There are certain figures in history who, you
know, they fit very neatly into boxes. Right.
You've got your scientists over here, the Newtons,
the Darwin's people who see the world through
observation, data, cold, hard facts. The rationalists.
Exactly. And then over on the other side, you
have your mystics, your religious leaders, the
people who look at the world through faith and
ritual and things unseen. We're comfortable with
that. We know a shelf to put them on. It's clean
separation. But today we are diving into the
mind of. a man who looked at those two completely
opposite worlds, the rigid structure of science
and the deep emotional pull of religion, and
he decided he didn't want to choose. He wanted
both. He decided to just weld them together.
It's arguably one of the most complex and, frankly,
strangest intellectual journeys of the entire
19th century. And we are talking about a ghost
compt. We are. On the one hand, you have the
man who literally invented the word sociology.
He's the godfather of applying the scientific
method to human society. The reason we trust
data to run governments, the reason we think
statistics can tell us the truth about ourselves.
That's all him. But then, on the other hand...
This exact same man ends his life wearing a robe,
proclaiming himself the high priest of humanity
and writing these incredibly detailed instruction
manuals for a new secular religion that he genuinely
believed was going to replace Christianity. It's
a bit like if, I don't know, a leading Silicon
Valley CEO suddenly quit building AI and declared
himself the pope of a new church dedicated to
the algorithm. Right. It sounds completely insane.
But as we dug through this. source material for
this deep dive, what's almost terrifying is how
logical his progression actually was. It's not
like he just snapped one day. He followed this
straight line of reasoning that just happened
to lead him right off a cliff. That is the perfect
way to frame it. Comte wasn't a madman, or at
least not in the way we usually think of one,
though we will absolutely get to his mental health
stroke. Oh, for sure. He was obsessed with one
thing above all else, order. And to understand
why a brilliant mathematician would end up inventing
a religion, You have to understand the world
he was trying to fix. Because he didn't just
wake up one morning and decide to invent sociology
for fun. He was trying to save civilization from
what he saw. as total collapse. OK, so that's
our mission today. We're going to track that
trajectory. We're going to unpack his law of
three stages, which is his kind of grand theory
of everything, how all of human history unfolds.
And we'll look at why he hated what he called
the metaphysical stage, which, spoiler alert
for everyone listening, is basically the stage
of modern democracy we are all living in right
now. Right. And we absolutely have to talk about
the twist right in the middle of his life. A
really tragic romance that, well, it turned the
human calculator into a priest. And we can't
forget his legacy. I mean, we literally use his
vocabulary every single day. If you've ever used
the word altruism, you are speaking Comte. I
had no idea. If you've ever said sociology, you're
speaking Comte. He gave us the language to describe
the modern world, even if his prescription for
how to. you know, run it was, let's just say,
a little eccentric. All right. So let's drop
the needle on the origin story. To really get
Comte, we have to go back to France. But not
the romantic postcard Paris. We're talking about
the wreckage left behind after the French Revolution.
Total chaos. He's born in 1798 in Montpellier,
the south of France. And what's the vibe in the
Comte household? Tense. Extremely tense. You
have to visualize the timeline to really feel
this. The revolution kicks off in 1789. The king
is beheaded. The reign of terror happens. It's
bloody. It's chaotic. So by the time Comte is
born, France has basically torn down its entire
social structure. The monarchy, the church, the
aristocracy, everything is gone. But they haven't
built anything to replace it. Exactly. They're
in a vacuum. But his family, they are staunch
royalists and fervent Catholics. So they're looking
backward, clinging to the old order, pretending
the revolution was just some horrible nightmare
that will eventually end. So he's a kid growing
up in a house that's saying the past was better,
the king was chosen by God, while the entire
world outside his window is on fire and moving
at a thousand miles an hour. That has to create
some serious friction. Immense friction. Comte
is a genius, even as a child, but he's a child
of his time. He looks at his parents' devotion
to the king and the church, and he just sees
it as a relic, something dead and illogical.
By the time he's a teenager, he creates what
he later calls unbridgeable differences with
his family. Unbridgeable differences. That's
a strong phrase. He uses it more than once in
his life. He completely rejects the Catholic
God, and he rejects the king. He decides that
the revolution was necessary to destroy all the
old rot, but he also sees that the revolution
completely failed to build a new house. And that's
a really key insight, isn't it? He wasn't a revolutionary
in the sense of, let's just burn everything down.
He was the guy standing in the ashes saying,
okay, the fire's out, now where are the blueprints
for the new building? Precisely. He was looking
for a new source of authority. If the king isn't
in charge anymore, and God isn't in charge, then
who is? And for him, the answer was obvious.
Science. The scientists, the engineers, the mathematicians.
Which leads him to Paris. It leads him to the
École Polytechnique in Paris, which is arguably
the single most important institution in his
life. You have to understand, this was not some
stuffy old liberal arts college. This was a military
and engineering school founded during a revolution.
So it's a product of this new world. It was a
hotbed of radical republicanism and this incredible
scientific optimism. The air there was just thick
with this idea that engineers should be running
the world. That is a very modern idea. The technocrat.
The belief that if you're just smart enough at
math, you can solve poverty like it's an algebraic
equation. That was the entire ethos. The students
there believed that the methods of the natural
sciences, you know, observation, experimentation,
calculation, could and should be applied to social
problems. And Comte just absorbed this completely.
But his academic career doesn't exactly go smoothly.
No, it hits a wall. The government actually shuts
the entire school down in 1816 because the students
were considered too radical, too Republican.
So Comte gets sent home, gets into more fights
with his parents, those unbridgeable differences
again, and eventually he just drifts back to
Paris broke and without a degree. And this is
where he meets the man who essentially gives
him the raw materials for his life's work. Henri
de Saint -Simon. Saint -Simon, the mentor figure.
From the notes, it seems like Saint -Simon was
already cooking up a lot of these ideas about
social... physiology and reorganizing society
around industry. He was. San Samuel is a fascinating
character in his own right, this eccentric aristocrat
who had somehow survived the revolution by the
skin of his teeth. For Comte, he was the catalyst.
San Samuel believed that the old feudal system
was dead and that the new society had to be led
by what he called industrialists. Which wasn't
just factory owners, right? It was a broader
term. Much broader. For him, it meant everyone
productive. Workers, scientists, bankers, engineers.
In 1817, Comte becomes his secretary, his student,
and he's the young bulldog, the systematizer.
Saint -Simon would have these grand, messy, brilliant
visions, and Comte would be the one to write
them down, give them structure, and turn them
into coherent essays. It sounds like a classic
dynamic, the big -picture visionary and the detail
-oriented operator. It was, for a while. But
the sources say it ended badly. That phrase,
unbridgeable differences, seems to be comedy's
personal catchphrase. It really was his recurring
pattern in life. The breakup in 1824 was just
ugly. It was partly about intellectual criticism.
Comte felt that Saint -Simon was putting his
own name on Comte's specific work, treating him
like a mere scribe instead of a true collaborator.
I can see how that would be frustrating. But
it was also philosophical. Saint -Simon was an
activist. He wanted to rush straight to the political
changes. He wanted to reorganize society now.
Comte was more cautious, more methodical. He
basically said, hold on, we can't reorganize
society until we first reorganize the way people
think. You can't build the new building until
you've invented the physics that will keep it
from falling down. That's the perfect analogy.
So he walks away. No job, no degree, totally
alienated from his family and now alienated from
his mentor. And he decides at this low point,
you know what? I'm going to create a system that
explains the entire history of human knowledge.
That is a staggering amount of pressure to put
on yourself. And the pressure, well, it broke
him. We often skip over the mental health aspect
of these great philosophers. You know, we treat
them like these disembodied brains in jars. But
with Comte, it is absolutely crucial to understanding
the urgency of his work. In 1826, just as he
started lecturing on his great new philosophy
to a private audience of very distinguished scientists,
he had what was called a cerebral crisis. Which
is a polite 19th century way of saying a complete
psychotic break. It was severe. He fled his home,
he was found wandering in the suburbs of Paris,
and he was eventually admitted to an asylum run
by the very famous alienist of the time, Jean
-Étienne Dominique Esquerolle. And the treatment
back then was? It was rudimentary. It was brutal.
Isolation, cold baths, probably bloodletting.
And the medical notes from the time are really
telling. It says he was released, but not cured.
Right. He was just stabilized. His mother essentially
had to sign him out and take him home to care
for him. And the tragedy just keeps going. A
suicide attempt. A very serious one. He was rescued
by a passing royal guard, but it was an incredibly
close call. It really changes how you read his
work, doesn't it? I mean, this is a man whose
internal world was absolute chaos. He was prone
to these violent mood swings, deep, deep depression.
So when he sits down to write... thousands of
pages about order and stability and certainty,
he isn't just talking about France. He's talking
about himself. He's trying to build a mental
cage strong enough to hold his own sanity. That
is a profound and I think completely accurate
observation. His philosophy, which he calls positivism,
is arguably an externalization of his desperate
need for internal control. After he survived
that suicide attempt, he adopted this incredibly
strict personal regimen he called cerebral hygiene.
Cerebral hygiene. He refused to read newspapers.
He wouldn't read other people's scientific journals,
no political reviews. He basically cut himself
off from almost all new inputs. Why? To keep
his mind pure. for his own great synthesis. He
wanted absolutely no outside noise, only the
sound of his own internal logic working itself
out. That's wild. He essentially ghosted the
entire intellectual world so that he could write
the instruction manual for the entire intellectual
world. It's the ultimate paradox. Okay, so let's
open that manual. He starts publishing the course,
Positive Philosophy. It's enormous, six volumes.
And the core of this whole thing is positivism.
Now, in modern English, when we say someone is
positive, we mean they're happy or optimistic.
That is not what he meant. Not at all. In Comte's
French, the word positive has a very specific
technical weight. It implies something that is
real, useful, certain, precise, and organic.
It's the absolute opposite of the negative critical
thinking that he felt had defined the revolution.
What do you mean by negative? Well, the revolution
was great at saying no. No to the king, no to
the church, no to the old ways. But it was terrible
at saying yes to a new system. Positivism is
all about finding the yes. It's about establishing
facts that are so certain, so undeniable that
they can serve as a new foundation for society.
And to get to those undeniable facts, he says
we have to clear the deck. No more ghosts, no
more spirits, no more abstract concepts like
human rights. If you can't measure it, observe
it, or deduce it from other observations, it's
garbage. Exactly. Positivism is what philosophers
call an epistemological perspective. It's a rule
for how we know what we know. He's making this
huge distinction between the natural philosophy
of the past, which he saw as just smart guys
thinking deep thoughts in their armchairs, and
science, which is based on discovering laws.
through rigorous observation. And to organize
all of this, he creates one of his most enduring
ideas, the hierarchy of the sciences. He called
it the encyclopedic law. He basically creates
a ladder and ranks every single field of human
knowledge. It's an incredibly ambitious project.
I love a good list. How does he rank them? Is
it by importance? It's by a combination of decreasing
positivity or exactness and increasing complexity.
But the easiest way to think about it is dependence.
Imagine a ladder. At the very bottom, the first
rung, you have mathematics. It's the most abstract,
the most perfect, the most exact science. Two
plus two will always equal four. It doesn't depend
on anything else. You don't need to know biology
to do math, but you absolutely need math to do
everything else. Right. So math is the foundation.
It's the tool for all the others. What's next
at the ladder? Next is astronomy. It's the study
of the simplest concrete objects, stars and planets
moving through a vacuum. The variables are relatively
few. You have mass. distance, velocity. He argued
it was the first science to become truly positive,
truly scientific, precisely because it's the
simplest thing to observe and predict. Then I
assume we get closer to home, more complex. Exactly.
The next rung is physics. Now we're dealing with
terrestrial matter, with heat, light, electricity,
gravity on Earth. It's more complex than watching
a planet. After that, chemistry. Matter isn't
just moving, it's reacting, it's changing its
composition. It's getting messier and more complicated.
I see the pattern. We're moving from the simple
and the abstract to the messy and the concrete.
Precisely. The next rung up is biology, or physiology
as he often called it. And now you have life,
an infinitely more complex phenomenon than a
rock or a chemical reaction. You have organs,
you have systems, you have death, you have reproduction.
And at the very, very top of the ladder. At the
very top, the queen science. The science that
depends on all the others, but is more complex
than any of them. He calls it sociology. He puts
his own invention at the top of the pyramid.
That's a pretty convenient move. It's a power
move, for sure, but it follows his logic perfectly.
You cannot possibly understand society, which
is a group of living humans, if you don't first
understand biology, how individual humans work.
And you can't understand biology without understanding
the chemistry of the body and so on, all the
way down to mathematics. So his argument is that
the reason society was such a mess in the 1800s
was that we were trying to solve sociological
problems without having mastered the science
of sociology first. That's it, exactly. We were
trying to run a country based on old religious
books or vague philosophical ideas, what he would
call feelings and guesswork, instead of on social
physics. Social physics. I know he eventually
dropped that name because some other guy stole
it, but I actually... like it better than sociology.
It tells you exactly what he was trying to do.
He wanted to find the laws of gravity that govern
human interaction. He really did. And the theft
of the name is actually a pretty funny sidebar
in history. There was this Belgian statistician,
Adolphe Quetelet. who started using the term
social physics for his own statistical work,
which was mostly just crunching crime rates and
things like that. And Comte was not happy. He
was furious. He felt Quetelet was just playing
with numbers without the deep philosophical framework
to understand what they meant. So in a fit of
pique, Comte coined the neologism sociality,
which is this awkward hybrid of Latin, socius,
meaning companion, and Greek. Logos, meaning
study. The language purists must have hated it.
They did. They called it a monstrosity. But it
stuck. And he split this new science of sociology
into two major branches, statics and dynamics.
Which are engineering terms. They're borrowed
from mechanics. Absolutely. He saw society as
a machine or an organism. So social statics for
him is the anatomy of society. It's the study
of the forces that hold it together at any given
moment. The forces of order. What would he examine?
He looked at things like the family unit, language,
religion. the division of labor. These are the
institutions, the connections, the boundaries
that create social cohesion. If you don't have
these, he argued, society just dissolves into
a collection of individuals. And social dynamics.
That's the physiology. It's not the structure,
but how the organism moves and changes over time.
This is the study of progress. How does a civilization
evolve from one state to the next? How does it
develop? And that dynamics part, the study of
how society moves, that leads us directly to
the big one, his grand unified theory of history,
the law of three stages. This is the absolute
central pillar of all of his thought. He believed
that this wasn't just a theory. It was an observable
scientific law like gravity. The idea is that
the human mind, and therefore all of human society,
inevitably passes through three distinct theoretical
conditions. And it applies to everything. To
everything. To an entire civilization over thousands
of years, to a single science, and even to the
development of an individual person's mind from
childhood to adulthood. He famously said, the
dead govern the living. He meant that our current
world is completely shaped by the path laid down
by these previous stages. All right, let's walk
that path. Stage one. The theological stage.
He also called this the fictitious stage. This
is the childhood of humanity. It lasts roughly
from the dawn of time up until the late Middle
Ages, maybe the 1300s. In this stage, the human
mind is desperate to know why things happen.
The ultimate questions. The absolute questions.
Why is there thunder? Why did the river flood?
What's the first cause of everything? And because
we don't have science yet, we invent supernatural
agents to explain the anomalies in the universe.
The thunder god is angry. The river spirit is
hungry and demands a sacrifice. Exactly. And
what's interesting is that Comte doesn't mock
this stage. He actually argues that it was absolutely
necessary. If the primitive mind didn't have
some kind of theory to connect the facts, even
a made -up one, it would have been completely
paralyzed by fear and confusion. observation
would have been impossible without a framework.
So religion was like the training wheels for
human thought. That's a great way to put it.
He also said it created the first class of people
dedicated to speculative activity, the priests,
which paved the way for later philosophers and
scientists. And this stage has its own evolution.
It starts with fetishism. Which is believing
that inanimate objects, like a rock or a tree,
have a spirit or a soul in them. Right. Then
it evolves into polytheism. We move from every
single object having a soul to having specific
gods for specific things. Poseidon for the sea,
Ra for the sun, and so on. This is an improvement,
but it's confusing because the gods are always
fighting with each other. And that leads to the
climax of the stage. Monotheism, the belief in
one single all -powerful god. For Comte, this
was the peak of the theological stage because
it brings the most order. Polytheism is chaotic.
Poseidon might want one thing, Zeus might want
another. Monotheism reduces the entire confusion
of the universe down to a single will. One God
in heaven, one king on earth, one absolute truth.
It prepares the mind for the idea of universal
scientific laws. But then we grow up a bit. We
hit the difficult teenage years. Stage two. The
metaphysical stage. Or the abstract stage. He
saw this as a transitional phase, lasting roughly
from the 1300s to the 1800s. It covers the Renaissance,
the Enlightenment, and crucially, the French
Revolution. So what defines the stage? In the
metaphysical stage, we stop believing that Zeus
is literally up on a mountain throwing lightning
bolts, but we're not quite ready for pure physics
yet. So we replace the supernatural agents with
abstract entities or invisible forces. What does
that mean in practice, abstract entities? Instead
of saying, God moved the planet, a metaphysical
thinker might say, Nature abhors a vacuum. Instead
of saying the king rules by divine right from
God, we start talking about the sovereignty of
the people or inalienable rights that are endowed
by, well, something abstract. We talk about a
social contract or vital forces in biology or
the soul. Wait, hold on a second. Inalienable
rights, sovereignty of the people. That sounds
like us. That sounds like the U .S. Declaration
of Independence. That sounds like the foundation
of modern democracy. And this is precisely where
Comte gets so controversial and so challenging
to our modern ears. He hated this stage. He called
it the critical or negative stage. Hate of it.
He saw it as necessary, but only as a tool of
destruction. He believed it was like a teenager
who has to rebel against their parents to become
an independent adult. The metaphysical stage
was necessary to destroy the old tyranny, the
theological stage, the absolute power of the
king and the church. But he argued that you cannot
build a lasting society on it. Why not? I mean,
we seem to have built plenty of societies on
the idea of rights and liberty. Come to would
argue, have we? Or have we just built societies
that are in a permanent state of argument? His
critique was that metaphysical concepts like
liberty, equality, or human rights are just abstractions.
They aren't scientifically defined. You can't
measure liberty. And because they aren't observable
facts, people just debate their meaning forever.
It leads to what he called intellectual anarchy.
He's basically looking at the French Revolution
and saying, see? You got rid of the king in the
name of liberty, and five minutes later you were
chopping each other's heads off in the name of
liberty. Exactly. The abstraction didn't provide
stability. It created a vacuum. He saw liberal
democracy as this chaotic, messy bridge between
the old stable order of the past and the new
stable order that was yet to come. A necessary
phase of destruction, but a terrible foundation
for construction. That is a genuinely haunting
critique. He's saying we are just stuck on the
bridge, arguing. Precisely. And he desperately
wanted to push humanity across that bridge to
the final destination. Stage three, the positive
stage, the adulthood of humanity. The scientific
stage. What does that world look like? In the
positive stage, the human mind finally gives
up the search for absolute knowledge. We stop
asking why. We stop asking, what is the ultimate
meaning of life? Or where did the universe come
from? Because those questions can't be answered
with observation and data. So what do we ask
instead? We ask how. How do the planets move
according to mathematical laws? How does poverty
spread through a population? We stop searching
for first causes and start searching for discoverable
laws, which he defined as the constant relations
between observed phenomena. So we trade meaning
for prediction. See to foresee, foresee to provide.
That was one of his great mottos. The goal of
science for him wasn't just to understand the
world. It was to control it for human benefit.
If we know the scientific laws of sociology,
we don't need politics anymore. We don't need
to vote on whether to build a bridge or how to
distribute food during a famine. We just calculate
the optimal, most efficient solution, and we
do it. It's the ultimate technocracy. The absolute
ultimate. It sounds incredibly efficient. It
also sounds incredibly cold. It's a world run
by spreadsheets. There's no room for debate,
no room for passion, just calculation. And that
is exactly where the entire story twists. Because
Comte, the man of pure reason and cold calculation,
fell in love. And it completely broke his system.
Enter Clotildeveau. The year is 1844. Comte is
long separated from his first wife. a woman named
Caroline Massine, a former prostitute he'd tried
to save, and their marriage was just disastrous
and volatile. A total mess. So he meets Clotilde
at the home of one of his students. She's young,
she's an intellectual, she writes poetry, and
she's also trapped in a terrible situation. Her
situation was just tragic. Her husband was a
tax collector who had embezzled a huge amount
of government funds and then fled the country,
leaving her disgraced, penniless, and abandoned.
But, and this is key, divorce was illegal in
France at the time, so she was still legally
married to him. And Comte falls for her. Hard.
He becomes completely infatuated with her. But
it couldn't go anywhere. The relationship couldn't
be consummated? It was this intense, passionate,
intellectual, and emotional connection, but it
was strictly platonic. Clotilde is a devout Catholic,
and she refused to break her marital vows, even
to a criminal husband who had abandoned her.
Comte just worshipped her. He wrote her these
agonizingly long, beautiful letters. He called
her his angel. But the story doesn't have a happy
ending. No. She was sick with tuberculosis, and
she died just two years later in 1846. literally
in his arms. And this death, it wasn't just a
personal tragedy for him. It completely rewired
his entire philosophy. Completely. Before Clotilde,
Comte believed the intellect was the supreme
guide for humanity. The brain was the boss. But
after her death, after experiencing this profound
love and profound grief, he decided that the
intellect was actually just a servant to the
heart. He had this huge realization that his
positive society had a fatal flaw. Which was?
It was boring. It was cold. It offered truth,
but it offered absolutely no comfort. It had
no community, no ritual, no love. The theological
stage for all its fictions had rituals and art
and feelings that bound people together into
a community. The positive stage was just dry
data and efficient administration. So he decides
to solve this problem. And where most people
would, you know, just join a choir or start a
book club to find community, Comte decides to
invent a new global religion. The religion of
humanity. This is the phase that his former admirer,
John Stuart Mill, famously called the bad Comte.
Mill loved the scientific philosophy, but was
horrified by what came next. So what was the
goal of this religion? The goal was to fulfill
the cohesive social function of traditional religion,
but for a modern scientific society. Comte argued
that humans have an innate biological need to
worship. You can't get rid of it. So since we
can't believe in a supernatural god anymore,
because science has proven that's a fiction,
we should worship the only thing that is truly
worthy of our worship. Which is? Humanity itself.
The collective greatness of the human species,
past, present, and future. He called it le grandet,
the supreme great being. He was not speaking
metaphorically here. Not at all. He designed
a priesthood. with himself as the first high
priest, naturally. He designed a whole new calendar.
He renamed the 13 months of the year after great
historical figures. Moses, Homer, Archimedes,
Caesar, Shakespeare, Descartes. He even created
his own set of social sacraments. Oh yeah, he
went all in. He had nine of them, which mirrored
the seven Catholic sacraments, but he expanded
on them. Instead of baptism, you had presentation,
where the parents formally present their newborn
child to humanity. At age 14, you had initiation,
where the child enters public life. At 21, admission,
where they choose a career. Then you had marriage
and so on. And what about after death? That was
the final sacrament, incorporation. This took
place seven years after your death. There would
be a public judgment of your life. And if you
were deemed to have been a worthy servant of
humanity, your remains were symbolically incorporated
into the great being. You achieved a kind of
immortality through the memory of the living.
It's just fascinating because he's literally
reverse engineering Catholicism. He grew up in
it. He rejected it. He hated it. And then he
spent the last years of his life rebuilding it
piece by piece, but just swapping out Jesus for
civilization. He explicitly called his system
Catholicism without Christianity. He wanted the
entire structure, the rituals, the robes, the
moral authority, the social cohesion, but without
any of the supernatural beliefs. And this is
where we get his other major contribution to
our vocabulary, altruism. Right. This is the
other word he coined. We tend to use it to mean
just, you know, charity or being nice to people.
But for Comte, it was a much more rigorous and
central concept. He coined the term from the
French phrase vivre pour autrui, which means
to live for others. For Comte, the entire ethical
basis of this new religion was that the individual
must subordinate themselves to the collective
whole. You exist to serve humanity. Self -interest,
egoism was the original sin. Which sounds incredibly
noble on the surface, but when you combine it
with his political views, it gets a little dystopian,
a little creepy. He wanted what he called a sociocracy.
Yes, and this is where the modern critique of
liberticide, the killing of liberty, comes in.
He believes that since social physics is a science,
you shouldn't vote on its findings. You don't
vote on the laws of gravity, do you? Of course
not. So why, he asks, should you vote on the
laws of society? He imagined a future world ruled
by a sort of board of directors, a coalition
of bankers who would manage the material resources
of society, and positivist priests, the sociologists,
who would manage the education and morality.
And what would the public do? The public would
just obey. Their job was to trust the experts.
It's the Borg from Star Trek. It certainly has
those deeply authoritarian undertones. He explicitly
valued order far above liberty. For him, liberty
was just a messy, disruptive, metaphysical concept.
And this is why, for all his brilliance, his
religion of humanity never really took off in
Europe. The intellectuals loved the sociology
part. They loved his analysis of history. But
they ran for the hills when he started talking
about wearing robes and having bankers run the
world without elections. But, and this is one
of the weirdest and most fascinating facts in
all the notes, it did take off somewhere else,
not in Europe, but across the ocean. In Brazil.
It's a crazy piece of history. In the late 19th
century, Brazil was still an empire, and a powerful
group of military officers and politicians wanted
to overthrow the emperor and establish a modern
republic. And they were reading Comte. They were
obsessed with him. People like Benjamin Constant
and the military thinkers at the Military Academy
of Rio de Janeiro. They loved his idea of a scientific
dictatorship. They saw it as a way to modernize
Brazil overnight, to skip the messy metaphysical
stage of democracy and go straight to the efficient,
positive stage of order in scientific governance.
And they literally put his slogan on their new
national flag. Ordem e Progresso. Order and progress.
That is the abbreviated positivist motto. The
full version is love is a principle and order
is the basis. Progress is the goal. When you
look at the Brazilian flag today, you are looking
at a giant billboard for Auguste Comte. That
is absolutely mind -blowing. A forgotten 19th
century French cult leader is waving over the
beaches of Rio de Janeiro right now. And it gets
weirder. There are still actual functioning temples
of humanity in Brazil and a few in France. You
can go visit them. They have the altars, not
to saints, but to Newton and Caesar and Dante.
It's like a living fossil of this very specific,
very strange moment in intellectual history.
I want to touch on one other quirk before we
get to the final legacy. For a guy who claimed
to know the future of science, he made one hilariously
bad prediction. Ah, yes. The star composition.
This is a classic. In his big book, The Positive
Philosophy, Conti wanted to give an example of
knowledge that was permanently and forever out
of reach for humans. He wanted to show that science
had its limits. Okay, what was his example? He
wrote, with complete confidence that while we
can calculate the distance and movement and mass
of the stars, we would never be able to know
their chemical composition. Why not? Because
we can't go there. We can't fly to a star and
take a sample and bring it back to a lab. It
sounded perfectly logical. But literally within
30 years of him writing that, the science of
spectroscopy was invented. Gustav Kirchhoff and
Robert Bunsen figured out that you could analyze
the light coming from a star, look at its spectral
lines, and from that, you could tell exactly
what elements it's made of. Helium was discovered
on the sun before it was discovered on Earth.
So he was proven completely wrong almost immediately.
Humiliatingly wrong. It's a great lesson for
any thinker. Never, ever bet against human ingenuity
in technology. But there is another evolution
in his thought that's actually quite surprising,
and that's his view on Islam. Yes, I saw that
in the notes. For a French atheist ex -Catholic,
he developed a surprisingly warm view of Islam
later in his life. How did that happen? Well,
initially he was pretty dismissive, just like
most Western European thinkers of his time. He
saw it as less rational, less progressive than
Western monotheism. But as he got deeper into
designing his own religion of humanity, he reassessed
it. What did he see? He looked at the Catholicism
he grew up with and saw a messy, overly complex
theology with saints and relics and a convoluted
hierarchy. Then he looked at Islam and he saw
what he called doctrinal simplicity. One God,
one book, a clear set of practices. He really
admired the focus on daily ritual, the five prayers
a day, and the intense social cohesion of the
Ummah, the global community. So he thought it
was a better model for his own religion. He actually
argued that Islam was better suited to transition
people to the final positive stage than Christianity
was. He even proposed borrowing the idea of the
Qibla, the fixed direction of worship toward
Mecca. He wanted his followers to pray in a certain
direction. Yes. He proposed that all positivists,
wherever they were in the world, should orient
their private prayers toward Paris, specifically,
toward his apartment on the Rue Monsieur le Prince.
His disciples even nicknamed his apartment our
Kaaba. It just shows how desperate he was to
create this universal system by borrowing what
he saw as the best practices of every culture.
Okay, so let's zoom out. We have this incredibly
complex figure, a rebel, a math nerd, a mental
patient, a tragic lover, a self -proclaimed high
priest. Why does he matter today? If the religion
of humanity was a total failure, why are we still
talking about him? Because the structure of our
modern world is fundamentally positivist. Even
if we don't wear the robes or pray to humanity,
we are living in the house that Compt designed.
How so? Just think about how a modern government
or a modern corporation functions. We have the
Bureau of Labor Statistics. We have the Census
Bureau. We have economic forecasting models.
We have A .D. testing for websites. We have an
absolute faith that the way to fix a problem,
whether it's inflation or crime or low user engagement,
is to gather massive amounts of data. Find the
pattern and then pull a policy lever based on
that data. That is pure cunt. It is the absolute
essence of the positive stage. We are all unwitting
positivists in our public and professional lives.
We accepted his method, even though we totally
rejected his bizarre religion. We took the sociology
and we left the supreme great being on the shelf.
We did. But here's the thing. I would argue we
are also feeling the consequences of that choice.
We're feeling the absence of the thing he tried
to create with his religion. What do you mean?
Compton was right about one huge, important thing.
Data is not enough to satisfy the human soul.
We are living in the most positive, scientific,
data -driven age in all of human history. And
yet, what do we see everywhere? A massive crisis
of meaning. People feel lonely, alienated. They're
becoming more and more tribal. They're desperately
looking for rituals, for community, for something
to belong to. That's the great irony, isn't it?
We basically achieved his dream of a scientific
society, and it feels exactly like the metaphysical
anarchy that he warned us about. We are still
arguing endlessly about rights and liberty. We
are still searching for that sense of community
he thought was so important. It suggests that
maybe his law of three stages isn't a straight
line. Maybe we don't just grow out of the theological
or the metaphysical stages and discard them like
old clothes. Maybe a healthy society and a healthy
person needs all three. You need the science
for the plumbing and the bridges. The metaphysics
for our rights and our justice. And the theology,
or at least the ritual and the community part
of it, for our hearts. And Comps' tragedy, or
maybe his genius, was that he saw the need for
all three, but he tried to jam them all into
one single, rigid, top -down system. And it just
collapsed under its own weight. But you have
to admire the sheer ambition of the attempt.
He looked at a world that he saw as completely
broken and tried to build a single machine that
would fix everything. He absolutely did. And
in the process, he gave us the very language
we use to understand our own brokenness. Sociology.
altruism, social dynamics, the entire idea of
functionalism, that society is a system of interconnected
parts, like a body, that's all him. We are still
thinking with the tools he forged, even if we
completely disagree with the building he wanted
to construct. So here's the thought I want to
leave you with as we wrap this up. Comte believed
that the metaphysical stage, the stage of questioning
authority, of debating abstract rights, of individual
liberty, was just a messy, chaotic teenage phase
we needed to grow out of. He thought the Final
destination was a world of perfect, silent, scientific
order. But looking around at our world today,
maybe the messiness isn't a bug. Maybe it's the
feature. Exactly. Maybe the endless debate, the
constant questioning, maybe that is the point.
And maybe being a walking contradiction like
Auguste Comte, someone who needs both the cold,
hard math and the deep human mystery, is just
what it means to be human. A thought worth pondering.
Thanks for taking this deep dive with us. We'll
see you next time.