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Ideas Matter Podcast is home to talks from leading contemporary thinkers on the most important political and cultural issues and intellectual trends of our times. Many were recorded at or reflect the topics discussed at Ideas Matter events, including Living Freedom summer school, The Academy residential weekend and Debating Matters schools debating competition.
Episodes
Friday Aug 15, 2025
Friday Aug 15, 2025
The Industrial Revolution was supposed to set humanity free. It promised progress—mastery over nature, freedom from suffering, and a future shaped by human reason. It gave us the means to solve problems that once seemed like fate, to subject the world to human ingenuity and build a civilisation of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
But something went wrong. Instead of controlling the world, we turned inward, seeking to control ourselves. Today, we no longer dream of engineering great structures—we seek to engineer the human mind. The great optimism of the Enlightenment has given way to a deep post-liberal pessimism, a belief that the real problem isn't the world but us.
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