Ben Sasse: belief

Transcript context

…And page 33 mentions it once. [laughter] Right now, you’re kind of creeping me out. [laughter] Again, the five constructive chapters are about self-consciously developing a work ethic. They’re about limited consumption — it’s a soft apology for stoicism. They’re about intergenerationalism. They’re about learning to travel, and they’re about becoming actually literate — not just functionally literate, but appetitively literate, habitually literate. I think it was Twain, I can’t remember for certain, but I think it was Twain who said, “The man who chooses not to read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” And right now, we live in a society of people who are decreasingly, appetitively literate. The average American reads 19 minutes a day, and it’s age correlated. Older folks are reading quite a bit more than 19 minutes and younger folks much less than 19 minutes. I think Gutenberg is the true father of America. I think the sine qua non of America is mass literacy, which led to competitive ideas, healthy challenges to authority, a plural marketplace after the printing press, that then creates a First Amendment culture of free speech, press, assembly, etc. So those are the five chapters. The intergenerational chapter for a while I framed as “discover the body.” What I mean by that is that kind of dependency of youth and then ultimately the dependency again of your declining years, and an awareness and honesty about mortality. So much of unhealthy utopian status projects in the world are driven by a denial of mortality. We are mortal. You are going to die. You have limited options with your life. And you want to think a lot about redeeming the time. Healthy people think about, “How can I get more of the crap out of my life, that I’m never going to look back and say, ‘Oh, I’m glad I wasted time trying to consume that frivolous fad for a time’?” No commentary on fidget spinners here. [laughter] Overrated. [laughter]…

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