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 over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Making Sense with Sam Harris · #483 — The Knots We Tie Ourselves Into · 1 Jul 2026 podcast

That's absolutely right.

And even, you know, take the concept of the planetarium.

So all around the world, planetariums, you go and look at stars.

How do we justify planetariums?

It's overwhelmingly to do with scientific explanation rather than awe or A-W-E.

In other words, you know, you go to a planetarium and they're very keen to tell you about the precise dimensions of, you know, Kepler-32b and, you know, the rings of Saturn, etc.,

rather than what I think would be an equally opposite point, which is how small we are in the universe, ego reduction, which has traditionally been one of the functions that religion has taken on very effectively.

In Zen Buddhism, there were moon viewing ceremonies on platforms, poetry was read, rice cakes were eaten, or still are in some parts of Japan at some points.

In other words, the moon is being used not as an astronomical phenomenon, but as a sort of psychosocial phenomenon, as a tool of culture.

And that's very helpful.

So if we look at, you know, the nightclub, the planetarium, etc., there are lots of things that secular culture has, but isn't properly connecting up with some of the themes that religions were pretty good at bringing to the fore.

Yes, I mean, I think psychedelics are very interesting.

I've explored this theme extensively.

I mean, if we look at, you know, you mentioned these two functions.

Absolutely.

I mean, if you, you know, one of the functions of psychedelics, MDMA, et cetera, is socially to remind us of what we have in common with other people.

You know, when people say, I took this substance and I loved everybody.

This is, of course, one of the feats of spiritual development in all religions, that it is through meditative activities and also ecstatic activities that you discover that the barriers between humans are, let's put it gently, exaggerated in normal life.

In normal life, we focus on the differences, but how interesting and how nice life would be if we focused on the similarities.

And we may need a substance and a setting in which that can more easily be accessible to us.

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