The Fragility of Virtuous Government

We are not living in an age of unusual folly. We’re simply rediscovering how rare good government has ever been – and how much there was to appreciate. Enjoying our Youtube videos? Get full access to all our audio content, videos, and thousands of thought-provoking articles, conversation cards and more with The School of Life Subscription: https://t.ly/7VE6e Be more mindful, present and inspired. Get the best of The School of Life delivered straight to your inbox: https://t.ly/Oe2EH FURTHER READING “It is an enormous and very rare privilege to have lived in the days of good government. Across nations and centuries, few people have ever done so. By a rare bit of luck, certain groups in a few corners of the globe tasted decades of this remarkable, anomalous blessing. They might even, foolishly (especially if they travelled little, seldom read history books or had a very high estimation of their own populations) have started to assume it was a natural or god-given norm. Yet the default state of almost all nations is quite other, it is authoritarianism, bullying, demagoguery, corruption, monopoly, racial segregation and state sponsored aggression and murder. We will not now, it seems, be living in dramatically unusual times; it was the years before that will be remembered as unusual: a daring bet against the facts of our nature. We aren’t sliding into a new age of darkness, we are reverting to a mean. Civilization was always, simply, an unlikely concept…” You can read more on this and other topics here: https://goo.gl/JwpQ85 MORE SCHOOL OF LIFE Watch more films on CAPITALISM in our playlist: http://bit.ly/TSOLcapitalism SOCIAL MEDIA Feel free to follow us at the links below: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theschooloflifelondon/ X: https://twitter.com/TheSchoolOfLife Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theschooloflifelondon/ MUSIC By Kathleen Ferrier, singing Bach's Erbarme Dich, St Matthew Passion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDDyHigHQao CREDITS Produced in collaboration with: Matthew Hammett Knott https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/matthew-hammett-knott #TheSchoolOfLife ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices