The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

You know, I know a lot of that's overblown.

Um, But what's cool is there's a book by Steven Pinker, also from a secular perspective, called The Blank Slate.

And he talks about the idea of the blank slate that we don't really have an innate nature, that we're just socially constructed.

That the people pushing that at the time, they kind of knew it wasn't true.

But it was justifying ideas of equality and democracy.

And like, oh, and one more, this is like the same thing.

So we get the blank slate and we got materialism and physicalism.

When the very people that built these systems were trying to, they were trying to achieve a greater good from their perspective.

And even how we design our cities.

We are pulling all of this from Steven Pinker's pivotal work, The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

It's such a fascinating source.

It really is.

So how did we get here? Like how did an entire society decide that biology is basically evil?

Well, it turns out we've built our modern intellectual lives on three specific interlocking philosophies.

And the first one is the title of the deep dive today, The Blank Slate.

Right.