We are an amazing species, an amazing culture, an amazing civilization.

Whenever you feel down, just spare a tiny thought for the fact that at any other time

and in almost any other place, people lived lives of more hardship, more danger, more hunger than you.

That doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel blue.

You are.

It just means that there are a lot of things that you don't have to feel blue about that most humans who ever lived did.

And what has generated this bounty that we currently enjoy?

We didn't steal it, despite the ills of colonialism.

We didn't.

From whom did we steal space rockets and marriage equality and in vitro fertilisation?

We didn't get it because we were uniquely violent, many more violent cultures, litter history.

To the extent that we are free and plump and equal, it's because of one thing above all others.

It's because we started listening to each other,

arguing with each other,

enlightening each other.

What made the enlightenment different,

what unleashed the ferocious creativity of the modern age,

was that we stopped respecting witch hunts and dogmas,

dark age thinking and judgmentalism and censoriousness.

We started having conversations that were mind-expanding, that were generous, and above all, conversations that were uncomfortable.

So, Today on the show, the American University professor who doesn't take any shit from anybody, including universities and his bosses.

Lee Jussam is an American social psychologist.

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