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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And from that experience, all of us have rooted in us, I think, a capacity to be awed by another human.
And as it were, to imagine, to project onto them an all-knowing quality.
And, you know, in normal development, in normal psychological development, we gradually discover in adolescence that our parents are flawed, that even though they looked absolutely powerful when we were seven, by the time we're 17, we discover that they're boring, frightened, uncertain, and in many ways, not sure of where they're going.
And these are wonderful discoveries, necessary discoveries of adolescence
And if I can make a strange link of democracy, democracy is the democratic mindset is one which is post-adolescent and properly recognizes the impossibility of heroes.
There are no heroes.
There are merely humans like you and me who are finding their way prone to error and not omnipotent.
But in moments of stress, in moments of regression,
people and peoples will, as you know, of course, regress back to that childhood mentality and then you get serious dangers because if somebody's the daddy or the mommy and they don't have the benevolence that we sometimes associate with those words,
then you've got trouble on your hands.
And I think it's in all of us.
All of us can be in danger, depending on our state of mind and the atmosphere around, of projecting onto leaders a power that no adult can possess, simply because that's where we all came from.
And it's a lot easier when you're feeling under pressure to believe that.
Death is a very important thing to keep on the agenda, not just for the actual moment you're going to die, but for everything it symbolizes about your limits of understanding and control, accepting death.
in its metaphorical sense of limits, is a wonderful route to making you a little bit less of a difficult person, a little bit less of an awkward person.
People become a lot more fun when they accept their limitations.
Childhood is a very difficult period.
And I think we all need to understand that children are born into the world utterly dependent on those around them, the few people around them who are randomly chosen and who will be suffering from various distortions of their own minds.
I mean, it's very rare that you are born into a sane family.
Most of us are born into, you know, it's a lopsided sort of proposition.
Showing 161–180 of 1,037 · page 9 of 52
← Previous
Next →