Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are doing something
a little different today. We're looking at a
man who is essentially the operating system for
the modern world. That's a great way to put it.
You know how we obsess over data, how we say
trust the science, how we all just sort of believe
that if you break a problem down into small enough
parts, you can solve it. Yeah, that entire method.
That framework, you know, that entire way of
interacting with reality. It didn't just appear
out of nowhere. It had an architect. It absolutely
did. And that architect is Francis Bacon. But
the deeper we got into these sources, the biographies,
the court records, the letters, the more I realized
that the father of science title is actually
the boring part of the story. Really? The boring
part? I think so. Because the man himself, he
is a mess. A brilliant, catastrophic, just...
A fascinating mess. That is exactly what struck
me. We are talking about a massive contradiction
wrapped up in an Elizabethan rough. On one side
you have the light. The highlight reel. The highlight
reel, exactly. This is the guy who coined the
phrase, knowledge is power. The guy who basically
stood up and told all of humanity, stop guessing
and start looking. I mean, he dismantled the
way people have thought for 2 ,000 years. 2 ,000
years of dogma. Just boom. Gone. But then you
flip the record over and you get the dark side.
And it is dark. We're not just talking about
a guy with, you know, a bad temper or a few skeletons
in his closet. No. We're talking about a Lord
Chancellor of England, the highest legal officer
in the kingdom, convicted of corruption and bribery.
A man who arguably sent his best friend, his
patron, the guy who gave him land and supported
him, to the executioner to save his own career.
To save his own skin. And a figure whose private
life was, well... It was rife with rumors of
masculine love in an era where that could get
you killed. It's a lot to unpack. And our mission
for this deep dive is really to try and reconcile
these two versions of the man. How can you be
the justice judge in England, as he called himself,
and yet accept bribes? Right. How do those two
things exist in the same person? And how do you
have a man who preaches clean hands in science?
I mean, his whole thing is strip away your biases,
be pure in your observation. But gets his own
hands incredibly dirty in politics. That is the
central paradox. Bacon isn't just some historical
footnote. He is the bridge between the medieval
mind and the modern world. But to understand
how he built that bridge, you have to look at
the mud he was standing in. So we have to look
at the biographical records, his major works
like the Nova Morganum and New Atlantis, and
some very gossipy, very revealing historical
accounts from contemporaries like John Aubrey.
So let's rewind. We need to set the scene. We're
in London. It's 1561. Queen Elizabeth I is on
the throne. And Francis Bacon is born at York
House. Right. Now, usually when we talk about
disruptors or revolutionaries, you expect an
underdog story, right? Someone scraping by on
the streets, fighting the system from the outside.
That is not this story, is it? Not even close.
Francis Bacon is the ultimate insider. He is
born into the absolute heart of the English political.
The establishment. The establishment, exactly.
His father is Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper
of the Great Seal. Which, just to clarify for
everyone, sounds like a wizard title from a fantasy
novel. It really does. But it's actually one
of the highest legal offices in the entire country.
It means he's the top lawyer presiding over the
Court of Chancery. He's the guy holding the stamp
that makes laws official. And his mother, Anne
Cook, is equally formidable. She's a noted humanist,
a translator of complex theology, and a radical
Puritan. So super smart and super intense. Terrifyingly
smart and incredibly intense. She made sure her
sons were educated to the highest possible standard.
And the connections don't stop there because
his uncle is Lord Burghley. William Cecil. Lord
Burghley. For context, you have to understand
Burghley is essentially the prime minister before
that title even existed. He is Queen Elizabeth's
right hand man. He runs the country. So Francis
is the nephew of the most powerful non -royal
in England. He's got the keys to the kingdom
from birth. So he's got the pedigree. He's got
the connections. And by all accounts, he's clearly
a genius. I read in the notes that he was sent
to Trinity College, Cambridge at age 12. 12.
12 years old. I was, I don't know, barely figuring
out how to organize my binder at 12. And he's
off to university. It was unusual even for the
time, though not totally unheard of for the high
aristocracy. The queen herself noticed him early
on. She loved talking to him. She used to call
him the young lord keeper. She saw the potential.
But this time at Cambridge is crucial. It's the
first major pivot point we see in the sources.
Because usually a kid that age, you go to school,
you learn what the teachers tell you, you try
to pass your exams, you try to fit in. You toe
the line. You toe the line. Bacon looks at the
entire curriculum and says, this is garbage.
He hated it. He despised it. And we have to understand
why. Because this teenage rebellion, this hatred,
is what... eventually gives us modern science.
At the time, the curriculum was entirely scholastic.
It was medieval. It was completely dominated
by the philosophy of Aristotle. But not the interesting
Aristotle. Not the let's go out and look at nature
Aristotle. No, no, no. This was a fossilized
version of Aristotle. It was let's read what
Aristotle wrote about nature 2 ,000 years ago
and argue about the precise definitions of his
words. So it's all theory? It was pure deduction.
You start with a general premise that Aristotle
claimed was true, like, say, that heavens are
perfect and unchanging. And then you just debate
the logic of it. You never actually look out
the window. So if you want to know how many teeth
the horse has. You don't open a horse's mouth
and count. Yeah. That would be vulgar. You check
the textbook. You check Aristotle. And if the
textbook says 40 and the horse in front of you
has 38, then the horse is wrong. Or you're counting
wrong. Or you're counting wrong. The book is
the truth, not your own eyes. That would drive
a mind like Bacon's completely insane. He called
it barren, right? Barren, argumentative, and
wrong in its objectives. That is a scathing review
from a 14 -year -old. He saw the smartest minds
in Europe just spinning in circles, debating
these abstract... Logic puzzles. While diseases
were curing nothing, bridges were falling down,
and agriculture wasn't improving. It was useless
knowledge. It was just words about words. Even
as a teenager, Bacon wanted knowledge that did
something. He called it fruit. He wanted results.
Practical application. Exactly. He revered Aristotle
as a person. He respected his mind. But he thought
the philosophy had become a dead end. This is
the seed of the entire scientific revolution.
It starts with a grumpy, brilliant teenager at
Cambridge thinking his professors are wasting
their time. So he has the ambition to change
the world. He has the family name to get him
into power. You'd think he's set for a smooth
ride straight to the top. But then real life
hits him in the face. 1579. What happens? He's
18 years old. He's in France, part of the ambassador's
entourage, getting some diplomatic experience,
probably living the high life. And word arrives
that his father, Sir Nicholas, has died suddenly.
Now, typically, the Lord Keeper would leave his
son a fortune. Sir Nicholas had actually set
aside a massive sum of money to buy an estate
specifically for Francis, his youngest son. But
he didn't sign the papers. He died with the quill
effectively in the air. Because the legal work
wasn't finished, the money wasn't ring -fenced
for Francis. So it all went into the general
pot to be divided among all the children. Francis
got a tiny fraction of what was intended, about
a fifth. So he went from being the pampered son
of the elite, expecting a life of leisure where
he could sit around and study philosophy, to
a young man who suddenly had to work to survive.
He had debts, he had expensive tastes, and now
no income. That is a brutal reality check. And
this is where the hustle begins. I think this
context is so important because it explains his
desperation later on. He isn't just ambitious.
He's panicked. He is terrified of poverty. He
enters law school at Grey's End, not because
he loves the law, he found it tedious, but because
he needs a career. And he immediately starts
leveraging those family connections. He writes
to his uncle, Lord Burghley. The most powerful
man in England. And he's basically saying, hey,
Uncle William, it's me. Your brilliant nephew,
Francis. Give me a government job with a good
salary and lots of free time so I can fix all
of human knowledge for the betterment of mankind.
And what does Uncle Burgly say? You more or less
ghosts him. Ouch, why? Well, Burgly was a pragmatist,
a very cautious, steady administrator. Francis
was flashy, arrogant, brilliant, and full of
these grand theoretical schemes. Burgly probably
saw him as unreliable. Plus, Burtley had his
own son, Robert Cecil, to promote. Oh, nepotism.
He didn't want his brilliant nephew outshining
his own kid. So for decades, Bacon is left on
the outside looking in. He gets a seat in parliament,
becomes an MP, and he makes a name for himself
as a liberal -minded reformer. But the high office,
the real power, keeps slipping through his fingers.
And this constant rejection, this frustration,
drives him into the arms of a different patron.
It does. This brings us to the Earl of Essex.
And honestly, this chapter feels like a movie
script. It has everything. Friendship, power,
loyalty, and a whole lot of betrayal. It really
does. Since his uncle wouldn't help him, Bacon
attached himself to the rising star of the court.
Robert Devereaux, the second Earl of Essex. You
have to picture Essex for us. Who was this guy?
Essex is. He's everything Bacon isn't. He's dashing,
military -minded, charismatic, impulsive, handsome.
And most importantly, he is Queen Elizabeth's
absolute favorite. The golden boy. He's the golden
boy. She's old. He's young. There's this weird,
intense, almost mother -son flirtatious energy
between them. He has the queen's ear. And Bacon
becomes his brain. Essentially, yes. Bacon becomes
his advisor, his strategist, his speechwriter.
And in return, Essex tries very, very hard to
help Bacon. When the powerful job of attorney
general opens up, Essex campaigns aggressively
for Bacon to get it. He lobbies the queen. He
makes a scene. He promises her anything. But
Bacon loses. He loses to Edward Koch. And we
need to put a giant pin in that name. Sir Edward
Koch. The villain of the story. He's the antagonist,
for sure. Koch was the greatest lawyer of the
age, no question. A brilliant legal mind. But
he was also rigid, aggressive, foul -tempered,
and Bacon's lifelong rival. They hated each other.
So Bacon loses the attorney general gig to Koch.
Then he loses the solicitor general gig, too.
He does. And Essex feels so guilty about his
failure to help his friend that he gives Bacon
a piece of land at Twickenham worth a small fortune.
That is a good friend. Sorry you didn't get the
job. Here's an estate. That creates a serious
debt of loyalty, doesn't it? If my friend gives
me a house, I feel like I owe him my back. It
absolutely creates a debt. A massive one. And
that is what makes the next part so shocking
and so controversial. Because Essex was not a
stable guy. Not at all. He was volatile. He was
arrogant. He eventually fell out of favor with
the Queen after a disastrous military campaign
in Ireland. He came back against her orders.
burst into her bedchamber before she had her
wig on. A huge no -no. And then, in a moment
of absolute madness, he attempted a coup. He
tried to overthrow Queen Elizabeth. He tried
to raise a rebellion in the streets of London.
It was a complete shambles. It failed within
hours. Essex is arrested and charged with high
treason. So now Bacon is in the worst position
imaginable. He is a lawyer for the crown. The
queen is his ultimate boss. But the man in the
cell is his patron, his benefactor, his best
friend. And the queen knows this. She commands
Bacon to be part of the legal team prosecuting
Essex. She is testing his loyalty. She knows
they were close. She wants to see in public where
Bacon stands. And here's the choice. You defend
your friend, or at least you recuse yourself,
and you probably get destroyed politically. You
might even be accused of being a co -conspirator.
Or you prosecute your friend to save your own
skin and get back in the Queen's good graces.
Most people would understand staying silent.
You know, finding an excuse to be sick that day,
get out of town. But Bacon doesn't just do the
bare minimum. The records show he went after
Essex hard. He used his inside knowledge of Essex's
plans against him. He did. He systematically
dismantled Essex's defense. In his closing arguments,
he compared his friend to Cain, the biblical
murderer who killed his own brother. He was relentless
in securing the conviction. Which led directly
to Essex being executed, beheaded. Yep. That
is cold. I mean, I understand self -preservation,
but actively prosecuting the guy who gave you
an estate, is there any defense for this? Or
is he just a monster? Well, the Bacon apologists,
and there are a few, would argue that Bacon believed
in the stability of the state above all else.
He genuinely saw Essex as a dangerous, reckless
revolutionary who would plunge England into a
bloody civil war. So in Bacon's mind, he was
choosing the greater good over the private friendship.
He was choosing the crown over the individual.
That's the argument. He even wrote a pamphlet
after the execution explaining his actions, trying
to justify it. That sounds like a very convenient
rationalization for saving your own neck. It
does. And honestly, it didn't even work that
well for him. He got the conviction Essex was
beheaded, but the public hated Bacon for it.
It sets up this pattern, doesn't it? Bacon is
capable of these incredibly high -minded ideals,
the state, the truth, human progress, but also
this incredible moral flexibility when his own
career is on the line. He's a master of compartmentalization.
He can shut off the friend part of his brain
and turn on the lawyer part. And that ability
to separate things, to detach, is actually the
key to his philosophy, isn't it? While all this
political drama is happening, he's essentially
rewriting the rule book on how human beings are
supposed to think. Let's shift to the light side.
The philosophy. Right. So keep in mind, while
he's hustling for jobs and prosecuting friends,
he is constantly writing. He publishes his masterpiece,
the Novum Organum, in 1620. Which translates
to the new instrument or the new tool. Which
is a direct jab at Aristotle, whose collection
of works on logic were known as the Organon or
the instrument. Exactly. Bacon is saying, that
was the old broken tool. Here is the new one.
And the core of this new tool is induction. We
touched on this with the horse teeth, but let's
really clarify the difference for everyone. What
is the fundamental difference between the old
science and Bacon's new science? The old science,
deduction, moves from the general to the specific.
You start with a big assumed rule. All heavy
objects fall faster than light objects because
Aristotle said so, and you apply it. If you see
a cannonball and a feather fall at the same rate
in a vacuum, you assume your eyes are lying or
it's some kind of trick. The theory is king.
The theory is king. Bacon flipped it entirely.
He said, start with the specifics. Start with
the particulars. Forget what you think you know.
Go out and gather the data first. Drop a thousand
different rocks. Watch a thousand birds. Record
the tides for a year. Collect, collect, collect.
And only then, after you have mountains of data,
can you carefully start to form a general rule.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. That
is the quote. And it's so profound. You can't
force nature to fit your theories. You have to
listen to nature first, be humble, and let it
tell you how it works. And this is where his
most famous and, I think, most useful concept
comes in. To be a good scientist, Bacon said
you have to first clear your mind of idols. The
idols of the mind. This is my favorite part of
his philosophy because it feels so startlingly
modern. It's like he's a cognitive psychologist
from the 21st century. It really is. He identified
four mental blocks, four systemic biases that
stop us from seeing the truth. These aren't golden
statues. They are bugs in our mental software.
There are systematic errors in how we process
information. And he breaks them down into four
brilliant categories, the idols of the tribe,
the cave, the marketplace, and the theater. Let's
walk through them because I think everyone listening
is going to recognize these in their own lives,
maybe even in their own social media feeds from
this morning. First up, idols of the tribe, idola
tribus. So this doesn't refer to a specific tribe.
It refers to the tribe of humanity. These are
errors inherent to being a human being. They're
built into our biology, our hardware. Like what?
Well, for one. Our senses are imperfect and they
can deceive us. But more importantly, we are
hardwired to see patterns where there aren't
any. We see a face in the clouds. We think a
sports player is on a hot streak when it's just
random chance. We see conspiracies and coincidences.
And confirmation bias, that's the big one from
this category. That's the absolute killer. Bacon
nailed this. He wrote, the human understanding,
when it has once adopted an opinion, draws all
things else to support and agree with it. If
you believe something, you will actively look
for evidence that supports it, and you will unconsciously
ignore, dismiss, or forget evidence that contradicts
it. He saw that 400 years before modern psychology
gave it a name and ran experiments on it. It's
astounding. Okay, so that's the tribe. Number
two, idols of the cave, idolospicus. This is
individual. Think of Plato's cave. Each of us
lives in our own little private cave of personal
experience. Your upbringing. Your education,
the country you live in, the books you read,
the friends you have. All of this shapes your
unique perspective and creates specific biases.
So if I'm a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Precisely. If you are a chemist. You might try
to explain all of human behavior through chemical
reactions, ignoring sociology or economics. If
you grew up in a very religious household, you
see the world through that lens. If you grew
up in a very secular one, you see it through
another. You are trapped in the cave of your
own limited experience. Today, we call this the
echo chamber or the algorithmic bubble. The news
feed that only shows you what you already like.
The YouTube recommendations that pull you deeper
down one rabbit hole, that is a digital idol
of the cave. It's the perfect modern analogy.
It's terrifyingly accurate. All right, number
three, idols of the marketplace, idolafory. Bacon
thought this was the most troublesome one of
all. This idol arises from the exchange of words,
the marketplace of communication and debate.
It's about language. It's about the slipperiness
of language. Words are imprecise. We use the
same word to mean different things. We argue
for hours without realizing we've defined our
terms differently. It's more than just semantics,
though, isn't it? It's much deeper. It's when
language actively distorts reality. We create
words for things that don't really exist, like
luck or fortune, and then we start treating them
as real forces. Or we lack words for things that
do exist. Look at any heated political debate.
Someone says freedom. Oh, boy. One side means
freedom from government regulation. The other
means freedom from poverty and want. They get
red in the face shouting at each other, assuming
they're talking about the same thing, but they
aren't. They're just throwing words, these idols,
at each other. These are the false dogmas of
grand philosophical or ideological systems. Bacon
called them theater because he said these systems,
like Aristotle's or alchemy or astrology, were
like stage plays. They created these elaborate
fictional worlds. that looked coherent internally
they had their own script their own characters
their own rules of logic But they had no relation
to reality. It was just performances. This is
ideology. When you buy into a system so completely,
whether it's Marxism or libertarianism or any
-o -ism, that you stop checking if it actually
works in the real world. You're just living inside
the play. Exactly. So Bacon's solution, his scientific
method, was essentially a mental hygiene routine.
It was a way to debug the human mind. He wanted
us to constantly ask ourselves, am I believing
this because it's true? Or is it because my tribe
is hardwired to believe it? Or because my cave
has reinforced it? Or because the words in the
marketplace have confused me? Or am I just watching
a very convincing theater play? It's an incredible
checklist for critical thinking. And his goal
with all this wasn't just to be smart for the
sake of it. It was part of a grand plan he called
the Great Instauration. He wanted to rebuild
all human knowledge from the ground up. He had
a six -part plan to basically reboot civilization.
He categorized everything. History. which relies
on memory, poetry, which relies on imagination,
and philosophy, which for him included science,
which relies on reason. He wanted to build a
foundation so solid that humanity could regain
the dominion over nature that was lost in the
Garden of Eden. He saw it as a religious duty,
didn't he? Deeply. He believed science was a
way to serve God by relieving the suffering of
mankind. He wanted to cure diseases, stop famines,
build better cities. His goal was always practical.
So on one hand, we have this noble, almost saintly
vision of serving humanity through pure, unbiased
reason. And then we have to go back to the man
himself, because while he is writing about clearing
the mind of idols, he is also climbing the greasy
pole of politics under King James I. And he is
about to have a very, very big fall. The rise
under James is spectacular. Queen Elizabeth dies
in 1603. James I of England comes down from Scotland.
And Bacon knows exactly how to play him. James
fancies himself a great scholar, a philosopher
king. So Bacon butters him up. Oh, absolutely.
He flatters him, writes philosophical tracts
dedicated to him, and it works. He gets knighted.
He becomes solicitor general. Then finally, he
gets the job he always wanted, attorney general.
He beat Coke to it this time. And then in 1618,
he reaches the absolute summit. He becomes Lord
Chancellor. The job his father had. The job his
father had, but with even more prestige. He's
given titles. Baron Verulam, the Viscount St.
Alban. He is, for a time, the most powerful and
influential man in England next to the king in
his favorite. And he starts living like it. Oh,
the spending. Bacon was notoriously, catastrophically
bad with money. He had a retinue of servants.
There was basically a small army, all dressed
in lavish livery. He threw parties. There were
the talk of London. He was constantly building
and renovating his house. It was always in debt.
Always. Even when he was earning a fortune, he
spent more. And that... Constant desperate need
for cash, combined with the way business was
done back then, set the stage for the crash.
1621. The crash, it happens fast, isn't it? It's
instantaneous, like a lightning strike. A parliamentary
committee starts investigating corruption in
the courts. And guess who is in parliament leading
the charge? We say it's Koch. It is Sir Edward
Koch, his old rival. He has been waiting decades
for this moment. He's now in the House of Commons,
and he smells blood. He finds witnesses, disgruntled
litigants who are willing to testify that Bacon
accepted gifts while their cases were pending
before him at the court of chancery. Let's get
specific. What are we talking about here? Is
this like brown envelopes of cash? Essentially,
yes. In one case, a set of expensive gold buttons.
In another, a cabinet worth hundreds of pounds.
In another, just hard currency. The charge sheet
eventually listed 23 separate counts of corruption.
So he's caught red -handed. Now, usually a politician...
in this spot would deny, deny, deny. It was a
loan. It was a gift from a friend. I never saw
that money. What does Bacon do? He collapses.
He confesses. But, and here are the new ones
that just makes your brain melt. He makes a very
specific, very Baconian defense. He writes a
statement, and in it is this incredible quote.
I was the justice judge that was in England these
50 years, but it was the justice censure in Parliament
that was these 200 years. Translate that for
me. I'm the best judge there ever was, but I
totally deserve to be fired. How does that work?
It's his compartmentalization again. He was admitting
that, yes, he took the money. He acknowledged
that taking gifts was technically against the
rules that gave the appearance of corruption,
even though it was common custom at the time.
So the censure from Parliament was just. Okay.
But his defense was that he never let it influence
his judgment. How can you take money from a guy
who has a case in front of you and say it didn't
influence you? That's impossible. Bacon pointed
out. and the record seems to back this up, that
in several cases he took the bribe and then ruled
against the person who paid him. That's his.
That's wild. I took his money, but I still made
him lose, so that proves I'm honest. In Bacon's
mind, his intellect was so pure, so detached,
so free of idols, that he could separate the
gift from the legal merits of the case. He thought,
I can take this cash because I need it for my
servants and my fancy house, but I will still
judge the law according to the truth. It's the
ultimate intellectual arrogance. He thought he
was above human nature. He forgot the most basic
idol of the tribe, that he was human too. And
Parliament didn't buy it. Or at least, they couldn't
afford to ignore it publicly. He was fined an
astronomical 40 ,000 pounds, sentenced to imprisonment
in the Tower of London, though the king let him
out after just a few days, and most devastatingly,
banned from holding public office ever again.
His career was over. Dead. No, there is a theory
that he was a scapegoat. We should mention that.
Yes, this is important. The king's favorite at
the time was the Duke of Buckingham, George Villiers.
And Buckingham was deeply, openly corrupt. Way
more than Bacon. Many historians believe Parliament
was really aiming for Buckingham, and the king
sacrificed Bacon to satisfy their bloodlust.
Here, take the Lord Chancellor and leave my favorite
alone. Exactly. Bacon took the fall. But there
might be another reason he folded so quickly.
Another reason he didn't fight the charges more
vaguely. And this brings us into his private
life, because if bribery got you fired, there
was something else in his closet that could get
him killed. We have to talk about his sexuality.
This is an area of intense historical debate,
but the primary sources are quite loud about
it. They are. First, let's look at his marriage.
He did eventually marry a woman named Alice Barnum
when he was 45 and she was 14. Which is, yikes.
Even for the time, that was a very wide gap.
And while some sources say it started with much
conjugal love, he designed a robe of honor for
her that she supposedly wore for 20 years. It
disintegrated over time. Why? Bacon was difficult,
obsessive with his work, and always broke. He
was probably not an easy man to live with. Alice
eventually sought affection elsewhere. She had
an affair with a Sir John Underhill. And Bacon's
reaction when he found out was ruthless. Completely.
He immediately wrote her out of his will, disinherited
her, revoked everything he'd planned to leave
her. He left her with nothing. But the marriage
itself might have been, for him, an attempt to
conform, to put up a conventional front. Because
the rumors about Bacon and men were constant
throughout his life. What do the sources actually
say? Because often history books just sort of
say he never married until late and leave it
at that. Well, John Aubrey, who wrote the famous
Brief Lives a few decades after Bacon's death,
didn't minch words. He called Bacon a pederast.
He noted that Bacon's Ganymedes and favorites
took bribes. Ganymedes refers to Ganymede, the
beautiful young cupbearer to Zeus in Greek myth.
It was common code for young male lovers. And
there are diaries too, right? Contemporary accounts.
Yes. A Puritan diarist named Sir Simons Dewes
wrote about Bacon's downfall and mentioned his
catamite and bedfellow, a Welsh servant named
Henry Godric. Even Bacon's own mother, the formidable
Lady Anne, wrote letters to his brother complaining
about Francis's bed companion named Percy. She
was distraught. She said he was keeping unsuitable
company in his bedchamber. And in Jacobean England,
sodomy wasn't just a sin, it was a felony. It
was a capital offense. You could be hanged for
it. It was called the unspeakable crime. Bacon's
own older brother, Anthony, had been charged
with sodomy in France years earlier and had to
flee. It was a terrifying prospect. So this leads
to the blackmail theory. Exactly. Some historians
speculate that the real reason Bacon confessed
to bribery so quickly The reason he didn't put
up a fight and drag it out was that his enemies,
like Koch, were holding the sodomy charge in
reserve. The implied threat was, confess to the
corruption or we start talking about your bedfellows.
A bribery charge gets you fired and disgraced.
A sodomy charge gets you executed and damned
for eternity. So he took the lesser fall. It
adds a whole new layer of tragedy and complexity
to the story. He was a man trapped by the laws
and prejudices of his time, even as his mind
was trying to free all of humanity from prejudice.
So he's disgraced. He's out of office. He's broke.
He's vulnerable. What does he do with his final
years? He does what he always wanted to do his
whole life. He's finally free from the hustle.
He spends his final five years revising his famous
essays, working on a history of King Henry VII,
and writing his utopian book, New Atlantis. New
Atlantis is his vision for a perfect society.
It is. It depicts a lost island called Ben Salem.
And the center of this island isn't a palace
or a church. It's a massive research institute
called Solomon's House. What's it like? It's
basically the dream of a modern scientist. They
have labs for every conceivable purpose. They
have experiments running constantly. They have
teams of scientists who collaborate and share
information. It is the blueprint for the modern
research university or for institutions like
the Royal Society, which was founded a few decades
later and was explicitly inspired by Bacon's
vision. So even in disgrace, he's still dreaming
of the future. But we have to talk about how
he died because it is possibly the most Francis
Bacon death imaginable. It's almost too perfect.
It's mythic. It is the perfect end to his story.
It's April 1626. Bacon is 65. He's riding in
a carriage near Highgate in North London. There's
snow on the ground, an unusual spring snowstorm.
He's with the king's physician. And suddenly,
Bacon's brain kicks in. He has a hypothesis.
He starts thinking about preservation. Right.
He knows that salt is used to preserve meat.
And he looks out at the snow and he wonders,
does snow preserve flesh in the same way salt
does? Can cold halt the process of decay? He's
thinking about refrigeration centuries before
Frigidaire. And unlike the Aristotelians who
would just sit in the carriage and have a nice
long debate about it, Bacon acts. He yells, stop
the carriage. They get out. They go to a poor
woman's cottage at the bottom of Highgate Hill.
They buy a hen. They have the woman gut it. And
then Francis Bacon, the former Lord Chancellor
of England, the Viscount of St. Alban, stands
in the snow and stuffs this chicken carcass with
snow with his own bare hands. He is literally
conducting an experiment on the side of the road
in the freezing cold. And it kills him. He catches
a sudden, violent chill, almost certainly pneumonia.
He's immediately too sick to travel back home.
So they take him to the nearby house of the Earl
of Arundel. And here is the dark comedy of it
all. The Earl is away. The Earl is actually imprisoned
in the Tower of London at the time. So the servants
don't quite know what to do with this great man
who has shown up on their doorstep, shivering.
They put Bacon in the grandest guest room. But
the bed hasn't been slept in for a year. It is
damp. It is cold. So he goes from the freezing
snow to a wet, freezing bed. Which is the worst
possible thing for pneumonia. And he dies a few
days later. But not before one last act. But,
and this is why you have to love him, in a way,
on his deathbed. He dictates one last letter.
He writes to his friend, the Earl of Arundel.
He apologizes for being such an inconvenient
house guest and dying in his house. And he compares
himself to Pliny the Elder, the great Roman naturalist
who died trying to observe the eruption of Mount
Vesuvius. And then he writes his final triumphant
line. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded
excellently well. He wanted to make sure everyone
knew the chicken was preserved, the data was
good. He died for the data. A martyr to experimental
science. That is just an incredible story. So
let's widen the lens as we wrap up. What is the
legacy here? Obviously, the scientific method
is the big one. If you're a scientist today,
you're a Baconian, whether you know it or not.
Absolutely. That's the headline. His influence
goes beyond the lab. He was a guiding spirit
in the colonization of the New World. He wrote
reports on the Virginia colony on Newfoundland.
He believed in expanding the English reach and
using the new lands for discovery. There's actually
a Newfoundland postage stamp that commemorates
him. And the American founding fathers were obsessed
with him. Thomas Jefferson commissioned portraits
of three men to hang in his office at Monticello.
John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon.
He called them the three greatest men that have
ever lived. He believed Bacon laid the foundation
for the rational, evidence -based thinking that
made the American Republic possible. We should
probably briefly mention the Shakespeare thing
just because people will ask. The Baconian theory.
Right. The idea that Bacon secretly wrote Shakespeare's
plays. It started in the mid -19th century. People
looked at Bacon's towering genius, his legal
knowledge, his court experience, and said, But
what's the verdict from serious historians? It's
a fringe theory. There's no real concrete evidence
for it. But the fact that the theory even exists
shows you how highly people rate Bacon's intellect.
They think if anyone could have secretly been
Shakespeare, it's him. It's a testament to his
reputation. And the Rosicrucians. The secret
societies. That's a bit stickier. His book, New
Atlantis, looks very Rosicrucian. This idea of
a secret brotherhood of enlightened scholars
guiding humanity from behind the scenes. Some
people claim Bacon was a secret master of the
order. Whether he's an actual card -carrying
member or not is impossible to prove, but he
certainly influenced their ideals of scientific
progress and secret knowledge. So we have covered
the hustle, the betrayal, the science, the corruption,
the secrets, and the foes and chicken. When you
step back and look at the whole life of Francis
Bacon, What is the synthesis? What do we take
away from all this? I think Bacon is the ultimate
proof that intellect and character are two completely
different things. You can have a mind that sees
the universe more clearly than anyone else in
history. You can map out the future of the human
species. You can identify the idols that cloud
our judgment. And you can still be a petty, ambitious,
corrupt, and deeply flawed human being. He emphasized
clean hands in science. Don't let your biases
corrupt the data. But he could not keep his own
hands clean in politics. And yet, without him.
Where are we without his relentless push for
utility, for practical results, for knowledge
that works? Do we get the Industrial Revolution?
Do we get antibiotics? Do we get the Internet?
He broke the 2000 year old spell of Aristotle.
He taught us to look at the world as it is, not
as we wish it to be. It brings us right back
to the idols. Bacon argued that we must clear
our minds of idols to see the truth. But today,
we live in a world that is practically built
to generate idols on an industrial scale. Algorithms,
echo chambers, 24 -hour news cycles, social media.
We are drowning in idols of the cave and idols
of the marketplace. It raises the really provocative
question, the one I think he'd want us to ask.
Are we actually capable? of the kind of clear,
objective thinking that Bacon demanded? Or have
we just traded the old idols, Aristotle and superstition,
for new, more powerful digital ones? Are we just
worshiping different statues in a different theater?
That is a thought to chew on. Maybe the next
time you see a hot take on the Internet or you
feel that rush of I'm right and they are wrong,
stop for a second and ask yourself, is this an
idol of my tribe speaking or is this actually
the truth? And remember, if you're going to test
a hypothesis involving snow and poultry. Wear
a warm coat. Solid advice. Thanks for listening
to this deep dive into the messy, brilliant life
of Francis Bacon. We'll catch you on the next
one.