The Enlightenment Was Cringe
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ก.ค. 2024
- An essay on the Enlightenment and its consequences. We have been taught to deify it, but does this hold up? When we look at what gives life meaning, has the Enlightenment, and its corollary, industrialization, helped or hurt us?
The seeds of a society's collapse are sown at its peak, and these seeds must not be mistaken for the fruit which sustained the society. The worship of science, and the dismissal of "subjective" experience, has left a void in the human heart. A void which we attempt to fulfill in fantasy, to varying degrees of success. This void must be filled, but mere science, mere objectivity, is woefully inadequate to the task. Why?
00:00 Intro
00:35 Thanks to the Enlightenment
01:28 The Modern World
03:12 What Took so Long?
06:07 A Pre-Enlightenment World
09:02 The Problem
10:12 Seeking a Solution
11:58 Despair's True Cause
12:46 Where to Go?
This is the best summary of the way I've felt on the Enlightenment for a very long time. I've seen the horror that comes with the actions of the "innovators" from silicon valley, and the empty unromantic ways that people view the world on social media. even in the appreciation of aesthetic, people strive to make it into a product. it's interesting to watch the rise of a movement promoting the simple life, for example cottagecore, and then see it fall into a bastardized version of itself where everyone is out to make a quick dollar. This was an excellent analysis, and you've got a new subscriber. can't wait to see your video on Romanticism
Thank you for the kind words - I'm heartened to know I'm not just yelling into the void. The Romanticism essay should be out next Wednesday - hope to make it worth your time!
The problems you describe are not signs that we are worse off thanks to the enlightenment.
Cheap food artificially engineered to taste better than naturally possible is still better than starvation, which was common in the dark ages. Obesity is also better than starvation.
Living easy lives and never having to do hard work would be the dream of 99% of people who lived in the past. People in the dark ages took it for granted that your body would hurt due to hard work.
Rates of depression were not measured in the dark ages, but we have a lot to be happy about, and I think I'd get depressed if my whole family got wiped out by the black death.
It is true that life expectancy is going back down, but not as much as in the dark ages, and your fate is more in your control now. If you choose to smoke and then you end up in a sickhouse, why should you complain? You had no choice but to die in childbirth in the dark ages.
Phrases like "Dark Ages" appeal to a consensus framework that demands that everything will get continually better. Even if I accepted every premise (and many premises, like the notion of eternal back-breaking labor in the Middle Ages, are questionable), my goal in this essay is not to say that we would be better off in a pre-Enlightenment world. Rather, I must point out that the Enlightenment carried with it some disastrous consequences, and we would be better off rejecting its framework. As I say, we can take the good aspects of industrialization (modern medicine, and aspects of material abundance) without accepting the a purely rationalist, anti-beauty, anti-story framework that arose out of the deification of Science, and the simultaneous rejection of Truth itself.
@@PennedLionsPen Why do you write truth with a big T?
@@Siegfried5846 because I like it
In the past you would also be more ignorant, because you wouldnt be aware of the inherent lack of purpose because it would be easier to make you believe in something because youre surrounded by a natural echo chamber. Ignorance is bliss.
"inherent lack of purpose" please just go touch grass. Lift weights, or go for a run.
You're not cool for pretending life is meaningless - you're just vaguely sad. And you're a liar, too - you clearly think there's something worth doing, in choosing to exist, in choosing to leave comments. Ignorance is indeed bliss, and so is *true* enlightenment, true knowledge.
The pain only comes when you apply a fundamentally midwit framework, desperate to "scientifically prove" meaning (as though truth is subordinate to science, instead of the other way around). You are so desperate to make the world fit into your small, human framework that you conclude there is no meaning when it doesn't. It can't possibly be your framework that's at fault!
I am serious about my first comment by the way. Many cases of seemingly untreatable despair happen because you are depriving your life of its basic necessities - exercise plus good sleep can make a night-and-day difference.
The examples of clothing that you showed were from the 1800s, that is, after the enlightenment.
Most of the most beloved architectural styles were done during the enlightenment such as neoclassical and rococo.
It should also be said just how bad painting was in the dark ages. The greatest paintings of all time are from the 1800s, well into the enlightenment. Medieval art is awful.
It sounds to me like you're just trying to grasp at straws to avoid pointing out the true problem: White erasure. If we could only have our homelands back as Whites, then every other problem would be solved.
As I put it in my description, "The seeds of a society's collapse are sown at its peak, and these seeds must not be mistaken for the fruit which sustained the society." Classical music was a product of Enlightenment times, and many of its features are beautiful. But the ultimate legacy of destructive, false ideologies is measured in centuries, not years. The age of the Enlightenment was able to coast off of centuries of accumulated wisdom, culturally speaking, and the final consequences of rationalism have taken a long time to set in. But the modern world decries the horrors of rationalism with every breath it takes.
And if it's true that the problem is just White erasure, then how did we get here in the first place? If we again saw an ethnically homogenous West, what is to suggest it would not repeat the same mistakes that led it to a modern world which is, one way or another, fundamentally broken? It seems most natural to assume that there is an intellectual failure, a fundamental disconnect between our values and how our values ought to be. It's awfully convenient, but fundamentally wrongheaded, to reduce it to an issue of race.
@@PennedLionsPen You didn't point to a single thing that wasn't a consequence of antiwhitism or capitalism, and so without antiwhitism, we'd have beautiful architecture and clothes. As for capitalism, it is more so the destruction of the environment that I'd be worried about, not the potato chips (if you eat too many potato chips and therefore get fat, you have made your own bed and can easily unmake it), however, most right winged conservative christians want the environment to be destroyed, so this ideology is not the solution to that either.
@@Siegfried5846 What gave rise to the distinctly modern problems you cite? Very few people identify as "antiwhite" or "capitalist" - these are specifically accusatory terms used by others. These, generally, were not explicit "movements" - or at least not on the same level as others throughout history. If only there was a single, widespread movement which had tangibly false premises and whose premises we see giving rise to horrible consequences, which could account for a large range of problems in modernity. Perhaps if this movement turned the realm of morality, of goodness itself, into a purely subjective and therefore suspect, pursuit. Or if this movement worshipped the industrial, the material, in precisely the manner which would later be decried as "capitalist," wreaking environmental havoc for shortsighted gain.
If only...
@@PennedLionsPen Allowing other races to live in our lands, and letting them handle our finances gave rise to these problems. Most likely, christianity is at fault. Christianity also undermines White wellbeing by telling us that we're brothers with non-Whites.
The right winged conservative christians have been obsessed with morality for centuries and it has never been used for anything but antiwhite purposes. Christian morality is an antiwhite concept.
Also, just because people don't call themselves antiwhite, that doesn't mean that they're not. Antiwhites call themselves "civil rights activists", "human rights activists", "blm", "communists" and so on and so forth. If they called themselves antiwhite, they know they'd face lawsuits, imprisonment, and all of the other things they subject the White positive movement to. People do say that they believe in capitalism, but it is better to call it radical individualism.
@@PennedLionsPen Oh and also, it is very shallow of you to make a video complaining that people are voluntarily eating too many potato chips when White women are being graped by antiwhite non-White muslims and christians as we speak.