Alain De Botton
speaker
1,037 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Alain De Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I think I still diagnose modern societies as coming out of the very long religious age which preceded it.
And taking my cue from a thinker like Nietzsche, who predicted, I think very accurately, that the end of belief would be trouble for human beings.
I mean, it's not like there was no trouble before.
Don't get me wrong.
There was a lot of trouble before as well.
But there were particular kinds of trouble that were going to beset humanity.
non-religious eras, predominantly non-religious eras.
And I think it's a good place to look.
I mean, let's look at some of the things that religious societies do and secular societies have problems with.
One of the things that religious societies do is to socialize in ritual forms certain kinds of psychological transitions.
which secular societies have a lot of trouble orchestrating or putting on the agenda.
I mean, our diaries are filled with business meetings and technical priorities.
In the more religious eras, days were devoted to ideas, to priorities of the soul, if you like.
Now, one can have all kinds of objections to how those priorities were framed, but it's a very interesting way in which in the 19th century, what happens is that private life gets
personalized and individualized to an unprecedented degree.
And so if you're in love, if you're struck by nature, if you're interested in community, if you're moved by the sight of mountains, et cetera, you do that on your own.
You're not within any kind of structure.
And we've had a hard time cohering people into structures that
you know, guide psychological, I guess one you might call health.
Religions talk of the soul.
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