A Notions of Progress series in 3 Acts

By Matthew Ehret

An unfortunate 2-fold lie has captured the minds of many unfortunate dupes for over two thousand years: 1) That it is somehow possible to integrate Plato and Aristotle into one unifying framework and 2) That Aristotle and Plato do indeed represent incompatible worldviews… except that Aristotle is an ‘improvement’ to the nonsensical fantasies of Plato.

As you will come to see in the course of this introductory series of short videos (Featuring a very fun chat with my friend Marshall Madow, host of Notions of Progress Podcast), this clash of paradigms, and the superiority of Plato is made transparent for all functional minds to follow.

Part 1| Plato vs. Aristotle – The Flame, the Vessel

KEY TOPICS COVERED in part 1

• What “progress” means when stripped of relativism — Ehret’s case for an objective baseline in the universal biophysical requirements of human life

• Why Ehret locates the origin of the West’s most productive intellectual impulses not in the Enlightenment but in the Platonic-Pythagorean tradition

• Plato’s Academy: its geometry requirement, its Pythagorean foundations through Archytas of Tarentum, and its founding pedagogical premise

• Constructive geometry as epistemological method — why the Academy required students to discover rather than assume

• The Meno dialogue: how Socrates leads an uneducated slave boy to geometric truth — and what this demonstrates about virtue, knowledge, and the limits of Sophist teaching

• The first Plato–Aristotle contrast: a noun-driven versus a verb-driven universe

Part 2: The Allegory of the Cave

KEY TOPICS COVERED IN PART 2

• The Meno and whether virtue can be taught — and why Plato’s answer challenges the Sophist model

• Who the Sophists were, what they sold, and why their influence on Athenian democracy troubled Plato

• The Allegory of the Cave explained — shadows, puppet masters, and the degrees of knowledge

• Two groups who both misread the Cave: critics who call Plato a proto-fascist and Neoplatonists who use him as a blueprint for elite control

• The part both groups omit: the philosopher’s obligation to return to the cave out of love for those still inside

• Free will, the soul, and Plato’s argument in the Gorgias that no one wills evil knowingly

• Leo Strauss, the noble lie, and the Straussian lineage from the University of Chicago to Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz

• Peter Thiel’s essay ‘The Straussian Moment’ and how it situates a secret-doctrine tradition running from Plato through Locke, Hobbes, and Bacon

• Gnostic Neoplatonism versus authentic Platonism — and what Augustine’s battle against the Gnostics reveals about the deeper conflict

Part 3: Plato vs. Aristotle: The Divide That Still Shapes How We Think

KEY TOPICS COVERED IN PART 3

• Aristotle’s relationship to Plato and the nature of his departure from the Academy

• The Plato–Aristotle divide as a civilizational operating system — Ehret’s central thesis

• Open versus closed systems: what the distinction means for how cultures generate knowledge

• Entropy and anti-entropy as frames for evaluating whether a civilization is genuinely progressing or in decline

• Ehret’s account of what changes when inquiry becomes classification — and what is lost in that shift

• The epistemological stakes: whether creative discovery is possible within a closed-system framework

• The concluding movement of the Ehret arc and the questions it opens for the episodes ahead

Bio: I am the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. I’ve written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series, the Revenge of the Mystery Cult Trilogy and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. I am also co-host of the weekly Breaking History on Badlands Media and host of Pluralia Dialogos (which airs every second Sunday at 11am ET here).

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