The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1165

00:00:00.000 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the podcast The Lotus Thesis for Thursday,

00:00:03.900 the 15th of May, 2025. I'm joined by Dr. Nima Parvini. Hello. How are you doing?

00:00:11.640 Thanks for having me, Carl. Good. It's been a wonderful spring.

00:00:16.180 It's been lovely, actually, isn't it? You can see why Starmer's like, yeah, we're going

00:00:18.940 to turn off the sun. You're having too much of a good time. Not on my watch. But today

00:00:24.160 we're going to be talking about the absolute state of modern education, because, of course,

00:00:28.540 this is something that has deeply concerned me for many years. You know, I'm a dad. You're

00:00:32.980 a dad. Our children are getting the worst education. It's probably since the Middle Ages, if not

00:00:38.040 before. And just dramatic embarrassment. Then we're going to be talking about how Julius

00:00:44.200 Caesar was, in fact, a wizard. And I'm not going to qualify that. I absolutely mean when I say

00:00:51.840 Julius Caesar had access to magic. He did. You'll find out what I mean. And then we're going to

00:00:56.800 go on a crusade against Latin. Just the language. When used in the English context.

00:01:06.320 Look forward to it.

00:01:08.160 It'll be good. Trust me. Anyway, so let's begin with the absolute state of modern education.

00:01:12.640 Now, it's actually not any kind of revelation to say that, well, modern education is pretty

00:01:18.360 poor, isn't it? I mean, everyone knows it. It's everywhere all around us. And this is an

00:01:24.940 old joke that old heads will know, right? A video called Modern Education that was produced,

00:01:30.400 and I checked this, nine years ago, right? But what this was mocking was the advance of

00:01:35.320 woke and SJWs through the education system back then, which was totally fair. But the problem

00:01:42.080 of poor education predates this by a long way. This is something that began in the sort of middle

00:01:47.400 of the 20th century, probably around the boomers, actually, and was taken away from us. And weirdly

00:01:53.800 enough, it was something that came up a lot when I was talking about adolescence. Did you watch

00:01:58.560 adolescence?

00:01:59.600 I haven't seen it, I'm afraid.

00:02:01.260 You know what? I think you'd actually enjoy it because it's actually more interesting than you

00:02:03.540 think. Because one of the things that's portrayed in it is the schooling system. And the only thing

00:02:08.280 you can come away with from watching their portrayal of the modern school system is that this is

00:02:13.240 totally dysfunctional. And in fact, the police officer who's investigating in the series says,

00:02:17.700 how does anyone learn here? And the answer is, of course, they don't, because it's dominated by

00:02:22.460 women, which means the boundaries are very soft when it comes to punishment. And the children are

00:02:29.460 totally disrespectful to the teachers. And of course, they're not really learning anything in

00:02:32.740 the classrooms. And so when I was on GB News, that was something that just kept coming up because

00:02:36.440 it's like, well, look, this is a real reflection of our reality. Like you go to any state school these

00:02:42.240 days, probably looks a lot like what's represented in adolescence, unfortunately. And this is

00:02:48.460 completely well known in academia and in the literature. They are well aware of the fact

00:02:55.800 that actually things have gone downhill dramatically. And there's no reason that it should have been the

00:03:03.300 case. Again, this is just from Cambridge Assessment, where they, and I was like, my God, why are things

00:03:10.240 going downhill? Why is it that the quality of education that we're getting is plummeting?

00:03:16.360 And I just want to give us, I just want to go through some examples of just how bad our education

00:03:20.700 is getting. And so, I mean, this is in 2008, but again, in the early 20th, early 21st century,

00:03:27.460 like you can find this in the Guardian, right? The, where this was in 2004, where the Guardians are like,

00:03:33.560 well, hang on a second. Why exactly is it that we as adults now don't really even understand the

00:03:41.260 Victorian exam papers that 11 and 12 year olds had to take then? I mean, you see this critical

00:03:46.660 school policy of seized on a Victorian exam paper as proof that education standards have been dumbed

00:03:51.460 down. No question of it. And I just want to, right, just a quick caveat on this. We're going to look

00:03:58.600 stupid, right? Because we are the products of the modern education system, as are you, as other

00:04:04.700 people writing this, who, as campaigners say, the school entrance exam would be too difficult, even

00:04:09.480 for most of today's A-level students. Yeah. Yeah. So let's, let's have a quick look at some 1859 exam

00:04:17.180 paper questions, shall we? Because these are, honestly, it's embarrassing. It's genuinely embarrassing

00:04:23.120 that we've got to this point, right? So they're going to here. Here we go. There's the examination

00:04:28.480 paper that any 12 year old in 1859 would have had to take. And we're going to skip the arithmetic

00:04:34.140 ones. Because I can't answer them. I mean, I'm not a mathematician. A wedge of gold weighing 14

00:04:42.560 pounds, three ounces and eight DWT. The hell's DWT? I don't know what that is. And it's valued at

00:04:52.520 514L, which, I mean, is that pounds? I mean, I don't know. Like, and four shillings? What's

00:05:00.600 the value of an ounce? Man, I don't know. Good God, you know. But we're going to, anyway,

00:05:05.080 like I said, we're going to skip the arithmetic ones and go to the English grammar analysis and

00:05:08.840 composition ones, right? Mention some connective words which are not conjunctions.

00:05:13.100 I have no idea.

00:05:19.040 Yeah, shit, it's tricky, that. Okay, yeah.

00:05:22.760 Is the definition usually given of the relative pronoun applicable to any other pronouns?

00:05:28.040 What is the distinctive characteristic of the relative pronoun?

00:05:32.000 Hmm.

00:05:33.660 What? I don't know. I don't know what the answers to these questions are. And I'm 45 years old and

00:05:40.800 deeply embarrassed by this. Define the degrees of comparison of adjectives. Give a list of

00:05:46.460 adjectives which have irregular forms for the comparative and superlative degrees.

00:05:52.780 Any idea?

00:05:53.780 These aren't easy questions, I'll tell you that.

00:05:55.600 For us, anyway. Right? I mean, thankfully, the next section is History of England. I can

00:06:01.300 actually answer these questions. For example, explain the terms Wetenegamot,

00:06:05.960 Dengelt, Curfew, Doomsday Book, Scootage, and Magna Charter.

00:06:09.420 I assume you can do those as well. So just for anyone watching, the Wetenegamot was an

00:06:14.000 Anglo-Saxon meeting and acted as a kind of advisory council to the king. The Dengelt

00:06:20.360 was what we paid the Danes to tell them to get lost. Curfew is obviously a restriction

00:06:25.900 on movement. The Doomsday Book was a William the Conqueror's assessment of everything that

00:06:31.900 was in England. Scootage was a tax that knights paid to evade military service. And of course,

00:06:38.020 the Magna Charter is the beginning of the historic constitutional liberties of the English,

00:06:44.120 signed in 1215 under duress by John I? I think it was John I. So at least I can answer the

00:06:52.140 history ones. But the only reason I can answer the history ones is because as an adult, I

00:06:56.100 was like, oh, I'm interested in history. I will learn about this. Whereas any 12-year-old

00:07:01.440 would have been expected to have been able to answer this. I couldn't have answered that

00:07:04.480 at 12 years old. Could you?

00:07:08.200 No.

00:07:09.180 Right? And so why is this the case? I mean, again, I can answer these as well, but I won't

00:07:16.620 for now, just to save time. But the point is, this is what our kids used to have access

00:07:23.400 to, this level of understanding and information and knowledge. And the BBC did a kind of dumbed-down

00:07:29.560 conversion for modern audiences. So I thought we'd go through this. This is a bit easier.

00:07:34.040 All right. Yeah.

00:07:35.460 Find the lowest common multiple of 10, 24, 25, 32, and 45.

00:07:43.520 Should we take a guess? Let's take a guess. Oh.

00:07:47.440 Oh, wonderful.

00:07:48.220 Okay, pretty good.

00:07:48.840 7,200. Thank God. Let's go to the next one.

00:07:53.780 Explain the chemical changes that take place during the process of combustion and ordinary fire.

00:07:57.800 Yeah. Hydrogen combines with oxygen to make water vapor. Definitely not. Hydrogen combines

00:08:02.800 with nitrogen to make ammonia. Definitely not. Carbon combines with oxygen to make carbon

00:08:07.600 dioxide. Magnesium combines... I reckon it's that one. I mean, I don't think it makes ammonia

00:08:12.660 or water vapor, right? No, energy is contained. Energy has to be released. So maybe it's this

00:08:18.860 one. I don't think it's making water vapor. Maybe it is. I don't know. This is the point,

00:08:24.880 right? Victorian school children knew this. Bollocks.

00:08:29.040 The point is I don't know these things. What are the three main elements in the composition

00:08:37.300 of air? I'm pretty sure it's this one. Sounds right. 21% oxygen. Yeah. There we go. Yeah.

00:08:44.740 There we go. Suck it, Victorian school children. Immediately, describe how a note is affected

00:08:49.940 by having a dot placed immediately after it. I don't play music, so I don't know. Let's just

00:08:57.320 choose one. Oh, that's a lucky guess. I at least know what the doomsday book is. A written

00:09:04.620 record of everything, so that's fine. When it is 12 o'clock in Greenwich in winter, what

00:09:10.380 time is it in St. Petersburg? How many hours ahead is Russia? Let's think... I'm going to

00:09:19.820 go three. Your guess is as good as mine. Yeah, let's go three. Oh, there we go. What is

00:09:29.620 a preposition? It is a... Let's have a look. It's not the first one. A word that tells you

00:09:40.540 where or when something is in relation to... It's that one. I actually know that it's that

00:09:44.880 one, and I'll explain to everyone why I noticed this one shortly afterwards. Correct. And what

00:09:50.100 was the Spanish Armada? This one is correct, of course. Yes. So, even in the dumbed down

00:09:56.500 one, we only got seven out of eight. Smashed it. And that was two lucky guesses. I mean,

00:10:02.900 if it wasn't multiple choice, we wouldn't nearly have done so well on that one. But this is

00:10:10.400 the point, right? And so it's become dramatically apparent that even to very well-educated and

00:10:17.400 credentialed gentlemen like ourselves are missing something. There's something that we should

00:10:23.840 have that it would have been expected that we would have had 200 years ago. It's genuinely

00:10:30.780 embarrassing. It's just hordes of children in school in the 19th century learning things

00:10:37.860 that were important to know in order to be able to just do things in the world. And

00:10:42.720 we've been deprived of this. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, one of the things, of course,

00:10:49.260 Carl, that all of the 12-year-olds would have done in that day and age was something called

00:10:53.680 the trivium. That is true. We're going to be talking about it soon. Well, you know what?

00:10:58.360 It's funny you should mention that because that's actually making a comeback, right? So this

00:11:03.280 is an article from just the other day, just February, in which there's a modern school

00:11:09.180 in Britain that has decided what we might want to do, given how stupid everyone is now and

00:11:15.000 educated is now, is maybe reintroduce the form of education that they had in the 19th century

00:11:22.480 and, well, as you can see, with astounding results. And this really shouldn't come as any

00:11:28.700 great surprise to anyone, but I'm just going to read from this article, right? Newham Collegiate

00:11:32.440 Sixth Form Centre has an atmosphere of respect, hard work, traditional instruction that can

00:11:37.080 be traced back to its founding in 2014. The school has a liberal arts programme which

00:11:43.140 uses methods inherited from medieval and ancient teachers to introduce students to cultures

00:11:47.860 of the past. This model is called the trivium. And so what they have done is brought back

00:11:52.660 the trivium for 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds, and as they say, quote, the results are astounding.

00:12:00.020 At A level in 2024, 96% of their students were B or above. That is incredible. And then they

00:12:08.320 point out for context, Eton is only 93.6. So it's a better education standard than at the

00:12:14.420 best school in the country.

00:12:16.980 Excellent. Not surprising, though, to be honest.

00:12:19.860 No, not at all surprising. But, like, the question is, well, okay, why were we deprived

00:12:24.440 of all of this? Is the real question, right? Nobody scored less than a C in anything.

00:12:32.280 What? That's crazy. Last year, 95% of students received offers from Russell Group Universities,

00:12:39.800 including Oxford and Cambridge. And they're going for, like, Harvard and wherever. So, okay,

00:12:44.020 we really should be doing something different with our education here. And so you've got various

00:12:50.360 educators who are like, yeah, no, we need to bring the trivium back into classrooms, right? We absolutely

00:12:55.180 need to do this. We should have done, we should never have let it leave. Why was it ever taken

00:12:58.600 out is the question. But we obviously should bring that back. So, Martin Robinson is an education

00:13:04.600 consultant who has been doing the same thing. And he's the person behind this particular school.

00:13:09.940 And within three years of opening, the school is sending pupils to MIT, Harvard, Princeton. And

00:13:16.680 the, just, again, you read this, okay, why was this taken away from me? It's like, why is it now,

00:13:23.700 if I go to the average man on the street and ask him, what's a syllogism? He's like, I don't know.

00:13:30.000 Why would he know? Right? Whereas you can watch interviews with people, like men on the street

00:13:34.540 interviews in the 60s. And you'll notice how much more intelligent they seem. And this is not a

00:13:39.920 coincidence. This is because they had the trivium and the classical education. And it's beginning

00:13:45.820 with the boomers, I think, that this was in fact taken away from them. And this has been the case that

00:13:50.900 the curse that we labor under all of this time. Any thoughts on this so far? Yes. I mean, I think one

00:13:59.120 of the things that sets trivium apart from the sort of education that we may have had is that I think

00:14:07.860 maybe starting in the 1960s onwards, there was a kind of thinking that we have maybe progressed,

00:14:16.000 quote unquote, beyond this, that we're more sophisticated now. Enlightened, perhaps.

00:14:21.120 Right. And so therefore, rather than spending hours upon hours learning about demonstrative adjectives

00:14:28.900 and parts of speech and, you know, how to construct a sentence and boring things like syntax and how to

00:14:37.300 use a comma. Instead, we're going to be doing feminist deconstructions of, you know, a poem or, and I'm not

00:14:49.720 even really exaggerating that much where, I mean, I'm just thinking back to my own school. I mean,

00:14:58.300 I was lucky enough to go to a school at a certain time that did actually teach old fashioned grammar

00:15:06.120 parts of speech. Okay. But in that school, my textbooks, I remember I opened them and they were

00:15:13.240 printed in 1948. And I was being taught by ancient 80 year old nuns. Yeah. Okay. That was a kind of,

00:15:22.140 not everybody had that education. No, I certainly didn't have that education.

00:15:26.380 But moving forward in my education, certainly that emphasis on grammar and the fundamentals,

00:15:32.180 the ABCs, gradually reduces over time. Certainly by the time of 12, and then certainly by the time

00:15:39.280 you're doing GCSEs and A-levels, it's completely gone. Logic, which isn't the second part of the

00:15:45.180 trivium, I mean, I should probably explain. The trivium was writing, logic, or grammar, you should

00:15:50.320 say, logic and rhetoric. Okay. Logic, never taught at any time in my education, at any point, was logic

00:16:00.460 formal or informal taught. And then...

00:16:05.180 Just a quick point on that. I had to do a degree in philosophy to get an education in logic,

00:16:09.560 informal logic. And that is crazy if you think about it, because I mean, constructing a syllogism

00:16:15.080 is something you do every day. Is it going to... Is the sky black? Yes, the sky black. Then it's

00:16:19.580 going to rain. Then I should bring an umbrella. Right. Everyone uses logic in every decision that

00:16:24.680 they make. And the fact that like 12 year olds used to have a proper conception of what a formal

00:16:29.700 logical proposition was, and adults now don't. I mean, the question is, what is the agenda behind

00:16:37.120 this, right? Now, one thing that lots of people now think is that, well, it was a deliberate attempt

00:16:43.980 during the 20th century to create compliant workers, to man the factories, to man the offices.

00:16:50.320 And honestly, maybe they're right. But you have a choice as to whether you're going to allow that to

00:16:55.880 be the future that they condemn you to. And I've decided to make the choice against it.

00:17:01.480 But sorry, go on. What's the rest of the trivia?

00:17:02.960 Oh, well, and then the third part, of course, is rhetoric.

00:17:07.240 Where, you know, I mean, literally from the Greek rhetoricians and philosophers, you learn,

00:17:17.860 you know, not only what the... I mean, I think there's a kind of... People remember some of the

00:17:23.920 memes, you know, not an argument and all of that, where you learn a few fallacies here and there.

00:17:28.840 But I'm talking about dozens upon dozens of rhetorical forms or ways of thinking about how

00:17:37.700 to approach an argument, what you're actually trying to achieve, things like Kairos, which we

00:17:44.360 were talking about earlier on.

00:17:46.280 Methods of persuasion.

00:17:47.440 And pivotally persuasion. Now, in terms of rhetoric, which I would say has been the one

00:17:53.800 not taught for the longest time, I think that those darker arts of rhetoric were basically

00:18:03.000 co-opted by the advertising and the marketers and kind of kept as a, almost like a secret

00:18:08.100 knowledge. So, but anyway, the point is, is that...

00:18:13.640 Just before we go on that, because again, this is another thing that you can see yourself.

00:18:19.320 Go back and look at speeches from politicians, excuse me, so like 60 years ago, right? You

00:18:24.900 will notice that they are all... And George Galloway is basically the last great rhetorician

00:18:29.760 in this country. And compare it to the speeches that are given in parliament now. It's total

00:18:34.360 amateurs who do not know how to project. They don't know how to construct an argument using

00:18:39.320 grammar, because they never talk, will never talk grammar. They don't know how to make sure

00:18:43.360 their arguments are logically consistent. And so you can always poke holes in them, because

00:18:47.420 they've not been trained in logic. And they don't know how to deliver them in a persuasive

00:18:50.860 way, because they've all got that same kind of modern Blairite sounding mediocrity that

00:18:57.460 underpins the quality of their speech.

00:18:59.560 And you see this in like the, just the Labour front bench, frankly.

00:19:05.460 Well, I mean, the Prime Minister, I mean, as much as many of us liked his speech the other

00:19:09.720 day...

00:19:10.220 He's a terrible speaker.

00:19:11.080 He doesn't speak from the diaphragm. He speaks all up here.

00:19:14.820 Very nice.

00:19:15.200 So he's the full force of the law. People, people, but it's a different resonance where

00:19:22.580 if you listen to Galloway, and I was lucky enough to see George Galloway speak live a couple

00:19:25.960 of times, and he ejects to the back of the room. He's a great public speaker. You may

00:19:33.320 dislike his politics.

00:19:34.200 Oh, I do. But you can't deny that he is a force when he is speaking. He is able to sum

00:19:40.980 it up, genuine rhetorical power, because he knows how grammar and logic and rhetoric dovetail

00:19:46.880 together to make him a presence in any room that he is in. And this is like, again, Galloway

00:19:53.860 is a great example. And you can pair them with just anyone. Ed Miliband, right? Just listen

00:19:59.980 to Ed Miliband explain himself, and you realise you're dealing with a very pathetic person

00:20:05.920 who doesn't... Like, do you remember when he was... Who was it that he was talking to,

00:20:10.740 like, at some interviewer? And they were saying, are you tough enough to challenge Vladimir

00:20:14.000 Putin? He's like, heck yeah, I'm tough enough. And it's like, there is just no way... I mean,

00:20:18.240 that was a joke, you know, fell completely flat, because he had no rhetorical power. He

00:20:22.560 had no logical force. And he had no ability to combine words in a certain way to tickle

00:20:28.780 the back of your brain and make you think, oh wait, this guy might be on something. And

00:20:32.420 so you can see that Ed Miliband is the product of the modern education system. All of this,

00:20:37.840 the technique has been drained out of it. And our parliament is full of these people who

00:20:42.820 have no technique. It's embarrassing.

00:20:45.040 I mean, ideally, if you master all three parts of the trivia, you will make an argument that

00:20:50.500 somebody gets instantly, i.e. it's so clear that anybody, even a 12-year-old or, you know,

00:20:59.160 whoever was going to get it straight away.

00:21:01.320 Even a Labour Party member.

00:21:01.960 Yeah, even a Labour Party member won't get it straight away. The second thing is that the

00:21:07.360 argument makes sense. It's coherent. It's valid. It's true. And then the third part is you're

00:21:13.100 getting underneath the mind and you're hitting the non-intellectual parts of, which is the

00:21:20.900 majority of how people think and how they're persuaded. And ideally, you do all, and if you

00:21:26.600 can do all three of those things, then, you know, well, like the world is your oyster.

00:21:32.160 You're going to be ahead of a lot of other people. The other thing to say is that, like

00:21:37.360 I was saying, the modern education system tries to do a lot of running before it can

00:21:42.040 walk. And what the Trivium is very good at is building block by block from the foundations

00:21:48.140 where it's like you're building up a toolkit to be able... It's like the difference between,

00:21:55.100 you know, giving a man a fish and teaching a man to fish.

00:22:00.220 Oh, genuinely.

00:22:00.760 Right. And it's like one of those skills that once you've mastered these things, you'll have

00:22:07.160 them forever and it will see you good pretty much in any given setting. And it will help

00:22:13.340 with any other subject, not just English, but any topic.

00:22:18.880 But this, getting back onto the sort of more conspiratorial aspect of it, you can see why

00:22:23.280 if you were thinking, well, I want compliant workers to work in offices, I don't want them

00:22:28.500 having hypercritical skills. I don't want them being able to analyze correctly the world

00:22:34.420 around them. I just want them to be compliant and be technically proficient. And so one of

00:22:39.640 the things I've always wondered is, why do I know what Pythagoras theorem is? Why do I

00:22:42.980 know what this is? I remember being taught it at 14 and thinking, okay, I'm never going

00:22:46.900 to be called upon to use this. And lo and behold, you know, 30 years later, I've never been called

00:22:51.820 upon to use it, but I still know it's A squared plus B squared equals C squared for some reason.

00:22:55.940 And that's the kind of like drone programming that our schooling system has given us at this

00:23:00.860 point. Whereas I had to, you know, luckily enough, I'm fairly smart. So I had to go and find all of

00:23:06.040 this for myself, rather than it being the standard. And you cannot think, well, this has been done on

00:23:12.000 purpose. So anyway, I guess this is a good part to point out that what we're doing now is producing

00:23:17.860 courses. And so we have licensed your Trivium as the first course that we are going to be producing.

00:23:24.200 Now, these courses are not going to be idle. The purpose of these courses is to reconstruct

00:23:30.660 the education you had denied to you. The Trivium will be the first one that we're producing.

00:23:36.720 But Stelios is currently busy writing a second course that will be out very soon,

00:23:40.740 which is about how to lead a good life. Because again, this is one of those things that has just

00:23:46.300 been deliberately, I would say, deprived from people in the modern era. Because it used to be

00:23:53.540 that there was a whole suite of wisdom literature that the ancients had access to is what you should

00:23:59.820 be doing. Because at the moment, oh, you're free, go and do what you want. Well, actions have

00:24:04.560 consequences. What is it you're supposed to be doing? And so Stelios will have a course coming

00:24:08.460 very soon. But for now, we'll focus on the Trivium. Because if I recall correctly, I was the one

00:24:13.500 battering you to write this, wasn't I? Yes. Yeah. Back in, I mean, whenever it was.

00:24:21.880 Yeah, like 2016 or something.

00:24:23.240 Absolutely. Yes. You were talking loud and clear about how something like this needed to be

00:24:29.060 available. One of the things I found when I actually came to do this is that a lot of the

00:24:37.740 textbooks were Victorian, some of them even older. I was telling you just before we came on air that

00:24:45.280 for rhetoric, because it hadn't been taught for so long, I was having to uncover books from the 18th

00:24:51.280 century. And one of the textbooks I was reconstructing this course from was literally

00:24:55.720 falling apart in my eyes like an antique. So there is an extent to which all of these

00:25:04.440 things have to be kind of put back together, rediscovered by us as a generation who basically

00:25:12.900 were denied these fundamental skills. I mean, one of the things I should mention really is that,

00:25:18.960 I mean, I have a PhD. You know, I've taught at the highest level. I've seen...

00:25:26.520 You were a lecturer for many years.

00:25:27.680 Yeah. I've seen students come in to study English who can't write a sentence. These are all people who

00:25:33.400 have A-levels in English literature, by the way, who need to be taught how to write again. But even

00:25:38.740 from my own background, okay, when I was a student, I mean, I'm not just saying this to...

00:25:44.960 I'm not saying this to boast, but when I was an undergraduate, I had the highest grade for 80 years

00:25:52.180 in the college I went to, okay? Then I went on to Oxford.

00:25:55.560 Cline is real.

00:25:56.360 And then I went on to... Well, this is where I'm getting to. Then I went on to Oxford,

00:26:00.040 got a distinction from there, okay? Then I came to do my PhD, and I handed in my first chapter,

00:26:07.040 pleased as punch, you know, cock of the walk. I was, you know, this is it. I was doing the best

00:26:11.700 thing since sliced bread. Came back. It was absolutely covered in red ink. And my supervisor

00:26:17.080 was like, you can't write, can you? I was like, what?

00:26:20.800 I've got a master's in English. What are you talking about?

00:26:23.000 Yeah. I'm the best student ever. What are you talking about? Yeah, you can't write, can you?

00:26:29.000 And then I kind of, it really kind of rocked everything. And I was like, shit, he's right.

00:26:36.180 I can't write. And I had to basically teach myself, again, how to write from the ground up,

00:26:43.600 unlearn all of the terrible habits that have been built up from the education system that I'd had,

00:26:49.780 okay?

00:26:50.400 But you should have been instructed in as a child.

00:26:52.980 As a child. Yeah. This is stuff I should have known from the age of 12. But in fact,

00:26:57.280 the system was rewarding those bad habits all the way through, okay? Until I was literally that late

00:27:03.640 on that I came to realize. But then I realized other things. Okay. I've written all these essays.

00:27:09.700 Okay. Have I ever studied logic? Do I actually know? I'm analyzing arguments, but do I know

00:27:15.280 what an argument is? Do I know how to define a term? Do I know what a premise is? And this is

00:27:22.060 something else that our school system, right? I did the GCSE history and A-level. I remember being

00:27:27.660 asked to compare sources, analyze this source against that source, but we'd never been taught

00:27:34.100 the basic skills of what makes a good argument, what is logical. So you're basically asking kids

00:27:42.480 to do things that they've never been taught to do. And probably the teacher doesn't know how to do it

00:27:52.380 either. They're a product of the modern education system as well. Because I do think this began

00:27:56.880 with the boomers in the 60s, where the education system was changed to deprive them of this. And so

00:28:03.360 my parents, me, and my children are all missing out on this. And you can see that it's being brought

00:28:08.540 back experimentally. It's like, oh, well, you know, the, well, what a surprise if we experimentally

00:28:15.060 bring it back. All the kids are doing brilliantly. It's like, yeah, so who's held accountable for this?

00:28:20.380 Who can we hold accountable for ruining our education?

00:28:24.240 I mean, the analogy I'd make is that it's like being sent out to play football, right? But you

00:28:30.200 know, like all those like little tricks that Messi and Ronaldo used to do, like the flip overs and

00:28:33.980 stuff. It's like sending somebody out, but you've only taught them how to do the fancy tricks, but

00:28:38.100 you've never taught them how to do like just the simple side pass, the little A to B, the, you know,

00:28:43.960 the really basic things of positioning. It's exactly like that. And we're sending thousands,

00:28:49.760 millions of kids out into the world, having never taught them the fundamental ABCs.

00:28:57.380 So yeah, I mean, when it comes to these courses, I really believe not just for 12 year olds. Okay.

00:29:03.520 I mean, some 12 year olds may even, if they're used to the sort of work they'd be doing, they

00:29:08.980 might do these courses and think, oh, this is a bit of a step up. But I would recommend this for

00:29:13.420 anybody who never did this stuff. Oh yeah. In school at any point, even if you're a PhD, you

00:29:20.180 know, it's funny. I was on Twitter the other day. Did you see that one? I'm a PhD. You don't need to

00:29:27.640 tell me what median is. It means average. Oh my God. Did you see that one? No, I didn't.

00:29:32.480 Yeah. So that was like. Median as I understand is the middle point. It's the middle point. It's not

00:29:36.500 the average. But so we're, we're now, we're now producing people who are on Twitter saying,

00:29:41.180 I've got a PhD. Don't try to explain to me. You know, so they've got the, they've got the

00:29:45.440 letters, they've got the status, but they still don't even understand the absolute basics when

00:29:51.200 it comes to argumentation, writing, and, uh, and of course rhetoric, which we're going to

00:29:56.700 write to talk about. So, you know, you know, the, the reason, the reason that I began thinking

00:30:00.440 about this way back, and this must've been like 2016, 2017. I remember doing a video for

00:30:04.340 my Sargon channel where I was just, I was a bit drunk and I was just rambling at, look,

00:30:07.980 we are losing the quality of people that we used to produce. Cause it used to be when

00:30:12.700 someone from Britain arrived on a continent on the other side of the world, that was an

00:30:16.640 important thing. Like the, sorry, you've got like an educated Englishman who has now stepped

00:30:21.920 foot in like Malaysia or something. Oh, this guy's going to be able to do things. He's going

00:30:26.040 to be able to understand things and make things happen that otherwise wouldn't have been

00:30:29.060 able to happen. This is an important and impressive person who's traveled across the world

00:30:32.940 and he is going to make a difference. And so, and we used to produce generation after

00:30:37.260 generation of these people. These were the men who staffed the British empire and made

00:30:42.080 it the largest imperial project ever and made it respectable and worthy. And all I was thinking

00:30:48.460 at the time is just, we are just not producing those kinds of men anymore. And I, at the time

00:30:52.700 I had no idea why, obviously I just could see that we were not, cause I was, you know, researching

00:30:56.620 and just watching old things and thinking, why are we just such worse communicators? Why

00:31:02.280 are we just worse intellectually than these people? And of course it's because they did

00:31:06.540 the trivium and we didn't. And so I've sat there and I've done your trivium and I've,

00:31:12.980 one thing that you get is it humbles you because you realize, oh, I didn't know this and I should

00:31:19.320 have known this. And you can already see where you yourself, where you think about things you've

00:31:23.880 done recently or whatever. And you're like, hmm, I shouldn't have done it like that. I

00:31:27.380 should have done it this other way. And it's one of those things where it's like, right,

00:31:30.760 okay, no, it is absolutely true that we are going to just have to retake our own education.

00:31:36.160 This was stolen from us.

00:31:38.100 Absolutely. I mean, and one of the things you see, the knock-on benefits are so great because

00:31:42.960 the key thing is not even just writing and communication, it's clarity in your own thinking.

00:31:50.340 Okay. And this is, I mean, having taught hundreds, thousands of students over the course of my

00:31:55.940 life, you can always tell if somebody doesn't really know what they're talking about. They're

00:32:02.740 just writing words or they're just trying to fill up the space. Okay. And it all comes through

00:32:08.460 as a quality of your writing. Foundations of writing will actually force you to think about

00:32:15.900 what you're saying in a sentence to make it make sense. And I mean, one of the things we can talk

00:32:23.140 about later is even the order of the words in the sentence, subject, verb, object, subject, verb,

00:32:30.940 object. And this is one of those things that once you start spotting it, you'll start seeing how

00:32:35.040 politicians, for example, hide the pronoun. Okay. So rather than saying, I did this, they'll say

00:32:41.840 things like, oh, well, mistakes were made. Yes. Okay. Well, you're now hiding the doer of the

00:32:47.540 action. If you think, well, every sentence needs a doer of an action, you're already, it's, so it's

00:32:53.960 automatically making like the world more real. Okay. Cause it's concretizing it.

00:33:00.300 But also this shows you how the politicians are getting away with it. If, if the, the people they're

00:33:05.120 talking to have been denied an education in grammar, well, it's not self-evident to them to look

00:33:11.020 for the hidden pronoun in the sentence that gives the politician plausible deniability and cover

00:33:16.400 for their own actions, for the things that they've done. And you wonder why we've got such

00:33:19.840 poor quality politicians and they keep getting away with it. Well, it's because the public can't really

00:33:24.460 see what's happening because of this. And it's all down to this. I think, I really think so.

00:33:30.020 So basically live now at courses.lotuses.com is the trivium. And this, I'm very, very, very,

00:33:37.700 very pleased with all of this. Um, but the, uh, so you can buy the courses individually if you are

00:33:42.720 interested only in logic, rhetoric, or writing. I mean, for example, I did logic during my degree

00:33:48.300 in philosophy. So I actually didn't do your foundations of logic course. Cause I looked,

00:33:52.060 I looked at the syllabus and was like, well, this is exactly the same as my philosophy degree syllabus.

00:33:56.080 Did you do definitions of terms when you were, uh, probably I have to go back and check my notes.

00:34:01.080 I'm skeptical of that. Um, I, I, I look, I didn't, I just didn't have time to do it in preparation

00:34:06.780 because so one of the things I think is important to stress with this is that this is not just you

00:34:12.040 watching YouTube videos, right? What this is, there is an hour long lecture for each one. Then you have

00:34:16.960 all of the, the materials that go with it. And then you have a series of like examination style

00:34:21.660 questions that you yourself have to write. This is not just watching entertainment. What this is,

00:34:27.140 is improving yourself because you are not what you should have been because of what the 20th century

00:34:32.860 has done to us. That's literally that simple. Uh, and so, yeah, I, I had to spend a day going

00:34:38.640 through each one of these, uh, and just in preparation to be able to talk about now and

00:34:42.940 already, I mean, I'm going to go back through them because there are definitely the writing

00:34:46.320 thing in particular, cause I do a lot of writing myself. So it's like, yeah, no, I really should.

00:34:50.060 I really should be more buffed up on this by a long way. I'm reasonably confident about my rhetoric,

00:34:55.280 but the rest of it, the writing in particular, I personally found a lot of good in. Um, so this

00:35:01.320 is definitely what I would recommend. I know if you do take it, I would say that the order you

00:35:07.420 should do them in is, is the order that you see. I would, I would do writing first, then logic,

00:35:12.640 then rhetoric. The reason I say that is because you remember I was just talking about walking before

00:35:18.600 you can run. The writing and the logic is almost like walk, learning how to walk rhetoric. You're

00:35:24.760 getting into a jog or you may even be running like, you know, there are some, you kind of need

00:35:30.020 to know the rules before you break the rules and, and rhetoric doesn't always play by the rules of

00:35:35.440 logic or even good grammar. So yeah, but it is, it is, it is also one of the most fun parts. I have

00:35:40.580 to say it's the fun part. I do. It was the bit that I went to first, but the, the rhetoric is more

00:35:46.740 fun, but anyway, Carl, you need to, you need to have your roughage, eat your Brussels sprouts and your

00:35:54.200 veg before you move to the delights of the plate and eat the meat. That is true. There's rhetorics

00:35:58.880 like the meat. And that is exactly what I explained to my children, but I still don't do it. But

00:36:03.220 seriously though, this is, honestly, I'm, I'm very proud to be able to have this as our sort of

00:36:08.960 flagship course because I, I've, I've, and you guys know, watching the podcast, I've been complaining

00:36:13.560 about the state of education forever and it's not coming back for us, right? If you're an adult

00:36:18.600 watching this, which undoubtedly you will be, you aren't getting this from somewhere else, right?

00:36:23.080 That, that, you know, no one's going to provide this to you. Uh, you should have had this when

00:36:26.780 you were a child. This was taken away from you. And the thing is in your schools at the

00:36:30.060 moment, I know a lot of you are going to be dads. My kids are going to be doing this when

00:36:33.680 my oldest son reaches 12. Sorry, son, we're sitting down and we're doing the trivium because

00:36:37.840 you need to know, and I will have to be able to be the one who tests him in a homeschool on

00:36:43.780 this course.

00:36:44.460 The other thing I'll say is that with this course, no wokery of course, right? But also

00:36:51.600 no corners cut whatsoever. I was literally going to source, you know, what is it that

00:36:58.960 the Victorians did? And I didn't really dumb it down, if that makes any sense, like for

00:37:06.120 a modern audience. Cause like why, you know, the whole point is that you have to learn.

00:37:11.040 So there are a little few parts of it, especially when you're doing the logic, they get a bit

00:37:15.280 esoteric where you have to like start learning these weird words to try to remember the order

00:37:20.100 of the, uh, the order of the premises and so on. But these are like actually how they

00:37:27.600 would have done it because a lot of the sorts of education they had in the Victorian time,

00:37:32.060 they did a lot of drumming, you know, you just have to learn this through repetition.

00:37:35.740 And one of the things I wanted to build in is, um, by making the tests at the end, like

00:37:43.640 you have to, I was pretty impressed that you got through them in a, in a, because you have

00:37:47.460 to like ace, you can't get like five out of 10 or something. You have to get full marks

00:37:54.260 basically because it's testing. Do you know this? And there's no shortcut. You either have

00:37:59.220 to know it or you don't, you know? So that's another thing that I wanted to try to get a little

00:38:03.940 bit of that kind of Victorian strictness in there. If that makes any sense.

00:38:08.660 But I mean, and this is another, another point. This is the point I was making when I was talking

00:38:12.280 about adolescence, but the strictness is actually a necessary guardrail in order to keep you on the

00:38:17.740 correct path. You just have to have it. And so like, like I said, the, these, this is not you

00:38:21.760 watching YouTube videos. This is you doing active work, but the point is to make you something that

00:38:27.340 you weren't before you did it. This is a way of genuinely leveling up yourself. And it genuinely

00:38:33.960 is in every aspect of life. If you, you will find yourself understanding things quicker than your

00:38:39.480 boss. You will understand why your boss is talking nonsense or why the people around you just are not

00:38:45.120 able to properly formulate and articulate a correct argument to things. And these are all things that

00:38:50.720 you should have had as a child. So this is currently live, like I said, at courses.lotuses.com.

00:38:55.800 And because I've managed to drag AA into the studio, we are also going to be doing a free

00:39:03.040 webinar. So this will be at 7pm on Thursday, which will be today, of course. This will be linked in

00:39:10.560 the description. So come and follow it. We will be live at 7pm where me and him, he'll be explaining

00:39:15.800 the depths of this to us. And I will be the normie asking normie questions and we'll take of course

00:39:21.380 a Q&A from the chat. So you will be able to ask direct questions on why you need this. And I

00:39:28.320 genuinely think we do need this. And I'm not just saying this because, you know, obviously I've been

00:39:33.000 had the Trivium, you know, for a while. I have had people who've taken it and been like, yeah,

00:39:40.000 I took this and my grades improved or I aced my exams or I even had one car. It helped me get a date.

00:39:46.640 Look, I mean, like this is what the thing's for. I had one car saying, help me get a date because

00:39:53.700 she wrote back and said, you write such beautiful English. Oh, really? Yeah. It made him stand out

00:39:59.420 on OKCupid or whatever it was. This is the point though, isn't it? Because what these skills do

00:40:04.740 is give you certainty about yourself, right? You are actually now the master of the things happening

00:40:10.480 around you. And that really, honestly, that's what women look for, frankly, is a man who's got mastery

00:40:15.380 over the surroundings around him. And so, honestly, I can't recommend this enough. Like I said,

00:40:21.440 it'll be 7pm today, free webinar. Go and find the link, come and join, and we will see you there.

00:40:29.520 You've got to sign up with your name and email and we will send you the thing for 7pm today.

00:40:34.500 Right, so let's move on to Julius Caesar, who actually is a famous spellcaster. And people don't

00:40:42.240 realize that, in fact, many people in the ancient world were famous spellcasters. And a lot of people

00:40:47.560 are like, well, hang on a second, what are you talking about? He's just saying he was likable,

00:40:50.600 because it's well known that likable people are, of course, more successful. And this

00:40:53.720 is 90% of politics, as we cover politics all the time. This is why Boris Johnson is a genuine threat

00:41:00.100 to Nigel Farage still, even though no one wants to talk about it. But Boris could probably come back

00:41:04.320 and upend the apple cart, because people like Boris. Boris is a good speaker, and he's just affable,

00:41:10.200 amiable, and this is an important characteristic. But the thing is, you might not be likable. So

00:41:15.280 what's your second option? Well, your option is to be persuasive. And that is also very

00:41:20.400 important. If you can construct clever arguments that actually are, well, yeah, fair enough,

00:41:24.360 that makes sense, then you can get where you want to go in life. Because 90%, again, of everything

00:41:32.000 is just persuading people that they want the same thing. And this is what Julius Caesar did.

00:41:38.020 This is why Julius Caesar was able to get into the position that he was in to cross the Rubicon,

00:41:44.020 become the leader of the Populares, and win the Civil War, and merely become the first citizen of

00:41:51.220 right. I mean, I'm not going to call him anything worse than that. But the point, as they make in

00:41:56.240 this, is that, look, rhetoric is persuasion, but not just any persuasion. It is persuasion towards the

00:42:01.800 truth. And so we know about Julius Caesar studying rhetoric, because Cicero was also studying rhetoric

00:42:08.840 under a famous rhetorician called Molo Rhodes when Cicero was over there as well. Because this is what

00:42:15.580 they used to consider rhetoric to be, a kind of magic, a kind of persuasive talent. In fact, because

00:42:22.540 they were the ones who invented the trivia, they gave themselves the ability to properly construct

00:42:29.520 sentences using grammar, properly construct arguments using logic, and then properly deliver them using

00:42:35.120 rhetoric. Now, if you've ever been to a job interview, this is a supremely important skill that you absolutely

00:42:44.000 need. And I, as someone who has interviewed many people for jobs now, man, can I tell that a lot of people have

00:42:51.180 not been taught even the very basics of this skill?

00:42:55.700 Yeah, I mean, the thing is, is that this word magic is very interesting. Now, I was a Shakespeare

00:43:02.880 scholar, or a slammer Shakespeare scholar. In Shakespeare's time, they genuinely believed, inherited

00:43:10.440 from classics, that words had magical power. Yes. There is a truth to that. Because if you say

00:43:22.260 something with conviction, if you say it with authority, if you vibrate it even, right? I mean,

00:43:30.240 if you watch like a film, like Lord of the Rings or something, and listen to Gandalf's voice of power,

00:43:36.360 or Saruman, or Christopher Lee. Or just listen to Christopher Lee talk, right? That booming voice.

00:43:43.320 There is something in that, that gets beyond the rational brain. But also there is a power in,

00:43:50.360 this is going to sound a little bit strange, Carl, but if you repeat something often enough,

00:43:54.480 with enough conviction, you can bring it into reality. Okay? And I mean, there are, like,

00:44:00.660 I've said this before, Donald Trump is kind of a bit of a wizard, right? He...

00:44:07.100 Meme magic is real.

00:44:08.260 He, just through the power of words, through repeating something often enough,

00:44:12.780 has brought things into reality that seemed impossible only a few years ago.

00:44:18.780 So just as a quick thing here, I genuinely didn't believe in meme magic when in, you know, 2016,

00:44:25.040 it was, you know, we're going to build a wall, make Mexo pay for it. I thought this was a big joke.

00:44:28.300 And you got the posters online who were just like, no, no, no, this is going to happen.

00:44:32.040 And I was like, it's not going to happen. And then all of this stuff happened. I was like, okay.

00:44:35.200 And again, come sort of now, I'm just like, okay, no, there's, there is definitely a power in it.

00:44:42.160 And this is what the ancients knew. In fact, they, they were well aware, again,

00:44:45.900 as this, this article discusses, of the danger of rhetoric. This is a power over other men.

00:44:51.580 This is something that itself was considered, obviously, it could be used for great good,

00:44:56.540 but like with any power, it can be used for great evil. And I, and honestly, I think this is one of

00:45:01.620 the reasons that they just don't want to teach this anymore. It's like, well, do we want an active

00:45:06.180 intelligent population who can use a power against us? No, if I was the managerial regime,

00:45:12.660 the last thing I would want is strong rhetoricians running around doing anything.

00:45:17.620 And it is worth mentioning as well, that this is, it's a double-edged sword. Okay. So yes,

00:45:22.000 it can be empowering. Yes, it can, but it can work the other way. Let's pretend the person who's

00:45:27.300 always putting themselves down or a person who's always saying, oh, well, I can't do that. Okay.

00:45:32.120 If you repeat it often enough, self-fulfilling prophecy, you make it, you actually make, you make

00:45:37.120 it real. Okay. Now this may sound a bit strange to some people, but there's a deep truth. There is a

00:45:43.120 deep truth to it. Um, and you know, even sometimes when you're joking, when you say things like,

00:45:50.380 I mean, in my darker moments, Carl, I've often wondered like, should I have mean Tony Blair is

00:45:55.580 the dark Lord? I actually worry about that too. I really do worry about it. Have I, have I brought

00:46:02.220 this into reality? Cause it's, it's kind of weird how that happens. Possibly in small part, you know what I

00:46:07.060 mean? But you, you are right about the, uh, the positivity aspect as well. And the sort of self-belief

00:46:11.940 again, like Julius Caesar is a great example of this. When he was captured by the Cilician

00:46:15.860 pirates, they're like, okay, yeah, we'll, we'll do it for like 50 dinars or something.

00:46:19.400 He's like, no, it needs to be double that, triple that. How dare you only ransom me for

00:46:23.260 this petty amount? And they're like, okay, fine. And of course they, uh, they raised it.

00:46:27.880 He raised it, came back and crucified the lot of them. The point is self-belief is important.

00:46:32.680 And it, the, the, the pirates themselves were won over completely by Julius Caesar's ability

00:46:37.220 to charm them with his words. Because of course these were just like backwards tribals.

00:46:41.940 We were living like on the coast of Asia who just like, okay, yeah, we can get a boat and

00:46:45.320 we can catch people and they'll give us money for it. Like literally like Somalians now,

00:46:48.380 right? If you can charm them with your words, they gave him a very nice captivity. Like Julius

00:46:54.380 Caesar enjoyed his captivity because he was just able to be charming and they liked having

00:46:58.060 them around. And then he came back and crucified the lot of them. So you, you can see that the,

00:47:03.300 as he says in here, look, it's as if rhetoric itself acted as some magic spell set by a warlock

00:47:08.240 on the listeners to coerce them into thinking terrible thoughts. Uh, if, if it's been used

00:47:13.540 for evil, yeah, that's how it comes across. But then conversely, if it's used for good,

00:47:19.000 it comes across as heroic. I mean, we'll, we'll get onto Churchill a bit later, but Churchill

00:47:24.020 employed a lot of very powerful rhetoric in the defense of Britain and the allies during

00:47:29.660 world war two, whether you like or love, love or hate Churchill, you can't deny his power.

00:47:34.980 And Boris Johnson's very much in the same vein.

00:47:37.700 There are extraordinary examples in history as well, Carl. One example is Pope Gregory VII,

00:47:44.200 right? Where there was an army assembled like to take on the Pope, right? They marched on the

00:47:51.200 Vatican. They got there. They were red. They were, there was an army there. Pope had nothing.

00:47:56.080 He was just a man. And it's like he melted their brains when he got, and they just stopped and

00:48:02.160 knelt. Yeah. Okay. Yes. There's faith involved. There's other things, but it's just remarkable.

00:48:07.300 Well, another great example of that power is Napoleon's return from exile during the hundred

00:48:11.660 days where they sent Ney in the army to come and accept him. And he just walks forward as

00:48:16.040 chess players. Will you shoot on your emperor? And they all know bent the knee, long live

00:48:19.960 the emperor. And it's like, there we go. Napoleon's off. And he, all he had to do is walk up to

00:48:23.720 them and speak to them. It's all the power is all of that. And of course he had the education

00:48:28.760 that we, that we're talking about not having. And then I want to give a great example of

00:48:33.280 my favorite piece of rhetoric. So I, I, I spent my twenties and early thirties just listening

00:48:38.600 to audio books of ancient writers, uh, talking about things. One of my favorite was Thucydides'

00:48:43.460 History of the Peloponnesian War. And I absolutely love Athens. I love Athens because Athens is

00:48:47.740 mad, right? Athens is the maddest place in the world. Everyone thinks, oh, the school of Athens.

00:48:52.060 No, no, no, no. The Athenians were mental and they wanted war all, all over the place.

00:48:56.980 Right. And so at one point they're like, shall we invade Syracuse and Sicily and take over

00:49:02.160 Sicily? It's like, okay, you are in the middle of a war with Sparta. Don't you have more pressing

00:49:05.440 things? I'm like, ah, we can do this. And so there's a debate on the Pnyx, the, you know,

00:49:10.080 the ancient forum of democracy. And here you have Alcibiades, who's completely in favor of

00:49:15.460 the war. He's like basically an ancient Greek version of Milo Yiannopoulos. Uh, he's a total

00:49:19.880 playboy, but totally rhetorically strong. And then on the other, on the other side, you've

00:49:23.760 got the stuffy Nicias and Nicias is like, no, no, this can't be done. We definitely shouldn't

00:49:27.960 do this. And so I'm just going to read a bit of Alcibiades rhetoric, just so you can see

00:49:31.700 how much more powerful their speaking was. Right. So Alcibiades says in this state of

00:49:36.880 things, what reason can we give to ourselves for holding back? Or what excuse can we offer

00:49:41.600 our allies in Sicily for not helping them? There are confederates. We are bound to assist

00:49:46.000 them without objecting that they have not assisted us. We did not take them into alliance to

00:49:50.740 have them help us in Hellas, but so they might annoy our enemies in Sicily to prevent them

00:49:55.120 from coming here and attacking us. Men do not rest content with parrying the attacks of a

00:50:00.540 superior, but often strike the first blow to prevent the attack being made. Be convinced

00:50:05.520 then that we shall augment our power at home by this adventure abroad. Let us make the expedition

00:50:11.300 and so humble the pride of the Peloponnesians by sailing off to Sicily and letting them see

00:50:16.720 how little we care for the peace that we are now enjoying. And at the same time, we shall either

00:50:21.980 become masters, as we very easily may, of the whole of Hellas through the accession of the Sicilian

00:50:27.440 Hellenes, or in any case ruin the Syracusans, to no small advantage of ourselves or our allies.

00:50:34.680 And so Thucydides said, well, such were the words of Alcibiades. And as you can see in that,

00:50:39.800 giving that on a podium in front of the Athenian men assembled, you can see how this would be

00:50:44.920 highly persuasive. And by the end of this speech, it's much longer, but that's just an excerpt.

00:50:48.580 By the end of the speech, the Athenians are like, yeah, this is brilliant, right? We are a powerful

00:50:53.200 empire. Syracuse, who cares about Syracuse? We're just going to get, you know, however many men,

00:50:57.760 10,000 men, 20,000, 100 ships. We're going to sail over there and smash them. And so Nicias gets up

00:51:02.740 and he realizes, oh, everyone's blood is up now. Alcibiades is an amazing speaker. I guess I'm just going

00:51:07.660 to have to come out and be like, well, I mean, if you were going to do it, you'd have to take double the

00:51:11.380 number of men and double the number of ships. It'd be really difficult. And Alcibiades just

00:51:15.620 gets up and it's just like, done. And everyone's like, brilliant. Yeah. And so Nicias, he has

00:51:19.360 rhetorically brought him into a trap. He has brought everyone's blood up and all Nicias can do,

00:51:24.200 he can't calm them down. All he can do is say, well, you would need much more than you've got

00:51:27.580 access to here. And so Nicias essentially is tricked into pulling a coup de grace on his own argument,

00:51:34.540 you know, promising even more. And so suddenly everyone, and then they go off,

00:51:38.120 they invade Syracuse and it fails completely. Uh, but the, but the point being is you can see how

00:51:43.340 as a master of rhetoric, Alcibiades was trained as a, as a young man to arrive at this point,

00:51:49.740 to be able to persuade an entire crowd, an entire city, the, the, the seat of the cockpit of an empire

00:51:54.500 to embark on the, on the, on the adventure that he wanted to go on. And this is all what the point

00:52:01.280 of rhetoric is. This is why it was considered a form of magic that, that moves men's minds and souls.

00:52:06.780 Absolutely. Yeah. Um, I mean, we, we should mention it's not, so we, we, we've talked about

00:52:15.360 the power of words. Um, there are other non, non-verbal elements that are part of the performance.

00:52:25.920 Hence me moving my arms here.

00:52:27.300 Yes. Right. And so there are, there, I mean, you, we talked about Caesar. There's, I mean,

00:52:32.540 there are all sorts of kind of hidden persuasion nodes. We could say like authority, for example,

00:52:39.360 you know, they've done, um,

00:52:41.120 Well, let me, let me, uh, cause I, I know when I did your course, as I said, I noticed that you,

00:52:46.740 you lent on Caldini's six principles of persuasion.

00:52:50.120 Yes, absolutely. Because they've done like, for example, you see these all the time on

00:52:56.540 an advert. I don't know if they do that so much these days, but you know, when we were

00:53:00.280 growing up, it'd be like a personal advert, buy it. But they put the guy in the doctor's

00:53:05.160 jacket. Science has shown that this, um, you know, and I wasn't at the Milgram experiments

00:53:11.940 as well, where it's just the guy in the, in the white jacket and they'll just rank up

00:53:16.420 about electricity. I mean, we lived here in COVID. You see how much power the idea of

00:53:22.380 the expert, the idea of the guy with authority carries. And for a lot of people, that is enough.

00:53:30.400 Oh yeah.

00:53:30.780 Just the authority alone. I can imagine the authority a man like Caesar would have had,

00:53:34.780 you know, could have moved mountains with it. Um, I mean, there are, there are other persuasion.

00:53:40.800 I mean, one of them is just really simple to people like you, you have to be likable,

00:53:45.660 you know, and some of those things are difficult to quantify. I mean, say one about Tony, he was

00:53:53.660 kind of likable. Gordon Brown couldn't smile famously.

00:53:57.940 No, you didn't want to look at Gordon Brown.

00:53:59.920 It's kind of pretty much the same ideas, a little bit to the left maybe, but you know,

00:54:05.460 some people just don't have it. Other people do. Um, Trump is likable. He's kind of likable

00:54:11.780 guy. Kamala Harris, not so much.

00:54:14.120 This is why CNN stopped broadcasting his, his just talks where he was just, you know,

00:54:18.380 I'm in front of a stage, I'm on a stage talking to the audience for an hour. Cause if they

00:54:22.220 just let Trump talk off the top of his head for an hour, people come away going, yeah,

00:54:26.320 I quite enjoyed that.

00:54:27.080 It's just funny. It's like watching a New York standup comedian or something, you know?

00:54:30.080 And so they just stopped broadcasting his campaign because it was like, no, it's going to

00:54:33.780 it's going to win our own. So, so that's two of them. Uh, and then, well, one of them

00:54:39.880 is something called social proof, which is, I mean, it's as simple as you've got to buy

00:54:45.220 something on Amazon. Oh, a thousand people have given up one star review. I don't buy

00:54:51.220 that thing. What's wrong with it then? You know, um, so that, that this is the social

00:54:55.540 proof you're looking for the fact that other people, is anybody else doing this? Now, some

00:55:02.080 people aren't persuaded. Like for me, I'm not persuaded by the crowd. I don't really

00:55:06.160 care. If everybody goes that way, I don't care. I'll go the other way.

00:55:09.780 So I agree with that. But, but when I'm buying things off Amazon, the social proof is really

00:55:13.440 important to me. But a lot of people are like, this is terrible. A lot of people won't do

00:55:17.020 anything until they see that social proof. Cause I'm one of those people are kind of like

00:55:22.000 heard. Well, people are heard animals when I'm buying things off Amazon, at least. Um, so

00:55:27.400 that's a, so there was that one. Then reciprocity, scarcity, authority. So

00:55:32.580 reciprocity is I'm giving you something. You give me, you're, you're giving something

00:55:38.320 to me money. Say I'm giving something back to you. So it's a fair exchange. Um, you

00:55:44.140 know, pretty simple. And then what were the other two? Uh, consistency and commitment.

00:55:50.040 Okay. Uh, well, so consistency is this is basically I can, you can, you can have trust

00:55:56.800 in this person cause they're always going to be there. They're going to be, you know,

00:55:59.960 if they say they're going to be there on Tuesday, they're going to be there on Tuesdays.

00:56:02.640 That's why flip-flopping is such a crime in politics. You've got to maintain a consistent

00:56:06.740 through line.

00:56:08.440 Yeah. Or like, I mean, say this channel, if you say you're going to go out at 1 PM every

00:56:13.300 day and you decide, I don't know, I'm going to take a month off for no reason. People

00:56:18.080 will be like, Oh, hold on a second. I can't, they're not consistent, you know? So it's

00:56:21.480 a pretty simple thing. And then the last thing is scarcity, which is basically like, I'm telling

00:56:26.740 you a secret. This is forbidden knowledge. This is forbidden knowledge that has been,

00:56:30.940 uh, you know, kept away from you by dark elites type thing.

00:56:36.840 Ironically, this is actually what has happened. I mean, it is, it is actually, it is actually

00:56:41.080 what has happened, but that's not, that's not even, that's just genuinely what has happened

00:56:45.440 at this point. You know, you arouse the curiosity factor and it's a basic law of economics.

00:56:50.900 Of course, the more scarce something is, the higher its value is.

00:56:54.720 Yep. And it's obviously true. Uh, so anyway, like, uh, we said of earlier, uh, the Trivium

00:57:00.780 is available on courses.lotuses.com, uh, go and get it. This, you, you will absolutely not

00:57:07.180 regret doing this. Like I said, we are not offering you something easy. This is not something you

00:57:10.660 are just going to watch. This is work. You are going to improve yourself, but you will

00:57:15.040 be glad that you did at the end of it. And when, once you've got it, you can go back to

00:57:19.280 it as many times as you like, of course, you know, it's yours forever. Uh, and like I said

00:57:23.040 at 7 PM today, uh, that is, uh, British time, uh, which is 2 PM New York time and 11 AM LA

00:57:31.500 time. Uh, we will be doing a free webinar. So go and sign up, uh, to the webinar. The link

00:57:37.480 will be in the description. Uh, just put your name in, in your email and we will send

00:57:40.860 you a link to the webinar zoom call. Uh, and we will be doing a little lecture to explain

00:57:46.300 the general, um, essence of each particular course and then doing a Q and a with you.

00:57:50.560 So you can learn as much about it before you think of actually jumping in. And that will

00:57:55.960 be, like I said, 7 PM today, British time, 2 PM or 11 AM New York and LA time. Uh, right.

00:58:01.680 Let's move on to the, the final part of this that I personally, this has been a bugbear of

00:58:06.380 mine for about a year now. And I don't know how I got onto it, but it became very apparent

00:58:11.660 to me that English is by far the best language, right? You wouldn't be able to invent a language

00:58:16.380 as good as English. It's so obviously the case that this has been organically produced

00:58:21.600 by a fortuitous series of historical circumstances to produce what again, like foreign authors

00:58:28.920 will say, Oh, English is the best language. Right? So this is a, an Argentinian fiction writer

00:58:34.360 telling William F. Buckley why English is much better than his native Spanish.

00:58:38.640 Well, like I've done most of my reading in English, I find English far finer language

00:58:43.640 than, than, than, than Spanish. Why? Well, there are many reasons. Firstly, in a,

00:58:49.640 firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. It goes to registers. For example,

00:58:57.360 for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words do not mean exactly the same. For example,

00:59:04.360 if I say regal, they're not exactly the same thing as saying, saying kingly. But if I say

00:59:09.360 fraternal, they're not saying brotherly. Or dark and obscure. Those, those words are different.

00:59:14.640 It would make all the difference, speaking for example, of the Holy Spirit. It would make

00:59:18.640 all the difference in the word in the poem. If I wrote about the Holy Spirit, not of the

00:59:21.640 Holy Ghost. Since ghost is a fine dark Saxon word, while spirit is a light, Latin word.

00:59:27.640 Latin word. So I love this distinction. And this, this is something that as soon as you start thinking

00:59:33.560 like this, you realize, oh, I use a lot of Latin words, actually. And, and this is one of the, um,

00:59:39.720 curses of modernity. So it became apparent when I was doing my philosophy degree, that the, you,

00:59:43.960 you learn about the positivist movement, the logical positivists through the beginning of the,

00:59:48.120 sort of end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, who wanted to make a language that

00:59:52.040 was devoid of metaphysics. Now in English, what this means is a language that is purely scientific and the

00:59:57.480 scientific terminology in English is Latin. The, the genuine human terminology is all Saxon.

01:00:03.560 Uh, and so what, um, it, it turned out that by the 1950s, this had burned out because it just

01:00:08.360 wasn't possible to have a metaphysically pure language, one that didn't have it. I mean, just

01:00:13.240 the, the very word I is a metaphysically loaded question. As in, what does I refer to? Is it referring

01:00:19.800 to my body or is it referring to my consciousness or the concept of a person who is unique in place

01:00:25.560 and time and denoted in every possible universe? And then suddenly you realize that even if, if,

01:00:30.680 if I can't be meta, under described in a way that isn't metaphysical, then this whole movement is

01:00:36.520 gone. Right. And so by the, by the 1950s, the scholars had worked out, yeah, this is probably

01:00:40.120 nonsense, but the, the scientific revolution carried on and the sciencization of our language

01:00:45.720 is everywhere. Now you'll notice. And if you start looking for this, people are using Latinate words,

01:00:51.000 where the good Germanic word would do. A great example of this, uh, in fact, we'll, we'll get to

01:00:56.600 here, right? This was a great post that I found and, uh, we're going to have to scroll down,

01:01:01.720 it's because it's too big, right? And this is a great post that I found and this really summarizes,

01:01:07.320 right? So it says, English has a cool built-in heuristic for detecting bullshits. Most of the nouns

01:01:13.000 are, and verbs are Latin, Greek, or Germanic in origin. If Germanic, the things being discussed are

01:01:18.280 probably real physical actions and things. Tree, walk, cow, shit, fall, wood, buy, go, whatever.

01:01:24.840 If they're Latin or Greek, caution is advised. Concept, information, imply, connotate, equity,

01:01:30.840 liberty, diversity, oppress, empower, persecute, periphery, center, idea, entirely, all these sort

01:01:35.880 of things. They're, they're all airy words where it's like, okay, there are many interpretations of

01:01:39.720 these words and they could be used to conceal things. Uh, and, uh, he says Germanic words are the ones

01:01:45.640 we needed in 1065 and have never stopped needing. Words for, real words for real things. Latin and

01:01:51.160 Greek words are the ones the Norman French aristocracy felt lost without, or philosophers

01:01:55.560 and scientists felt the need to borrow from the ancients or make up. And this is why, like, you know,

01:01:59.800 the name of dinosaurs is always some, you know, extraneous weird Greek loan word compound that you

01:02:06.840 can't pronounce, you know? Otherwise it'd be, you know, armored spiked dinosaur would be, you know,

01:02:11.640 what the ankylosaurus was called or whatever, right? Uh, and so this is a very interesting

01:02:16.280 distinction because as he points out here, it's not that they're all vapor, it's just good to keep

01:02:20.440 that in mind. If you're asking yourself, is this bullshit? First ask yourself, is there a way to

01:02:25.640 express this without a lot of Latin and Greek? And if the answer's no, you can be at the very least,

01:02:30.920 it's not lindy. So here's an example, misinformation. We have Germanic words that appear to cover this

01:02:36.280 concept just fine. Lie and wrong. Now, which one do you feel more safe using? When, when, when someone

01:02:44.120 comes out and says, this is misinformation, right? So you're not saying it's a lie. So you're not saying

01:02:48.760 it's wrong. You're saying there's something else attached to this, which is a great observation.

01:02:54.600 Those words don't, those won't do because misinformation doesn't mean wrong. It means

01:02:58.040 heresy. It means that there's some kind of orthodoxy that the misinformation is attacking,

01:03:04.600 even though it's not the misinformation. The, the, the thing that you're referring to,

01:03:09.640 even though it's not a lie and it's not wrong because it wouldn't be accurate to say

01:03:12.920 that's a lie because it very firmly grounds it in yes or no. Whereas this is very airy,

01:03:18.840 has blurred edges. You don't know as maybe, I mean, misinformation, what does that mean?

01:03:23.000 You know, they get malinformation. It's even more sort of a fruity. And so you've got the

01:03:28.520 institutional Latin of the judicial legal domain of experts. You don't need a master's degree to

01:03:34.360 know what is and isn't a lie, which is of course, old English. What's right? Old English. What's wrong?

01:03:39.640 Old English, which means that they can't use a real word without looking absurd. They have to read the

01:03:44.360 liturgical languages. I love the use of that. Liturgical languages. Exactly right. Latin being the

01:03:49.640 language of the church. And so when we say, oh, the experts are taking on a new priestly class.

01:03:54.920 Yeah. And they have their own liturgical language, actually. That's how you know they're lying. And

01:04:01.000 so he said, you know, he points out the look and that's how you know they're lying. Every word in

01:04:05.240 the sentence is old English. And so this is why it's not good for the Latins on the continent. Now,

01:04:11.000 that's not to say that, you know, Latin in its context is bad or anything like that. You know,

01:04:15.400 the Latin languages are fine. It's just when it's being used in Anglo-Saxon, in Old English,

01:04:20.120 in the English language, this is an important thing you should think about. Because actually,

01:04:25.800 a lot of like what Fauci was saying and stuff like this would all be couched in Latin language.

01:04:31.000 Whereas a lot of the language that we, for example, the books that we read that are still the most

01:04:37.160 powerful things we read today, well, they're written in Old English. And an example of this is

01:04:41.720 Tolkien, right? So you've got a series of famous authors here. But look at Tolkien's there as the

01:04:49.480 textual analysis, right? He writes long sentences. And he writes with only 8% Latin words. 89% of his

01:04:59.160 words are solid, earthy, Germanic words. And you wonder why people like in 2013, people like the BBC

01:05:05.560 polled people, what's your favourite book? Lord of the Rings by a long way. The most popular book.

01:05:09.640 So not only is Tolkien creating the sort of lost mythology of the Anglo-Saxons, he's doing in their

01:05:14.680 language. And there's a great little anecdote here. When he was writing Lord of the Rings, he,

01:05:22.920 when Bilbo, well, sorry, the Hobbit, sorry. When Bilbo was leaving Bag End, Tolkien had Gandalf saying,

01:05:28.600 saying, adieu, my dear Bilbo, or at least au revoir. This was struck through in the note reading,

01:05:34.200 saying, no, Gandalf would not speak French. I mean, can you imagine how much more different

01:05:40.120 it would be if Gandalf was like, au revoir, Bilbo? It wouldn't feel right, right? And it's this

01:05:46.520 attendance to the content and the prose and the origin of the words that is such an important

01:05:53.640 thing. And it's, again, it's become a kind of weird obsession for me. And there's this kind of

01:05:58.680 Anglish movement that you'll find on Twitter and online that's like, okay, well, what does English

01:06:03.480 sound like without the Latin words? And it sounds so much more organic. Like, I covered this in

01:06:09.640 issue three of Islander. Like, the wanderer. Wanderer is actually a Germanic word, but it's used in a

01:06:14.040 Latinate way, whereas the actual direct translation is earthstepper. And earthstepper sounds more like

01:06:21.400 ancient and true than wanderer. Wanderer's got a possibly positive connotation, but earthstepper

01:06:27.080 makes him sound like condemned, you know, to wander the earth.

01:06:31.400 This would have been an absolutely deliberate stylistic choice for Tolkien, of course, as a

01:06:36.200 medievalist, he would have been, you know, and somebody interested in language. He would have

01:06:41.160 been all over this. If you just go back to that Twitter post, Carl, I'll just look past the fact

01:06:48.360 it's not written in proper sentences with capitalization, which wouldn't pass the trivia on

01:06:53.080 this one. I should say that the basic argument is absolutely true. When people are writing,

01:07:01.000 they should aim for concrete language and to, wherever possible, avoid the abstract.

01:07:09.720 Because the more abstract you get, the less clear it is for your reader. You should ideally

01:07:16.200 aim for the five senses. Okay. So if I'm describing a dark forest to you, you should almost be able to

01:07:23.800 like, you know, that smell the leaves, you know, you could feel the, the damp in the forest or chill

01:07:29.720 in the air, you know, and good writing, whether it's fiction or nonfiction should aim to activate all

01:07:38.840 five of those senses. So it feels like you're there. And your emphasis on, you know, the Anglo-Saxon

01:07:47.720 root words, as opposed to the Latina root words, really is getting to that. And that's one of the

01:07:54.280 things, you know, in Foundations Writing on the Trivium, I really strongly emphasize, they call it

01:08:01.080 plain English. Okay. And in fact, there's been a long, I don't know if it's still going actually,

01:08:05.560 but it certainly was 10 years ago, something called the plain English campaign. Okay. This

01:08:11.960 is something that, um, is very evident when you start reading French theory. Okay. Critical race

01:08:19.960 theory, all of the SJW stuff. There was this author I was thinking of bringing her in today

01:08:25.720 called Gayatri Spivak, a post-colonial author about the subaltern and all of this. It's all written

01:08:31.960 in this horribly obtuse, abstract language where you don't know. It's kind of disappearing up itself.

01:08:40.840 Okay. And the reason they do that is to hide the lack of clarity in their own thinking,

01:08:46.280 to almost bamboozle you with thinking that, oh, this must be sophisticated.

01:08:51.000 It's completely intentional. All postmodern, like one thing I noticed when I was first reading the

01:08:55.640 postmoderns is they would essentially Yoda-like reverse the sentence structure just so it's difficult

01:09:00.840 for a normal person to read. And I had to train myself to be able to read their, their words

01:09:05.400 properly. And it's like, this is very strange, but it's completely on purpose. Just a quick thing

01:09:09.560 with the, uh, the Latin and the English, right? So I, I, um, when I was doing my philosophy degree,

01:09:13.960 um, I was reading, uh, Bernard Williams, who he had, he was an English philosopher and he had a term for

01:09:18.680 this. He called it thick language and thin language. Now the thin language, the Latin language,

01:09:23.240 when used in English, it's not the same in the Latin context. Um, the thin language has the air of

01:09:29.080 objectivity, right? Because it isn't morally loaded. Uh, and so if I were to describe, you know,

01:09:35.400 misinformation, that doesn't necessarily mean bad. I mean, I, you know, I, I could say, well,

01:09:41.000 actually we're doing, uh, uh, a seminar eight, eight o'clock and you say, no, that's misinformation.

01:09:46.280 It's at seven o'clock. Well, oh yeah, that's a good point. That's not necessarily a, a slight on my

01:09:50.760 character. That was just, I was wrong about this, right? There's, there's an abstraction away. Whereas

01:09:54.680 if you would say, no, you've lied about that. Well, the lie is, and the, the, the good thing

01:10:00.680 about the earthy Anglo-Saxon words, they're all social words, right? So what they, what they do

01:10:05.640 is they include a lot of extra information and a lot of moral intonation into what they're being,

01:10:12.200 into what they're delivering. And they're always really short words as well. So these are powerful

01:10:15.800 words, the many led. So, I mean, the, the, the example I was getting, I mean, lie is a superb

01:10:19.960 example. To be called a liar is just, it's offensive on the face of it, right? If I tell

01:10:25.800 you you're a liar, that is basically a personal challenge. And now we're in a conflict confrontation

01:10:30.680 and you, you can't just casually call someone a liar, right? So to call someone a liar is a powerful

01:10:35.400 thing, even now, you know, uh, because what it's saying is there's, there's a, there's two people

01:10:39.720 who are connected. There's a connection between them and the content, the quality of this connection

01:10:44.440 hinges on a malfeasance. Again, enjoy that Latin word, uh, on a wrong that one has done the other,

01:10:51.080 right? And so this implies a character judgment, a negative character judgment on the person who

01:10:56.920 told the lie. So we've got a time, a place, people, and bad intent, moral judgment, all including just

01:11:04.040 three letter word. Betrayal is another one. So no, something has happened between two people

01:11:09.480 and there's deep moral negativity contained within it. You betrayed me. Again, there's,

01:11:15.240 you can feel the power in it, you know, and, and all of the Anglo-Saxon words have this and the

01:11:20.440 Latin words just don't have this. And that's why they used in scientific literature is that we want

01:11:24.520 to be objective. We want to try and get away from like judgmental language. But this is also what

01:11:29.720 makes reading books from a hundred years ago so much more powerful. They're before the positivist

01:11:34.040 movement. So they're just freely just casting out all of these deep, thick, earthy,

01:11:38.200 judgmental terms. And it makes the entire thing more engaging and enriching. And this is why

01:11:43.320 every book written a hundred years ago is just better than any book written now,

01:11:47.320 just on the, on the tone of it. There are also hidden elements. You know,

01:11:51.640 we were talking about rhetoric earlier on a lot of, uh, uh, these, uh, Germanic words that we're

01:11:57.720 talking about are monosyllabic. Okay. Without getting too into it in, in poetics, there are unstressed

01:12:05.880 syllables and there are stressed syllables. Well, those monosyllabic words scan beautifully when

01:12:14.040 you're speaking them and you can, you know, you can, you know, you can talk about wrong,

01:12:20.360 right. And it's kind of, I talked about plain English. Um, there's something about the musicality

01:12:28.200 of a mono, of a, of a long, uh, a stressed monosyllabic word that does something to our

01:12:36.520 brains when we're, when we're listening that has a power that those fancy Latinate words don't have.

01:12:43.880 Yes. They kind of fritter away because they're, you know, for one, because they're five syllables

01:12:48.120 in it, you know? Yeah. And the, the Latinate words are designed to make the person feel superior

01:12:53.240 to the audience that he's talking about. It's deliberately designed to, to separate. No,

01:12:57.480 you don't really understand what I'm talking about. This is airy nonsense words. And so what,

01:13:02.040 what's interesting about this is that you get like, um, you know, trying to avoid the, uh,

01:13:07.000 the words and stuff like this. Um, but you get Jonathan Haidt's elephant and rider. Uh, this

01:13:13.240 dovetails very, very nicely with this. And I think I'm the first person to really make this observation.

01:13:18.680 The Latinate words are aimed to the rider. And as Jonathan Haidt points out, the rider is only

01:13:23.480 really in control of the elephant when the elephant feels very calm. So in a very secure position,

01:13:27.480 he can with, you know, with enough practice, he can rationally get the rider to turn the elephant.

01:13:32.280 Well, the Germanic words are addressed directly to the elephant. The, the elephant is activated

01:13:38.920 by the Germanic words. If I say you lied to me, oh, I've got your elephant right there.

01:13:43.240 You know, and suddenly, whoa, whoa, you didn't call me a liar. Did you? And it's like,

01:13:46.440 sorry, what happened to the rational Latinate words? Are we going to bring them up? No,

01:13:49.160 we're not. We're about to have a fight over something. Right. And so you can see why the

01:13:53.080 power is actually far deeper and more important in the Germanic words than the Latin ones.

01:13:58.040 This is a very good insight, Carl, because one of Haidt's other descriptions for the elephant

01:14:02.680 and the rider, I can't remember where he says it in the righteous mind, probably. He talks about

01:14:07.320 the rider as a kind of like little bullshit lawyer. Yes. Like, he's like your little lawyer,

01:14:12.440 post generating little bullshit arguments for you. This is why I did this thing.

01:14:16.840 Have you ever read any legal documents? They're all written in, in legalese in, right. But what that

01:14:23.720 is, is a kind of arcane gatekeeping system to push up the premium of the lawyer. Oh, you're a lawyer.

01:14:30.280 You speak this magic, magic kind of elite language that you need all sorts of training to understand.

01:14:36.440 You know, probably if all legal documents were written in plain English, you know, the lawyers

01:14:44.840 would not be able to charge a fee as they do, because half of it is understanding what the hell

01:14:48.360 they're going on about. You'd be able to do it yourself, probably. But this, the reason I bring

01:14:53.000 this up is, like, the Latin-Germanic distinction is incredibly important. And I found myself just,

01:15:00.280 just almost every day, thinking about this. Because, like, if you go to Churchill, Churchill's a

01:15:04.600 master of doing this. Like, in the, in the famous, we shall fight them on the beaches,

01:15:08.280 we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them on the fields and the streets,

01:15:11.160 we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender. Well, there's only one Latin word in

01:15:14.920 that. And it's the bad word. It's the surrender, as if the, the, the Anglo-Saxons didn't have a word

01:15:21.000 for surrender. Because why would we need that? And this is just one of those things where,

01:15:27.240 if you're a master writer, you realize, oh yeah, no, this actually affects the tone and

01:15:33.240 impact of the writing itself. And this, and then you, you come on to what are Fowler's rules and

01:15:38.120 Orwell's rules, which is what you talk about, in fact, in your Foundations of Writing course,

01:15:43.400 which I, again, I just, I didn't know this in advance of doing the course, but as soon as I saw

01:15:48.600 it, I was like, all of that is correct. Do you want to just give us a quick recap on them?

01:15:51.720 Well, do you have them here?

01:15:53.160 Uh, well, I, I didn't get them up, actually.

01:15:55.400 I've got them out.

01:15:55.800 Okay, do we have, uh...

01:15:57.240 The Fowler's rules and Orwell's rules, they're basically very, very similar in,

01:16:00.920 just use small words and plain language as much as possible.

01:16:05.800 Yeah, I mean, so for example, as we've been talking about, don't use a fancy word where

01:16:11.160 a simple word will do, okay? One of Orwell's rules. Don't use more words than you need.

01:16:21.480 Yeah, there's another thing, economy of words is also important.

01:16:24.040 So, I mean, Orwell is trying to get you to write economically. And in fact, reading Orwell,

01:16:31.000 not just 1984 in Animal Farm, any, any Orwell, he was a fantastic writer of prose,

01:16:38.040 and is somebody who I'd recommend people read.

01:16:42.280 You know, I've got a great example of this. In shooting the, shooting an elephant,

01:16:46.840 when he was a colonial administrator in Burma, he's like the only white man around.

01:16:51.160 Again, this is like, oh, white man has arrived, the Englishman has arrived in Burma, is he?

01:16:55.000 Okay, things are going to happen now. So there's an elephant rampaging through the village,

01:16:58.360 and Orwell is describing this. And because he is using mostly Germanic, mostly plain language,

01:17:04.360 oh, you feel like you're there. And this is, you can feel the pressure that's on Orwell as he's got

01:17:09.160 to go get the elephant gun. And he sees the elephant, you know, the elephant's actually

01:17:12.280 calmed down a bit, but it's still rampaging a bit. And he shoots it in the head and it just freezes.

01:17:16.360 And he's just like, and so, but suddenly you're, you're immediately there. And the writing is so

01:17:20.600 much more compelling than if he'd used an abstract Latinate word to describe the genuine feeling of

01:17:26.360 like, cause he didn't want to shoot the elephant, obviously. And he came away and he's got a great,

01:17:30.760 he's got a great, uh, turn of phrase in there. He's like, look, I've realized I was becoming

01:17:35.160 something that I didn't want to be because I was wearing the mask of the colonial, colonial,

01:17:39.640 colonial administrator. And when you wear a mask, your face grows to fit it. And again, you know,

01:17:46.920 the mask, that's the Latin word, but face grows to fit. So these are all the Germanics being pulled

01:17:53.080 out of yourself. And that just struck me. And it's because of these rules that, uh, that he

01:17:59.240 established, uh, that it just still lingers in my mind because the writing was so much more powerful

01:18:04.440 than it would have been had I written it because I'd be using half Latin words because I was a product

01:18:08.680 of the bloody modern education system. Yeah. I mean, a lot, a lot of it is one of the worst

01:18:13.320 habits that anybody can have. And if anybody is still in school or university, this is one tip

01:18:18.680 I can give you today to just stop doing. Okay. You're writing a, you're writing out your essay

01:18:23.480 in word. Okay. You highlight the, you highlight the word, you press shift and F7, you bring up the

01:18:30.440 thesaurus and you, uh, be like, well, what's this more clever sounding word for that? What's the alternative?

01:18:37.320 Just never do that. Try to write as if you could explain it to, you know, somebody who's not on

01:18:44.360 your course. I mean, I always just say like, can I explain it to my mother, which you know what I'm

01:18:48.680 talking about, you know, uh, or almost, almost to a 12 year old, you know, if you want to put it that

01:18:55.400 way. Um, and, and more powerful writing, uh, generally comes from when you're not trying to

01:19:03.160 be clever. The worst writing is when you're trying to come across as if you're clever,

01:19:08.360 just say what you mean. And moreover, if you're trying to sound clever, then is what you're saying

01:19:12.920 really as clever as you think it is? You know, you, if, if you're trying to mask how, you know,

01:19:18.360 if you're trying to sound clever when delivering your argument, then your argument can't be that

01:19:21.800 clever to begin with. And so maybe you need to go back and work on it, but, um, but anyway,

01:19:25.720 just, uh, so the courses.lotuses.com, the Trivium is live and we will of course be hosting our, uh,

01:19:34.040 webinar at 7 PM Thursday today. Uh, and we will have a discount code for anyone who completes the

01:19:40.520 webinar as well. So, uh, do come and see us in, well, about five hours in fact, uh, because we'll be

01:19:47.080 doing that. Um, so let's, uh, let's go to some comments. We've got a lot of comments, obviously.

01:19:51.880 Um, uh, Fleet Lord Anfar says, uh, for your information, Zoom still harvests everything

01:20:01.320 bigly. Boomer choice to use. Well, okay, but it's just, it's a tool that works. Sorry.

01:20:09.400 Uh, Amdeen says in my sixth grade, my class was given a writing assignment. In my story,

01:20:13.720 I wrote dismounted her horse and my classmate criticized me for saying, why don't you say

01:20:18.280 she got off of her horse? Classmate was right. Absolutely. Based Anglo-Saxon classmate, I'm

01:20:23.880 afraid. Classmate was right. Um, uh, Carl and Harry's video, we can see, see the injury he

01:20:29.480 sustained when he claims that he were the hands of his toddler, but obviously a case of vicious

01:20:33.320 workplace violence in the hands of Stelios. Do something. Uh, I, I will take that under advisement,

01:20:39.000 but Stelios is strongly denying that he wounded Harry. So what can we do? Um,

01:20:44.600 uh, what other Western countries besides Britain and the U S did this too? All of them. It was the,

01:20:49.080 so what's interesting is at the beginning of the sort of 20th century, uh, 21st century,

01:20:54.040 you can see in fiction, the, the sort of modern education system that's come in,

01:21:00.920 that's primarily concerned about wellbeing and feelings and, uh, an equality of standard and

01:21:06.360 equality rather than as, you know, hard standards. And it's, it's just all of the Western countries have

01:21:11.560 done this. Well, one of the things I can tell you is that one of the, um, there's a writer called

01:21:15.960 GM, GM Batista Vico, right. Who's actually famous for cyclical history. If, uh, if you read prophets

01:21:22.600 of doom by me, there's a chapter on, on Vico in there, but his actual day job was as a professor of

01:21:28.120 rhetoric. Okay. Now, obviously he was Italian writing in Italian, but his textbook was translated.

01:21:35.720 That 18th century textbook I had was an English translation of his textbook. So there was clearly

01:21:42.280 like a cross European culture of people doing the trivia because they were, you know, um, a lot of

01:21:49.560 the logic stuff was kept alive by the scholastics. Um, so there's a lot, there's a big Catholic angle

01:21:57.400 as well. Um, the Catholic church, whatever you make of them kept alive logic. It's Aristotle

01:22:05.880 specifically. Aristotelian logic, uh, alive. And I, I still think in many parts of the world,

01:22:13.960 if you're fortunate enough to go to a Catholic school, as I was when I did the grammar, for example,

01:22:19.080 they keep some of these things alive more regardless of where you're from. Oh yeah. I mean,

01:22:24.280 this is one of the things that, uh, modern philosophers tend to basically assume that nothing

01:22:30.200 happened for about a thousand years in Europe. Uh, modern philosophy courses will go from the ancient

01:22:34.760 Greeks to about the 16th, 17th century. It's like, sorry, there's a bit of a gap there.

01:22:39.880 And so you don't learn anything about the scholastics. You don't learn about Aquinas or

01:22:43.480 any of the other, um, like medieval Catholic theologians and philosophers. And you don't

01:22:48.200 understand why Aristotle suddenly becomes relevant again. It's like, but he never stopped being relevant.

01:22:53.160 For a thousand years, he was just called the philosopher. I love that. Carl, I love the

01:22:57.800 scholastics because they're so autistic. Yeah, I know. It's like, here's an argument. Okay. But now you're

01:23:03.960 a 17 counters and I'm going to go through each of the 17 counters one by one and explain why you're

01:23:09.720 wrong. So sit down and get ready. Number one. Number two. I mean, I love, I love that. Um,

01:23:14.920 so anyway, I can see, I can see why Bacon was like, look, these guys actually don't have the answers

01:23:20.440 because they didn't, but the, the logical form and, uh, what was it called? It was called the

01:23:26.840 Organum, which was the Aristotelian and other logical, uh, tools that they used. It's good

01:23:33.320 that they preserve this. And this is, this is what has been denied to us now. And so, uh, like I said,

01:23:38.680 go and get the course if you want to get the course, or if you want to get a promo code, go and sign up

01:23:43.720 for the webinar where we'll be giving a promo code and a lecture on the course itself. And you'll be able

01:23:48.600 to ask questions and find out more information. A large part of logic I can just tell people for

01:23:53.480 free is categorization. Oh yes. Categories within categories within categories. Oh,

01:23:58.840 didn't Aristotelian. It's categorization. Super autistic detail. It's kind of a beautiful,

01:24:03.320 beautiful subject, but anyway, let's go. Um, uh, Tom says, will the courses be on

01:24:09.080 Lotus Eaters? Yes, they will. Courses.Lotacies.com. Uh, and how much will it cost subscribers? Well,

01:24:14.600 the same to, uh, everyone, uh, unless you come and sign up for the webinar, which you will get

01:24:19.240 a discount on. Uh, but the, the bundle itself is discounted. Uh, so each course is 150, but the

01:24:24.760 bundle itself is 375. So the bundle is discounted. And to be honest, I do recommend doing them all.

01:24:29.480 Like I said, I did them all and, uh, and they were just really good. And they're, especially if you've

01:24:35.800 got children, but I am genuinely excited to force my children to do this. Uh, they're not going to enjoy

01:24:41.640 it, obviously, but that's not what they're, you've got to learn these things. It's not for pleasure,

01:24:46.520 it is for necessity. Um, uh, Akral says, certainly education standards are lower, but things have

01:24:53.640 changed as well. Now kids need to know what a transistor is or how to define a Python dictionary.

01:24:58.040 Yeah. And that's fine. And they, they, the ability to gain technical education is there,

01:25:02.920 right? This is what you'll learn doing a particular course geared to that thing. But what you won't learn

01:25:08.040 is how you should be interpreting the world around you and how to make sure you get the

01:25:13.960 most out of your ability to communicate with the rest of the people around you.

01:25:17.720 Like these, these things are genuinely important. And just for some reason it was decided, well,

01:25:22.920 we, again, I, I genuinely am the cynical type, but I think this is done deliberately to dump out

01:25:27.560 the population. I would also argue that understanding syntax and understanding those logical categories

01:25:33.560 as I was talking about. I mean, they would help with any of those things. Well, I did program.

01:25:37.640 With programming, you know, certainly. It's all logic all the time. It's 100% logic. And I think

01:25:42.280 one of the reasons that I was, I did quite well on my logic course in university is because of my

01:25:46.840 programming background, frankly. I just taught myself to program. Uh, Pat says in the early 1900s,

01:25:53.960 American high schools taught classical Greek and Latin. Uh, we, today we have to teach ourselves

01:25:58.120 remedial English in our universities. Absolutely true. It's, it's so true. And again,

01:26:03.000 like being forced to learn Greek and Latin, not fun when you're a kid, but it gives you

01:26:08.920 so many other things. I mean, like, uh, one of the things about learning Latin is you would be

01:26:12.760 reading Cicero, right? And now, so that, that you've got a double bonus here. Not only are you

01:26:18.200 learning the, the forms and structure of grant and grammar of a different language, which teaches

01:26:22.680 you about the grammar of your own language, but you're also learning the political education that

01:26:28.760 a Roman student would have had at the same time. And this is one of the reasons the enlightenment

01:26:33.400 happened in the first place is that they had all been learning Latin and going through like

01:26:39.080 Republican texts and democratic texts from Athens and Rome. And so they realize, well, hang on a second,

01:26:44.200 the world can be very bad, very much better and very different to the way it is at the moment.

01:26:48.040 And this, and you will notice that when you're reading any kind of liberal enlightenment philosopher,

01:26:53.560 they draw heavily on their education in Greek and Roman, uh, philosophy and politics. They will just

01:26:59.880 cite these things like this. And most people now would have no idea what the reference is. I know

01:27:04.280 the reference because I went through and read all those things myself for the fun of it, but nobody else

01:27:08.120 will. And that's, that's a tragedy that speaks to the paucity of the education system now.

01:27:13.320 I think it's important to say is that another reason that the Renaissance happened is because

01:27:17.800 when they went back to those classical texts, yes, they had some degree of reverence, but they didn't

01:27:25.000 dogmatically, they approached them in a critical way, which means that they were able to use their

01:27:30.280 intelligence. They were actually able to use the skills, um, to come at them anew in a way. One of the

01:27:37.560 things they used to teach, uh, is something called classical imitatio. That is, could you like, let's,

01:27:44.600 let's say, if I said to you, I pretend to be Ed Davey, I don't know, and come up with his arguments

01:27:50.840 better than he could come up with us. Okay. And they all had to do that in school. So they were trained

01:27:58.360 to do. Now I wonder today how many, let's say Democrats could come up with Republican arguments.

01:28:05.960 We know they can't. Or vice versa. Well, it's been polled. We know they can't. The Democrats have no

01:28:10.600 idea what the Republicans are thinking. The Republicans actually are very good at what the

01:28:14.520 Democrats think, because the Republicans take the Democrats at their word, whereas the Democrats are

01:28:18.680 like, right, so Nazi, got it. Okay. So you just want to kill all the Jews and, you know, exactly. It's

01:28:23.240 like nonsense, right? And so like, we know that they don't have essentially a theory of mind for these

01:28:29.720 people. And this is what you're being asked to reconstruct. Could I make Ed Davey's arguments better than him?

01:28:36.360 Maybe, actually. I think I might be able to, to be honest. And maybe, maybe I'll do that. That

01:28:41.000 sounds like... You might be able to explain why there's so much noise on the trains.

01:28:44.840 Well, all I'm saying is Ed Davey is a secret racist.

01:28:50.520 By left-wing standards, of course. By normal standards. He's a very normal chap.

01:28:55.800 Russian says, 90% of modern universities are an international student farming Ponzi scheme.

01:28:59.960 That is totally true. And this is another issue with the education system,

01:29:04.120 is it's being run for reasons that are not for education. So again, come and join us in this

01:29:09.480 webinar this afternoon, or this evening, should I say. 7pm British time, 2pm New York time,

01:29:14.920 11am LA time. Because otherwise, you will be trapped in the mediocrity of modernity, Frank.

01:29:21.560 The question always is, are you doing it for the skills themselves, or for the knowledge itself,

01:29:26.600 or are you doing it for the piece of paper?

01:29:27.720 A piece of paper. Yes. And I wonder how many students are there for the piece of paper,

01:29:32.760 ultimately, because that piece of paper will get you a job, you know, which is a very different

01:29:37.400 thing from actually learning skills. And it's a very different thing from the knowledge as well.

01:29:44.120 And I just want to be clear, there's no piece of paper at the end of this, right?

01:29:47.400 You know, we, I mean, we could send you a little thing saying, well done, you completed our course,

01:29:50.760 but you know, that's the other, other institutions aren't going to understand it,

01:29:54.200 but that's not what this is for. This is to make you better, right? This is for you to improve

01:29:59.160 yourself and become a superior version of yourself. And that's, the trivium is the basis of this. But

01:30:04.680 again, Stelios is how to live a good life one. That's coming next. And that's going to be equally

01:30:09.800 as if not more important, because just knowing what you're supposed to be doing from a human

01:30:15.640 perspective. I mean, that's, I, I, when I said to him, Stelios, can you write courses? Like,

01:30:19.800 I'm full of courses. I was like, okay, good. I need a course that I want specifically

01:30:23.960 tailored to young men to teach them how to be good men and to live a prosperous life.

01:30:28.360 And he's like, I can do that. And so he's been working very, very diligently on this for months

01:30:32.520 now. Because of course, Stelios, PhD lecturer from York, I mean, philosophy, he knows exactly

01:30:37.320 what he's doing. His course is gonna be amazing too. But for now, go and get the trivium, come and

01:30:41.400 watch us, come and join us in the webinar. We'll be giving a lecture and asking questions and answers

01:30:46.440 from the audience. And we will also be handing out a discount code for the bundle. So do come and join us in the

01:30:53.720 meantime. Thanks so much for watching, folks. I've just been informed, apparently there has been an

01:30:57.960 issue in the common sense crusade for today has been cancelled. So sorry if you were looking forward

01:31:02.120 to that. But I don't know what the issue with it is. I've just got a note that says it's cancelled for

01:31:06.760 today. So sorry about that, folks. I'm sure we'll be back next week. And we will see you at 7pm

01:31:12.040 tonight, British time. Come sign up for the webinar.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - May 15, 2025

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1165

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