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Notes -
I mean I actually do think that a bad outcome of the Enlightenment is that it led to overpopulation, particularly of populations groups which are not cut out for industrialized modernity. I’m not as big a booster for the Enlightenment as my posts today might indicate; I believe that the Enlightenment focused too much on the inalienable intrinsic moral dignity and importance of each individual human life; this was due to those philosophers operating in a very homogenous context.
With the common knowledge we have now, not only of HBD but also of the unarguable fact that we have (at the very least) millions of human individuals walking among us who are totally incapable of empathy, rational behavior, and forethought, we can see that at least one aspect of the Enlightenment was based on faulty/incomplete premises. That doesn’t require us to scrap the whole edifice, but it does obligate us to at least reconsider and correct for those particular weaknesses. (Yes, my primary criticism of the Enlightenment is in many ways the popular opposite of the mainstream conservative criticism, insofar as I believe that we actually care too much about individual liberties and the sanctity of human life.)
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