260805: Desegregate Generations & Delay Gratification
Sasse: “The digital revolution that we’re going to live through... For a small number of people, with lots of intentionality, lots of habits, and thick communities of accountability... These tools are gonna be great. For the majority of people they're going to be disastrous.”
Douthat: “What do you give to the normal people in that scenario? Is it a different philosophy of life? Is it a religious vision?”
Sasse: “Communities that can do deferred gratification. Self-discipline, self-restraint, self-control are the only antidotes to others’ restraint, others’ disciplines, others’ controls. We have to think very intentionally about our affections. What are our loves? We have to think deeply about rank-ordered loves… We’ve been, for 150 years, tempted by generational segregation…”
Douthat: “Meaning the young don’t encounter the old, and vice-versa.”
Sasse: “In my personal pantheon of American greats, and villains, I think we radically underestimate the downsides of John Dewey… I think John Dewey did many many terrible things and one of them was say, Well, the economy went from craft work and agriculture to industrial scale. We should make childhood on an industrial scale, we should industrialize children the vast majority of the time… And only around people of their same birth year.”