Explaining the Origins of Science

Summary

History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett Episode: Explaining the Origins of Science Release Date: February 19, 2025

In this enlightening episode of History 102, Rudyard Lynch, the creator behind the popular YouTube channel WhatifAltHist, joins Austin Padgett to delve into one of the most pivotal developments in human history: the origins of science. Hosted by Turpentine, the conversation navigates through the complex interplay of historical narratives, philosophical underpinnings, and societal transformations that shaped the scientific revolution. The duo challenges prevalent misconceptions about science, explores its deep-rooted connections with ancient philosophies, and critiques the modern paradigm of scientism.

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1. The Significance of the Invention of Science

At the outset, Rudyard Lynch underscores the monumental impact of science on human civilization. He posits that the invention of science is arguably the most crucial event in history, rivaling even the Industrial Revolution in its transformative power.

Rudyard Lynch [00:21]: "Today's episode is the origins of science. And this is one of those things that is one of the most important events in history... because there are three or four different psychological narratives that we got really incorrectly."

2. Debunking Psychological Narratives Surrounding Science

Lynch identifies and deconstructs four key psychological narratives that distort our understanding of science:

a. Diverse Historical Perceptions of Reality

Lynch highlights that different societies have fundamentally different worldviews that shape their understanding of reality. He uses Indian philosophy as a prime example, where the physical world is considered an illusion (Maya) created by the gods, contrasting sharply with the Western notion that physical reality is primary.

Rudyard Lynch [02:30]: "In Indian philosophy, reality is an illusion spun by the gods called Maya or Goliath... until the British Empire, it was seen as immoral to make the peasants wealthier."

b. Science's Ancient and Medieval Roots

Contrary to the belief that science is a purely modern invention, Lynch asserts that it draws heavily from ancient and medieval philosophies. He emphasizes that early science was deeply intertwined with Christian and Hermetic thought.

Rudyard Lynch [33:00]: "Science was the Culmination of a much older tradition that stemmed back into the ancient world."

c. Science and Religion Are Not Inherently Opposed

Lynch challenges the common narrative of an inherent conflict between science and religion. He explains that early scientists were often devout religious individuals who viewed their work as uncovering the divine plan.

Rudyard Lynch [49:11]: "Every single figure in the development of early science also studied the Hermetica... they saw science as finding the mind of God."

d. Modern Society Practices Scientism, Not True Science

The conversation shifts to the critique of scientism—the ideology that elevates science to the status of an all-encompassing belief system—arguing that contemporary society has lost its ability to practice authentic science.

Rudyard Lynch [57:39]: "Science is the actual testing method. Science itself is actually pretty spare. It's just an empirical testing method. Scientism is the culture of being the science."

3. The Origins of Science and Hermetic Influences

Lynch delves deeper into how Hermeticism, an ancient Egyptian philosophy intertwined with alchemy, significantly influenced the early development of scientific thought. He notes that many early scientists, including Newton and Galileo, were steeped in Hermetic and mystical traditions, viewing their work as a means to achieve spiritual perfection.

Rudyard Lynch [42:04]: "Hermeticism was alchemy... the symbol for alchemy is making gold, but it was really about the perfection of the human soul."

4. The Role of Christianity and the Catholic Church in Science

Contrary to the myth of the Church opposing scientific progress, Lynch elucidates how the Catholic Church was instrumental in nurturing scientific inquiry during the medieval period. Figures like Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon, both monks, were pivotal in formulating the scientific method.

Rudyard Lynch [48:39]: "You can't have science without Christianity because all of the founders of early science were Christians. It's predicated upon Christian philosophy."

5. The Limits of Science and the Rise of Scientism

The discussion turns critical as Lynch explores the limitations of science, particularly its inability to address moral codes and complex societal issues. He argues that while science excels as an arbitration method through empirical testing, it falls short in providing contextual and ethical guidance.

Rudyard Lynch [08:52]: "Science is really bad for contextual understandings or human life... it's limited by its own definition."

6. Cultural and Societal Implications of Scientism

Lynch and Padgett examine how the elevation of scientism has led to societal issues such as the erosion of wisdom, the decline of abstract thinking, and the rise of bureaucratic impersonality. They discuss the detrimental effects of prioritizing empirical data over human experience and tradition.

Rudyard Lynch [24:52]: "The industrial system demands constant growth to maintain itself... the collapsing birth rate is the Canary in the coal mine."

7. Modern Reflections: GDP, Inequality, and Governance

The conversation pivots to contemporary issues like the misrepresentation of GDP as a sole indicator of economic health, the complexities of genetic engineering, and the challenges of governance in a scientistic society. Lynch criticizes the oversimplification of societal well-being through metrics like GDP, noting the neglect of qualitative aspects of life.

Rudyard Lynch [31:19]: "Our enslavement to GDP per capita stats is weird... Kenya has six times the economic size in reality than on paper."

8. The Future of Science in Society

Looking forward, Lynch warns of the impending social renovation necessitated by declining birth rates and the unsustainable nature of continuous growth. He envisions a shift away from scientism towards a more integrated approach that harmonizes empirical testing with wisdom and tradition.

Rudyard Lynch [26:20]: "The underlying end point of all of this is the collapsing birth rate... we're going to have to go through a social renovation process."

9. Conclusion: Reclaiming Science from Scientism

In wrapping up, Lynch emphasizes the importance of differentiating between science and scientism. He calls for a renaissance of true scientific inquiry that respects historical philosophies and integrates subjective human experiences with empirical data.

Rudyard Lynch [65:53]: "We are the last men... we're stuck in the closed loop where you are correct by definition."

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Rudyard Lynch [00:21]: "The invention of science... is one of the most important events in history."

• Rudyard Lynch [02:30]: "In Indian philosophy, reality is an illusion spun by the gods called Maya or Goliath."

• Rudyard Lynch [33:00]: "Science was the Culmination of a much older tradition that stemmed back into the ancient world."

• Rudyard Lynch [42:04]: "Hermeticism was alchemy... it was really about the perfection of the human soul."

• Rudyard Lynch [48:39]: "You can't have science without Christianity because all of the founders of early science were Christians."

• Rudyard Lynch [08:52]: "Science is really bad for contextual understandings or human life... it's limited by its own definition."

• Rudyard Lynch [24:52]: "The industrial system demands constant growth to maintain itself... the collapsing birth rate is the Canary in the coal mine."

• Rudyard Lynch [31:19]: "Our enslavement to GDP per capita stats is weird... Kenya has six times the economic size in reality than on paper."

• Rudyard Lynch [26:20]: "The underlying end point of all of this is the collapsing birth rate... we're going to have to go through a social renovation process."

• Rudyard Lynch [65:53]: "We are the last men... we're stuck in the closed loop where you are correct by definition."

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Key Takeaways

1. Science as a Historical and Philosophical Culmination: The origins of science are deeply intertwined with ancient philosophies, particularly Hermeticism and Christian thought, challenging the notion that science emerged purely as a modern phenomenon.

2. Debunking Misconceptions: Common narratives that pit science against religion or view science as an unbiased arbiter of truth are oversimplifications that obscure the complex historical relationship between these domains.

3. Limits of Scientism: Elevating science to a sole guiding ideology—scientism—neglects the nuanced and subjective aspects of human experience, leading to societal issues like the erosion of wisdom and increasing bureaucratic impersonality.

4. Cultural Divergence: Different societies have unique worldviews that shape their understanding of reality. Recognizing these differences is crucial for a comprehensive grasp of scientific development.

5. Future Challenges: Modern society faces significant challenges, including declining birth rates and the unsustainable demand for continuous growth, necessitating a reevaluation of how science and societal values intersect.

6. Reclaiming True Science: There is a pressing need to distinguish between science as an empirical testing method and scientism as an ideological dominance, fostering a balanced approach that integrates empirical data with humanistic wisdom.

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Looking Ahead

In future episodes, Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett plan to explore topics such as the 1950s—a pivotal decade with significant cultural, political, and scientific developments. This promise of continued exploration signals a commitment to unraveling the intricate tapestry of historical events and ideologies that shape our present and future.

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History 102 with Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett continues to provide profound insights into critical moments in history, offering listeners a nuanced understanding that bridges past and present. For more episodes and information, visit www.turpentine.co.

Transcript

[Whatifalth]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hi, Austin. How are you?

[Austin Padgett]

Hello. Excellent facts.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So today's episode is the origins of science. And this is one of those things that is one of the most important events in history, I think you could say the invention of science. It's competitive for the most important event in history, and people often bunch it together with the Industrial Revolution. But they're actually diff. They are different historic events that occurred for different incentives, although they're connected. And the biggest thing for this video is less so implicitly about science itself, more so disproving. Disproving historic and cultural narratives we have related to science that make it impossible for normal people to understand what actually happened. Because there's three or four different psychological narratives that we got really incorrectly. And the only way to see the reality is to debunk each of those.

[Austin Padgett]

And what are those psychological narratives.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So let's go through each of them one at a time. The first is that we have no idea how the rest of humanity perceived reality. Secondly, we don't realize that science itself pulls on ancient and ancient and medieval roots that we've forgotten about. And thirdly, actually, there's four. Thirdly, that science and religion are not actually at odds. And fourthly, that what we're practicing now is not science and that we don't actually use science to guide our society anymore. And so if you look at each of those four, you'll see that the invention of science, you need to study those four things. And in the process of seeing those, you'll be capable of understanding why science developed, how it made the modern world, where it stemmed from, and what that means for us today. So the first of them is understanding how the rest of human history perceives the world, where, for example, we forget how much of the things that we believe as completely obvious are in fact particulars to certain historic trajectories. We have an example of this, and this is the simplest thing, the idea that physical things exist. This is an idea that stems from Aristotle developed the concept that there are physical things and that the spiritual concepts are fundamentally derivations of originally physical things. And that sounds obvious, but. But in Indian, Platonic, and in Islamic philosophy, the spiritual is first, and then the physical world is a mere. Is a pale imitation of the spiritual. So in lots of world philosophies, things that we view as completely insane are just taken for granted. Where in Indian philosophy as an example, reality is an illusion spun by the gods called Maya or Goliath. And thus in Indian philosophy as an example, until the British Empire it was seen as immoral to make the peasants wealthier because if the peasants got wealthier then they would suffer less and thus they would need religion less. And the purpose of life is to lead to religion. Thus bringing the peasants out of poverty is immoral and selfish and materialistic because you're shutting them off from reaching religion. So I'm going to let that sink in because that sort of thing is an example of how different a worldview can be. And interestingly enough, Indian philosophy and history isn't even the furthest removed from the Western tradition because they both originally have an Aryan root.

[Austin Padgett]

So with the Indian example it's. And the different frames, I guess a good way to think of it is they're following the logic of certain conclusions. So if you set something as your highest value, then all sorts of weird yes situations can arise out of trying to attain that. Like an AI movie where the AI goes crazy because his mission is to protect X person. Then he goes out of his to weird conclusions to do that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And I was going to do, I was going to bring this up later in the video because we've done that today. And it's one of the biggest parts of the downstream effects of science. Because I'm going to argue that the invention of science, although it is, is inordinately positive. There are very key negatives to it. And an example of this is that there's a great book called the Knowledge Machine by Stravens and it's about the origin of the scientific method. And so this is very important because it talks about the iron rule of science. And the iron rule of science, the way the scientific method works is that you create a test where one of two results creates an outcome, that you have two hypotheses, then you have an intent. A test where an empirical result can pick one of one or two hypotheses. An example of this is that if you were to say, is America a WASP oligarchy? Let's compare income range by American white ethnicity. And when you find that Italian and Polish and Jewish Americans are the highest rank of white American in income and then British Americans are below average, you can see that America is no longer a WASP oligarchy like it was a century ago. So you have two hypotheses. One, that America is run by a small Anglo Saxon elite. Another is that we have a more diversified white elite. And if you look at income ranges, that can lead to the hype. The second hypothesis that we've seen a democratization of power and wealth in America across all white ethnic. Across multiple white ethnicities. And so you could. The way science works is that you have a test, and the empirical results for the test dictate which of these hypotheses you pick. And this is incredibly good at certain things. And the point the author makes is the thing science does the best is it's an arbitration method. Where there have been many examples of this over history, where the shift from Newtonian to Einstein physics, they had a. And this is another thing the book talks about, where they had inconclusive evidence to move from Newton to Einstein's model, and then they purposely hedged the evidence to move it towards the Einstein model because the scientists involved had a bias towards internationalism because it was during World War I and the British were fighting the Germans. So he thought if we can prove a German philosophic thesis, then we can show that war is bad and we should love internationalism. And physics is one of the fields I've studied the least. But as far as I can understand Einstein's model, the thing with physics is I meet lots of people who are way smarter than me in this discipline and they have vastly different opinions on physics. And so I don't really know what opinion to say. But as far as I could understand, Einstein's theories have trounced Newtons or they've created a different field. But the thing with the test that there's multiple, multiple points I'm trying to illustrate with this. The first is that science is a testing method. The problem is that you can't use science to develop a moral code and you can't use science for contextual understandings. Where we have tried to shove science, which is limited by its power, where science is so good because it creates an arbitration method and also creates incentives to gather data. Because what the scientific method does really well is that it gives an incentive. If we establish empirical data to decide between different theses, then that's what we reward. And thus the modern world has this huge amount of data that we can use for different stuff. And it's good for. It's good for process of elimination. But science is really bad for contextual understandings or human life or things that require more complex motion and more complex fluid systems because. Because it is by its own definition, limited. And when science was developed, there was. If you had told the people at the time that this one thing will become your entire formulation for all of human knowledge, they would say that's insane. Anyone in the development of science, if you asked them this will become your, in several hundred years from now, your entire society's mental formulation for how you relate to the world with your only form of knowledge. They would say, yeah, that's not going to work.

[Austin Padgett]

And they were right. Because I guess that's where we get up to chaos theory.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Where the overly deterministic scientific view of the world started to run up to its limits in the 70s or 60s.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This is something that I've, I want to make a video about. But in every single discipline we hit up against a wall that we can't really use science to predict. And then the obvious answer that I'm shocked no one has reached is that in almost every case the pre industrial world already had an answer that question. So in physics, physics, both Einstein and Newton's theories have been pushed up against their limits and there's too much stuff that we can't predict. We've hit a point where every single honest physicist is like, I have no fucking clue what's happening. And so physics, for genetics, we hit this wall of DNA where DNA is so complicated and there are so many different sub interactions that it's impossible to predict. Same thing with psychology and human nature where you hit up against Freud and Freud can't explain everything. Then history and politics, you hit up against this, the, and throw on top of this just blatant lying. The blank slate's a lie, equality is a lie, progress is a lie. We'll get to that later. And so something we'll talk about later is the shift from actual science to scientism. We were. Science isn't even our arbitration method anymore. We just make crap up and then try to rationalize it. But we'll get there. So in each case we've tried to push using purely science to the limit. And the. And Houston Smith is one of my favorite authors, he is a religious author. And he said science is like, you know, there's these broadcast lights where if you've got a show, there's these huge lights, there's the lights make huge beams of singular light that hit that you use to like show on the crowd or show on sign on the singer. He said science is like that where it's very good at, it's very good at basically shining on a certain thing and understanding a given issue. But then you have to relate to the entire night sky as a human being and so that's why you, you, you need to have tradition or wisdom or religion and art and those things. Because even art, we don't think of it this way. Art is a way of thinking because it's a. It's figuring, it's relating to the subconscious. Which is why for all of us, there are pieces of art that are the most important thing in our lives, because it spoke to something deep inside of us. And I find a lot of science is the attempt to avoid wisdom, because wisdom is uncomfortable. Because the thing with the first of all, wisdom is not fair, and it's also heavily hereditary. So if you acknowledge wisdom, you have to acknowledge some people are born innately vastly more intelligent than others. Then on top of that, wisdom is also gained through studying the past, and it's also gained through life experience. Wisdom comes from both books and beatings. And that's not something we want to acknowledge because one of the great moral taboos of our society is. Is you can't say there's a positive to suffering in our culture. You will never find someone, even indirectly, say that suffering builds character and that you have to suffer to grow strong.

[Austin Padgett]

And how does that relate to wisdom? Because it's more like trial and error. And I guess, does it introduce a level of uncertainty where it doesn't apply to kind of the neurotic focus of, of science where you can't demonstrate wisdom?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Almost every issue I will say with science here is not an issue with science per se. It's an issue with the society that used science. So science is itself. It's pretty unapologetic and it's very good at what it does. The issue is trying to use science something it's not. And people. The. There's multiple factors going on here. And I'll jump to the fourth point where we don't practice science anymore. We practice scientism. And I think the peak for the legitimate application of scientific research on a society was around World War I. Because around. Because if you actually study science, you find there are lots of very uncomfortable realities that we can't stomach. As an example, you can't say that you're a scientific society and then have men and women say that men and women are the same, that there's just no basis for that men and women are physiologically different, they're neurologically different, they're psychologically different, their values wise different. Same thing with biological race has been completely proven scientifically. You can ask anyone who study biology and genetics and they'll say that or that or that there's lots of weird scientific research we haven't integrated. So there's we've proven that plants have the ability to read intentions where you can modulate these blood pressure, the pressure on a plant as you change the things you're thinking about the plant, and then the plant can see whether or not you're thinking good or bad thoughts. We've run this experiment a bunch of times and it's pretty consistent. And that's one of those things where if we actually studied science, we would have to grapple with that. But we haven't. And now our real God is equality. And then we rationalize scientific we make up and rationalize scientific results to get the end result of equality. And that's been the case ever since World War I. And the book that I've recommended before in the previous show is the Past the Passion of the Western Mind by Tarnas. And it's the best philosophy book I've read where he said the west today we lost faith in God, and then with the world wars, we really lost faith in science. So now we have no arbitration method for our moral code. So we just make shit up.

[Whatifalth]

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[Austin Padgett]

And is it a coincidence that we lost science swiftly after God?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, they're completely connected because we'll get there. But I mean, one thing that always shocks me is that like the current ruling class, they pretend that they have any validity. And I try to. I'll ask them, okay, so how do you rationalize your moral code? Explain to me why you have validity. Explain to me why the things you say have any meaning. And I don't understand why no one under looks the philosophic underpinnings of our society. Because this stuff isn't hard. Like, these are relatively simple concepts and our society's ruling class and our ruling philosophy, and it's just stuff I've read these thinkers, they say reality doesn't exist. Power determines reality. Humans are infinitely mutable. And that once you gain the government, you can control everything. I think to myself, that's so disastrous if your elite believes that something very, very bad will happen. And those are easy concepts to understand. Like, I grew up in a. I grew up in a rural, mostly Christian place. And among the normies I grew up with, they could, they were capable of understanding theological concepts like they would talk about, like concepts in Christianity that are more advanced than the stuff I just said. And there's this huge psychological blockage inside our minds from realizing how silly the Things we are, the things we believe are.

[Austin Padgett]

And a lot of it was done with the magic trick of just changing the language because most disagreements are definitional. So you have an intuitive understanding of what something is and then people end up defining it a certain way. And then you can say, you know, I don't care what you call it, just this thing that we're describing, let's define it, not use a word. This phenomenon like you describe science is actually, you know, a simple useful concept. And they've twisted that to the point where they use empiricism like a cudgel, but they're only selectively choosing correlations that enforce either the oligarchy or some ideology of equity. So a lot of it I think is just they're manipulating the words and that's manipulated our mind. And they've kind of claimed evidence based and almost made it a bad word when it doesn't need to be, just because of the way that they're abusing it as a call to authority.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I call myself a radical empiricist. And what I mean by that is that if it works, it works. I don't really care why or how it works. And the I and I the irony with empiricism is that if you are an empiricist, you look back over human history and you'll realize, wait, every society ever needs religion. The societies without religion fail. And people, people sub people subjectively have religious experiences. And that's something you need to keep track of. People subjectively have emotions and relationships to the world and communities and that stuff. And what people did is they said if it's not perfectly replicable, it doesn't exist. But. And that works for certain things. Like my friend Kurt Doolittle always likes to say that for law that's completely necessary. And I agree, for legal systems, for business contracts, for that stuff, you have to operate off replicability. But most of the human condition itself is not replicable. And so if you want to operate on that for the entire human experience, you're just going to end up in a completely numb and meaningless society, which is where we are. And I believe in subjective empiricism, where if you feel an emotion or if you have a religious experience, it is what it is, write down what happened and then you can relate back to it and use it as a tool of analysis and then you can study it for its predictive value, where you just look at the experience for what it is, you look at how you feel about it and then you subjectively see what the symbolism is, and this is what Jung and Freud did, and it's the underlying nature of psychoanalysis. But one of the things that the Tarnas book talks about is, is that there's all of these philosophic and also with radical empiricism, it's incredibly easy to unify science, religion and philosophy at once, because you've integrated the entire human experience through a combination of the subjective feelings, through empathy, and then the empirically what happens? And then you test all these things for how accurate, how well they work. And the thing that Tarnas book said that's really interesting is he said there's this huge romantic push over the last 200 years against the cold impersonality and materialism of industrial civilization. But then what happens is that those people can never systematize. So that over the long duray of the industrial revolution, what happens instead is that the forces of bureaucratic impersonality just gradually grow larger and larger and squeeze out everything else because they have been institutionalized, so they don't even need to think, they just constantly keep moving forward, while subjective stuff can't be institutionalized on an industrial basis.

[Austin Padgett]

So when you lose your ability for wisdom and objective striving for new objectivity, then the institutions just run rough shot. Yes, there's no alternate.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I see it as like real estate, where the big firms like BlackRock, they buy up more and more land. And if you have a small real estate firm, one bad house can screw you over. And then what happens is that when you're the scale of blackrock, nothing is bad enough to stop you, so you just keep growing. And then the bad luck of smaller real estate companies adds up. And it's Matthews Law. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And so over industrial history, basically standardization had a scale advantage and you would short term break. You had short term pushbacks of subjectivism like Nietzsche or the hippies, or like, I don't know, grunge or the Nazis or romanticism or any of these things. And then each time they push it back a little, and then the force of managerial bureaucratic sterility, it keeps pushing forward because there's nothing really to fight against, because it's a system. You can't fight against a system. Although I try.

[Austin Padgett]

And what is. So what changes that dynamic is. And that's a product of losing the ability to be generally objective in the culture.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So this trends can't last for much longer because the underlying end point of all of this is the collapsing birth rate. Because the birth rate is the Canary in the coal mine that something about modern society is innately intolerable enough that people won't have kids. And so I see that the collapsing birth rate is a sort of silent strike by population saying our lives are not fulfilling enough, so we refuse to have kids. And then the industrial system can't survive that because it demands constant growth to maintain itself. And so the one thing it can't handle is a declining population. And so we will have to go through, well, we're going to have to go through a social renovation process. And an example of this is in Japan. They're trying to institute a four day work week. You know, the Japanese are workaholics because they need people to actually like fuck each other. And so they're like, we'll give you an extra day off if you have kids. And so I'm expecting more of that because also as the population's grown, the value of human life has decreased. And at the same time as the value of human life has decreased, the power of the system grows. But then as the population goes down, the value of human life vis a vis the system will increase.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I mean, it depends how you're conceptualizing value because you have the general growth. Is it like one person as a percentage of value or the value generation of an individual person combined? Yeah, but I like. And then mate formations an interesting indicator because you know, there's a lot of arguments about inequality. You can talk about Pareto distribution or when is it too much inequality, when everybody's conditions are getting better, etc. And the lack of ability for mate formation kind of cuts through that as the relevant indicator. It's like, okay, yeah, maybe you can have different percentages of inequality and it's not a problem, but if you have mate formation breakdown, then there's going to be people looking to change the system.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I was in the phone with Merrick today and what I told him is the boomers can cope about anything. That the stock market, the boomers can be like, oh yeah, people aren't having kids. Oh yeah, people are make less money, purchasing power is lower, mental health is worse. And then they point to the stock market and they'll be like, yes, but at least the GDP number goes up. And they've been able to default and say that the complete failure of every other institution except GDP go up is fine because it allowed the GDP number to go up, the birth rate stopped the GDP number from going up. So there's nothing they can cope about. And so that will, once the boomer can no longer cope is the day our age ends.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't know about the exact correlation between the GDP and our current population trends or when the timing of that will hit, but I think already politically the stock market has stopped being an end all, be all economic indicator for what makes people politically happy. Because everyone knows pumping the big stocks is not helping the general economy. It's like increasing real estate and stocks is good for people's portfolios or boomers portfolios, but it's not actually helping the economy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's true for us as conservatives because we're not the ones getting the government printed money. But so for the left, the line go up is really a psyop where I have friends in politics who tell me a huge amount of Democrat policy is just doing money printing so they can shove their buddies money. So they're going to print a crap ton of money for quantitative easing and then give it to U.S. aid, give it to their constituents, give it to democrat cities, give it to various corporations built off the payroll. So what the right is moving past this and what I see for the left is they're like, oh yeah, stock market, stock market go up, number go up, here's $10 million gay charity fund of Uganda. And so they're using lion go up as this cover to just shove their buddies money.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. It's exactly, it's an upper middle class welfare system. And it also, if you for example, ban stem cells or make these pharmaceutical treatments 10 times artificially more expensive, that's going to boost the GDP because we spend like 28% of it on medical care. But that's not actually improving people's lives. It's the same as buying tanks and bullets. And yeah, you get the GDP boost but you're rationing. So these numbers are not good indicators always.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There's a great book called the Growth Delusion by David Pilling and I read it in high school and it was very, it was very important for my future mental development because I'm kind, I'm an anti corporate rightist. And what the book's about how our enslavement to GDP per capita stats are weird. And it has these bizarre outgrowths where an example of this is that Kenya has six times the economic size in reality than on paper because third world currencies are not processed at the same level as first world currencies. And so an example of this is that if you buy a burger in America it can be like 15 bucks and it would be 10 cents in Kenya or and so it's counted a lot less as a transaction that on top of it, a lot of the Kenya's economy is done through family relations or village relations, where money's not spent, or the black market. And so if Africa has six times the economic size of what we think, that's a huge detail. Or it talks about how the US Government purposely pushes this enormous, really inefficient medical bill spending and in exchange for that, because it grows the number and this they can tell voters they made jobs. And what they're not saying is how much was wasted to make those jobs.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And on the other hand, you, if you did actually go after the oligarchies and open up markets, you would see GDP drops of a lot of big corporate stocks. And I don't know what the time gap would be, but ultimately you would see GDP continue to go up.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Like even faster. So GDP can represent. It's not good things, bad things, it's just not a perfect indicator.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So to go through the different points, the thing with other societies having completely different value systems, you notice it more so when you see the threads that science did pull from. And another great thing, the Tarnas book covers is he talks about the shift in Western philosophy between revering the ancients and then not reading the ancients, where almost every single thing you admire or respect in our society was built because someone read the Bible or the ancient Greek classics and then they were trying to imitate it. And so American democracy was built off the Greeks and the Romans. Our entire social structure was built off imitating the Bible. And so many ideas you wouldn't even think about do ultimately stem from the classics. And when you read the founding fathers and that entire the French Revolution. The French Revolution was the invention of leftism. And they were trying to model their constitution of this like single city state in the Aegean that they said was a utopia. And you know, utopians always have to default on. There was a society the size of a village where this worked. And they would wear the Phrygian cap. So these are early leftists, people who are basically communists. And their biggest fashion statement was wearing this Friggio was this country in Western Turkey the time the ancient Greeks, they weren't even Greeks. And it's crazy that it was a society where the average educated person was literate enough to know specific details of fashion about Phrygia. And the point I'm trying to convey here is that we see science at the start of a new age, but in reality, science was the Culmination of a much older tradition that stemmed back into the ancient world. And so when you try to figure out the factors that resulted in the creation of science, you're looking at fundamentally the repackaging of ancient and medieval philosophy. And then what happened is that once science worked, they translated it into a more science fiction mental mold. And there was a tipping point, I would say in the 1800s, when people thought science has made us so great that we no longer have to read anything our ancestors said. And that's what unmoored us from reality and became so dangerous. Because once you can't cross reference yourself against history, you're just making stuff up. And the philosophic schools that science comes from is they were pulling from Aristotle, Plato, Christianity and Hermeticism. So for each of those, the ancient Greeks and Romans had their own logical tradition that wasn't science. And this is something people think. People like to imagine that the ancient Greeks and Romans founded science and then there was a dark age and then the Renaissance showed up, and then people started bathing again, and then they started reading again. And that narrative is completely incorrect. The way you should see it better so is that the Greeks and the Romans are a completely different civilization. You should see the Greeks and the Romans more comparably to how you see Islam or China than like an extension of Western Europe, where they were these collectivist slave societies that worship pagan gods and they lived in clans. So they were a completely different civilization. Although we have a lot to be grateful from from the Greeks and the Romans. And as we said in the previous video, their concept of logic was that they didn't want to apply things the physical world. They didn't have empiricism because you could find logically correct arguments. And then from said logically correct arguments, you could extrapolate to figure things out. As an example of this is that Aristotle said that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. And then in the Renaissance, an Italian thinker went onto the Leaning Tower of Pisa and he dropped two objects of different weights and they fell at the same length, at the same speed. And so in 20 seconds he disproved this thing that had been believed for thousands of years. And that's a great example because it shows the big flaw in the ancient Greco Roman worldview, where they had highly advanced logical systems, but they didn't apply them to the real world because that was seen as ungentlemanly, where their entire worldview was the aristocracy could think and operate in complex concepts, but then they couldn't. They shouldn't touch the real world. So the Greeks and the Romans actually had the steam engine and computing technology where they had these highly advanced gear mechanisms that operated as computers. And they didn't have an industrial revolution, partly because slave labor was so cheap, but also because they didn't want to have to deal with the physical world. And it's important to understand why they believed that. Because the Greeks were trying to adapt to to firstly the invention of geometry, where geometry was the most important thing in Greek philosophy and the way mathematics works is that you develop these abstract principles removed from reality and then you use abstract principles to figure out physics equations. So they were trying to do that for the entire human condition. And also we have proof the Greeks were using psychedelics. And this is what Plato stems from, where they would use the Eleusinian rituals or the Orphic rituals to go to the spiritual and then they would talk to these abstract, spiritual archetypes. And so what this means is that the Greek worldview viewed all philosophy and all thinking as purely abstract. And then the more you sullied the abstract with the physical, the more, the more you were defiling it. But the problem is that this created very this meant that they could never break through the actual science or industrialization or empiricism, because these are all based on touching physical things.

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[Rudyard Lynch]

And.

[Austin Padgett]

They assume the flaws and inconsistencies of the physical world were actually messing with their logical models and throwing them off the course rather than correcting them. And it's a great example of incorporated knowledge because I was thinking about the Apple example and tower of Pisa, etc. And it's just hard for me to conceptualize that people didn't know that objects fell at the same speed. Yeah, because I just figured there'd be so many accidental examples where you could see that. But maybe the differences are small and you can't measure accurately. So the logical presupposition takes precedent over the poor measuring of empirical reality.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They actually pulled from a different philosophy that got them to believe that.

[Austin Padgett]

Excellent.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So what you said leads back to the second philosophy I'll talk about, which I think is actually the most important for the development of science, which is hermeticism. And hermeticism was ancient Egyptian philosophy that went back to the pharaohs, where if you look at 3000 BC and the the architecture in the pyramids of the Sphinx, it's still hermetic symbolism. And when the Greeks conquered Egypt, they codified it into a set moral code that was used that later went into Islam and Western Europe. And to simplify, hermeticism is alchemy. And alchemy is supposedly about making gold. But what they were really trying to do is that gold was symbolic for the perfection of the human soul. And they were using this coded language. They wouldn't be accused of heresy. Heresy. Although the church did support hermeticism. Hermet it's funny that hermeticism, or the worship of Hermes, was widely accepted in early modern Europe, in a very Christian society, where in the Catholic Church they said hermeticism was like Seneca or Plato or Aristotle, were pre Christian pagan philosophies that were in line with Christianity. So the papacy funded hermeticism. Every major court in Europe did. And the way the Hermetica works is it's the underlying philosophy. If you're trying to increase life charge and then through you increase life charge through suffering, where all of the world is a unified consciousness and the world has the ultimate goal of making humanity more like God. And through the process of life, you learn and then over time you learn to be more and more like God. And this is one of those things where it's hard to overemphasize how much hermeticism influenced modern science. Almost every single figure in the development of early science also studied the Hermetica, where Galileo, as an example, he. The idea that there is a sun and then planets revolve around the sun and there's thousands to millions of planets, that's a hermetic idea. And so in Copernicus and Galileo and Bruno, Bruno was the first thinker and he was very overtly a hermetic. When they were saying this, they weren't saying it because there was scientific evidence. There is not. At least at first. They were saying it because there was a previous religion that said it and they were trying to like stick it to the previous. They're trying to say this previous religion is correct or Newton. A third of the books he studied was alchemy. And every principle in Newton's laws of motion stems of the cabalian. And I'm understating this. This is true of. This is true of basically every thinker of that time period. And the concept of evolution itself, where the, the alchemical transmutation of forms is that you face suffering and through facing suffering, you gradually transmute into something better. Through the gradual process, you evolve from one form to another. And what happened is that hermeticism was very popular in the 1500s, as was mysticism, where every. This is thing we've wrote written out as well. Every single one of the early scientists also studied the occult and they didn't see any barrier between religion and science. Newton wrote as much angels and demons as he did about science. Same thing with John Dee. And so they saw science as finding the mind of God. So their goal was through science, to find God. And this is actually how science started in, back in, in the medieval period where the goal for science was to reflect the beauty of God's creation. You look at the Islamic world, the reason the west developed science and the Islamic world didn't is that in the medieval period the Islamic world thought all of God's truth is contained within the Quran. And thus there's no reason to study science because you can just study the Quran and the outs. The external earthly world is itself fallible. And then in Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas is a very important figure. We've forgotten he lived in the 1200s and he made the, he made a logical system that connected Christianity with the Greek thinkers. And in the process he made the philosophic principle that became dominant in the west that Earth is a reflection of the divine plan. And thus by scientifically studying Earth you could find the mind of God and learn to honor God more greatly. And you had this debate in Europe in the high medieval period between Duns Scotos, the Duns Scotus school, that it's basically the Muslim opinion that you should submit to God and then the Thomas Aquinas school and they were both fighting against more rigid pre established beliefs, either just completely worshiping the Greeks or worshiping the previous Bible without critically thinking about it. And then almost every single underlying toolkit in the scientific method was developed in the 1300s by monks where the William of Ockham, developer of Occam's Razor, he was a monk, an English monk in the 1300s, Roger Bacon another English monk in the 1300s. And so every. And this is thing I can't overstate is that you can't have science without Christianity because all of the founders of early science were Christians. And, and it's predicated upon Christian philosophy where the breakthrough to from the Greek rationalist tradition to modern science is that the Christian value of humility demands you test things. Because if you want to apply Christianity to science it's. We don't know what's true because we're humble. So let's just test everything to see what works. And so that is the touchstone. You had to combine the Greek rationalist tradition with Christian humility to create science. And the greatest funder of science into the. Into basically now was the Catholic Church where the Catholic Church act. And this is the thing we really got wrong with the narrative. The Catholic Church funded and protected and guided science for most of this time period. And it was only later that they became a scientific reactionary force where Galileo is the touchstone example. But Galileo and the Pope were friends and the Papacy funded his research and they. Galileo got in a bad spot with the church, due to complex church politics relating to a variety of other things.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. He was not even purchased because of this supposed conflict between science and Christianity, which it was completely church politics. So that's a great cultural myth. It's interesting how pervasive it is, I guess, as part of the propaganda. And then you get into natural law with Aquinus. Right. And does that. Does that relate to. There's kind of a parallel between the study of physics and the study of sociology, where you look at. There's certain patterns to human nature.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And then there's certain patterns to the universe, like within physics. And both of these concepts are connected to the idea of God's words versus God's works. And is that kind of like the problem with Islam, as they were stuck in the words but not the works, as in acknowledging the universe that God created has certain rules that can be observed and discovered?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, that's correct. Great point you made there. And natural law is such an important thing. And our society can't understand the concept of natural law, but it's actually a pretty simple concept. The universe has certain rules and it rewards you following the rules. And that's obviously true. Like, if you work harder, that's generally better. Men are generally physically stronger than women. There are these general principles to the universe, and if you follow the principles, you get rewarded. And our society rejects that, although it's obviously true. And natural law, there was this concept that there was a unified theory of how the world worked. And over time we used science to dissolve any concept that reality exists. Until you hit the 20th century, when every. I've read multiple philosophers say, the great issue of philosophy is that there's no argument for why reality exists. And I thought, you idiot, of course reality exists. If you need an argument for why reality exists, you're a fucking nerd. Just shut the fuck up and just cut that. Cut the nerd shit, man. And it's the whole thing with postmodernism where they're like, oh my God, how do I prove reality exists? Okay, if I kick you in the face, you're going to feel pain because I kicked you in the face. That is the nature of reality. If you don't think reality exists, if you don't think reality exists, you have not faced enough suffering and. Or you face too much suffering and you're coping. But the church science division is interesting and it's largely an outgrowth of the Thirty Years War and that. So the religious wars in the mid-1600s, they created a very first of all they got rid of mysticism, where the connection between mysticism and science, that was a side effect of the ends of the wars of religion, because Europe was so deeply ravaged by these religious wars that there was. There were several subconscious assumptions the west made that we haven't tackled, but are super important. The first is that religious wars became socially taboo. Secondly, the church, the religion got sectioned off in its own little ghetto where we are a society where religion is seen as purely subjective, purely, purely personal and purely cultural, while science gained complete dominance on how to understand how the world works. And then the public sphere. And you also saw the separation of religion and the church, where they became at odds because they weren't at odds beforehand. And that was structured because. So the philosophy books I keep reading, they'll say that there's the Galileo, Kant, Descartes axis, and that this is the axis that separates the enchanted medieval and early modern world from the current world, where Galileo found that the world circles the sun. And this was huge because the previous idea is that you go up into the heavens towards God. And then we found that, no, the reality is that it's just space out there. And this was important because it made us realigned how we physically processed the world, because we confused psychic space with physical space, because what religious thinkers have constantly said is that heaven is above us and that hell is below us. That's symbolic of the human condition. We have to go as we. We have to start choosing good and evil. You can go towards good or towards evil. And then we literalized that. And the Protestant Reformation made religion really literal when it was originally meant to be symbolic. And then that killed religion, because religion can't exist on this literal frame of reference. And Galileo did that. And the Church could have positioned them. The Church positioning themselves against Galileo was a huge PR disaster they never were able to recover from. Then under Kant. Kant argued that what Kant and Descartes both argued that is that you should ignore the senses and that what mattered is what fits in abstract. You should ignore the physical sensations of the world. And then what that in turn allowed was just logical arguments disconnected from reality. And the biggest issue with modern philosophy is it's completely disconnected from the human experience. It has no relation. You'll never hear philosophers talk about culture or sex or history or politics. Like I was reading this book about burnout and the book never mentioned people are working more hours, they have worse mental health and that stuff. He was just saying philosophically, the substructure of studying Kant, this is why people have burnout And I'm like, no, man, people have burnout because they're working too much for too little pay.

[Austin Padgett]

They have burnout because they're trying to figure everything out without actually addressing reality.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

Exhausting.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And so over the course of the 1600s, it feels. It looks like. It looks as if you have something to say about the thing I was saying earlier.

[Austin Padgett]

Like, I. Yeah, the subjective versus objective part. I just kind of wanted to nail down into that more because it's almost like the. The deterministic view of science wiped out that integration of objectivity and subjectivity, and then all we were left with at the end was subjectivity and power games. Yeah, it's kind of a hard needle for people to mentally thread that. Just because humans are unable to be objective about reality doesn't mean that objective, objective truth doesn't exist. And you have to be able to operate subjectively to get closer approximations of objective reality. And that's just a hard mental place for people to be. They kind of drift into subjectivity or objectivity, at least in our current cultural paradigm.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. I think equality killed a lot of our abstract thinking. And it's funny that as the complexity of the concepts we worked with got higher, the mental ability of the intellectual class decreased. Where we don't understand the concept of an abstract concept, where for natural law, as an example, the innate polarity of the masculine and the feminine is the most basal level of reality. If you can't understand that men and women are different, you're completely crazy. And this is how I feel about a lot of this stuff, where science was an incredibly useful rationalization tool because it created. You could have a test, and then said test could claim to be objective. And then what happened is that each part of the political spectrum has been able to rationalize why they are the objective truth. Because they study the things they want to see and they refuse to study anything else. Because if only things that we can scientifically replicate are true, then you can make up a bunch of crazy stuff that's obviously not true and then not study it. It's a really easy thing to psychologically hack, which is why, as I said before, every corner of the political compass has at one point or another said they're scientifically true. And the lack of an ability to understand an abstract concept is, for example, it's clear that moral goodness exists. It's like you can attain moral goodness, but because you can't measure moral goodness, then they can say it doesn't exist. Although it's clear that like, Gandhi is a better person than Hitler.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And even if people stop trusting the institutions, it's almost like we've lost our ability to flex this science muscle ourselves.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And think in that way. And then if you wanted to just like, really quickly define science versus scientism again just to keep our models clear about it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So science is the actual testing method. Science itself is actually pretty spare. It's just an empirical testing method. Scientism is the culture of being the science. And so as of now, we're almost purely scientistic and then not scientific, where the whole Covid thing of follow the science is. That's an example. We'd all know that. So obviously rigged. Because any of like, we found consistently that Covid is not that dangerous, all things considered. And whether or not how much you want to react to an illness that's not particularly dangerous is your choice. But then the science. The only science we were allowed to say was that Covid was dangerous. And so there was this apparatus that demanded you follow the science. And we've been doing that for a while. We're in the 20th century. This allure of the science became our entire ruling religion, Although it was stuff that was the opposite of the truth in all reality. And one of the points that our society needs to learn that we haven't is that we are the weird outliers, where there's a bunch of things that every other society in history except us, believes that we don't. And it's pretty inexcusable that we forgot the things that everyone else in history believes. And then we use science as a way of rationalizing it. But the reality is that we is that through science's incredible abilities, we grew so wealthy that we gained delusion. And then we rationalize the delusion with science. We were stuck in the closed loop. Where you are correct by definition and examples of this is that equality isn't real. Genetics determines reality. Every other society in history is religious. They believe in God. They believe in the spirit world. They believe in natural law, they believe in the nation, ethnicity, culture, art, philosophy. As an example. Culture is pretty clearly important, even on a materialist basis where you can say that a culture is someone's identity. It's how a society survives. It's the operating system. But then we could use a very narrow scientistic understanding of reality to. To basically say if we can't study it, it's not real, and thus we can completely ignore the importance of culture.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And it just seems so simple breaking it down. I'm Wondering, like, how do people fall for scientism? I mean, I know, I get it, I've seen it. But it's almost like you have to remove thought to go along with certain things. And like you said, is the fragility allows you to ignore it and not focus on it. Because you can build up fragility for a time. We have that luxury. But it's like it's been 50 years after the death of this deterministic philosophy with chaos theory that we're still operating in this manner. It's also consistent with the avoidance of uncertainty, like the uncertainty of life. We try to eliminate all risk. So if it's the bureaucratic element of our civilization to the point where you're actually creating more risk, etc. So I guess it just, it's like the apples, like people not knowing that things the same, different weights fall at the same speed. It's just. Yeah, it's amazing what you can miss based on selective focus.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, it's because we're the last men. Writing in 1880, Nietzsche said that after a century of nihilism that the west would become a society that prized comfort and mediocrity and weakness and stability. He said the society of the last men would be so decadent they'll be incapable of protecting itself or having the will to live. And it would be a society where it would punish great, where great men could not rise, but at the same time that it would be a society incapable of flourish, of allowing even normal, healthy human life to develop because it would prioritize emotional stability and comfort and that above all else. And I've thought about that and the more I see, the more I realize that Nietzsche was just completely accurate and that we are, before anything else, we are the last man. Sorry, we are not the last men, we are the last man.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. But when we lose all these qualities and then it becomes kind of easy to cut through or just a few people who remember how to think to make a change.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And how does action relate into this? I feel like action is tied in somehow to science and actually advancing trial and error and being attached to certain outcomes and moving and taking risk. Like, is there a science action element that's missing from the scientism side that is found in the science side?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Science is innately, incredibly masculine in that it is purely evidence focused. It removes all strippings, it removes trappings. It removes all trappings, it removes all context and it's purely effectiveness because at its core masculine is doing, feminine is being. And so I think a Lot of the over feminization of our culture is actually a reaction to the over masculinization of science where we have this very hyper masculine social mental model, supposedly our culture, and then we attach feminism to the other side of it for us to psychologically balance. I say modernity is a combination of the autistic masculine and the hysterical feminine, which is a descendant from Romanticism and the Enlightenment, where what we're seeing now is the degenerate form of the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement. And the thing with action is that science demands constant testing in order to work. And it's innately very. It's innately progressive and it's also innately destructive. And so what you ended up with is a social code where the only thing that's acceptable is the disproving of previous theses. So we took the empiricism of the scientific method and then warped it into something. It's the culture of critique, where the reason the culture of critique worked is because it's the scientific empiricism and the complex thing that. Do you ever find it ironic that the culture of critique came from the exact same society as. So the way postmodernism works is you basically say, let's criticize everything and let's be open to all ideas, and then let's immediately jump to the most doctrinaire Marxist worldview possible, where you can't criticize anything. They make the mental jump. Everything is open to question. Criticize everything. Oh, wait. We have this incredibly doctrinaire theory that the second you deviate from it, we're kicking you out.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Well, you get the institutionalized protection and then you get different legal mechanisms reinforcing those cartels.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

So people can't question the reputations. And so that can lead to a paralysis of actions. But it's kind of like it's. I'm trying to relate it to the words versus works. And it's like I consider the works like the action. And like you said, they kind of hijacked it. So we were doing things and then we just started talking about doing things to the point where that became the whole process. And you see this with a lot of organizations where it's originally about like a mission and then it becomes about the bylaws or something. Yeah. Or with the Pharisees, where you have like, the law is supposed to serve you versus the other way around. And it's like we stop doing the actual act. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

One of the most retarded things modernity believes is that if you have a Good mindset, you can do anything. Like the only thing stopping you from attaining complete success is your bad mindset. And so if you're not successful, it's because you don't have a good mindset. And that is just. Or also that you can just choose to be happy and you can choose to have your internal monologue, both of which are just completely insane. Like there's no rational justification for them. And they actually end up becoming quite tyrannical. Where it's, you see it in a lot of the class oppression of our society, where if you're a working class white person barely getting by, actively discriminated against by the system, the system will just say, oh, you're, you're not wealthy because you don't have a good mindset. And they ignore all of the systemic things that have happened against working white class white people. I feel bad that we just relentlessly shit on scientism because science has done so much good for the world and it goes unstated where everything around us has been influenced positively by science, between the electrical lighting, between air conditioning, between food, between our ability to live in Texas or everything is scientific. And so I want to express tremendous gratitude to science. But at the same time, I think you guys already know that and that's such a part of our society's mythology. I don't feel the need to emphasize it that much here because it's something that's so obvious. And it's also saying we're all told from childhood, where we're all told from the second we wake up that the reason our society is great is due to science.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And that's true if you take it by its literal definition or its original definition, which is why it's so annoying and pervasive how words are manipulated. Because we're having this conversation about feeling bad about crapping on science when there was not, there was nothing ever wrong with science.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And we just don't do it. And they stop us from doing trial and error and act and they stop us from discovering and flourishing and all these things on the altar of some weak correlation, maintaining a insane ideology or a cartel. So the issue, yeah, the biggest issue.

[Rudyard Lynch]

With modern society is that there's no rules for, there's no rules for discourse or. I see this online a lot, where lots of online discourse is literally just slander. There's no benefit, it's not funny, it's just people slandering each other. And that adds nothing to society. It adds a massive negative. And if you go out online and say, hey, you guys need to actually have constructive conversations. That's the most morally impermissible thing, because it's like you're having a standard for them and our society. The worst thing you can do is hold others to standards. And which is why we're the last men. And then that's true in the society where if the left just makes shit up and then when the right calls them out and making it up, they're like, oh my God, how can you say that? But then there's no fact checking mechanism, so people just abuse terms and then they just make stuff up and then they'll just break definitions and then put them back together. And there's just no qualification against it. Because the biggest thing with our society is there's no feedback loop to reality. We just make stuff up.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And appeals to the truth get mocked even by the right almost because we're so deeply in this environment. But the, and I like to say the truth won't always save you, but it really, it sure can help to have it on your side. Yes, there's an enormous networks of information and people that constantly work to hide the truth. They do a lot of work on it. And there, there's a reason they do that effort is because it's the reality undermines their conceptions. And I think we're starting to get to the point where we can reclaim the language just by distinguishing through this new term, scientism, and having people have clear understandings of those definitions. It's a language battle.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The, the best thing we have going for us is that leftism is a luxury belief. And most people in the west are poor now, so they can't afford, if they can't afford luxury beliefs anymore. So I think we did science justice. I think we covered the whole arc of science. Anything else, Austin?

[Austin Padgett]

Just the four. The arc was.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You want me to repeat that? Okay. First arc is that societies across human history have vastly different beliefs than we do. And then as an example of this, most societies in history don't even have a concept of rationality. The Greeks invented the concept of rationality. And as an example, if you tried to explain a natural law to a Babylonian, they would have no concept of that because their entire view of the world was that a God wills something. So you give Marduk or you give Tiamat presence so that they help your fate. The idea of an objective universe is an ancient Greek concept. The idea that the universe is also rationally explainable is also a Greek concept. So that's the first thing that most people in history do not believe the things we believe. And in fact our beliefs are very, very rare. Secondarily, that science stemmed from ancient and medieval beliefs about the world in that the science was actually formed by the Catholic Church. Thirdly, that the divide between religion and science isn't real. And then fourthly, our society doesn't use science anymore. We use scientism.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And the last example I wanted to talk about was gene editing and governance because like you talked about with gene editing, where we thought we were going to be able to do all these things and then we realized pretty much every single gene we mess with creates a worse result or like a failure of the biology or basically death because you don't understand the inner working or inner workings of that complex system. So it's basically. It's almost impossible to make an intervention and get lucky. And it's. It's similar with governance and central planning, where this is. This ideology also emerged around scientism and the idea of determinism and human beings are make up complex systems. So you try and make interventions to that, it leads to problems which leads to further breakdown. And you can illustrate that through biological examples or other things. I think it's interesting. That's an. I think that might have been one of like governance might be one of the four things we missed with gene editing and the other examples you gave earlier in terms of another field that this philosophy has corrupted.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's interesting with. When I was a teenager, I predicted that with genetic engineering we'd hit up against some kind of wall like that, that there's some natural principle that would stop us from being able, being able to manipulate genetic engineering to the level that we believe we would. Because for everything there is a cost. And so I imagine, let's say if we do genetic engineering to raise the average IQ of a person 20 points, is that it would come in at a cost of so many other things in their life.

[Austin Padgett]

And you don't even know which gene leads to an IQ increase, not necessarily the one you think it is, because everything's interrelated in a complex system.

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, we could solve this by encouraging people with good genetics to breed more.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, some sort of natural breeding. Well, that's what gene editing has gone into in the plant world is they're making breeding stock. So they're not breeding to the final qualities, but they're using very minor interventions to create a breeding stock that then is naturally bred for the final result.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The people who are doing these genetic surveys probably have very good genetics if they're smart enough to do this sort of thing, and I'm sure they don't have kids. There's something deeply hilarious about that.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, there's. There's a big correction mechanism. I mean, yeah, we talked about the population problem. There's a disaster there. But hopefully, if people can act again free of bureaucratic fussing, it'll be cheaper to have kids and they can start doing it early.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So one of my friends likes to say that a lot of leftism is people with good genetics telling people with bad genetics that genetics doesn't matter. The biology department at Harvard is able, very good genetics. And then they're telling, like, the entire rest of population, oh, genetics don't matter. Don't worry about the unconscious, about the innate bias, the innate advantage we have.

[Austin Padgett]

It's like a Hollywood actor saying that money doesn't matter or something.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I'm trying. I have a joke there. I'm just forgetting it. So. Okay, do you have a pick for next week?

[Austin Padgett]

I do not. Maybe hermeticism.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Let's not go down that rabbit hole now. I don't want to do an entire history 102 on. It's not just on the hermetica, just.

[Austin Padgett]

Because I don't know as much about that, but let's.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Let's do the 50s.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, fun. A little modern. That's super relevant. It'll be easier to make political correlations or modern correlations facts.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Okay, goodbye.

[Austin Padgett]

All right, see you guys.

[Whatifalth]

History102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen, live players and econ 102. 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.