Based Camp： Why Mormons Won't Inherit the Earth
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about what it means to be a Mormon and why we should call them Mormons. We also talk about why we shouldn't call them "Mormon" and why it's so important that we do.
Transcript
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I will describe this graph. It has two axes. Okay. This axis is progressive to conservative.
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Okay. Progressive means more like the dominant urban monoculture. Conservative means more
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deviant from the dominant culture. The other axis is traditionalist versus accelerationist.
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Okay. It's easy to confuse these two axes and think that accelerationist means progressive
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and traditionalist means conservative. Yeah. They're two completely unrelated things. And in
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fact, generally the most accelerationist cultures are also the most conservative cultures and
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the most conservative cultures are often the most accelerationist cultures because they
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need to protect themselves from the dominant societal culture. That's goal is to stamp out
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anyone who's doing their own thing. Any signs of true diversity within society. This progressive
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monoculture will eventually inject itself into the central church. It will eventually eat
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the central church. This virus is incredibly good at corrupting everything, especially large
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bureaucracies. The larger and more entrenched the bureaucracy is, the more susceptible it
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is. And it is a miracle that the central church hasn't been eaten yet, but it will be.
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Absolutely spectacular. So this video is in relation to a user comment who is something like, I'm
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a Mormon. What do you guys think of Mormons? Now, we know enough about Mormons to know that the
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church deemed that term offensive. Was it like eight years ago? What did they call it? One of the
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Yeah, but members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doesn't exactly roll off the term.
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And you know, my friends who, so for context, from soup to nuts, I've been adjacent to Mormon
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communities in preschool. I went to a Mormon preschool. It was called Class A Tiny World,
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and I loved it. And everyone was Mormon, except for like me and a few other kids. And then I went to
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And her parents pulled her out, because she started asking them about Bible stuff,
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and they freaked out, because they're like extremist progressive.
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Well, no, that's just when they started sending me to Dharma school. They didn't take me out of
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that daycare, because it was the best ever, because Mormons are the best ever. And then I
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went to college, and pretty much only had Mormon friends, because my roommate out of freshman year
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was Mormon. I tend to avoid people, and only like befriend people that I work with. So I just had work
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colleagues, and then my like recreational friends were Mormons, and members of the local singles
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ward. And I loved it. And I love Mormons. But also, like, even within that community,
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they refer to themselves internally, like as, like, they'd be like, are you a Moe? Like,
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like, they don't even say Mormon. So how can we be at fault for not calling, you know, people,
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members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint, when they're all like,
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are you next Moe? Are you Moe? Like, you know, come on, guys.
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Well, and you also did, you didn't drink when I met you, and stuff like that.
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No. Well, I mean, when all of your friends were Mormons. Yeah. Why would you?
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I told her on the first date, I go, this isn't going to work unless you drink. So I ordered her
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That was your loss, Malcolm. You paid through the nose for that. Cocktails in San Francisco. I mean,
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God knows now you can probably buy like, you know, for the price you'd get a cocktail you could have
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gotten a car like 10 years ago. But yeah, so we're going to call them Mormons because that's,
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It's actually a very interesting community and a very interesting culture that we really highlighted
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in the last video. So I think one of the things that we admire about Mormonism as a cultural
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tradition is it is such an accelerationist cultural tradition. And I think that this is where
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society, we see things as Simone often mistakenly does on a spectrum of conservatism to progressivism,
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but conservatism to progressivism is really just a spectrum of how much do you bend the knee to
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whatever the prevailing social norms are of your society, which right now is the mind virus.
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So that is one axis of a spectrum and Mormons do not bend the knee very much. So they are on the
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far conservative side of that spectrum. But then the other axis of the spectrum is traditionally
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traditionalist versus accelerationist. And the traditionalist versus accelerationist is how
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much do you, and how aggressively do you adapt your traditions and change your traditions to try to
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compete with a changing environment, changing technology, and to react to what often are the
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progressive threats to more conservative movements. So what you will often find is that the most
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accelerationist movements are often some of the most conservative movements because they are the
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movements most aggressively under threat from the progressive hive mind that wants to attack anyone
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in any culture that deviates from it and deviates from its sort of approved ideas, morality, and way of
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doing things. So Mormons are very accelerationist in that respect. What would you say your general read of
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Mormons is? And I can give you mine as well. So as an outsider, my TLDR is Mormons among modern
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US-based religious communities have the best lifestyle. It's like, they're kind of like the
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Disney of lifestyles. You know, you can really get into it. It's very appealing. It's very warm and
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friendly and family friendly. And you may not agree with all of it. Like you may, you may be a Disney
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family and not like the prices they charge or not like the way that they run their corporation or
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think that they killed Star Wars, but you still just, it's a great place to go on vacations. Your
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kids love it. You know, you like a lot of the movies. So you just become a Disney family. And I think a lot
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of people stay with the church or even join the church because of the lifestyle and they don't
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necessarily buy into the religious doctrine. Though I do think that many more people are leaving the
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church now because both the religious doctrine isn't holding up, I think really that well in the
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age of the internet. And also because especially like women, I know read a lot of the, well, like
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hear a lot of sort of the stances on women and their positions. And it just, it's really hard to both
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become educated and to be ambitious and to be, to be down with the way the church says women need
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to be or should be. Right. So this is really fascinating to me. And I think the Disney analogy
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is pretty apt because I can look at Disney and be like, well, there still are aspects of Disney
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products that I am able to engage with, but I can also see the direction things are going and the size
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of their bureaucracy is just so large and so unchangeable that I know that where Disney is
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going is a place I cannot follow. Um, and it's going towards collapse basically. And I, and I,
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I think that the Mormon church is very far from that, but I do think it's heading in a negative
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direction and that is very worrying to me. So when we talk about religious traditions, we talk about
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them as sort of cultural units, like collections of memes that often co-evolve with individuals and
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they can create a culture, which can be very strong after somebody leaves the church. And so this is
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something where, when I look at a secular Jew who is no longer theologically Jewish, but now a secular
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Jew, I can still see a lot of their cultural practices and a lot about them. Mormons, this is
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something that you see it really strongly. When a person deconverts from Mormonism and becomes
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secular, especially if they don't, if they aren't just like a reactionist against the church,
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they are, yeah, some of the like mentally healthiest people I know, or in some of the,
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the best people I know in terms of cultural fit with our cultural traditions. And they also are
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unusually successful. So you see them just absolutely dominate in terms of online spaces,
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a lot of top influencers or Exmos. So in this leads to, I think, one of, if we're going to be
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critical of Mormonism, one of the things I would say, which is the most critical is that unfortunately
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the theology, and I think this is what you meant in terms of the age of the internet, it's really hard
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to believe. It's like trans people don't have an advantage at sports, hard to believe. And because
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of this, some level of psychological sectioning is prevalent within many of the more educated
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Mormons I know, which leads them to become susceptible to things that other communities
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aren't as susceptible to. Right. Like I've heard that in Mormon communities, MLMs are pervasive,
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for example. MLMs is a big one here. So yeah, Mormon communities are incredibly
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susceptible to certain types of mental viruses. MLMs being one of the most damaging to the Mormon
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community. Because so to work within the church, so much has to be sectioned off in terms of like,
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these are things we don't question, that sometimes things fall into that preserve that shouldn't be on
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the preserve. MLM type ideology being injected into it, being one of these things. And so this isn't an
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intrinsic thing with Mormonism, but it is tied to the level of intentional suspension of disbelief
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that I think is needed to believe some of the things in the Book of Mormon. Especially some of the
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historic things that we just have so much evidence that you can easily just like, look at. And it's just
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not, it is not like modern progressive history that's at odds with it. It's like the history that
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all other conservative groups agree on. You know, whether you're talking about like conservative
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Catholics or conservative Protestants or conservative, you know, many, many other conservative groups,
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they all agree on this history as well. And it is just like strictly at odds with the Book of Mormon.
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And you can do apologetics and you can look into it. But I, as somebody who's, who's, who's not a
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member of the church, I can say that it's clear that this sort of preserve of things we don't question
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within the Mormon tradition is much bigger than the other conservative Christian denominations.
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I think you and I both really enjoy watching video interviews with people who have deconverted,
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either from the mainstream church or from more, we'll say aggressive factions, you know, splinter groups
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that are not, that the main church doesn't endorse. And one of the really common threads that seems to
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show up again and again is they really, really, really want to believe. And every, every time someone
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like a church elder gives them advice or coaching on how to address it, it's just so insulting.
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Like it, you know, it, it just really doesn't work. They're, they're, they're not good resources.
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And then, you know, this sort of forces people to look things up online where they just find
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damning, like reams of damning information. And I, I really wonder what's going on with internal
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church governance there because they have to be looking at their rates of attrition. They have to be
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looking at, which are high. So something to note about the Mormon community is it looks like they
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fallen below repopulation rate and they have really high attrition rates. So like what, you know,
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and, and the other thing is you pointed out that, that the LDS church has adapted in the past,
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you know, and they are accelerationist in many ways. They are, they're happy to develop new social
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technologies. They've changed, for example, their stances on race in the past. So why aren't they
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adapting more now? This is the answer. It's because the central church now is more bureaucratic
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and larger and there is more inertia. So it's a very interesting mix where you have a naturally
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accelerationist cultural group paired with a hierarchical theological structure, like, like
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a structure that determines what the theology is, which is the, the governing structure and
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that determines what the rules are. And so this, this is where I think the Mormon church is going
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and the iterations of the Mormon church that'll be successful. I think the ones that follow the
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central church are going to be the ones that eventually die at. Well, what worries me about
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that though, is pretty much the only ones that, per my knowledge, don't follow the central church.
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Don't do it because they're polygynous for some reason. It's because they're polygynous. No,
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there's, there's other groups that are talking about it right now. Non-polygynous splinter groups.
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Okay. So there's within the, so this is the interesting thing. Within the Mormon intellectual
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sphere where I come close to it, there is talk of different ways of relating to things,
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different ways of relating to monumentism, like monumental building and stuff like that,
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different ways of saying, can we still technically be under the central church,
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but like change things within our community and like these distinct ways. So you're beginning to
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see this branch out happening, but it's not happening as an open revolt. Yes. The, the
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polygynous Mormons are in active revolt against the central church. I don't expect it to be that
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disharmonious. I expect it to be some groups increasingly do things that are additional rules
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maybe that sort of change the nature of things or different interpretations of teachings that make
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them more resistant to information online, but that makes them more and more deviate from what people
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consider like a traditional mainstream, like central church Mormon. I mean, I think that many of these
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groups will be more conservative. And when I say conservative, I mean that in the accelerationist
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fashion. What I mean is they will be more differentiated from the sort of mainstream progressive value set,
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which is dominant in urban centers throughout our society, that the central church beliefs and
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teachings will be closer to that than the splinter groups. What I find interesting in what you're
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describing is that if what you're saying is true and there are a broad range of different splinter
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groups, not all just like sort of polygynous cults, but also just different groups and communities
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that are still trying to tap into the network effects of the LDS church, which I think it's one of the
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strongest selling points while also maintaining, we'll say more sustainable philosophies.
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So why I think that's interesting is I think one of the primary selling points of this Disney Mormon
00:15:04.020
lifestyle, right? Is that one, it has one of the best modern solutions to dating markets that we've
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seen, right? It's, there are several different. And again, we've mentioned this in another video.
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We know somebody who converted to Mormonism just to find a husband and did.
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Right. And so, I mean, between singles wards, between people knowing to go to BYU to find a
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partner because people converging upon this university are far more likely to be looking
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to marry someone. And then between that and other conferences that are held among single young
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Mormons that we've only just been told about, thanks to helpful YouTube commenters,
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that's like incredibly valuable. But if the church splinters into a bunch of different factions and it's no
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longer unified, then you're not going to get that. And you really need the network. It's just like a,
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it's a key marketplace problem. So I worry about that because I really want, I want someone to prove
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that you can have functioning relationship markets in the modern world without coercion. You know,
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all of this is often, you know, people aren't forced. There may be some social pressure,
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but you know, whatever. And, and yet like, I do think it's possible.
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You're seeing that. Yeah. I do think it's possible. And I think we're seeing that already in the church
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and that you are seeing these differentiations. You are seeing these groups within the church
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that are saying, I think there are pretty different ways we could do things. And they
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aren't being fully kicked out yet. Now, admittedly, they aren't like going up and
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telling their church elders this stuff. So part of it is it's, it's working because they, at least what
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I've seen, there's this understating that, Oh, well within our community, most of the young people
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know about these problems and things will change when we get older and we have more power, but it
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may not happen. And you may just see a reaction. I mean, especially with life extension technologies
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and people living longer to the other thing that you were talking about, which I actually think is
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really interesting to go into. So this guy was talking about dating markets at BYU or girl, I guess
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actually people may be surprised to hear this. The majority of our audience is female. It's like 53%
00:17:02.640
female or something. So anyway, they were saying you go to BYU and it is not uncommon within your
00:17:08.800
first three weeks to like find a partner and, and, and get engaged because people, especially women go
00:17:15.020
to BYU with the intention of finding a spouse. And the cultural norm there is that you should find
00:17:22.300
your spouse before you graduate college. That is what you are in college for. Whereas the cultural norm
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among the, you know, progressive urban monoculture is that you really shouldn't start looking for
00:17:34.060
a husband until after college, which is just clearly stupid. Or even if you've met the person
00:17:38.240
that you want to marry, like maybe wait until your thirties to get married, which was how I came
00:17:42.600
into our relationship. You remember? Well, yeah, that's what you thought was normal when you came to
00:17:46.460
me and I was like, no, we're not doing that. You're like, no, we have to wait. It's too fast. And I was
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like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like you're already an old maid. You're what? You're out of college?
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Gross. Um, we gotta, we gotta lock this down and start pumping out kids.
00:18:01.000
You weren't interested in kids at that time. You know, we, we, we felt still, I think both of us
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were in that cultural mindset that we needed to have kids, which is another thing that the LDS
00:18:09.080
church really gets right. You know, it doesn't one, I think it has a much more supportive community
00:18:13.940
for people who want to have kids young. And it also encourages people to have kids young. I mean,
00:18:20.880
I, I'm not crazy about the fact that like it, I think there's more pressure to be a stay-at-home
00:18:26.120
mom, even if you don't want to be, which is, I'm not crazy about. I think people should only do that
00:18:30.080
if they're stoked for it, but it's awesome that people are having kids a lot younger. And, you
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know, when, when we see like when we're out and about and we're traveling and we see, you know,
00:18:40.080
a family of four kids and, you know, parents who are having fun with the kids and playing with them
00:18:44.560
and looking healthy and young and happy and not stressed. It's very clear that they started having kids in
00:18:49.600
their early twenties, you know, and like, I look at them and I feel so jealous, you know?
00:18:53.700
So. I think something that you pointed out, that's really interesting. So people have read
00:18:57.680
the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion. One of the things that we're building is something called
00:19:01.460
the Index, which is essentially a pluralistic religious community that allows for a central
00:19:09.420
organization to create the kind of the network effects that you see in other religious communities
00:19:14.020
where people who are part of this religious community can do things like dating markets and stuff like
00:19:18.140
that and get those benefits while still having very different belief systems. So long as those
00:19:23.460
belief systems are conservative and by conservative, what I mean is differential from this urban monoculture.
00:19:28.020
And so like we would happily welcome in Exmos and stuff like that, or even iterations of Mormonism
00:19:32.860
that want to break from the mainstream church to try to rebuild a network effect. I think one thing
00:19:40.040
you pointed out that's very interesting is, is so many of the benefits of Mormonism right now come
00:19:44.600
from this large network effect, which is facilitated by the central church. And the one pathway that
00:19:51.000
could be a really successful long-term pathway is a higher degree of pluralism and social
00:19:56.520
experimentation among different Mormon sects still operating under the central church. I think that
00:20:02.160
that is one path the faith could go down that will lead to enormous success.
00:20:06.860
So a sort of like if, what if like the LDS church sort of WordPressized, right? Like there's like a
00:20:14.740
platform and everything works through WordPress, but it's all like plugins and add-ons and things like
00:20:20.320
that. Right. Well, and I think one thing that's important for people who are listening to this to,
00:20:24.840
to, to make sure that they're not making this mistake is when we say, when we're talking about these
00:20:30.660
groups that are socially experimenting, they are socially experimenting in conservative ways,
00:20:35.260
in ways that would lead to progressive say, Oh my God, how could you do that?
00:20:39.320
Well, is conservative the right, I mean, wouldn't you say in, in values and
00:20:43.340
doctrine aligned ways, or at least values aligned ways, culturally aligned ways?
00:20:50.980
No, I mean, I don't know if that means it's inherently conservative. I just think it's inherently.
00:20:56.240
We're going back to the, the graph that I described earlier, and I will describe this graph again.
00:21:01.920
It has two axes. Okay. This axes is progressive to conservative. Okay. Progressive means more like
00:21:08.480
the dominant urban monoculture. Conservative means more deviant from the dominant culture.
00:21:13.800
The other axie is traditionalist versus accelerationist.
00:21:17.080
It's easy to confuse these two axes and think that accelerationist means progressive and
00:21:26.160
These are two completely unrelated things. And in fact, generally the most accelerationist
00:21:33.600
cultures are also the most conservative cultures and the most conservative cultures are often the
00:21:38.840
most accelerationist cultures because they need to protect themselves from the dominant societal
00:21:43.540
culture. That's goal is to stamp out anyone who's doing their own thing. Any signs of true
00:21:48.700
diversity within society. Fair. Okay. And I think that this progressive monoculture will
00:21:55.880
eventually inject itself into the central church. It will eventually eat the central church. This virus
00:22:02.920
is incredibly good at corrupting everything, especially large bureaucracies. The larger and more
00:22:12.080
entrenched the bureaucracy is, the more susceptible it is. And it is a miracle that the central church
00:22:19.560
All right. So we're done discussing that. I think another thing that I really want to talk about
00:22:23.160
with the LDS church and that I love, and I think is such a smart innovation is their, I don't know,
00:22:30.980
what do we want to say? Like fashion ways, their dress ways. Okay.
00:22:34.180
So I, I feel like if we're going to talk, use an analogy, everyone's talking about the quiet luxury
00:22:42.080
style. You know, we're like, you dress in a very high luxury way, but only in a way that
00:22:47.140
other people who are very wealthy will recognize, right? Because it's all very subtle. It's about
00:22:52.300
having really high quality materials, et cetera. What I love about Mormon traditions around dressing
00:22:58.860
is that you have to know what to look for in order to tell, but you can fairly easily tell,
00:23:07.260
especially if there's like, it's a couple or, you know, you spend a lot of time, like a couple of
00:23:12.120
days with someone over a period of time. If someone is in the LDS church, at least if they're like
00:23:16.620
adhering to this element of that culture because of their garments and because of, you know, some
00:23:20.620
other sort of just cultural trends. And I think that that's really cool because, you know, on one
00:23:24.700
end of the spectrum with fashion among like cultures or religions, you've got, you know, super,
00:23:31.220
super like Haredi Jews, you've got Amish where it's like, whoa, you're wearing a costume, you know,
00:23:37.520
like looks super like obvious and like you're turning heads and people are looking around at you.
00:23:43.740
Whereas here you have the quiet luxury. Cultural cohesion. It creates, you know, a sense of
00:23:48.680
belonging to a community, an ability to identify members of your community. Continue. Yeah. So what I
00:23:53.680
like with Mormon dress is that you, you can, you can tell quite often, and this is like to a lesser
00:23:59.080
extent names, like not everyone has like stereotypical, like Mormon names, but there
00:24:03.220
are like Mormon names. And I liked that there are these subtle signalers that I think add like a
00:24:08.180
booster effect, you know, like imagine that someone had like a kind of obscure, like Star Wars tattoo
00:24:14.120
or I'm not, I'm going to disagree with you on this. I actually think that you think it's too subtle,
00:24:17.900
a softened failure of the church to, you think they should dress more extremely? Yes. Here's why.
00:24:24.620
Okay. When you grow up and you are othered by the urban monoculture, when it tells you you're
00:24:30.300
different and you're weird. And this is something we intentionally do as our kids, give them weird
00:24:34.500
names, weird ways of dressing, stuff like that. Like our family does things where we are intentionally
00:24:39.120
and really specifically othered by society. Like society is like, oh, you guys are weird. You guys
00:24:44.900
are different. You are a different thing. And through that, our kids and me growing up specifically,
00:24:51.100
who also was this way to an extent, realize I'm different. I'm not whatever this mainstream
00:24:58.040
cultural thing is. And in a society where that mainstream cultural thing has obviously failed,
00:25:03.940
where like rates of depression are really high, rates of suicide are really high, you know,
00:25:07.340
like that's a great thing to be like, yeah, I'm different. They're like, aren't you worried your
00:25:10.900
kids will be bullied? It's like, oh, they'll be rejected from the mainstream culture. Like, okay,
00:25:16.460
that's the point. That's the idea. It's a feature, not a bug. Yeah. Yeah. That they will
00:25:22.240
develop an identity and a cultural identity that is deviant from that. Now with Mormonism,
00:25:29.080
I think their beliefs are differentiated enough that they do separate. Well, I think what you're
00:25:35.580
missing here though, is that, yes, I understand your point. And I think being othered and weirded
00:25:39.980
is great. And I think that Mormons definitely do enough things to make them othered and weirded,
00:25:44.520
you know, in a way that makes them know that they're different. I think what you're missing
00:25:48.240
though, is that there's a secret club thing that makes people feel really good when they see like
00:25:56.600
the secret handshake or the secret wink or like the secret tattoo that someone has, you know,
00:26:02.020
we're like only they know. So what you're missing here is, yeah, it's great to have that othering
00:26:05.920
effect. I totally agree with you. That's great. But, but what you're missing is that there's just
00:26:09.500
totally separate phenomenon when you get an in-joke and that in-joking is very powerful.
00:26:16.380
You've convinced me. Delta. You've convinced me. I think it rarely happens. Oh, the satisfaction.
00:26:21.660
It doesn't rarely happen. You've convinced me all the time.
00:26:26.340
Not always. You're, you're the smart one in this relationship. So.
00:26:30.340
I, I, I love the, but again, you know, we talk about willful suspension of disbelief, right?
00:26:35.300
That's what she needs to do to constantly believe that I'm the smart one with all the ideas.
00:26:45.400
I love it. Yeah. So I guess what I'd say is, is Mormonism. I mean, would you,
00:26:51.000
or do you have any other points you wanted to talk on about this?
00:26:55.520
Yeah, I do actually. So it's the, the only culture I know of, like if it's a religious culture,
00:27:02.080
so what we would call a cultivar where it's a mixture of culture and religion that includes
00:27:07.820
a very practical level of safety, practicality, and survivalism, you know, that it's encouraged to
00:27:14.280
have six months worth of food supply that, you know, you should have an emergency plan. You should
00:27:19.060
rotate through that food supply and, you know, cook what's about to expire and et cetera. The fact
00:27:24.020
that that's done, you know, yes, there are, there are doomsday preppers in the U S like that's a
00:27:30.380
total thing. It's a total subculture, but that's more like an identity, like a fan community to me
00:27:37.260
than like a cohesive culture. You know, there isn't like a, there are, there are correlatory
00:27:41.620
factors and correlatory values among doomsday preppers, but nowhere does it come close to
00:27:46.480
what you see with the LDS church. And I also really admire that. And it's not just, you know,
00:27:51.200
imparting useful practices to people in the church, you know, like temples also have resources for
00:27:59.860
disasters. You know, like this is a, this is a culture that wants to create civilizational level
00:28:06.720
resilience. If like shit hits the fan, that's really cool. And I think that's underrated when
00:28:14.220
people think about religious or cultural innovation, you know, they, they think about
00:28:18.900
maybe dating markets, maybe better aligning with values, but especially in an age in which people are
00:28:26.560
losing essential life skills, like crazy. I think it's, it's a notable point that that's something
00:28:33.260
that's encouraged within that culture. So one thing, yeah, that I'd add to this, which I think
00:28:37.640
is something that a lot of people don't know is one thing I really like that Mormonism does is it is
00:28:42.280
something that we've actually taken for our own kids is I believe that intense hardship is really
00:28:47.560
needed at certain parts of a kid's life and that they need to experience what these things feel like,
00:28:52.820
what starvation feels like, what really having to figure out your own stuff. Cause that's something
00:28:56.680
I went through as a kid, you know, and I think if we raise our kids without any of that, I think it
00:29:00.760
creates a lot of negative psychological effects. So one practice that exists within Mormonism is they
00:29:06.920
will do the Mormon trail or the, the thing that their ancestors did. Like with the covered wagons and
00:29:13.060
all that fun stuff. So this is something they'll do in the late teen years where they will try to
00:29:17.740
recreate this trail that their ancestors went on through the desert, pulling these, these carts
00:29:24.820
with low water supplies, with low food supplies, and really experience this extreme hardship that
00:29:31.640
almost no one in society today gets the opportunity to experience. And I think that this has, and I
00:29:38.800
think we'll see that it has permanent changes in the way a person's brain works as they get older,
00:29:44.080
if they experience one of these extreme, extreme hardship moments during specific developmental
00:29:49.260
milestones. And so I think that this is very beneficial. And I really admire that element
00:29:53.880
of their culture. I'd actually go so far and to say that I think they should lean into it more.
00:29:58.500
I think it should be longer. I think it should be more recurring during a person's childhood.
00:30:02.880
So if you look at like what we're trying to build for, for our kids in our community,
00:30:06.440
one of the things we've looked at building is, is there's some land up in Northern Canada where we're
00:30:11.280
looking at essentially creating a station where the kids have to learn to survive. And now, of course,
00:30:15.820
the whole thing will be wired with cameras and stuff like that. So we can make sure they don't
00:30:19.980
end up killing themselves or a bear doesn't like come on to the territory and end up creating problem.
00:30:25.460
But I think this sorts of extreme survivalism and having to figure it out on your own and experiencing
00:30:31.680
that is, is really important culturally, especially if you're moving into a civilization where many of
00:30:37.560
the luxuries that we've come to expect today, maybe our kids shouldn't expect is being as common
00:30:42.340
during their adult life. And what we also haven't talked about in terms of hardship is missions,
00:30:48.220
which, you know, few women go on, but like a lot of men do. I mean, I think one of the super
00:30:54.120
underrated aspects of that, of a, of a mission isn't, I mean, one, I guess it can get, it can get you
00:30:59.880
to double down on your culture, but I feel like these days, a mission is equally liable to make you
00:31:04.400
your culture. No, I think missions are a primary failure point of Mormonism, but we can get to
00:31:09.780
that. Continue with what you were going to say. So, well, but they have an upside. I think they
00:31:13.160
could be redesigned. And, and one thing that I think makes them uniquely interesting is they make
00:31:18.440
especially Mormon men uniquely attractive in certain facets of the job market. I totally understand the
00:31:26.300
point you're making here, Simone, which is, you know, especially in sales positions, Mormons are just
00:31:33.280
incredible because when you need to sell something that to a non-Mormon sounds pretty ridiculous and
00:31:38.800
you need to constantly deal with that rejection, that's one of the biggest parts of being a good
00:31:43.060
salesperson and developing those techniques and that resistance to rejection. But more importantly,
00:31:48.460
sales isn't just an important job for sales. Sales is an important job for raising money. Sales is an
00:31:54.060
important job for doing a job application or a university application. There's a saying at Stanford
00:32:00.760
and Harvard Business School that most of the students fall into the three M's, which is Mormons, military,
00:32:10.380
Wait, children of millionaires. Why would they have an advantage?
00:32:16.580
You could say that they're Nepo babies. You could say it's family culture or whatever, but it is true that
00:32:20.640
those three groups are, and millionaires today, you'd probably say billionaires or, you know, quarter billionaires or
00:32:26.340
I feel like they would perform way worse. I get Mormon. I get military, but anyway, that's interesting.
00:32:31.360
It was definitely something you see is kids from wealthy families are disproportionately represented
00:32:35.780
at top business schools. Mormons are disproportionately represented, and so are people from the military.
00:32:42.120
It's just a classic thing at top business schools. So you do see the advantage of this. Now let's talk
00:32:46.840
about why I think mission trips are a failure in today's environment. Almost always when I meet
00:32:55.000
a Mormon who has deconverted, the deconversion started on their mission trip. And almost always
00:33:02.600
they were incredibly fervent believers before the deconversion started. If you have a practice within
00:33:09.720
your cultural tradition that is causing disproportionately the most fervent believers to deconvert,
00:33:15.900
then that's something you need to work on. And it is really interesting to contrast
00:33:22.540
with Rumspringer. So both the mission trip and Rumspringer serve similar functions, which is to say
00:33:32.040
during the portion of a person's life where they are in this rebellious teen phase, they are coming
00:33:37.340
into their own as an adult, and they are likely to deconvert. One organization essentially says, okay,
00:33:42.700
let's put you on constant supervision of another member of our cultural group, and separate you
00:33:48.340
from friends and family, and you know, all of the things that might cause deconversion, and then put
00:33:53.080
you in an environment where you are constantly, through sunk cost fallacy, reaffirming your belief
00:33:57.740
system. Like, theoretically, it sounds like a good idea. The problem is that the human brain just doesn't
00:34:02.720
really work that way. Now you could say that mission trips are about conversions. If you actually look at
00:34:06.640
the numbers, and in the Fragment Sky to Crafting Religion, we go through this, mission trips are not really
00:34:10.220
good at converting people. When people convert to Mormonism, it's through other mechanisms often.
00:34:14.600
Like, they boast high conversion rates, but if you look at the number who stay in the church,
00:34:20.020
like, if you're just looking at baptisms, yeah, mission trips seem really effective. If you look
00:34:23.880
at actual growth in those regions of the Mormon tradition, they're not very effective. They're mostly
00:34:30.440
about, from a cultural evolution perspective, keeping members. But the problem is you look at the exact
00:34:36.120
opposite of all of those things I just mentioned, which is Amish Rumspring, right? It's like during
00:34:40.480
the period where you're most likely to deconvert, we say, yeah, if you want to, you can just like
00:34:45.640
leave the community and do whatever you want for a period. But no, I mean, there are consequences to
00:34:50.580
it, but mostly just go do what you want. And to people who are in one of these communities, where
00:34:55.360
there is a high social support network, where there is high in-group, what actually ends up happening
00:34:59.220
with Amish Rumspring, so a lot of people assume that Rumspring is like, kids leave, they go out,
00:35:03.780
they have a bunch of sex, they do a bunch of drugs. Not really. Actually, what happens is
00:35:08.820
they're told, you can do whatever you want. And this knowledge that they can do whatever they want
00:35:15.240
leads them to instead be like, okay, why don't I go get a buggy? Like, that'll be my big crazy thing
00:35:20.000
that I'll do. But otherwise, I'm basically not going to do anything that rebellious because why?
00:35:26.380
Like, when you can all of a sudden do whatever you want, what you realize, especially when you start
00:35:32.360
engaging in it is how hollow, you know, again, we define the world as progressive versus conservative
00:35:38.220
here, how hollow all of these things that this urban monoculture is offering are, how hollow all
00:35:44.720
the partying is, how hollow all the sex is, how hollow all the drugs are. You can engage with these
00:35:50.280
things, but if through engaging in them, you lose the community support, you lose, all of a sudden,
00:35:55.160
you're like, no, screw that. To the extent where I think a lot of progressives are like,
00:35:58.200
oh, but what if they're gay and they have to live out their whole lives, you know, as living
00:36:04.580
this straight lifestyle? You can read about Amish people who like, and this is the thing about
00:36:09.000
conservative cultures, like progressive cultures act like they pretend like gay people don't exist.
00:36:13.540
They don't pretend like gay people don't exist. They just have different social constructs for how to
00:36:20.160
deal with it when a person is born with a predominant same-sex attraction. Within Amish communities,
00:36:25.020
and you can read blogs of this, they know, they're like, look, I am predominantly same-sex
00:36:29.380
attracted. I know this is an aspect of my life I will never be able to fully participate in,
00:36:34.960
but I have engaged with that within the progressive world and I have lived an Amish person growing up
00:36:40.940
and I can tell you the Amish lifestyle is better even if I am forced to marry someone I don't find
00:36:47.160
sexually attractive because I can build a caring relationship for them. I can raise kids. It's the
00:36:52.240
part of my life that will never be as fully fulfilled as it is the other people in my community,
00:36:56.180
but that doesn't mean that the only solution to having been born same-sex attracted
00:37:02.980
is just complete engagement with progressive culture, complete engagement with their ways of
00:37:10.600
I do wonder is actually how there's an interplay between this and the belief that the person that
00:37:19.820
you marry, you're like perma-married to, you know, after you die, you will be united again and you
00:37:27.720
What I think is interesting about that is the reframing of marriage like that. I mean,
00:37:31.820
I don't think that people are picturing like, I mean, maybe they are, but like, I don't think
00:37:36.120
they're picturing like super hot sex, like as they're, you know, off in the afterlife or whatever
00:37:42.100
comes next, you know, building new worlds and everything, right? Like being like gods.
00:37:46.220
And, and so I wonder if perhaps a lot of it just takes the hedonism and the sexual, like
00:37:53.620
focus out of marriage and instead refocuses it into...
00:37:57.840
It's a really healthy one, I think, which is to say that when a Mormon, it's funny,
00:38:02.280
within progressive culture, it would be seen as unhealthy. They believe that when you get
00:38:05.900
married, you are with this person forever, like after death forever, forever, forever.
00:38:10.440
And it passed your physical corporeal existence. The vast minority of your time with this person
00:38:17.760
will sex be an option. And one, that means you don't really like fights are not an option.
00:38:26.380
Fights, fights are an option. I think what's different is that...
00:38:29.180
Fights are an option, but, but long-term systemic disagreements, like you can have conflict,
00:38:35.740
but the goal is to work it out because eventually...
00:38:38.720
Well, because it's not about you anymore. It's about you as a team, as a united unit,
00:38:44.820
as you together forever. And I think you're going to look at conflict very differently
00:38:49.860
when it's what, what do I want? What makes me happy versus like, how are we going to fix this for us?
00:38:57.300
And I think that it's a really interesting framing. And I think it would change the way,
00:39:00.840
like, if I lived in a culture, like I'm, I'm attracted to dudes, kind of, kind of only attracted
00:39:07.780
to you, Malcolm. But like, if someone, if I like grew up in a culture where they're like, Simone,
00:39:11.700
you have to marry a woman. Like, you know, my focus would be on finding a woman who I was
00:39:16.720
ideologically aligned with. And like, you know, we got along and like, we were ready to take on
00:39:21.140
the future and the world together. And we knew that we worked well together, you know, and like,
00:39:24.860
it wouldn't be about the sex. And that's okay. You know, and I think that that for many,
00:39:30.060
many cultural groups, that does sound very, very wrong, right? Like,
00:39:35.900
Yeah, like, how can you have a life without enjoying sex?
00:39:39.080
Yeah, right? Like, here's the thing, right? It's like, so Mormons are getting married,
00:39:43.580
Mormons are having kids, etc. And then you like, look at these plummeting sex rates
00:39:47.000
of the predominantly atheistic culture, right? And so it's like, well, you know, but who's really getting,
00:39:54.280
you know, getting sex now anyway? Who's sexually satisfied now anyway? Although I guess maybe
00:39:59.520
like, gay male communities are doing all right.
00:40:04.100
I don't know. I don't know how the church deals with it.
00:40:06.520
No, that's one cultural solution. And we don't try to like, we can try to give a honest take
00:40:11.060
about different cultures. But we always say that every cultural solution is up to them. And all we
00:40:17.280
want to do is see as many and as diverse cultural traditions surviving into the future. Now, to the thing
00:40:22.500
you were saying earlier, one thing that we praise Mormonism on in our books is, it has the best
00:40:27.180
afterlife, from our perspective, the best conception of an afterlife. The idea that one, you're spending
00:40:32.380
your afterlife with your spouse, like, I can't imagine not spending my afterlife with you.
00:40:37.980
You also get a meaningful project to work on with them, where you're like, oh, it's a big,
00:40:42.240
meaningful project. Because yeah, I mean, just an afterlife in bliss or complacency,
00:40:46.660
like, I really wouldn't like that. I like the idea of continuing to work with you after I die,
00:40:52.120
not just being around you and blissing out or something, or being around people we like or
00:40:57.260
something. I like the idea of having a project. But to that extent, when you talk about the
00:41:01.980
combined identity, it is very similar to our own theology in that way. Whereas we believe that
00:41:06.900
when a person gets married, they meaningfully become the same entity, they stop being two genders,
00:41:13.280
they stop being two different things. They are one thing. And a goal of marriage is to an extent,
00:41:21.020
the dissolution of the self. And that the way we live forever is through our kids and through our
00:41:28.080
family culture. And they really are a combination of the two of us. And that being the case, when we
00:41:37.940
think about how we live far into the future, it is as a combined entity. And we do like that
00:41:44.720
similarity we see with the Mormon tradition, even if the two things are very differentiated.
00:41:48.880
Another big similarity we have as a Mormon tradition is we are a highly derived and highly
00:41:53.580
accelerationist iteration of the Christian tradition. And where many would call us non-Christians,
00:42:00.260
many would call Mormons non-Christians. Like, yeah, we believe in a God, but like,
00:42:04.360
lots of caveats if you're going to try to call that a traditional Christian God. And it's the
00:42:10.680
same with the Mormon tradition. Do we think of ourselves as Christians? Yes. Do Mormons think
00:42:14.960
of themselves as Christians? Yes. But from the boundaries on Christianity that many other groups
00:42:20.680
place, I think both of us fall pretty squarely outside of that. And that's just another differentiation
00:42:25.660
there where we do have a lot in common with Mormons.
00:42:29.500
So the final thing I really admire, just as like a final note is I really appreciate it when new
00:42:37.400
cultures or religions and, you know, like the LDS church is relatively new, take mainstream holidays
00:42:43.100
and just punch them up or make them better. And for me, like, man, you know, Mormon Christmas is one
00:42:50.200
of the best flavors of Christmas. Like they take it, they make it a big deal. It's just amazing and
00:42:55.920
wonderful. And I really miss Mormon Christmases. And so, I don't know, there are just so many things
00:43:01.260
about the LDS church that are great. I hope what you're saying about the fracturing, like subunits
00:43:06.140
working in this, in this, this collaborating marketplace comes to pass.
00:43:11.760
Or, or one sliver of it will be so successful that it won't matter that it doesn't have the
00:43:16.240
market effects. It will be expelled from the central church, but it will be expelled in a way that
00:43:21.820
allows it to be even more innovative than it is right now. And you will come up with interesting
00:43:27.180
solutions. And if you are from a faction of, of, of the Mormon culture like that, please read the
00:43:32.500
Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion. Like it's like a playbook on how to adapt and better fight the
00:43:37.860
progressive mind virus, because eventually it will take your church just like it does everyone else.
00:43:42.980
Yeah. Well, Mormons, we love you. You're amazing. Don't disappear, thrive and succeed. We are not one of
00:43:51.300
you, but we deeply admire you. So yeah, we'd love to hear what you think of our hot takes
00:43:56.240
and Malcolm though, sadly, we will not probably be spending eternity together aside from through
00:44:03.600
our children. Yay. At least we can have future conversations like this. So thanks for this.
00:44:08.160
And I love you a lot. I love you too. And I do wish we, we got to live literally together forever,
00:44:15.400
but I think in every meaningful context, we do get to like who I am today changes, see our video
00:44:20.940
on determinism. I might even link to it on, on, on, oh no, life extensionism. That might be the one
00:44:26.060
where we talk about this. You know what? I'll lead to both of them because we talk about it in one of
00:44:29.160
them. Good. All right. I'll see you soon. Have a good one.