Dwarkesh Patel

That's true of every decade.

One fun game when I study the history of censorship, which I work a lot on, my next nonfiction book is going to be a book on the history of censorship.

And whatever they're looking at,

They're always wrong from our perspective about what they should be worried about censoring.

If we had a time machine and our goal was to go give them advice.

So here we are in the French Enlightenment.

Voltaire and Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade and La Matrice articulations of materialist atheism are flying around Europe.

And what is the Inquisition worried about?

It's worried about Jansenist treatises about the nature of the Trinity.

And Jansenism is sort of like a Calvinist version of Catholicism, right?

Do you want to have an incredibly terrifying authoritarian God who hates you and tells you that your soul is a worthless spider that deserves to be hurled into fire, but also have to obey the arbitrary Pope in Rome?

Then Jansenism is for you, has all the grimness of Calvinism and all of the authoritarian centrality of the Roman Catholics.

And this was a heresy that was abroad.

And they are so much more worried about Jansenism than they are about Voltaire.

That very chapter in Matisse's book I mentioned where they're raiding the clandestine bookshop.

And they're like, Voltaire, fine.

The banned encyclopedia, which is going to revolutionize all thought in Europe, fine.

Letters of Diderot, you know, Rousseau, fine, fine.

Yeah.

Jansenist treatises about the nature of the Trinity.