So hello everybody. I am currently speaking at an Orthodox Christian fellowship meeting for their

leadership, and I have a bit of spare time. And I have been reading Stephen Pinker's book

Enlightenment Now. I also heard him speak on Jordan Peterson's podcast recently. And so I thought

it would be a good opportunity to talk a little bit about his ideas,

about his book Enlightenment now, and some of the problems that come up in a manner in which

he frames his narrative, let's call it.

... This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So most of you who are watching this will know who Stephen Pinker is.

He is a psychologist at Harvard University, social psychologist, and he does studies on thinking, on society. And he's recently been known for pushing the notion of

enlightenment and how the values of the enlightenment and the think of the enlightenment are

the key to the problems that we're facing and are the reason for all the positive things in our world today.

His book, Enlightenment Now, which is, I think, his most recent book,

deals with the questions of how the world is getting better, the questions of the reason

why they seem to be doing better because of enlightenment principles, what he calls

enlightenment principles, and also the threat of this, based on what he calls

counter-enlightment principles, and also a regressive attitude going back to religion and going

back to all those things. So Stephen Pinker, he's quite anti-religious.

He really is a kind of atheist materialist in the Sam Harris version of it. And so it's very

fascinating to read his book and to try to analyze the way that he frames reality. And understanding the way he does that will also help us see the inevitability of some of the

patterns that I've been telling you guys about and some of the manners in which we frame the world

in order to present a coherent story.

And so Stephen Pinker says that his whole way of thinking, his whole manner

of presenting the world is based on reason and that if only human beings would center their

...