 Before we jump into talking about high learning and objectivism, I wanted to ask you in particular about maybe framing some historical context for our Gen Z listeners. The society which we live in today, not necessarily some of the more modern problems, but the way our systems have been built. Could you relate that back to the Enlightenment? Maybe just talk to us about certain values, key values of the Enlightenment period. Why they matter? Why was it so significant? And why I think for at least my high school academic circles in terms of where I've studied history or philosophy have never even been taught in Canada, at least about the Enlightenment. Although I've done, I've heard of John Locke, but I've never, I didn't know that this was an entire gathering of some of the most intellectual minds at the time where they came together they concluded certain rational beliefs and solidified these beliefs as being the leading way to live your life. Could you talk to us about why it took place and where it took place in particular and how that historical context has meaning to us today? Sure. I mean, I think it's a real crime the way history is taught today. It is truly tragic that Gen Z's, I guess you are, don't really know kind of the historical causality, the path in which humanity has really taken. One of the astounding facts is that for tens of thousands of years, if that's even imaginable that kind of scale, humanity pretty much was in a state of static existence. Most human beings on planet Earth were subsistence farmers. They got up in the morning when the sun rose, they went out into the fields, they worked physical labor all day, they came back, they ate something and they went to sleep because there was no light, soon as it got dark, life was over. And we romanticize that today and their movies romanticize it and I think some literature romanticize it. But life was short, life expectancy before 1800 was under 40, 39, I would be long dead, you guys would be approaching middle age, I guess, and it was brutish and it was really horrific. Violence was everywhere, people were murdered, there were wars constantly, people were being killed and slaughtered and this is the history of the human race, this is forever. With a few exceptions, maybe Greece, Rome and certainly civilizations in some other places around the world but those didn't last for very long and almost none of them had what we take for granted, running water, electricity, just basic things that we all today take for granted. So we are today like a million times richer in terms of the quality and standard of living that we have today, richer than our ancestors, than people were three, four, five, hundred years ago, never mind 10,000 years ago. And why is that? What happened in the last 250 years that made us so much more comfortable, rich, easier to live and of course has doubled and more life expectancy and my life expectancy in Canada and the United States is over 80, child mortality is, you know, as close to zero as one can imagine it used to be 50% of children didn't make age 10, 50% of kids died before the age of 10. That's unimaginable today to a modern Western audience. So really, you know, if you look at Western history, the cause of this amazing progress has its roots in ancient Greece, in the ideas of the Greeks, in the fact that they cherished human life and they started thinking about the issues of the world. They started thinking about what we know, how we know it, why we know something, what is the good life, what is not good life, what is moral, what is not moral. And they started, they created a field called philosophy and really it's the ideas of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle that really shaped the world ever since. Many of those ideas, certainly the better of those ideas, there is the Tullian ideas were lost during the rise of Christianity, the destruction of Rome and then the Dark Ages. And they were slowly rediscovered by the Catholic Church, accommodating with Thomas Aquinas who really brought them into the church and made them a reality. And over many decades and centuries following that, these ideas kind of infiltrated Western culture and became more established. And at the same time, religion was a big factor and during the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, there were massive wars. I mean, on a scale that we can't even imagine today, you know, as a percentage of the population, more people died in the wars of the 16th century than died in the 20th century, even though we had a first or second world war during that period. I mean, and the wars were all religious wars, Protestants, and Catholics killing each other on a massive scale. And at the same time, you've got these philosophical ideas bubbling under the surface. And in the 17th century, in the 18th century, what really happens is people are sick of the wars. People come to realize that these religious wars are destructive and horrific and a disaster. And these philosophical ideas are starting to bubble up. The way they really break through is with the scientific revolution. If you think about the Enlightenment, the first Enlightenment thinker is really Newton, right? Newton's laws, the real first scientist who really explains the world that we see, that we observe in ways that people can understand and becomes very popular. These ideas spread to Europe very quickly. With that, people start saying to themselves, if you will, I can understand the physical world. I can understand how objects move. I can understand these things. I used to believe, everybody used to tell me the truth was in a book written 2000 years ago, written by God or whatever, right? And then the only way I could know the truth is through the experts, the prophets, the pope, the platonic philosopher, kings. But it turns out I can know truth using my own senses and my own mind. And they started questioning, as a consequence of that, this discovery of reason as efficacious, reason as a source of knowledge, they suddenly started questioning everything. And you had John Locke asking these kind of questions, well, if people, if we can understand the physical world using reason, why can't we understand what's right and wrong using reason? Why can't we decide on a political system using reason? Why can't we decide on who a political leader should be using reason? And people started questioning, why can't I decide my profession using reason? Before the Enlightenment, you did what your father did, if you were a man. And if you were a woman, you had babies, you hoped not to die a childbirth, and you managed the home. That's it. There were other options. But men did what their fathers did. There was a guild system. And that was it. So suddenly people started questioning these. And suddenly you got the birth of this idea that the individual matters, that your life isn't ended in itself, that you have rights. This is John Locke's great contribution, that you have rights. All of that politically gets codified in the founding of America, in the Declaration of Independence and then a Constitution. Suddenly you get entrepreneurs. You get people saying, hey, I've got ideas. I've got an idea how to take the science and turn it into a product. And I don't need permission of a king. I don't need the permission of a pope. I can just do it. So you get the Industrial Revolution. You get a continuation of the Scientific Revolution into the 19th century, where people are continuously asking themselves and pushing the envelope, and you get these massive advances in science in the 18th and 19th and into the 20th century. So the enlightenment is when all this happens. It's when this Aristotelian idea of reason, of individualism, of human happiness, the importance of human happiness, all become a reality for a vast number of people. They take it seriously and they start applying it to their lives and they change the world. And the world we live in today, the good parts of it are all products of the enlightenment. The bad parts of it are all products of reactionary forces continuously fighting against the enlightenment. But that's the battle that we live today in. It's enlightenment versus everybody who's lying against it. Great. And that was a great answer. You basically summed up my history class in like five minutes. Well, it would be great if you had that class. I wish you had it. But you know, this is, it would be great if we actually went to school and studied this in detail and actually studied each period and from the perspective of what caused the good stuff and what caused the bad stuff and what are these clashes of ideas and philosophies and how did these shape the events that happened? Because I believe, I in man believe, I learned this from my in man and Linda Peacock, that ideas shape history. They shape the future. They shape human events. They shape your life as an individual. And they shape our lives as a culture and as a, as a, as a, as a historical phenomenon. What we need today, what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. All right. Before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figured at least a hundred of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but, but at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to a hundred. All it takes is a click of a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. 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