Chesterton Was Right About Everything
"G.K. Chesterton wrote eighty books, four thousand essays, and two hundred short stories — and almost nobody reads him anymore. This episode walks through why the Apostle of Common Sense diagnosed the diseases of modernity a hundred years before the symptoms became impossible to ignore: the cult of progress, the silencing of tradition, the assault on the family, the case for distributism, the madman who has lost everything except his reason, and the line that summarizes everything — that the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and left untried.
• Chesterton wrote 80+ books, 4,000 essays, and 200 short stories before his death in 1936.
• C.S. Lewis credited one of Chesterton's books as the single most important factor in his conversion to Christianity.
• On progress: "My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday."
• On tradition: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes — our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead."
• Chesterton defended the family as the test of freedom, because both big capitalism and big socialism have an interest in absorbing it.
• With Hilaire Belloc, Chesterton developed Distributism — the principle that productive property should be owned as widely as possible.
• On capitalism: "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."
• Chesterton compared the modern madman not to someone who has lost his reason, but to someone who has lost everything except his reason.
• On Christianity: "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."
• Chesterton's cause for canonization was opened in 2013. Start with Orthodoxy — short, brilliant, and it will ruin you for every lesser thinker."