See here.
At age 16, Boyan invented a “passive plastic catchment system, using circulating ocean currents to net plastic waste”. On Boyan’s Wikipedia page, it says: “As of mid 2020, Interceptors have been deployed in Indonesia and Malaysia, and are prepared to be deployed in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic.”
For simplicity’s sake, I will today just quote from the text below the video, because it covers all the essentials. It’s probably the best exposition of Jordan Peterson’s views we will get in just one hour, and I’ve seen a lot of videos with and about him. It was posted on YouTube on 14th November 2021.
Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report talks to Dr. Jordan Peterson, author of 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, about what is actually informing COVID restrictions, the real choice that faces the clean energy COP26 crowd, and his response when he is asked about the existence of God.
First, Jordan discusses why we chose medical tyranny and a totalitarian state as a response to the COVID epidemic. He shares how the politics of fear, more than science, has been informing COVID policy in Canada in the U.S. Jordan also tries to understand how the left, who usually hates big corporations, has handed over it’s trust to big pharma.
Next, Jordan discusses the COP26 summit and the horrible position liberals and environmentalists have put themselves in by pushing for more expensive renewable energy while claiming to care for the poor. He explains why their more expensive energy plans will cause electricity prices to skyrocket, hurting those most vulnerable. He suggests we follow China’s lead and invest in nuclear power to create as much cheap energy as possible which can mitigate the effects of climate change without sacrificing the poor. He explains the problems of sustainable development and why you should dismiss anyone who advocates for Net Zero.
Finally, Jordan discusses what religion and spirituality mean to him. He shares the answer he gives when asked “does god exist?” He also explains why people like Sam Harris may not be as atheist as they may think they are. He also explains why science fails as a religion and what religious thoughts really are.
I will just add that Peterson announces that he is going to the UK soon, to speak in Cambridge and Oxford, with, among others, Richard Dawkins. That’s something to look forward to.
“We shall repeal the 20th century.” These were words spoken by American economist Murray N. Rothbard (1926 – 1995) near the end of an article he wrote in 1992. Another American economist, Gary North (b. 1942), who is a historian and theologian as well, used these words near the end of a lecture he gave in 2010.
Rothbard made clear why he wants to repeal it, when he asked, ironically:
“Who would want to repeal the 20th century, the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide, who would want to repeal that! Well, we propose to do just that.”
With “we” he meant what he hoped would be a resurrected movement which in America is called the Old Right, a movement that was libertarian in its core, supported decentralised structures, laissez-faire economics and minimal interference of the government into private lives. This movement was effectively killed off around the year 1900 and replaced by interventionist, imperialist, big-government and big-business supporting politics.
Similar things had happened, or were happening, in Europe. Nationalism was the name of the game, and that sentiment lead to centralised governments continually increasing their interventions into the economy to suit their lust for power. Imperialism was the natural outgrowth of this development. This in turn lead to the original catastrophe of our time, World War One.
Considering that we are by now one fifth into the next century, it is clear that we have been unable to repeal the 20th century. For, as an idea, or phenomenon, the 20th century, in all its awfulness, is still firmly with us. So, how can we go about “repealing” it?
Continue readingProfessor Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher, gave a talk in 2018 with the title “The Libertarian Quest for a Grand Historical Narrative“. In it, he said the following:
“While many libertarians fancy an anarchic social order as a largely horizontal order without hierarchies and different ranks of authority – as “anti-authoritarian” – the medieval example of a State-less society teaches otherwise. Peace was not maintained by the absence of hierarchies and ranks of authority, but by the absence of anything but social authority and ranks of social authority. Indeed, in contrast to the present order, which essentially recognizes only one authority, that of the State, the Middle Ages were characterized by a great multitude of competing, cooperating, overlapping and hierarchically ordered ranks of social authority. There was the authority of the heads of family households and of various kinship groups. There were patrons, lords, overlords and feudal kings with their estates, and their vassals, and the vassals of vassals. There were countless different and separate communities and towns, and a huge variety of religious, artistic, professional and social orders, councils, assemblies, guilds, associations and clubs, each with their own rules, hierarchies and rank orders. In addition, and of utmost importance, there were the authorities of the local priest, the more distant bishop, and of the Pope in Rome.”
It is exactly this multitude of hierarchies and authorities which could, in the long term, be the guarantor of freedom and prosperity. Historian, economist and theologian Dr. Gary North has identified four authorities in human societies that are biblically ordained: The individual, the family, the church and the state (or, in medieval times, proto-state). They are constantly competing against each other, attempting to become the monopoly authority, thereby however preventing a monopoly of any one of them. Sometimes however, one of them becomes overbearing. Then society crumbles and falls apart. And the competition begins anew.
North writes about these competing authorities extensively in his book “God’s Covenants“. This is from the introduction:
“This book discusses three covenantal units that have operated in history from the beginning: individual, church, and family. It then discusses a fourth covenantal institution, civil, which began after the Fall of man.”
This is part 9 of my notes on the thoughts and ideas of Christopher Dawson. (In brackets the page numbers of each quote from TRBRAC, unless another book mentioned. “PwG” refers to my own thoughts.)
Dawson proposes not a League of Nations but a Confederation, a league of federations, that would unite the nations of the world. (p. 245)
Dawson states that such a federation would work only if it were based on some spiritual force, and he believes that we should look to Christianity to supply this spiritual force. Just as Christianity, in the past, was the basis of unity in Europe, so too, can it bring about world unity. (p. 245)
(PwG:) This is of course the total counter-vision to secular world government.
Continue readingThis is part 8 of my notes on the thoughts and ideas of Christopher Dawson. (In brackets the page numbers of each quote from TRBRAC, unless another book mentioned. “PwG” refers to my own thoughts.)
Dawson: “Either Europe must abandon the Christian tradition and with it the faith in progress and humanity, or it must return consciously to the religious foundation on which these ideas were based.” (p. 225)
Dawson: “true foundation of European unity is to be found not in political or economic agreements, but in the restoration of the spiritual tradition on which that unity was originally based.” (p. 227, my emphasis)
Totalitarianism and the totalitarian state [are] a force that impedes the restauration of the Christian tradition in Western Culture. (p. 227)
Continue readingThis is part 7 of my notes on the thoughts and ideas of Christopher Dawson. (In brackets the page numbers of each quote from TRBRAC, unless another book mentioned. “PwG” refers to my own thoughts.)
Since the time of the Renaissance, natural science . . . was based on a mechanistic view of nature that destroyed the old spiritual unity of medieval Europe, and it failed to establish a real basis for unity in European culture. (p. 215)
Dawson: “Thus as I have suggested, the progress of Western civilisation by science and power seems to lead to a state of total secularization in which both religion and freedom simultaneously disappear.” (p. 218)
Continue readingThis is part 6 of my notes on the thoughts and ideas of Christopher Dawson. (In brackets the page numbers of each quote from TRBRAC, unless another book mentioned. “PwG” refers to my own thoughts.)
[I]n England, they attempted to steer a middle course between traditional Christianity and the new ideas, and simultaneously devoted themselves to practical utilitarian activity. They put the new science into practical use, and at the same time developed a new social type, the hard-working, conscientious, abstemious man of business, who considered his work a kind of religious vocation. The “narrow and intense spirit of Puritanism,” remarks Dawson, “permeated the whole movement, and gave English middle-class society the moral force to carry out the vast material labour of the Industrial Revolution.” (p. 212)
(PwG:) Vishal Mangalwadi, in his magnificent book “The Book That Made Your World – How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization”, published 2011, argues that, without the Christian revivals in the UK and the American colonies (later the US), these regions would have been much more strongly influenced by the French Revolution than they were. That is why the Industrial Revolution started in Britain and the US, and not in continental Europe.
This is part 5 of my notes on the thoughts and ideas of Christopher Dawson. (In brackets the page numbers of each quote from TRBRAC, unless another book mentioned. “PwG” refers to my own thoughts.)
Out of this rationalistic current of ideas [the Enlightenment in France and Deism in England] developed the idea of Progress or human perfectibility that became the religion of many of the intellectuals of Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (p. 208)
Dawson: “while the God of the Deists was but a pale abstraction, a mere deus ex machina, the belief in Progress was an ideal capable of stirring men’s emotions and arousing a genuine religious enthusiasm. Nor was it limited to the followers of the French philosophic rationalism. It played an equally important part in the formation of German Idealism and English Utilitarian Liberalism.” (p. 209)
Dawson: “the French Revolution was not so much a revolt against misgovernment and oppression, as an attempt to restore the unity of European society on the foundation of new ideas.” (p. 210)
(PwG:) That last comment is interesting in the modern context, for this attempt is still ongoing.
This is part 4 of my notes on the thoughts and ideas of Christopher Dawson. (In brackets the page numbers of each quote from TRBRAC, unless another book mentioned. “PwG” refers to my own thoughts.)
Direct quote from Dawson: “Lutheranism and Calvinism . . . produce totally different social attitudes and have become embodied in opposite political traditions. For while Lutheranism almost from the beginning adopted a passive attitude towards the state and accepted a highly conservative and even patriarchal conception of political authority, Calvinism has proved a revolutionary force in European and American history and has provided the moral dynamic element in the great expansion of bourgeois culture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.” (p. 204/205, my emphases)
Direct quote from Dawson: “Calvinism [is] . . . much nearer to Catholicism in its conception of the relation of Church and State and in its assertion of the independence and supremacy of the spiritual power.” (p. 205)
However:
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