Dwarkesh Patel

And this is always true.

If we had a time machine for the Inquisition in the 1540s, we would say like, guys, Machiavelli, he's really important.

He's really revolutionary.

You got to be looking at this.

Or we would say Lucretius' De Verum Natura, which I did my dissertation on.

And many people are familiar with Greenblatt's book, The Swerve, which credits a lot of

change to the materialist science that this poem articulates.

There's a much more complex story, which you know is told in my book, which refers to Greenblatt's, and if anyone enjoyed the swerve, you would really enjoy the more detailed zoom-in that Inventing the Renaissance has.

But, you know, we would say, guys, you should censor this.

We literally have letters of inquisitors writing to each other saying we don't need to bother censoring Lucretius.

Only learned people can read it and they know perfectly well that the false stuff is false.

So it'll just circulate and it's fine.

What we need to worry about censoring is all of these fine-tune minutiae.

of Protestantism.

So like the 1545 edition of the Index of Banned Books says in its introduction, we shall put the names of arch heretics in all caps.

And when I first read that, I was like, oh, I want to see all my favorite arch heretics be in all caps.

And I eagerly flipped to M and Machiavelli is not in all caps.

He was not important enough from their position.

The all-caps authors are all minor Protestant theologians.

They're all people who are like Calvin and Zwingli and Luther and Melanchthon.