← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining the Enlightenment
02:13:35
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- [00:03]
A
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator what if alt hists Rudyard lynch and I dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.
- [00:16]
B
Hi, everybody. Today's topic is the Enlightenment. I am Rudyard Lynch. He is Austin Padet. How's everyone doing?
- [00:25]
C
Excellent. Time to get a enlightened. Or maybe not.
- [00:29]
B
I love being enlightened. It beats not being it. It beats being unenlightened.
- [00:34]
C
How enlightened were was the Enlightenment? I guess we'll figure it out.
- [00:39]
B
I actually don't have a good answer to that. You'll have to figure it out by the end of the video.
- [00:44]
C
So.
- [00:46]
B
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 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 of 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 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 Turchin's 250 year 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, 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.
- [03:47]
C
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.
- [03:59]
B
Yeah, I think a Spenglerian analysis of the Enlightenment is super useful for those that don't know. Oswald Spenkler was a German thinker from like a century ago who made the 2000 page 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 Jung, 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 Spengler he talks about, he got this from Nietzsche, life affirming and life denying 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 self analyzing its web to optimize it. This causes a series of factors. You see a toppling from aristocratic society to democracy 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 beings a classical civilization what Rousseau 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, 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 archetypically have in our minds as humans based on 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 the society breaks through the nihilism and develops a new synthesis. And every civilization goes through a phase of doubting its old religion. 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 worldview into a new frame. That means, that means 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 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.
- [08:05]
C
Got it. I. So then it relates to. I mean, we talk about this often in terms of the Logos and truth principle and 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 there's also. There's Christian and non Christian variations of it.
- [08:38]
B
Basically. Yeah, it's. It's a universal in society is where, 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 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, right?
- [09:15]
C
Because you can't figure everything out because it's too complex. So if you leave God and the attempt to do so, eventually you're going to be so fuddled and so far away from your destination that you become hopeless.
- [09:28]
B
And that's what killed both the Greeks and the Europeans. And in these civilizational patterns were Spengler and Amory Duriancourt as well as recently Philippe Fabry have done a good job with this is the Greeks are parallel to the Europeans, the Americans to the Romans, where for both the Greeks and the Europeans, peninsulas in opposition to large oriental empires which they later colonized, went through a dark age. 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 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 Peloponnesian 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 Achaean 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. 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 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. But it ultimately killed their own culture. Which is why 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. And if they hadn't done those things, their civilizations would have still died. Look at the Spanish or the Ottoman Turks or the Mughals 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. But in the long term it set Europe up on a track to decline for a different reason. While Europe would have declined for. For it meant Europe died rich rather than died sort of middle class.
- [12:27]
C
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.
- [12:45]
B
One of the disagreements I enter into with right wing circles is there's lots of people who sort of think modernity was a mistake. And I want them like you fucking idiot. Like the world is eight times the population we have. We can go to space. We've ended real poverty in the western world, at least until very recently. And so many other blessings. We ended horrible disease where 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, I can look at that society or the pre modern 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.
- [13:48]
C
Right? Because we know the flaws and trying to rely completely on rationality at the same time. We have a huge amount of advantages to pursue what is actual value actually valuable if we're allowed to do it. Basically because can you imagine what the founding fathers generation could have done with this level of information, connectivity and technology? They could have, they could have built a, you know, a beautiful whatever city or services or buildings are like pursuit of what people value basically enable the pursuit of humanity 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.
- [14:42]
B
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 so the optimates who were closer or the best, were closest to the Roman aristocrats. They had consistent support from the Hellenistic world, while the Populares were the Roman populist party who were more like Italian nationalist. And so 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 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. It had had so many Latin America esque civil wars for centuries that Julius Caesar was like, guys, I respect that you sort of did this, but you can't keep living off your ancestors forever. And that's a lot how Europe is today, if I'm being perfectly blunt. And they faced a lot of the same issues as Greece did, between socialism or juntas or nihilism or Roman authors would walk through Greece and say that the countryside and the cities were empty. A lot of cities in Greece opened their walls to the Romans because they were so trapped by intractable regional disputes. 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 white male society was bad because we would see that they were smarter than were more cultivated, they had a higher degree of humanity. And so.
- [17:07]
C
Yeah, even if they were, 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 memeplex 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 branches of the Enlightenment.
- [17:34]
B
Yeah, that's true.
- [17:36]
A
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- [18:23]
D
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- [20:18]
B
The basis in the 17th century, the Enlightenment was sort of the the hangover to the Thirty Years War where from the Reformation until the Thirty Years War, Europe engaged in constant religious wars between Protestants and Catholics and then we 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 one third 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 Westphalia, which people like bringing up in sort of diplomatic political circles because it was the state start of the creation of the modern European nation state where the Treaty of Westphalia 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 xiv, who was really against Protestants? The English had the Popish plot, where they were hysterical about Catholicism and the potential for a Catholic takeover of Britain. But you saw this gradual simmering down of religious tensions 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 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 17th 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. But England, the Netherlands, it was in France as well. And it's the 500 mile circle that generated most innovation since the high Middle Ages around France. 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, 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 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. 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 of 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?
- [26:04]
C
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.
- [26:22]
B
Yeah.
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C
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.
- [26:33]
B
A core issue with the Republic of Letters is it literally does not have any place for responsibility. Where one of the things I think about is that in the pre modern world, they didn't have a sort of back door in their worldview for you making a really good intellectual argument and validate something. So 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 a sort of hero of Letters, as Carlisle would call them, like he reversed it, a Ben Johnson or Rousseau or whatever. He hated Rousseau, by the way, but he would still put him in the same mental category. And 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 or at the very least aristocratic republics. But when you have this open source toolkit with no fact checking mechanism, which was the Enlightenment's big issue, is you end up with the most pleasant fictions like equality or communism or, or mankind is a God capable of constructing its own reality. Where when the Enlightenment started it was this efflorescence of creativity and openness, but because it didn't have fact checking or verifying intellectual structures, it spiraled into placating the mob over the course of a century.
- [28:57]
C
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, or quality, if that benefits you.
- [29:18]
B
When the Enlightenment started it was aristocratic networks. And so it was people who had to sort of like BE response. 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. And it's why 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 in 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 shit shows. Things barely worked. It was chaos. It was just operating off the dictator's whim. And due to that you have to realize that like singular cabals cannot actually manage the world. The reason that the Marxists took over is, is they appealed to certain social classes which could 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 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 actually a very Open intellectual Overton window where you could argue at every political position except communism. You could argue for anything, any philosophic position, as long it was not directly opposed to Christianity in the church. And so they had these rules where you can argue while you're still on our side.
- [31:22]
D
And.
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B
And a lot of the Enlightenment was taking away the rules. You can argue until you're on our side. And a lot of the Enlightenment had. 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. But 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 Voltaire at the time where he was a celebrity, he was like a rock star, like Elvis. And just his level of popularity is that the good things Voltaire said just became the water we swam in. Voltaire did for freedom of speech, freedom of religion against sort of hierarchical aristocratic authorities. And those worked and got implemented in society. And then we remember the sort of edgy things Voltaire did, like his like incredible anti Christianity at certain points of his life or his like sort of the French Enlightenment's issue, sort of Reddit rationality. That was the French rev. The French Enlightenment was very redditor energy. And so with the Enlightenment, the things that did really well and the things that worked was sort of the 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 Brittany, 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. 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 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.
- [33:43]
C
And.
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B
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.
- [34:03]
C
How does this relate to the straw man of the Enlightenment? That the religious monarchists represented the completely like backwards cultural forces and the Enlightenment was like secular progress.
- [34:22]
B
Yeah. So there have been three sort of factions in Europe since the Middle Ages or since, I'd say the. The end of the wars of religion, that being the conservatives, the liberals, and the leftists. So the conservatives, or true conservatives, are monarchists and noblemen. 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, the true conservatives we have are in most cases, sort of edgy youth who are rebelling. If you're making arguments for 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.
- [35:20]
C
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 want to bring back feudalism. They want to do all this stuff because the secular Enlightenment versus backwards religion is a much easier frame for them to compete on. Yeah. With taking out that middle option.
- [35:40]
B
One of the points de Tocqueville, who's one of my favorite authors of this era, makes is that the reason the French Revolution and the political events around it happened was this enormous district between Europe's feudal institutions and 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, 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 tax as. 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 awash in serfdom. And so most of Europe practiced serfdom that was comparably bad to black slavery. It was significantly worse than West European high medieval serfdom. And then France and Spain and Italy had these corrupt government monopolies that evolved into socialism. Most of Europe did not have religious freedom. And it's really. We Forget how much the Enlightenment accomplished where in France, a hyper educated nation, 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 had more religious elements, 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 and 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. And you could magnify that across all of Europe. And the two exceptions are the British and the Dutch, because in some cases sort of the other Nordic nations where 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 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 hyper educated, 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.
- [39:46]
C
And could you argue the Catholic Church contributed this to this dynamic? A bit of this hard dichotomy between religious monarch and secular Enlightenment where the Protestants were more easily able to incorporate the other elements.
- [40:04]
B
The Protestants adapted to the Enlightenment seamlessly because they had gone through a previous process of rationalizing their own religion through sola scriptura, 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 church authority or Christendom. Well, the Catholic Church said we have this monopoly pulling from a living tradition that stems back to Christ. And so.
- [40:58]
C
And the Catholics thought of the Protestants as atheists in some sense because of how heavily they leaned into that frame.
- [41:05]
B
And the Protestants thought the Catholics were superstitious cultists and idolaters. But so the Enlightenment crossed. The foundations of the Enlightenment stem from pulling analysis from what Tarnas, who's a great philosophy writer, calls the Galileo, Spinoza, Descartes axis. And in the 17th century, these three thinkers, you can throw in others, like Kepler or Leibniz, 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 this highly complex tiers of spiritual consciousness that you would see from thinkers like Dante in the Middle Ages. And so that taught us that we live in a cold.in space as the only complex life forms we know about, which created a materialist concept of matter in the world. Spinoza is integrated theology into the material world to say that the material world is the manifestation of God. But what that did is that it removed God from the world. 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 Galileo, Spinoza, Descartes, Descartes was a big founder of the Enlightenment because he made the mind, body distinction and earlier thinkers, and 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 Descartes 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 it was taken to mean the opposite by his intellectual descendants. And Descartes was a huge figure in France at the time, for over a century. So you have cogita ergo sum. 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 shadow 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, when divorced from the world and it's in our head, cannot adapt to the world. You just have to read the Bible or the religious texts. You can't look for religion in the world. Then science becomes this soulless Promethean Frankenstein, which is utterly removed from human values or intentions, tensions.
- [44:08]
C
The Dick Hart point about consciousness reminds me of 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 prognosis or theory.
- [44:27]
B
Yes. Who would ever argue people don't have intent?
- [44:32]
C
Communists, I guess. God free will relation.
- [44:35]
B
So stupid.
- [44:37]
C
But like you said, the what 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 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 totalizing, when in reality an alternate less leftist frame is there's constraints on the king, there's responsibility with leadership, 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 left wing. This left wing water, you know, left on your clothes.
- [45:36]
B
Yeah, that's a very good point. And 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. In the second one was 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 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 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 we will not listen to the Pope. And so the French government funded all of this secularism. You can look at the Cardinal de Richelieu, 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. France 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 many different wars to unify the most populous nation in Europe, 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 Empire in Africa later on. And the French government often even controlled what crops farmers in France grew, although the majority of France was owned by small farmers, not nobility. 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. Charles Taylor, the author of A Secular Age, said that this was one of the biggest motivations in the, in, in the Enlightenment. And this entire secularization, where a lot of it is how to give elites as much power as possible. And so you look at the different Enlightenments where the British Enlightenment, which is split up into the English and the Scottish, it stems from empiricism and sort of, sort of practical understanding of human nature. Because in England there was this 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 laissez faire attitude, because England had gone through religious wars for nearly a century between mostly different subgroups of Protestants who are quite similar. And so in England, that's where their empirical tradition stems from. In France, the rational redditor traditional stems from the state creating this bureaucratic monster which consumed the French society and the monarchy. And one of the points that Tocqueville 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 Germany, had its own Highly distinct introspective. This highly distinct introspective religious tradition that stemmed from certain subgroups of Protestantism. The pietists were part of this. Pietists like German Quakers, where they would meet up as friend groups and talk about their own introspective relationship with God. 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 Hegel did. Who was later on. It's what Leibniz. Most of the German thinkers of this era. And I think a lot of this German idealist bent was because Germany was disseminating 500 little states. So the religion in the hyper abstract was sort of the escape of the Germans for their powerlessness in material political reality.
- [50:55]
C
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. And 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. 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.
- [51:42]
B
Yeah.
- [51:42]
C
And then the, the other point was this, 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.
- [52:00]
B
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, science is not an aesthetic.
- [52:11]
C
And.
- [52:14]
B
With all of these different sub enlightenments, you're sort of trying to see these different aims and they evolved into different directions between 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. And shifts in the ideal, in 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. 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 that consistently happens with events like the French Revolution or World War I or whatever. And what I meant when I said that 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 with the Galileo, Spinoza, Descartes axis, there's the assumption that reality is purely material, that humans are sort of robots that do not have their own distinct soul motivations. There is that the worldview has to correspond to the rational arguments you make. And there's like a bunch of these. I speak of this in many other videos. And the core issue of the Enlightenment was they weren't fact checking if their own arguments were accurate. And they had a huge issue with as if clauses. And that's what 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, and 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's attitude towards homosexuality, towards the great chain of being women. I'm making the book sound more woke than it is. It's not really woke. I missed. Those are things that come to 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 as an example, Frederick the Great, who was considered an enlightened despot, he was told by one of his intellectuals around him, he said, we used to believe that man was innately crooked and innately sort of fallible now we think man is 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 serfs. I fought against the Russian barbarians. Zero chance. Human nature is innately sort of good.
- [55:46]
C
He's like, I've seen Eastern Europe.
- [55:48]
B
Yeah, exactly. 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.
- [56:03]
C
Excellent.
- [56:08]
B
Hi.
- [56:09]
C
Yeah. Can I comment on a couple things you said before you left, before you get into the next part? Sure, 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 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 dependent logic.
- [57:08]
B
So I know the answer to that because it's something I developed, an idea I developed where 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 so you can see everything as an indivisible whole, 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. Spengler, 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 and sort of trick you into their end point. And another element of the Enlightenment is. Europe is strange in that it doesn't have a traditional culture where most societies in the world revere 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 at 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. Tools and if they make good choices. So it's a high risk, high reward strategy.
- [59:30]
C
And it's almost, it's basically necessary at this point. Yeah, because you, someone's gonna do it. You can't. You have to play the game. And it's almost like instead of the Enlightenment, which creates the solute, this like idea that there's a single enlightened result or position out of it, it should almost be called the conversation or something.
- [59:52]
B
Yeah. Life is a conversation and through your actions you're asking the world for questions and answers. The process of living is a discussion with the world. 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 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 there's no culture on the early 18th century, even though it was a quite important historic time period where all of our culture in the 18th century is the second half of that century. But even less so is the second half of the 17th century, where after the Thirty 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 XIV developed these courts for aristocrats to party together and engage in luxury as a way to offset the enormous civil wars they had beforehand. And with this you see the, 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 and 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 really popular article called Ques gessay et the treisie estat, or what's the Third Estate? Where because you have 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 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 the first and the second. The French sort of ruling apparatus got corrupt. But then with the loss of them, France wasn't really able to recover after the death of the lcien regime, which is sort of a tragedy because the lion regime really did sort of suck. There were points where it was just like, if I was at the time, I would have supported the French Revolution, if I'm being honest. And in France you have a lot of weird sort of like we're distinct clauses, where 18th century France was a legal clusterfuck, 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 dissent. And so you see this gradual bubbling up that started with the aristocracy, where one of the points both de Tocqueville and Chris Dawson made is that the French Enlightenment started with 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 they would invite interesting thinkers together and they'd have 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 coffee was instrumental to the Enlightenment. It's these rational, energetic discussions where beforehand Europeans would just drink.
- [64:48]
C
All these autistic Enlightenment thinkers needed their wives to socially organize for them to get together.
- [64:53]
B
Yeah, basically. And so you had these 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 Voltaire's lover was one of these.
- [65:12]
C
They're like Gertrude Stein figures.
- [65:15]
B
I don't know who that is, but.
- [65:16]
C
Probably 20s Paris, same thing.
- [65:19]
B
You have a lot of Gertrude Stein figures like that. And what both Chris Dawson and de Tocqueville say is that these ideas emerged among the aristocracy. And by the time of the French Revolution, the French aristocracy was predominantly atheist 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 talking to each other, periodically fighting in wars, engaging in luxury or hedonism. They became atheist. And 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 very eloquently in his book Gods of the Revolution, which was. I didn't like that book when I first read it, but I realized later it was brilliant. Where he goes through the different sort of sub ideologies of the French Enlightenment. Between Voltaire and Montesquieu, they were aristocrats. And the first generation of the French Enlightenment were aristocrats who supported monarchy, social class. And then over time, with a tipping point around Rousseau, you saw the general public develop a watered down version of these ideas as the form of the general will, where you use Enlightenment ideas to rationalize sort of mob politics, where Rousseau said, the will of the rulers is by definition the will of the people. So in Rousseau'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 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 Rousseau 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.
- [67:53]
C
This parallels a ton of what's going on today in politics and including on the right where there's these watered down narratives that. Okay, okay, yeah, so like you said, they're. What did Rousseau say about the will of the crowd manifesting?
- [68:14]
B
So Rousseau was. Rousseau was psychologically a woman. I think that's the best example I can give. 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 idealized, 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 a sort of spartan state led by small technocratic elites who on the quote, will of the people to. 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. Okay, this is so easy to manipulate.
- [69:20]
C
The part of this that I think this is interesting is there's two ways to go with that is because Rousseau 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 because if you're not able to marshal elite politics, then you're just. And you become an empty vessel for the crowd. Then everything Rousseau 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 a B test and ride that wave and then you become a vessel for the crowd. So Rousseau is actually correct in some ways. But just appealing to the crowd is obviously a recipe for disaster and it's built off emotion and narrative.
- [70:11]
B
I am going to hard deny you here because.
- [70:13]
C
Excellent.
- [70:15]
B
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. I'm going to call it instead 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 you look at the general public, it's never the case wherein they did anthropological surveys. This is like one of the first things the field of anthropology did of 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 nobility were actually superior to them. And so 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 fodder, saying they should never be given social authority. Same thing as the Russian Revolution, small elite group. Well, the vast majority of Russians were peasants who just wanted to own their own land. 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.
- [71:44]
C
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.
- [71:54]
B
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've. I've tested this, where I'll see the exact opposite things a few months apart, and then people 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. And because I look at the Internet constantly, self contradicts, it cannot keep a line straight for like longer than six 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. You cannot say this dude is your savior last year and then say he's an utter failure now without realizing the disjoint and rationally analyzing why you made this shift.
- [73:05]
C
Well, the over optimism is directly corollary with how much the negative feelings happen after those expectations aren't met, versus having A realistic, positive, consistent baseline.
- [73:17]
B
It's just exhausting. Like why do I care?
- [73:19]
C
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.
- [73:32]
B
You have to cultivate. You have to cultivate detachment and attachment at once, which I will not clarify. It's a different topic.
- [73:42]
C
Makes sense to me.
- [73:43]
B
So French Enlightenment. Two big figures are Voltaire and Rousseau and they had their own rivalry. And I'll throw in the physiocrats in Montesquieu, where Montesquieu is one of the earlier figures in the French Enlightenment and he made the encyclopedia, which was the attempt to categorize all of human knowledge, like an 18th century version of Wikipedia. So they had entries on every everything. And the encyclopedia was colored by these rationalist sort of secular notions. Although interestingly, Montesquieu actually did believe in sorcery in his private life. There's a great book called 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 Sigmund Freud were obsessed with the spiritual and they did actually believe spiritual forces. It's just in their writings they wrote about highly secular ideas. But Montesquieu created this sort of corpus of secular knowledge distinct from the, from the Catholic core worldview. And thinkers like Montesquieu alternated between being supported by the French ruling class and being persecuted by them. Where France had a highly uneven policy in this regard, where France in the mid 18th century would still disembowel people for breaking the law or have heresy laws, but they would also enable these Enlightenment thinkers. And Montesquieu was a huge impact on the American Revolution because he talked a lot at 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, 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 and these various incentives for growth is that you will produce radical economic growth. So they're the first real economists. And there's the parable of the bee. And that was from England, where it's at this beehive that everyone's working together, produce the beehive. And it was scandalous because it's not the nobleman 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, you had De Maistre, who was a Savoyard, I think he was ethnically Italian, where he used the Enlightenment to sort of make an Ebola argument of irrationality is good, religion is good, mankind's innately predatory, and that's good. Good. But he was pulling more so from like an Oriental mystic argument, not a normal Catholic argument. On the other spectrum was the Marquis de Sade, 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. Please do not look his life up. You don't want to do this. And there's a. There's a book I read about analyzing the Marquis de Sade's philosophy through the. 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 Marquis de Sade thought sex was this underlying force which stripped us down of our external human trappings towards our core, which in reality is just using philosophy to go to hell. Like, I think he'd probably agree to that too. He would say stuff like that. 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. De Tocqueville or Lafayette were great examples. The French nobility wanted France to become an aristocratic republic, like Britain. 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 Saint Simon, 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 revolution in the first World. So stuff that sounds like trans. And so the entire political Spectrum as it exists today, fully formed in 18th century Enlightenment France.
- [78:53]
C
Yeah, exactly. That relates to people pointing out more, more modern trends or thinking this was the result of people partying in the 60s or something at that large concert that starts with the W. But it turns out that these trends are much older. And the logic for trans is based in the complete separation from the point about social con. Everything being about social conditioning in the French Revolution.
- [79:25]
B
If you. And please.
- [79:27]
C
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I was just gonna say like I actually finish your thought because I think this is more of a tangent.
- [79:34]
B
But what I was gonna say is if you'll get Thomas Sowell's open and closed view of human nature, that the open view is that humans are perfectible 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 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 laissez faire 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 perfectible view. And even Thomas Jefferson in America agreed with the French view. But de Tocqueville and Lafayette agreed with the American Anglo view because these were different wide scale 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 Voltaire and Rousseau. Voltaire was from, I think, a relatively poor family in central France. One of the local nobility, an older woman who appreciated him. I don't know if, I mean he was a child, it wasn't a sexual context, but 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, Moldova spoke French or they spoke their native languages, they had French chefs, they followed French fashion. So the central area in Paris rippled outwards. So when Voltaire had issued the French authorities, he lived with the King of Prussia, Frederick ii, who respected French philosophy. I think Voltaire might have made it to Sweden too, but I could be confusing him for Descartes. Voltaire became quite popular in this and his big thing was railing against the abuses of the Catholic Church and social controls where he would argue for rationality against the entrenched power of religion. He was violently for free speech. He, Voltaire 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. It was said by a Christian authority that although Voltaire calls himself an atheist, I'm sure he'd get into heaven because he's carried out the Christian morality in his actions. And Voltaire is a complex figure. He was part of that French society. So he'd have various love affairs with women who were supporting him. He lived in a castle with a female patron for a while till they had a falling out. He went out to Prussia with 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 several different times. But he was a sort of rock star and he was a rationalist. And the good things Voltaire did were things we've forgotten about. And the bad things were things that evolved in sort of Reddit rationality. His main rival, Rousseau was a Swiss guy from Geneva and we talked about his arguments already. He believed in the noble savage. 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 and the population make a deal on the rule and the ruled. And this powered a lot of modern political philosophy. And Rousseau was actually profoundly. He's become the sort of prophet of modern lib worldview. And he was more popular than Voltaire by the end of the 18th century. He was a very popular figure at the time. He was Napoleon's favorite philosopher and he was relentlessly sexist. In his book Emile, he talked about how women shouldn't be taught how to read. It was their place to just be submissive. He also was quite spiritual, although he wouldn't allow himself in the confines of traditional religion. And keep in mind that the first generation of leftists in France were harkening 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 primitivist culture that eventually won in the French Revolution with the goddess of reason that they put up in, in central Paris with like the least reasonable society ever. But it's interesting where Rousseau and Voltaire, they had like a beef where Voltaire would make poems and. Sorry, he would make poetry, he'd make like press statements and he'd make plays mocking Rousseau and. And Voltaire unanimously won where Rousseau, I think partly for censorship reasons, he fled to first Geneva, his hometown, and then he fled to Britain where Humes took care of him as a close friend. But Rousseau was not a functioning person. He let multiple of his children starve. I believe he was thanked by his mom. He would had terrible romantic relationships. He was permanently broke. And even his close friend Hume in Britain, who was 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 Rousseau was convinced that Hume was in a conspiracy to destroy him. And so the modern left bases all of their philosophy on this completely dysfunctional loser.
- [86:25]
C
Well, Humes was the ultimate humanity guy. And it seems that Rousseau had already lost the value for human life at that point, which parallels into some other things we were talking about. And so that tangent I was going to go on earlier because 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. So before going down this the path which was a reversal of those values.
- [87:05]
B
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 going to desecrate an imitation of God. It says everyone has a soul. And once you remove the religious Christian framework, you develop from humanism that ennobles the human character through art or philosophy or culture or development, to the horrifying dehumanization of totalitarian regimes like 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 sake, get rid of the sacredness inside humanity, which allows horrifying atrocities. As Voltaire said, once you can convince men to believe absurdities, you can convince them to commit atrocities. I have a T shirt of that somewhere.
- [88:07]
C
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 have a very basic treatment that could save a kid and the parents would be completely non responsive, like they already checked out, they already assigned themselves to the state 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, 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 mass abortion thing ties into this.
- [88:52]
B
Yeah.
- [88:54]
C
And 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 oftentimes people don't care any about anything at all. But that's just a front for domination at this point because the values have been so eroded. But it's a, it's a lingering 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 framework of prioritization like local out.
- [89:49]
B
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. 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. And so pull back. The core value of the Enlightenment was the pursuit of happiness. That was the big theme they would talk about. 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 hyper rationalistic redditor logic removed from reality. So I'm probably forgetting something of the French Enlightenment, but I'll see if I remember it later. With the British Enlightenment, you see it as a descendant of the British empirical tradition, which stemmed back to Francis bacon in the 16th century, who developed empiricism and with 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 English. 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 an important thing with the Enlightenment. And it's one of the historic events ever which is least informed by religion. It's not something where you can say like hermeticism or Platonism or sort of like esoteric Christian philosophy. 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 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, if you want to look at the Scottish Enlightenment, which in some ways shone even brighter. Scotland was coming out of a period of domination by 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 what they. 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 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 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 the colonies. And Adam Smith is one of the most famous figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. And he was the big developer of laissez faire economics, which became the dominant economic system of the Anglo Saxon world for at least the next century.
- [93:48]
C
And you could even say he was actually more of a collage guy than an inventor, because he basically collected a lot of the different points around the time, more than even was the progenitor of them. And he gets remembered because he organized all the thoughts.
- [94:04]
B
Yes, he did. Because you had these mental constructs that went Back further. And he developed, as I said before, his theories of economics from his deep understanding of human nature. The other important figure of the Scottish Enlightenment was David Hume. And Hume is a good philosopher who argued a sort of silly point. And Hume 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.
- [94:49]
C
Know, like something you're cognitive bias.
- [94:52]
B
He's stuck in the Descartes 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. 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 autistic 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 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 said is that after Locke, 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. 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 in an understanding of human nature and just sort of common sense where if you're just cherry picking which rational variables you look at, you're not going to get the correct answer. You need a holistic analysis of the entire situation. And so the American Revolution had these generalized principles at human nature which they pulled from the Greco Roman classical heritage rather than the modern Enlightenment. Because once you get into this highly rationalistic worldview, 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 occurred at the same time as these religious revivals, which you can see with Methodism starting in Wales or the second Great Awakening spread across America and Britain. You can see it with the Pietist revivals, or figures like Mozart, who created in 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. 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 Enlightenment atheism, which led to the French Revolution and its trans European consequences.
- [98:23]
C
Right. It was like, oh no, we were just starting to get the integration and now you followed us the wrong way. Yeah. And it's funny that if you say we, oh, we can only know anything based on logical and for instance, based on empirical proofs, then pretty soon you realize you have two options, which is to be say, oh 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.
- [98:55]
B
Exactly. The thing that won out in the Enlightenment was the aesthetic, not the actual scientific method. A lot of these ideas are designed to not be sort of to not be falsifiable. And the English Enlightenment, 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 Augustan Age because England was very prosperous. The average Englishman and Dutchman had returns to qualities of life comparable to the period right after the Black Death due to the innovations in agriculture and quality of living and the harbingers of the Industrial Revolution. So England did very well, but its two core thinkers were John Locke and Ben Jonson. You also had other figures like Edward Gibbon, Where John Locke was early 18th century and he was developing a philosophic system to deal with England's new laissez faire tolerance system, where the agreement among English elite was the Anglicans would maintain social authority. Where if you were in parliament or in universities or noblemen, 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 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. And so Locke developed ideas of tolerance and he was less laissez faire economically than we think, although he did in an open system. For example, he believed in the Marxist theory of labor value a century before Marx, but he believed in the same theory. And Locke created a lot of the concepts for the American Revolution, which was a descendant of Locke's worldview between tolerance for different religions. Because England had lots of comparable sects of Protestantism. Social openness, freedom of speech, where Locke argued for freedom 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.
- [101:45]
C
Right. And how does that relate to his conception of rational self interest?
- [101:52]
B
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.
- [102:09]
C
Okay. I thought maybe it related to conceptions about because I feel like he gets criticized a lot for being a rationalist figure, but I also know he was, he was more of a religious figure.
- [102:21]
B
Yeah. 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. Isaac Newton was obsessed with the Hermetica, same thing as Galileo and Bruno the Locke was religious. A lot of the Enlightenment thinkers believed in magic. And so 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 cherry pick on the road of progress a line that leads to us.
- [103:00]
C
Right. And I guess just to break down that concept of rational. Yeah, go ahead.
- [103:04]
B
Locke said that the one thing states could not tolerate were atheists.
- [103:09]
C
Oh that's funny. Very different from the perception that we're talking about here.
- [103:13]
B
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 Voltaire even said that the majority population has to be Christian because otherwise the poor will rise up and take the richest property.
- [103:28]
C
He said it's literally the opposite of the rationalistic fallacy.
- [103:31]
B
Exactly. Where Voltaire said I don't actually believe in God, but I don't want my servant to murder me, so you should.
- [103:38]
C
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 and they're like a dwindling breed because at some point it's like you have to make a decision 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, is an argument that leaves le fear people very open for criticism because there's a certain 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 the nature is that the universe is probabilistic. So the only rational thing is dispersed idiocentric behavior because you can't have a perfect answer. So people don't even operate rationally in a free market. And that's actually good because you need.
- [104:53]
B
A distribution which leads to the American Revolution which we'll talk about as a manifestation of the British Enlightenment. But for the finish off the English Enlightenment 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 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.
- [105:43]
C
Right.
- [105:43]
B
And he went around the Mediterranean, 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 without the Internet. And it's beautifully written. I mean, it's better written than almost anything today. But I struggle to read it myself because I don't have the attention span. I can read Will Durant. That's sort of the edge of what I can mentally do. But if this was a best seller 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. 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.
- [106:52]
C
Wow. So the same mistake that we made modernists made with Locke and separating from religion, atheists made with the Romans and Greeks by separating them from their religion.
- [107:02]
B
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.
- [107:20]
C
Yeah, right. Or base it in something other than like animal.
- [107:24]
B
Yeah.
- [107:25]
C
Instincts.
- [107:26]
B
Another thing is that 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. And so in Greco Roman, classical civilization was highly aristocratic. The Enlightenment was aristocratic until that lost out to Romanticism, which was more populist.
- [107:51]
C
Oh, well, this relates to the rejection of rationality because there is 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 the top. There's these other factors like elite interests and other conditions that get in the way of kind of a pure rationale 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 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.
- [108:39]
B
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 Phrygian cap would dress in togas. They.
- [108:57]
C
Right, right.
- [108:58]
B
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 Phrygians, 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.
- [109:28]
C
And it's like you said, we don't do a lot of history before the 1960s. Even so how would we figure that out?
- [109:34]
B
Welcome to the age of the last men. Enjoy your ride, it'll end soon. But so Finnish English Enlightenment. Ben Johnson was a huge figure 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. And I read a lot of 19th century English sources and the way they treat Ben Johnson is the way we would treat like the Beatles or like 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. 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 Montesquieu and Locke. And they built, built their political analysis of Aristotle and Polybius. And 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 mass democracy. But with the American Revolution you saw a series of distinctions. Sub elites who combined the aristocratic refinement with the ruggedness of the frontier. And Ben Franklin, who I heard so much growing up in Philly, who was a Renaissance man who ran, 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. You had John Adams, who was from Boston and he was a lawyer and a father philosopher. You had the great Virginians like Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or James Madison, who in their slave plantations would cultivate 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 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 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 whole where they could balance the Enlightenment's intellectual creativity without getting. Going crazy.
- [112:55]
C
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, 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 Uberman. She was combining all of these things when, when, if he went to Pennsylvania, people aren't going to do think of him as a frontiersman in the way that the French would if he put on the hat.
- [113:27]
B
Exactly.
- [113:29]
C
So that's like Ben Franklin's classic character knowing how to play for those archetypes. And it also makes the American Revolution just 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 the, with the Thomas Jefferson and Hamilton thing. Both like libertarian anarchists and not necessarily monarchists but Hobbesian figures. They criticize the Constitution and they bond through their criticism of the Constitution. But they're doing it for entirely different reasons. One side agrees with Hamilton, the other side prefers the Article of Confederation. So these guys are agreeing on their disdain for the Constitution, but each of them would prefer the Constitution rather than their opposing views. Even though they're uniting on this. I'm not sure that contradiction has been like totally thought out by people.
- [114:27]
B
This era was the most intellectually advanced ever in Western history. And I will stand by that. And it's kind of obvious if you like read the Federalist Papers, because 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 established these balances of authority so that it wouldn't be as bad as possible. 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 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 Bul Finch's mythology, written in the 1840s. 40s was a book for nouveau riche Americans to study the classics. And the author will just say, oh, people casually make references to Persephone or Prometheus in their daily conversation. And I thought, I have a lot of smart friends. We don't make casual references to like Cadmus 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.
- [116:24]
A
Right.
- [116:25]
C
Well, like we said, it was their memeplex. 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 because there's lots of interesting new thinkers and, and statistical concepts and philosophical 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 memplex.
- [117:11]
B
Yeah. With. So you have the American Revolution and what you're seeing is a process, sort of natural biological decay. And that happens to every society. And so the Enlightenment was the peak of that intellectual ability and then it degraded over time. 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 Germany's aristocracy was French and then the general population was 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 you had earlier figures like Leibniz, but he was a 17th century figure. But Kant is the huge figure of the German Enlightenment because he was pushing back against, against the French. He was pushing back against the French rationalist tradition which was highly atheist and sort of socially corrosive, which the Germans didn't like. And Kant developed a sort of brilliant concept that I don't think we've really squared but is the argument goes that 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. And that's very similar to a Jordan Peterson maps of meaning argument. 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 Giorgioni talks about how Kant went through a youth obsession with mysticism which nearly destroyed his career. And then he went hard against mysticism. He was studying Swedenborg's ideas 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 about these immortal sort of ideas. 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 autist the Platonic forms into sort of material reality. So he's widely considered the most important philosopher of the Enlightenment by philosophy circles. In Kant 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 hitting on the various Russian noblewomen 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. He'd take the same 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 where he thought that if he controlled his life perfectly, he could his.
- [121:28]
C
Longstanding health declines that probably contributed to his health issues big time.
- [121:35]
B
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 when you look at figures like Goethe or Schilling or Herder or this entire generation of early 19th century German philosophers who made the Romantic world, I forgot, 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 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 Schopenhauer or Nietzsche 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 unnached or the storm and night because they didn't like how clean and rational the French Enlightenment was. So they wanted more dark and mystical.
- [123:10]
C
So basically everything they were significant because every very Gothic, but everything that was under the French Enlightenment, yeah, 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 and because their elite adopted it.
- [123:38]
B
I don't like this framework because for a variety of reasons, but the French Enlightenment led to socialism in 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 Germany's trajectory. 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 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. Where Tolstoy, as an 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 Borodino and Tolstoy, who. I really do not like Tolstoy, one of my least favorite philosophers. 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. He lived in a serf society, claiming completely detached sort of lib communism, which takes a degree of denial that's quite powerful. But he said that these leaders don't actually control their armies. Things just 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 is this huge unconscious chasm that's been opened by the French Revolution. In Britain, you can see that philosophers like Coleridge or Lord Byron in France, Chateaubriand, Rousseau, 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 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. In the 20th century, that didn't happen, which is why the 20th century spiraled.
- [126:44]
C
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 because 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 kind of output and their political philosophy. Because there was a growing national kind of socialist movement in France that ended up becoming the Vichy government. So it kind of parallels this transition from French Enlightenment to German Enlightenment that you were speaking about earlier.
- [127:24]
B
That's correct.
- [127:26]
C
So not that France was going in a good direction. It's just that's where Germany was leading.
- [127:31]
B
Him along that yes, 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 Le Bon in the 1880s said socialism was already throttling France and Latin Europe.
- [127:48]
C
And Germany was the first to adopt public education, a lot of public education, health care spending, government welfare, a lot of stuff like that. In the late 1800s in Eastern Europe.
- [127:59]
B
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, of Frederick ii, who spoke French predominantly in his private life, who integrated Voltaire and these ideas into a predominantly serf based society. Maria Theresa in Austria, another enlightened despot. But I left that behind because next video is on 18th century l regime Europe. Video is on the philosophy and the inner life of that time period. Videos on the political and economic and social realities of 18th century Europe.
- [128:44]
C
That's awesome. And 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, even turns out 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, you need God to smart guy.
- [129:29]
B
I am definitely in the rational 10 of the population. People might say 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.
- [129:39]
C
Yeah, it'd be stupid not to say it.
- [129:41]
B
I am still profoundly motivated by my animal desires. I, I experience all of, 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 you just have a more sharpened toolkit. Not that because intelligence is the ability to. Intelligence is the skill level with which you realize your goals.
- [130:17]
C
Then yeah, it's just trying to figure stuff out.
- [130:19]
B
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 to. 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 can't build mythic worldviews or conceptions of the human condition purely around rationality, because when all is said and done, it's just a toolkit.
- [130:50]
C
The Bell Curve is the ultimate representation of that. Like, the only way in which I will emphasize the importance of intelligence is to make fun of mids in terms of the higher and lower ends. It doesn't really matter.
- [131:05]
B
Modernity creates an overproduction of mids due to how our educational system works to produce managerial bureaucrats. Most societies in history did not have the middle of the Bell Curve. You were either like. 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.
- [131:35]
C
No. Well, we'll have to figure out what to do with the Bell Curve. Maybe we'll figure it out next episode.
- [131:40]
B
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.
- [131:49]
C
Next week, I almost don't want to tell you. 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.
- [131:57]
B
So I don't care. I mean, I think people are sort of, like, weak. And so if you. They have. People have to actually know the truth. And you can't hide them behind pleasant fictions forever because if you. If you create the pleasant fictions, they're gonna. It's gonna screw them over. So next video is lossial regime, 18th century Europe. The video after that's going to be the Romantic era, Continental Europe. So this is good.
- [132:27]
C
Okay, that was a fun one. Bye. Bye. Catch you later.
- [132:31]
A
Peace History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Eric Torenberg is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.