Luke Burgis: evaluation

Transcript context

…As a critique of modernity, is Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann more on the mark? I’m very sympathetic to Thomas Mann because I went to a seminary on top of a hill in Italy for three years that almost felt like a sanatorium in some ways. I’m going to go with Dostoevsky, though, because I think his book Demons diagnoses what can happen at a psychic and spiritual level when social contagion runs rampant. Of course, having just written a book about social contagion, I don’t think he’s mentioned in the book, but Dostoevsky and some of the demonic elements, whether you believe in demons or not, we can speak of the demonic as something that seems to be characterized by social contagion usually. Here’s a question from GPT, and I quote, “Name the kind of person who reads your book, takes the thesis sincerely, applies it carefully, and yet ends up worse off.” What’s the story there?…

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