https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tXCRqOOEtho
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan is an intellectual figure. And you see that motif emerge very frequently, by the way, in popular culture. So, for example, in The Lion King, the figure of Scar, who’s a satanic figure, is also hyper-intellectual. And that’s very common, that, you know, it’s the evil scientist motif, or the evil advisor to the king, the same motif. It encapsulates something about rationality, and what it seems to encapsulate is the idea that rationality, like Satan, is the highest angel in God’s heavenly kingdom. It’s a psychological idea, you know, that the most powerful sub-element of the human psyche is the intellect. And it’s the thing that shines out above all, within the domain of humanity, and maybe across the domain of life itself. The human intellect, there’s something absolutely remarkable about it, but it has a flaw, and the flaw is that it tends to fall in love with its own productions, and to assume that they’re total. Solzhenitsyn, when he was writing the Gulag Archipelago, had a warning about that, with regards to totalitarian ideology. And he said that the price of selling your God-given soul to the entrapments of human dogma was slavery and death, essentially. And Satan, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan decides that he can do without the transcendent, he can do without God, and that’s why he foments rebellion. It’s something like that, and the consequence of that, the immediate consequence from Milton’s perspective, was that as soon as Satan decided that what he knew was sufficient, and that he could do without the transcendent, which you might think about as the domain outside of what you know, something like that, immediately he was in hell. And when I read Paradise Lost, I was studying totalitarianism, and I thought, you know, the poet, the true poet, like a prophet, is someone who has intimations of the future. And maybe that’s because the poetic mind, the philosophical or prophetic mind, is a pattern detector, and there are people who can detect the underlying, it’s like the melody of a nation, melody as in song, the song of a nation, and can see how it’s going to develop across the centuries. You see that in Nietzsche, because Nietzsche, for example, in the mid, around 1860 or so, he prophesied what was going to happen in the 20th century, he said specifically that the specter of communism would kill millions of people in the 20th century. It’s an amazing prophecy. He said that in the notes that became Will to Power. And Dostoevsky was of the same sort of mind, someone who was in touch enough with the fundamental patterns of human movement that they could extrapolate out into the future and see what was coming. And I mean, some people are very good at detecting patterns, you know, and Milton, I think, was of that sort. And I think he had intimations of what was coming as human rationality became more and more powerful, and technology became more and more powerful. And the intimation was that we would produce systems that dispensed with God, that were completely rational and completely total, that would immediately turn everything they touched into something indistinguishable from hell. And Milton’s warning was, it’s embodied in the poem, is that the rational mind that generates a production and then worships it as if its absolute immediately occupies hell.