And the enlightenment also

created a real disconnect with our lived

human experience.

um where Toltoy as a example of the sort

of romantic tradition of the 19th

century rejecting the enlightenment. The

core philosophic theme of war and peace

is

you see these enormous battles between

the Russian commanders and Napoleon like

Boredino and Toltoy who I do I I really

do not like. Toltoy, one of my least

favorite philosophers. um he was a

narcissist and he let his family

business fail and his marriage was a

failure and he just said we should

become like hippies. Uh he lived in a

surf society claiming completely

detached sort of lib communism which

takes a degree of denial that's quite

powerful. Um but he he said that these

leaders don't actually control their

armies. things just to sort of happen

and the enlightenment sort of focus in

the rational mind created this huge

backdrop of wait the rational mind like

10% of human nature there's this huge

unconscious chasm that's been opened by

the French revolution and you can in

Britain you can see that with

philosophers like Cridge or Lord Byron

um in France Chateau Bion uh Rouso and

the tipping point was the French

Revolution and the Napoleonic wars and

partly the rise of the industrial

revolution created this enormous disgust

with um with the sort of dehumanized

growth of these sciences and

technologies. So the 19th century did a

really smart thing of balancing the

exponential growth of their technology

and science and bureaucracies

with romantic subjectivism. And in the

20th century, that didn't happen, which

is why the 20th century spiraled off the

rails,

>> right, towards romantic subjectivism.

And you mentioned the Nazis. I'm glad

you brought it up because I don't like

to bring it up every time with every

example cuz it's so beat on, but I just

wanted to make the basic point that the

Germans were leading the French

culturally around World War II and and

kind of output and their political

philosophy because there was a growing

national kind of socialist movement in

France that ended up becoming the Vichi

um government. So it kind of parallels

this transition from French

enlightenment to German enlightenment

that you were speaking about earlier.

>> Um that's correct. Um so

>> and not that France was going in a good

direction. It's just that's where

they're Germany was leading him along

that that path.

>> Socialism leads to decay and you saw

that trajectory go in place in France

where France had a lot of elements of

socialism even in the 19th century.

Gustav Labole in the 1880s said

socialism was already throttling France

and Latin Europe. Um

>> and Germany was the first to adopt

public education, a lot of public

education healthcare spending

government welfare, a lot of stuff like

that. In the late 1800s

>> in Eastern Europe, the Enlightenment was

driven off enlightened despots like

Catherine the Great, who was ethnically

German, who owned Russia, or Prussia,

which was under the governance of um

of Frederick II, who spoke French

predominantly in his private life, who

integrated Voltaare and these ideas into

a predominantly surf-based society. Um,

Maria Teresa in Austria, another

enlightened death spot. But I left that

behind because next video is on 18th

century Lion regime Europe. Video is on

the philosophy and the inner life of

that time period. Next video is on the

political and economic and social

realities of 18th century Europe.

>> That's awesome. And that perfectly

correlates with one of my final

thoughts, which is that one kind of

flawed way out of the fact that oh, we

figured out not everybody's rational or

rationality doesn't work is we look at

oh well 10% of the population is

actually capable of abstract thought or

being rational etc. But like you said

the rationality is a very small subset

of the human condition. So even

that being slightly more rational than

the average population doesn't separate

you from the rest of the human

condition. So there is no elite rational

escape to this problem.

>> Yeah. Um I would

>> you need God too, smart guy.

>> I am definitely in the rational 10% of

the population. Um people would see that

it's arrogant. I just think it's like a

sort of like if you would if you had an

AI assess my personality, they'd put me

into it.

>> Yeah. It' be stupid not to say it. I am

still profoundly motivated by my animal

desires. I I experience all of I I

experience all of the normal human

motivations and negative flaws of the

human condition as everyone else. And

that and when you deny that you end up

with profound social arrogance which

backfires because even if you're in the

rational 10%. That's you just have a

more sharpened toolkit.

It's not that because intelligence is

the ability to re intelligence is the

skill level with which you realize your

goals. Um then

>> yeah it's just trying to figure stuff

out.

>> Character is how you relate to your

environment when you face an issue.

Character is how you react to it.

Intelligence is the skill level through

which you react. Um and I also don't

believe in valorizing intelligence or

IQ. I think the mind by itself gets

trapped in addictions to power and you

of build mythic worldviews or

conceptions of the human condition

purely around rationality because when

all said and done it's just a toolkit

the bell curve is the ultimate

representation of that like uh the the

only way in which I will emphasize the

importance of intelligence is to make

fun of mids

>> but in terms of the higher and lower

ends it doesn't really matter. Modernity

creates an overp production of mids due

to how our educational system works to

produce managerial bureaucrats. Um, most

societies in history did not have the

middle of the bell curve. You were

either like um you were either like a

religious schizo who had obsessive

esoteric knowledge or a cultured

aristocrat or you were a peasant. You

didn't have the huge middle of the bell

curve that modernity artificially

produces.

H. No, we'll we'll have to figure out

what to do with the the bell curve.

Maybe we'll figure it out next episode.

>> I'm considering making a video about the

sort of midwits on the main channel. I

haven't gotten to because it feels sort

of silly, but I'm sure it's not actually

silly. Um, next

>> I almost don't want to tell have all the

midwits figure out their midwits because

it seems like it's just too much to deal

with because they're so happy.

>> So, um, I don't care. I mean, I think

people are sort of like weak and so if

you um

they they have people have to actually

know the truth and you can't hide them

behind pleasant fictions forever. Um

because if you if you create the

pleasant fictions, they're going to it's

going to screw them over. Um so next

video is Loial Regime 18th century

Europe. The video after that's going to

be the romantic era, continental Europe.

Um so this is good. Okay,

>> that was a fun one.

>> Bye-bye.

>> Catch you later.