Welcome once again to Young Heretics where today my message for you is there are four lights.

Okay, that was door-level supreme. That's a real nerd shout out for the nerds among my followers.

It's a Star Trek reference. We're gonna explain in a second or in a little bit why I made it.

But if you watch Star Trek the next generation, which is the one with Patrick Stewart, right John Luke Picard.

There are four lights as a classic reference to the insistence upon absolute objective truth even in the face of interrogation and torture,

which is going to be our theme today. We are going back into Plato's cave.

I really love, I have to tell you guys and you should give me feedback about this because I'm interested to know what she'd think.

Recently on the show, as we've started to build up our reserves of shared references and stuff that we have read together or things that we've done other episodes on.

I have found more and more that there's a wonderful freedom in kind of seeing where the ideas take us, especially when we get to something like this.

I've been building up to being able to talk about Plato's cave with you guys forever. I've been so excited to do it. I want to take my time and I'm really, like I said last week, I'm enjoying the ride.

The show is becoming a little bit more open-ended in the sense that each episode leads on into the next.

I am really loving that we are able to do that. We have the luxury of going into detail that we can give substantive commentary on these deep texts.

That's what a classical education should be all about. Let me know. I'd be interested if you tweet at me or actually head over to local.

I'm going to head over to local. Let me know what you think about this new version, more exploratory version of the show because I'm really digging it and I'm grateful that I have an audience like you guys that will go with me with it through it.

Let me know your thoughts on the deeper version of the show. I am enjoying myself and we'll be spending some more time today on Plato's Republic book seven. I imagine that we will continue to spend time on it next week.

This is going to be, as I said, each time we read a passage, I'm going to sort of explore some of its implications from, sometimes from before in Plato's earlier career or earlier Greek literature or from after in the sort of repercussions and reverberations of these ideas throughout Western history.

We're going to do, I think, a lot of looking forward today. As I said, we'll see where it takes us. Where do we leave off? We had laid out the image of the cave, the allegory of the cave itself. Then we were starting to ask, well, if it's the case that with the cave Plato is describing just the way of the world.

The world is set up for the good to fail. It's a fallen world and Athenian society is corrupt in all these ways. If that's the case, then what happens when somebody really does have that we call it the divine intervention is born with this sort of yearning for the truth, this ability to listen to that voice or even is taught by mentors and friends to listen to that voice and seek the true sun, which is the idea of the good.

You get up there and you're supposed to then go back into the cave and become this bodhisattva king, which turns out later on we're going to find out that Plato wants to force philosophers who reach the good to start their training at age 30 to spend five years doing a course of rigorous study and then to spend 15 years managing the affairs of state before they kind of start training, becoming elder statesman in training other people to do the same at which point they can go lark about and have fun.

So that's going to become the actual program that he proposes for colipolis. But our question is, is going to be, well, how do we get people there at all, right?

How are we supposed to go back into this world that finds it very inconvenient sometimes to say the two plus two equals four or to say that, you know, wants to float alternative facts, right?

This is something I am talking, as I mentioned, all about this in my book, How to Save the West. It's available for pre order now. And I really think you guys will like it.

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