Leo Strauss observed that modernity lowered the bar for what human beings could achieve. While this has allowed more people to reach the bar, it has also resulted in a culture of mass mediocrity.

 

The consequences have been nothing short of catastrophic — we've forgotten who we can become.​

 

The crisis of modernity isn't just that we aim at the wrong goals — or mediocre ones — but that we've trained ourselves to be happy with minimally fulfilled lives.

 

Never has there been such a bored, passive, aimless, morally sterile, spiritually dead and philosophically illiterate civilization as ours. Our lives are one long exercise in escapism — from depth, from meaning, from anything that demands soul.

 

We once trained people for greatness. Now we train them for success. This is the story of the flattening of the human spirit.

 

My goal with this lecture series is to lay out the conditions for living a maximally fulfilled life, and to illuminate the ladder of greatness that anyone can climb.